Starfield is the first new universe in 25 years from Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning creators of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4.
I must say it is not the best RPG out there, but I feel like it would have earned more. I personally have a lot of fun playing.
While it was not a Cyberpunk-grade overhype, I think it must still have been overhyped. Because if you see it as Skyrim with better graphics, it is pretty much what you'd expect.
Some of the common criticism seems to be intrinsic to the sci-fi genre. In Skyrim, you walk 100 meters and then you find some cave or camp or something that a game designer has placed there manually with some story or meaning behind it. And as a player, you notice that, because most locations in Skyrim feel somehow unique. Even though for example the dungeons have rooms that repeat a lot. Having a designer place them manually with some thought gives them something unique.
In interstellar sci-fi, a dense world like this is simply impossible. Planets are extremely large so filling them manually with content is simply not possible. And using procedural generation makes things feel meaningless. Players notice that fast. So instead, Starfield opted for having a few manually constructed locations that are placed randomly on planets, unfortunately with a lot of repetition. But that is a sound compromise, given the constraints of today's game development technology. The dense worlds that we are used to from other genres simply don't scale up to planetary scale, and as players, we have to get used to that.
I just finished another play through of Cyberpunk before jumping into Starfield and the dialogue seems SO generic in comparison. Not to mention the whole "Oh hi, here's my space ship and robot. Bye!" was really offputting.
That entire beginning is definitely the worst part of it imo. No idea why they thought this was a good idea. It's not even just bland and weird in regards to the story but it is also a terrible tutorial experience. I only learned that you can mine super fast by holding right click after like a week form reading online comments of others. I can definitely see how some more casual people will be severely put off by such an experience.
I'm enjoying the game, but an annoying number of quests involve a pointless "go talk to this person to find out what to do", you get there and it's always some mundane instruction "go collect this thing from there". and you waste a few minutes for that
I’ve put 40hrs in and almost none of the quests have been interesting, they go nowhere, characters have little personality, the buildup never has a payoff, the “choices” are shallow and have no effect on anything. It feels like the quality of a community mod.
I can get on board with some of this. I like many quests personally but I really wish Bethesda would write more interesting material than some of the dialogue randomly spouted off by NPCs. I know it's a game and that action cliches happen in many games but it gets old after seeing overacted pirates or marines talk about their hardships. It just isn't believable.