Is it just me or is Starfield kinda meh?

I hate that people feel the need to say they're not a hater in order not to get abused for not liking a game. People out here treating games like a religion.
- I totally agree with this. I have always been able to empathize with people not liking a game that I'm obsessed with. Every game has flaws, and games are like music genres- if I like EDM, you may like country, and that's ok.
  People get really closed-minded about games, even past the point of "fanboy". It's like some sort of hero worship.
- Yeah, those people are so heavily invested in this game that it has to be great at all costs. I mean dropping $100 just to play a few days early and the subsequent justifications made after the fact really speak to that.
  I've heard people talk about how this is the greatest game ever released. Like dude, this isn't even the greatest game released so far this year.

I agree about the loading screens. It didn't drive me crazy but would have been better if there were fewer.
In regards to combat, I like it. Even many of the reviewers felt combat was one of the good things.
- I'm still pretty early game, but I also like it. The sponginess means I can't just fire a few shots at a guy's head and call it a day, I might need to cycle through weapons, be pretty careful about taking breaks for cover, watch my health. It means my ammo gets used up a lot more, and same with health items.
  Actually, Ive noticed a bit of a trend in Starfield where it seems like Bethesda is trying to push back a bit against having a massive overage of ammunition and money (without bringing the scavenging skill into it).
  Having spongey enemies and a ton of different kinds of ammo means no one weapon has an absurd amount of ammo, and not having a ton of easily burgled apartments or houses means I cant just have a huge city stealing spree and come out the other end richer than I know what to do with only ten hours in.
  I initially hated that there weren't huge apartment blocks ripe for stealing, but I can sort of understand why that's the case now and I can appreciate having a larger wind up time to becoming stupidly rich, especially with there being much higher money sinks compared to older Bethesda games between ship and outpost building. It really seems like, to me, Bethesda is purposefully trying to have a functioning economy compared with their older games where making money a non-issue was basically a part of the early game.
  
  I heard that it's possible to steal spaceships and sell them. It's a long process, but seems to be worth the time. Some spaceships bring lots of cash.
  Was i made a fool of?
- I haven't checked out a ton of reviews, just two or three from trusted reviewers. The very first one I watched said they didn't like the combat but still really enjoyed the game overall. I'm hoping I can push through to the point where I'm enjoying the rest of the game...
  
  I think part of this is what it's being compared to. The combat is significantly better in starfield than past Bethesda (BGS) games. People who are saying it's great are generally comparing it to their past games.
  I don't have experience with Cyberpunks combat yet (waiting for the update to finally play it) but I wouldn't be surprised if it's better.

I feel like there not being a single large map derives a bit from that BGS feel. In Skyrim if you need to go somewhere new you might trek across the map for a few minutes, and on the way come across a few random encounters and interesting places. In Starfield you teleport most of the way, and if you want to come across random encounters outside your ship you have to go out of your way or do some specific quests.
- Yeah, this is my feeling as well. It makes it feel like a few disconnected locations, not one shared universe. If we could get into out ship and fly places without just teleporting there from the map that'd go a long way to fixing things. Maybe also make things happening in space to make it feel alive. As it is, the space stuff is mostly just another loading screen on top of the other loading screens. It doesn't play a role in the rest of the game and just serves to disconnect us (rather than connect as it's supposed to) from the world we're in.

My main complaint is the writing and worldbuilding. So far I've been exploring new Atlantis and picked up exclusively fetch quests from NPCs so generic and uninteresting I don't really feel like continuing to talk to them. And the uncreative worldbuilding of authoritarian capitalists Vs libertarian capitalksts vs religious crazies. Can Bethesda not even imagine an alternative to capitalism?
- Name me one sci-fi that has had an alternative to capitalism without access to something god-tech level like Treks replicators, which would break the setting entirely.
  
  Not saying there should be fully automated luxury gay space communism, but that every faction is different flavours of capitalism is very disappointing. Sci-fi is usually a medium that criticizes the current society.
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
  
  It took like a 30 seconds of web search to find the dispossessed by Ursula le guin.
  Your argument is actively supporting the other commenters point about boring world building in sci fi.
  
  Capitalism works great with RPGs leveling system.
  But I'd love to have seen a cashless society where the only way to get stuff was to trade other goods.
  Or some sort of social credit system, where the nicer you are and the more quests you complete, the higher your status and the more free items you unlock.
  Or some authoritative system that binds you into a contract whenever you make a trade it forces you to work off your debt in all matters of ways.

I haven’t played that much yet, but I’m not hooked at all. It just feels like a bunch of games I’ve already played. The core gameplay is fallout or Skyrim, great games, but we’ve seen the formula plenty of times. Space combat is like a watered-down version of elite. The planet concept has already been done by NMS and so far I think they did it better. I don’t think it’s bad, but how is it supposed to compete for my attention with all the games that just came out?
- The space combat and flight capability in general being a watered down version of Elite’s is definitely my biggest complaint. I’m perfectly happy doing space-chores as gameplay and have really enjoyed bumbling my way between radiant quests and random buildings I find while scanning planets, but I want to land the ship dammit. So much of Elite I found incredibly boring but kept coming back for a long time for the flight/space combat.
  I get why they did it that way to make it more accessible to a wider audience (my partner for instance cannot begin to agree with me wanting the flight to be more complicated), but the space genre has often had a huge overlap with flight sim fans for good reason. I hope a very capable modder with far more time and skill than me can implement a more robust space flight experience in there one day.
  
