Despite No Man's Sky's many flaws at launch, I really liked the way it zeroed in on a sense of discovery. [I really enjoyed the first dozen hours of naming planets, scanning strange tentacle horses, and cataloging inconspicuous rocks, so it's no surprise that Bethesda is working on something similar with their epic space RPG, Starfield. After all, we've been doing this sort of thing for a very long time: catching Deugon in Pokemon Snap, scanning Shadow Moses as Solid Snake, etc. [But I'm a little surprised that the scans of the creatures in the "Starfield" version not only remind me of "No Man's Sky" from seven years ago, but they look almost exactly alike.

I saw a bit of Starfield's scanning at last month's Starfield Direct, but didn't realize how familiar it was until Bethesda tweeted a short clip of the planetary scanning yesterday. The way the binocular interface looks, the way objects glow when you scan them, the mostly useless but fun peripheral trivia you learn about things by scanning them, the little XP you get from cataloging them, all perfectly mimic the data collection experience in "No Man's Sky" In Starfield, it seems that you can determine the likelihood of a creature attacking you by its listed "temperament." In No Man's Sky, this same information is labeled "behavior."

Surveying is not the most exciting way to spend your days at Starfield, but it does seem to be lucrative. As the tweet points out, once you complete a planetary survey in Starfield, you can sell that information for credits, as in "No Man's Sky."

I don't know whether to be happy or annoyed about this. Because among the procedurally generated flora and fauna, there are hand-authored RPG towns and fully voiced characters. Scanning contributes greatly to the fantasy of space exploration, especially for those who would rather be admired for their exploration skills than the dead. At the same time, it is a little disappointing that Bethesda's vision of gamified discovery is basically "do what Hello Games did and don't mention it."

Games steal clever ideas from each other all the time, but what bothers me is that developers (especially big-budget games) often ignore or resist admitting it. Bethesda is no different from other major studios in this regard, but the more high-profile the games they borrow from, the trickier it seems. The mining laser from last year's gameplay showcase certainly resembles the multi-tool in "No Man's Sky."

Some of it is realistic. It is awkward for Xbox-owned studios to explicitly say "this part works exactly the same way it did in No Man's Sky" when a developer is promoting a game, not to mention it is useless to those who have not played it ("No Man's Sky" was released on PC and PlayStation 4, then released on Xbox about two years later). It is more likely to be seen as detrimental to the game, which is why developers do not politely acknowledge ideas that have been copied.

While this may be true according to a well-researched marketing deck, being upfront about obvious imitations scores serious points with me.