  I think an independent thruster controls mod would be great. Space drifting in elite with 6 degrees of freedom was so much fun.
  
  There are about a million things you can critique Elite but they fucking nailed combat, it was super satisfying in that game. That is the bar for subsequent space games and it’s definitely something that can be improved upon but so far idk if anyone has been able touch it. Really fun aspect of that game.

If you like it and are having fun, good for you. If you don't like it and would rather spend time on the bazillion other games out there, you won't be missing out much either.
At the end of the day, Starfield is just another Bethesda game. Same mould, same problems, same gameplay, with a slightly improved engine for overhauls which will be carried out by none other than free and enthusiastic modders.
Screaming at each other for liking or disliking a game is just what gamers always have been doing and will keep doing forever.

It is very whelming, yes. It's exactly what I expected, and yet... I want more. At least for the things it does to be done better. Give me a reason for base building. Make the AI not just stand there like dopes and be bullet sponges when you want them to be hard (seriously, "legendaries" have 3 fucking HP bars and it's dumb). Actually have dialogue choices that are a bit more meaningful and change things.
I'm tired of it just working. I want it to work fantastically.
- It will literally never be that if you keep buying it. It also just wouldn't exist at all, so I understand there is no winning scenario. But there definitely won't be more as long as it is "working".
  
  I haven't bought it. I smuggled it out of Neon. 😏

No sir, you are not alone. The horrendously weak opening combined with bullet sponge gunplay, so many loading screens, a horrendous UI, boring worlds with little to nothing to do on them...I managed to make myself play for 12 hours before I gave up for good. It simply didn't catch me at all, despite multiple attempts. Maybe in 2 years with mods, but for now it's just time to move on for me.
- What I think plagues this genre of game is that the sense of discovery is not there, like it is on a "2D" plane. What I mean by that is this:
  In a game like Skyrim where you have essentially a 2D plane of area to explore, you can see in front of you all the things that are possible even without using a map. You can play the entire game without a map by following roads, seeing things that pique your interest, and just walking there.
  However, in a game like Starfield, you can't go anywhere without entering a menu and going through 4 or 5 loading screens. And you HAVE to use the menu to go places instead of just walking to something you see in the distance. It's a huge barrier to organic discovery. And on top of that, purposely, there's nothing to do on the vast majority of planets AND THEN, even the things that are on planets are so unimportant, they may as well not be there. An anomaly I found on a planet was 1000m away, I walked to it, and all I could do was scan it for half a second. It was just a waste of time. Buildings don't actually seem to have anything to do in them. Caves are all empty.
  It's fun to think you can explore the galaxy, but making it too real makes it much too boring and much too difficult to feel that you're actually discovering anything.
  Edit: Another thought is that in Skyrim, you know there are things to discover, you just have to find them. In Starfield, Bethesda purposely made many of the planets devoid of anything of interest, so when you go to a new area, you're not even sure it's worth your time.

I have a rule about bethesda games - I don't buy them until well after the first few patches, or the GOTY edition. I am starfield curious but also, hesitant because of No Man's Sky. Allow me to elaborate:
NMS shipped and was garbage. But over the ensuing year, damned near everything players expected or wanted from it came to be with game altering updates that improved it's content range enormously. It's still not my favorite game, but every time I fire it up there's new shit for me to do and most of it's pretty well implemented.
I have absolutely zero expectations in this way for Starfield. They're not going to rework space-to-ground flight or rng generated ground plots you can't explore past; they may improve perf and qol over time, but I fundamentally doubt anything like No Man's Sky updates are in the future.
So yeah, that makes me pause, and remember to be patient.
- This is why I rented the game with gamepass. I'm so happy I did, this game is just... not fun and now I'm only out the time it has taken me to go play Sea of Stars

The game is a mess. It’s totally lost trying to figure out it’s identity. I’ve got the answer everyone can’t quite put their finger on. Had this game came out 2 or 3 years after New Vegas it would have been heralded as the next generation in rpgs. The problem is we are well past that. Bethesda should have made this game instead of fallout 76. It would have totally fit the time frame and been forgivable.
The problem is we have multiple games that do this better in whatever aspect you prefer. Like realism space sim, that’s star citizen or elite dangerous. Want planetary exploration with life form scanning and base building? That’s no man sky.
I still find myself playing because I’m so hard gay for that Bethesda fallout choose your own adventure foundation that’s present here. But damn is it overall shit. Just embarrassing
- star citizen
  The barely functional game that inspired NFTs by making people buy worthless digital items for internet clout?
  Starfield is basically the same recipe as past fallout/elder scrolls titles. Everyone loves to complain about them but everyone is still playing them. The fact is the choose your own adventure thing is still very much there. Just play it and have fun.
- I’m so hard gay for...
  Really?? Good post up to this point... /smh
  
  Lol no one cares.

After about 20hrs, I couldn't take it anymore. I popped open the console, increased my carry weight, added a bil creds, set my level to 666, and finally, tgm. Let chaos reign, baby.
I had already added a couple UI mods (because Bethesda still ships UI components at 30fps for whatever reason) and patched the achievement disablement function, so now I feel like I can actually kinda enjoy the game (when I'm not in a loading screen).
I've put another 20hrs in playing like this, and have zero regrets. It makes my time in the game feel arcade-like, in a good, nostalgic way. I went from being stressed out and annoyed, to relaxed and able to laugh at the endless jank that we've all come to expect from Bethesda. It's like GTA back in the day... if you weren't using cheat codes, you were straight up missing out on the fun.
All that said, overall the game does feel like Bethesda threw Fallout, Skyrim, and No Man's Sky in a blender and then ran it all through a sieve to ensure that only the worst parts made it into the final release. I'm actually shocked by how much they seem to have outright copied elements from NMS (from UI, to gameplay mechanics, to storyline elements). I've got hundreds of hours in NMS spread across the last 5ish yrs, and I can't help but feel kinda greasy when I play Starfield because of how much appears to be straught up lifted from NMS.
Ultimately, Starfield is a new(ish) experience and fun to fuck around in, but if I want to explore space, I'll go boot up NMS.
- I've already said "screw it" and started looking up the "get OP early" guides on Youtube, which I generally avoid. If it helps me have more fun then whatever... it's a game, not a chore.
  
  You can get the Mantis suit and ship early. Kill Spacers, look for note on “secret base”.
- *with a dash of Outer Worlds and Oblivion.
  
  destiny too
- Carry weight is the stupidest mechanic of all time, ever in gaming.

Most low level enemies drop weapons that only deal between 3 - 11 damage, which are basically useless against anything higher than level 5. I found some higher level weapons in a shop that dealt 30 - 40 damage and found they made combat much more fun.
As I progressed however, I noticed that enemy levels in a location were distributed:
4-5 low level
10-15 med level
1-5 high level
So there is still a problem with bullet sponges. I keep an overpowered shotgun (med damage, high rate of fire, explosions on crit) with me and just bum rush the high level enemies with that. Otherwise you’d be shooting them all day with your 40 damage rifle.
As you go on, those high level enemies drop weapons that do more damage, so there is progression…. But you also just encounter higher level enemies with more health so the problem continues.
I see that there are already combat rebalance mods on nexus, the kind I’ve used on Fallout games in the past, and I’ll probably install one of those when I decide to start a new play through. (Which, I definitely will. I’m enjoying the game a lot overall despite there being some tedious aspects)
- Thanks, I'll pay closer attention to the weapon damage. Maybe I'm not upgrading enough.
- I found that too, and I’d say that kind of design makes sense. For an RPG, it shouldn’t be like Uncharted where anything lying on the ground from your warpath suits the need; there should be reason and investment to get a good gun, then make it better.
  I’ve actually been buying up ammo, something I didn’t do in Fallout, because the caliber I get off enemies is puny.

I’m definitely having a hard time giving a fuck about literally anything in SF. Shame but I’m happy to go back to bg3 ig
Old Bethesda is gone and isn’t coming back, I wish people would stop pretending like they aren’t

Just FYI - ammo doesn’t weigh anything. I didn’t notice this for quite a while. If you have some cash go by a couple of gun/ammo shops and just buy out like, all of it. Pretty quickly you’ll get to the point where you have plenty of ammo for any gun you pick up. IMO the upfront cost is super worth not having to worry about having ammo for one gun or the other.
- Not to mention if you pick up guns from corpses chests etc, their ammo is added to your stash and you can then toss the now empty gun.
  
  Wait really?? That's gonna be helpful since I stopped picking up guns that were too heavy to be worth selling. Of course now it's one more chore to do... between wrestling the horrible UI and the inventory management itself (already a chore even if the UI wasn't bad), I'm not sure if this tip will be a net gain in fun levels. lol

It's not just you.
In the past Bethesda was innovent. With Starfield they are just stuck in the past.
The game is so close to a loading screen simulator that it kills emmersion.
- It's funny to me how many gameplay cues Bethesda took from No Man's Sky.
  And yet, they made exploration worse because there are no seamless transitions between anything and the places that you can visit have literally no reason to explore them.
  I spent 20 minutes exploring an abandoned mine, killing a bunch of Spacers and got literally nothing out of it. Wasted 4 digipicks for rooms and safes that had nothing of value in them too.

I can't even get to "meh" yet. I'm currently trying to get over all the steps backward from Fallout 4. Can't order companions in battle, can't swap out weapon mods, can't use/equip items on pickup without going into menus, and the local maps. Holy crap, the local maps are bad. All that is on top of having to mod the game as usual. StarUI helped a lot, and I had to grab a sound effects mod because there was painful, high-pitched tones in a lot of the interface stuff, but it needs a lot more help. Beth's games are starting to remind me of a Civilization series or Paradox Interactive situation where the base game is worse than a predecessor at release and doesn't yield incremental improvement until a robust mod scene/DLC arrives.
I've already written off the space gameplay (that was always a long shot for us space sim fans), and if I'm being honest, the loading screen pacing isn't all that different an experience from how I played Skyrim and FO4. I'm also taking the bullet-sponginess as a challenge to focus on weapon mods. I'm hoping once I get into a self-directed gameplay flow and get used to the quirks of the UI and zone arrangement it'll get better.
I gotta say though, even though it had its own share of bugs, Baldur's Gate 3 coming out a month ahead of Starfield does not invite favorable comparisons. The dialogues and quest design in BG3 run circles around what I'm seeing in Starfield so far. The "Back to Vectera" quest in particular was shockingly bad. Having multiple moments where there's no indication of what to do next until opening the mission log to find a stealth quest update is seriously rough. I'm guessing it was unfinished? I knew there were going to have to be sacrifices made at the procedural generation altar, but seeing even the bespoke elements on the main questline be this bad does not portend well for the overall quality of the game.
- Yeah its a little unfair to compare anything to BG3 so bad timing there. I think when Phantom Liberty comes out and a bunch of people jump to Cyberpunk, it's not gonna help this game much either. lol
  
  It's really not, lol. In the first hour playing this I kept thinking how dated the facial animations felt. CP2077 has the best faces I've seen yet, and it's not going to have this grey filter all over the place either.
  
  Like hell it isn't fair!

I'm feeling the same way. Starfield isn't a bad game, but it's very meh. I enjoy the ship building aspect, but otherwise nothing really grabs me with this game.
Combat is a good example, too. There just doesn't feel to be any impact to the weapons. Mobs just get shot but don't really react to it. I know they will flee at times which is nice, but close range SMG fire to ones torso should illicit more of a response.
Fast travel also seems to be an detractor. Being able to fast travel anywhere you've been even if that place is across the galaxy really removes a lot of the exploration vibe the game would have otherwise. I know this isn't a space sim, but a lot of the systems they have don't really mesh well with others.
Starfield is like mediocre lite-RPG / space sim crossover that doesn't do either very well.
Edit: I also want to point out that Bethesda did not come up with the "NASA-punk" aesthetic, either. I've seen articles about that. The Expanse has been doing that for years now. Even before that, I can think of at least two Matt Damon movies from 2015 and before that used it as it's setting. Point being it's not anything new.
- Fast travel also seems to be an detractor.
  Yeah it's kind of weird but I feel like they're too liberal with the fast travel. You really lose a lot of the sense of scale when you can just... go anywhere from anywhere.
  I mean, that said, given all the loading screens, I guess more fast travel means less loading screens so it's definitely a double-edged sword.
  Starfield is like mediocre lite-RPG / space sim crossover that doesn’t do either very well.
  The RPG aspects seem really shallow after Cyberpunk. The space sim aspects are what I'm hoping keep me interested once I get deeper into it. Fingers crossed.
  
  To make matters worse, the space around each planet is it's own load zone. Star systems are just collections of these zones. I don't think they can patch zone loading as it's done so much by design. It's like they took what they had in FO4 and just slapped a sticker on it that said "space sim".

- (fucking Star Citizen is a staggering grift)
  You know, I kickstarted that project (not gonna call it a game at this point) back when it was first announced and I'm STILL salty about it. "Wing Commander" was my first favorite game as a kid and that whole series plus Privateer and Freelancer were huge for me. I was SO excited for another game from that guy.
  The worst part about the whole thing? People are still falling for it. Like, if people learned from my mistake and the project would finally die, at least I'd feel like I accomplished some small thing with the money I wasted. But no, people are still giving that grifter money for some weird reason.

I find the start kinda weird. Touchy tabloid, pass out. Wake up and akwardy get forced in to ship and spooky drone watching you. Got to the new atlantis and was bored already.
Even skyrim did this better.
Explored the first planet to see whats the deal. Terrorform was uglyass mf, but standing on 1meter rock glitches it completely, and then just empty all ammo on it.

I was really excited to play. But unfortunately somehow this games makes me nauseous. Like some form of motion sickness. I play on xbox series x by the way.
Especially when you're low on health the blur makes it worse. As well as looking through the scope of a gun.
Tried turning the motion blur and film grain of, but that doesn't really help. Tried a few gameplay session. But everytime I play I get nauseous after a few minutes. Never had this in any other game. And I've been playing games all my life.
So for now I stopped playing. Hopefully they'll be making some changes in the future, that will alleviate this. But for now it's a no go for me unfortunately.
- I get that but it's because of FOV, and I know you can change it on PC but I think your SOL on console.

My biggest issue is how disconnected the worlds feel versus Elder Scrolls. Every point of interest stands alone in a sparsely decorated world, separated from all other points of interest by fast travel, unskippable animations and layers of maps.
- Kinda like space.
  
  It's less about the distances than the tedium of getting my character from one place to another. I fast travel everywhere as usual, but now there are so many more steps to it - Getting out of the pilot seat. Docking and undocking or landing and taking off. Finding a location by clicking through the 3-layered map. - It's way more complex than fast traveling from Windhelm to Solitude.

This game is exactly what I expected. Its unapologetically a bethesda fps rpg.
The menus are unwieldy, the economy is annoying, the politics half thought out, gun play is eh, etcetcetc.
But that's not why I play these games, I play them because I love the weird quest rabbit holes you find yourself going down. I love how I can just go somewhere and knock all the shit off the shelves.
I've been playing on normal difficulty except for 5 on 1 space battles, I set that shit down to very easy. The gun play has felt fine for me, focus on headshots and you end up with more ammo you can use, particularly caseless shotgun ammo, .50 cal, and whatever the grendel shoots. I almost always go into areas underleveled in early game so I tend to have long range extended gun fights or just barrel stuff with the old earth shotgun.
Last time I played New Vegas I walked directly to the strip at level 2, avoided all the cazadors and death claws, then started the Dead Money DLC at level 5, and finished it at level 9.
I'm ranting right now but basically what I'm trying to say is these games are games where you need to find your fun and set your goals. You have main quest lines that literally end the game, so go out and find something weird, set off in a direction and find a long winded side quest. Make your character a drunk and drink every single alcoholic drink you find. Make your character a clepto and steal relentlessly. Get addicted to every drug and refuse to wear armor and specialize in the utility knife.
if you really dont care about combat, just roll the difficulty all the way down and have fun.

For less loading screens: fromthe surface of planet on foot, open you quest menu and place the cursor of your quest. On PC press R to planned your trip. Press X to travel and Bam! There's a loading screen and Bam! you are on the surface of the other planet on foot. without other loading screen or ship animation. If you are already in space, you can't escape some of those loading screen.
The other points: I feel you... ennemies are sponges. I carry way too many weapons to ensure to have bullets. Stealth is meh until you invest points in it. Ennemies were seeing me near the ceiling through a vent grid -_-.
Hope it helps, I had tons of fun with Cyberpunk! I wish an amazing DLC!
- So, the ship is a superfluous mechanic they shouldn't have bothered with?
  
  I have enjoyed the few minutes of space combat I did so far. I am looking forward to being able to board and steal ships later!
  
  Well I have plenty of fun building my ship (even if sometimes its frustrating) and winning a space combat gives me great serotonine.
  
  If you want it to be. You can skip any section of this game. You don't need to build outposts, but if you want to use them you can. You don't need to build a ship, but if you want to be a cargo hauler you can. You don't need to do ship combat, but if you want to you can make that your main thing.
  You can really do whatever you want in whatever capacity you want to do it in. If you just want to be an on foot land traveller, then always fast travel to settlements and not in orbit. If you want to explore space and various planets and the stations and ships that are there, you can do that too.
  For me, ship building has been lots of fun and I have a strong 1/3rd of my gameplay focused on being an anti-pirate bounty hunter. There's also entire systems locked behind skill points, so you very well could be missing an entire aspect of a type of gameplay by just not knowing about it.

I still dont really know what the selling points are. In the lead up to release i was waiting to see what was gonna make it exciting. Never seemed to happen. Just clinical sci-fi.

the bullet sponge must be really bad if you're complaining about it after coming from Cyberpunk lmao
- It's absolutely the most bullet-spongiest gunplay in my recent memory. As the other guy said, I can unload an entire clip with an AR an not kill a normal mob, and there are elites with multiple health bars. Ugh...
- I've found hammering folks with a shotgun kills them pretty quickly but an entire magazine from an assault rifle doesn't kill most enemies. Pretty annoying.
- I played Cyberpunk with a Sandy and Gorilla Arms and even on the hardest difficulty I was killing most enemies in one hit. Though I think early game was pretty rough before I got chromed.
  
  Yeah I played pistol headshot build until they nerfed it, that was the only build that worked for me, it being one shot too. I dislike the leveled enemies in general. If I play it again it will be with a mod that removes levels and gives the factions more gameplay significance (like Maelstrom needing armor piercing).
  I played Tarkov before that and after that any amount of bullet sponginess is agony. I like realism.
  I completely ruins the immersion in Cyberpunk's amazing worldbuilding if unarmored enemies don't die after duping an entire mag into them. And even more so if I oneshot enemies in one neighborhood and in the next neighborhood they eat all my bullets for lunch without any visual indication why they would be stronger.

I’m having fun.
It’s not NMS and I don’t want it to be. NMS is great for what it does, but it’s barely an actual game (in my experience - not played it for a few months so it may have changed).
I’m familiar enough with loading screens from FO3, FO:NV, FO4, and ES:V so that doesn’t bother me much.
Also, I’m an old man, so I’m playing on easy because I want fun and to explore the story rather than have a stressful challenge. The bosses with multiple health bars are a bit shit but I’ve rarely run out of ammo.
So, yeah, I’m having fun. But my expectations going into it on Wednesday were that it would be FO4 in space. So far it’s doing slightly better than that for me.
- This is exactly how I feel about it. Well put.

After finding better weapons I have found enemies much less bullet spongy. Here's the assault rifle I'm currently using, it kills multiple enemies per magazine:

There is also a shotgun that one-taps enemies, but it has a reload time so long that it can't be reliably reloaded during firefights.
- Okay, I'm somewhat early game: what is up with the reloading times? Seriously, I've died a few times because the reloading speeds are so slow and you can't run and reload at the same time.
  Is there a skill I'm not seeing?
  
  There's an Expert-tier Combat skill that improves reload times by like 30%, yeah.

I agree mostly with this. The bullet-sponginess makes me somewhat dislike the combat. During some random exploration, I found a nice weapon which allows me to one-shot most people. That actually helped a lot, which is one thing that made me realize how spongy things actually are. And yeah, I also found Cyberpunk's combat better.
I'm on the fence with the menus and loading screens. Personally I just wish it was more consistent. If I set a course while sitting in the pilot's seat, I at least get a cutscene that offers some slight immersion. If I do it from the nav table, I jump instantly to my destination regardless of where I was before. Hate that.
- Personally I just wish it was more consistent.
  Ha, I agree but the opposite. The cutscenes for immersion are great... the first 50 times. After that, I just want the option to SKIP IT!!!
  
  But you can! Just use the nav table.

I red it takes like 12 hours for the game to get good. That's like two weeks for me. Some people have to work and limited time.
There's a 2 hour refund window. Bethesda misses it a tiny bit

I'm over 60 hours in and loving it. I've rarely ran out of ammo or health supplies, and I'm definitely not getting a lot of loading screens. And when I do, aside from the initial loading of a game, they're 10 seconds or less.
- What difficulty are you playing on? I had to carry like 6 different weapons to swap between for ammo reasons, and my aim is pretty good. I have since installed a mod that adds in ammo crafting recipes, which is insane it isn't there by default. In the post apocalypse of Fallout we can craft ammo, but in the far future sci-fi of Starfield with outpost building and resource mining we can't? We can pop robots (and nuclear reactors I think) out if we just have the resources and technology, but not basic lead and gunpowder ammunition?
  
  I'm on normal and I've amassed 2k bullets for my main weapon type in 20 odd hours.

When you realize how many loading screens there are, you begin to understand why Bethesda requires SSD versus HDD, otherwise half your time would be spent on loading screens.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found anything within the realms of “vanilla Starfield” to remedy your issues. I just kept playing through the main quest and as time went on, it got better (in my opinion). It’s one of those “oh you have to slog through X hours before it gets good” type of games.
Outside of the above, I can only recommend shelving it and waiting for mods or DLC that may freshen the experience.
- I first installed it on HDD....it wasn't playable (I didn't read the requirement, my bad). After the mining bit, the game just freeze every 10s for like minutes. I succeded to reach the door and see the sky before it crashed.

I genuinely haven't had any of these issues, menu/loading screen aside which there's small ways to mitigate (travel in space via select vs. map menu travel).
I quite liked the gunplay, at first. Then I got strong weapons, overlevelled for the order of quests, and now I feel like I'm one hitting them with a peashooter. So I actually have the opposite problem than you on this front, as I haven't been actually challenged in the game since the early levels. However, I prefer this for the ship combat since it's just a little more fun.
Ammo I've not once been low on. Granted, I collect everything but misc. In a few days I've amassed 400k credits, only buying upgrades for my ship. At a certain point I began buying ammo just to give vendors money to get rid of my junk. So, maybe if you have extra credits try buying some ammo? How many guns are you carrying? Realistically your base weight is about 50-65, given the head, armor, apparel, and then I have 2 weapons with a total mass of 5 (pistol and rifle). Between some health aids and other stuff I've found I'm usually sitting at 75 mass, which leaves quite of bit of space for selling weapons/armors.
The stealth isn't great in this game though. It's just not really a major focus outside of the areas they put thought into it for - frankly you don't need it at all for the games story from what I've been through so far. Obviously, there's 3 levels with green being detected in a safe area, orange needing caution before red aggro detection. But the transition from orange to red is egregious.
In addition to that you need stealth bonuses to be able to effectively be stealthy. This game does covert quests really well though, I highly recommend following the Ryujin questline in Neon and the UC/Crimson Fleet questline. Amazing quests, IMO. I have 1 point in stealth and primarily have done persuasion stealth and it's been great, but the most recent mission I completed I needed frostwolfs for (-50% movement noise). Which, that right there is your issue. You are loud as hell without stealth investments.
On top of that 50% reduction I also needed an apparel item that had 25% harder to detect. So I think it's just scaled a bit awkwardly.
So, with that in mind I would say it's a weird line between me agreeing that AI know where I am far too easily in stealth while simultaneously being able to cheese the AI by utilizing the additives the game gives you. Think about it... everyone has scanners. There's also a lot of security cameras that are fairly well hidden in various areas.You can't really just walk behind someone and expect to not be noticed, not unless your hopped up on combat meds and wearing chameleon or other stealth specifical items. Chameleon is a game changer, but it's a style of its own and not totally helpful for what we're after.
It's funny, 2077 I really enjoyed on launch but I can't help but see shortcomings in it as I've played through Starfield. That's not to say that it doesn't have shortcomings of its own, it definitely does what with the, for me, map menu navigation. It took a few days to get used to and still the core issue for me comes down to Missions not being categorized by Planet. It's so painfully obvious and to be lacking it is honestly a major fault. Other than that, hotkeys not being consistent.
That aside, every menu is tab once to go back to main menu except for map which is 3.
Another is a bit regarding scale. 2077 I really enjoyed just walking around taking in the view of Night City. Walking 400m doesn't really feel like a chore. For some reason 400m in starfield is a couple minutes, with sprint? It just feels a little too big in some spots and too small in others. Like you said, sometimes you'll go through 3 loading screens just to talk to a person and leave the area and go through another couple loading screens. Other times you get these amazingly long quests that feel just right, and other times you get landed 1000m away.
Most of the time, not always but a lot of it, I'm just trying to get there to do the next thing. In 2077 I was enjoying the journey being in awe and happening to reach the destination. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy New Atlantis and Neons visuals, I also think the world building and liveliness is an improvement (simple things like having more named characters, somewhat varied patterns with citizens, hireables, and named characters.)
I enjoy both for what they are. 2077 does the imposed story line well enough and it gives you enough freedom in the variety of playstyles that the lack of variance in story doesn't matter much. On the other hand, Starfield has very little imposed story (you were a miner, now you are a constellation member) giving you actual RPG freedoms. I haven't explored differences in traits, but if starting as a Var'uun Zealot is any different than the others then it's a big point over 2077.
And both have thoughtful quests. Neither is objectively better than the other, they both just play to various strengths and weaknesses.
As it stands, Starfield is a Bethesda game with inspirations from Elite Dangerous and futurism. 2077 is a game about a corpo-dystopian future. They have many similar and overlapping themes, and Starfield clearly has quests that are a response to 2077. Neither are perfect, but both are lots of fun once you get them rolling.

the only mechanic I truly want fixed is the need to pickup weapons to get all the ammo then having to dump the weapons. should be enough to collect the ammo only off a dead body and have that include the ammo loaded in their gun.
other than that I'm quite enjoying the game

I hardly run out of ammo, but I'm also the kind of person who levels up carrying capacity first and becomes a loot goblin.
And yes, ammo has 0 weight but more weight cap means more time for me to search every corner of every room
- In 20 hours, I've amassed 2k bullets for my main weapon type. Ammo is hardly scarce in this game.
  
  I have a beowulf that has increased damage for each consecutive shot and it deals 72 damage (large for my level). I have around 3.5k rounds waiting to be used and I've been really overusing it lol.

I feel similarly. One of the biggest things for me is how, although much does feel like a Bethesda game, there were some times it felt like they'd just take stuff out of other games and dumped it in. The lack of vehicles annoyed me too, and don't get me started on the basically non existent local map

My recommendation is to mod away the bullet sponge. It made the combat much better for me.
The npc has a lot of life in standard but they then get 20 hp more for every level.
Look at your weapons and you realize how much they absorb just from leveling compared to your weapons.

Loading screens are really the biggest negative for me. And navigating the menus takes some time.
I really enjoyed Fallout 4. And it feels pretty close to that for me with MUCH better gunplay. I can feel this being a time sink for me once i can actually get my teeth sunk in to it.

I could forgive bethesda games because I used to be able to look at them as "greater than the sum of its parts"
Fallout 4 with mods just barely got away with it.
Starfield has too many issues for me.
The biggest one, your second issue of loading screens, I don't think mods can fix. There just will never be a seamless overworld because of the spaceship mechanic.
- I have to be honest, If I could fly my ship right over a hideout and just shred it with turrets I would. The game just a bit to combat focused to have ships in the mix unless anti-air was a thing.
  
  That really only makes this world even weirder. Why AREN'T these ships just glassing planets?!
- We have Open cities so I think there will be a similar mod for starfield that help reduce the amount of loadingscreens
  
  I would absolutely love to enter planets after grav jumping just by flying down. I'm just having trouble imagining it happening.

The game mechanics and worldbuilding are underwhelming for what they were touting it as. Its going to take a few years to be good.
but question is cyberpunk actually good now?
- I am one of those weirdos who enjoyed Cyberpunk when it first came out. I don't know if I'd say it was "good" back then, but it was already fun. Now with a couple years of bug fixes and QoL features under it's belt, yes, it's a very good game. I just played through the entire game, doing all the gigs and most of the side jobs, and I'm really pumped to do it all again when the DLC comes out. Using a different build will change the entire play style of the game, and there is enough choice in the role playing that I can see different stories in the same quests.
  It's a very good game and anyone who avoided it before because of the bad press (but normally would like this sort of thing) should really give it a shot now.
  It's WAY better than Starfiield so far... :-/
  
  Ill tell my brother to play it, he'd love it
- I loved Cyberpunk. I didn't pick it up until 1.3, but I ran into only one major bug. And that was only preventing progression on a sidequest.
  As it stands, I don't see how I don't ditch Starfield for Phantom Liberty in a couple weeks.
- Cyberpunk was always a great game, incels hated it because incels hate everything original

What's a good space combat game?
X-Wing was one of my all-time favourite games, it was late niceties and got followed to by tie fighter then X-Wing Vs tie fighter but the original was best. It was really simple combat, lasers or rockets and you had to balance power between shields and lasers. I don't know what made it so great, there was a pace to it the just felt so good - lining up and blowing a tie fighter then another and coming down on the third, doing a hard breaking turn and driving your speed to get behind it and land a shot in its rear before it can outpace your maximum acceleration.
X com interceptor was a great game too, I remember it being deeply flawed but incredibly easy to get hooked into playing for hours. Combat was a bit more like wing commander which was a touch more strategic and less frantic.
Any good, ideally cheap, space combat games anyone can suggest?
- If you like the Freelancer style of combat I quite enjoyed Everspace 2. It's fairly simple but fun. Available on the Gamepass as well.
- Not combat specific, but x4 is a solid title. Combats a bit basic, but the empire and fleet management means you'll be in some pretty huge battles.
  
  Sounds perfect, between what you said and the other guy I'll check it out
- X4 is amazing if you can get past some of the jank. Space combat from piloting a single scout fighter to helming a carrier at the head of a fleet. Absolutely awesome game.
  Squadrons was alright and will hit your X-wing nostalgia pretty hard.
  Everspace 2 is pretty good too.

It took me quite a few attempts to get into the game, but I'm really enjoying it now. For me it's the first 3D game I'm properly playing on the xbox so there's a bit of a learning curve there (I'm used to mouse and keyboard on pc).
The biggest things that helped me enjoy it: when navigating cities or buildings that are all super maze-like, you can use your scanner to actually guide you in the right direction with little arrows on the ground as pathfinding. I kept getting lost and giving up on quests until I saw this in a video.
In the beginning I'd spent most of my money every time i was in town to pretty much fully fill my inventory with ammo, lockpicks and med packs. Especially since I'm trying to learn how to aim with a controller I'll waste a lot of clips missing completely. Just maxing out on ammo makes it a lot easier (and using a shotgun early on, just run at them and blast em point blank, lots of dmg / bullet)
Looking up how the UI / systems work online.. i wanted to do a pure experience, but holy crap is the UI hard to figure out sometimes. Especially things to do with ship building and traveling.
I'm really liking the random side quests though, and was just wasting away my entire Saturday playing, which hasn't happened in years for me.

Wasn't quite sure at first, but I kinda knew what to expect from a BethRPG - slowly grew on me and now i'm pretty into it. About 22 hours in and I feel like i'm getting thru most of the main quest. Seen some cool stuff, and I guess there's a NG+ so i'll probably push thru the main plot and then go a bit slower in the next game.
Wish you could traverse planets a bit faster, it can be a bit tedious. Felt like too much fast travel at first, but once you embrace it, it does move things along. (Wouldn't want to play with a HDD and not an SSD) Gunplay isn't bad. The companions are annoying and seemingly turn into stalkers lol.

It definitely feels "meh".
The characters are flat and tropey, the story itself isn't very compelling, there doesn't seem to be a lot of narrative freedom in the quests and the quests themselves are fairly cookie cutter. I was told the "First Contact" quest was really cool and well done. Nonsense! I'd like to be able to go back and talk to the NPCs about the progress of the quest, take their temperature on the options available. It didn't feel like there was much of a point in getting the opinions of the entities aboard the ship as they had zero say in the outcome.
The game feels very much like a fantasy setting wrapped in sci-fi aesthetics, especially with the way the main quest doles out powers.
I like building a ship. I wish the ship had more functionality. I like building outposts, though I have no idea what for, I can't see much of a use for harvesting and automating the production of resources.
The gun combat feels alright, but it seems health scales up really quickly on enemies.
I dislike how so much content is gated behind perk level ups, but it does keep me playing to see if the next unlock is cool.
- there doesn’t seem to be a lot of narrative freedom in the quests
  I've been playing more since I originally posted this and I'm enjoying myself more but the game still feels pretty meh. But this point above I think is the biggest sin the game commits. It's an RPG but it doesn't really feel like my decisions effect anything other than my companion's view of me. I don't think there are branching storylines or anything like that.
  Hate to do it, but gonna compare to Cyberpunk again. In Cyberpunk, there are multiple ways to solve quests and multiple endings with multiple endings! BG3, of course, also has branching quests that effect the state of the world. The lack of a feeling of agency in this game feels like the biggest fault.
  I can get used to the loading screens EVERYWHERE (a loading screen to enter a tiny store? really??), the weak gunplay, the watered down mechanics and wide but shallow world. But this game is an RPG first and if the RPG mechanics are bad, what is left??
  
  I haven't played CP2077, but I may have been spoiled by the characters and autonomy in BG3. The writing and choices are just so stellar in that game, it set a new standard. I remember in BG3 being so appalled by one NPC that I decided to just kill them instead of taking any of the games multiple dialogue routes to handle them and there were unique consequences and dialogue lines for taking that course of action!
  A lot of the story telling in Starfield just doesn't hold up to scrutiny if you look at it too closely and you have to closely follow the set paths or else it kinda breaks. Really disappointing in that aspect. Maybe if it had released prior to BG3, it wouldn't seem so unpolished.

I'm holding back till more mods start coming out to improve it like all other bethesda games

I have a recommendation for running out of ammo and health packs: spend the time searching everything. There are boxes of ammo everywhere to the point that I've never gotten close to worrying about running out.
Yes, it's tedious, yes, it's probably not great gameplay to have to spend so much time searching rooms, but it helps you not run out of ammo.

I've only watched someone play it, but it does seem like it is super superficial, like a puddle that looks deep but is only a few inches
- To be fair, I don't feel like I've gotten far enough into the game to be able to tell how deep it is. But compared to Cyberpunk, the both the story and the combat are a lot less engaging. The space combat seems like it has potential and base building is something I really want to get into but they are both things that require more money (aka time played).

I truly dont understand the "everything is a bullet sponge" argument.
I havent skilled any combat related skills and I am doing just fine in combat. Also I dont expect enemies in an RPG to get down in a single shot. Especially when they are armored like tanks or some weird giant alien creature. People have weird expectations tbh.

I think it makes great use of the engine. The game is super fun, way better than Cyberpunk 2077 (which is basically just Grand Theft Auto). The worlds are cool. The stories are great.
I think it's a great game.
- I'm in the same boat as the op, the best thing this game does is make me want to play cyberpunk more

I'm a social pariah for not even enjoying old Bethesda rpg games. So much loot fatigue.

I'm liking it more than Cyberpunk 2077 currently. I couldn't even bring myself to finish CP2077 and yet I'm playing multiple hours of Starfield every day.
- Out of curiosity, when's the last time you played Cyberpunk? There's been a TON of bug fixing and QoL in the least couple years. And the 2.0 patch coming with the DLC is gonna be huge even you don't get the DLC.
  
  Couple of months ago maybe. I don't have any technical issues, just find that the world, characters, and gameplay to be uninteresting. The game ran great when I played it.

git gud n3wb!
Jk i couldn't resist