this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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The needlessly underdeveloped mechanics are what got me. A few examples:
You can board and take over other ships, but selling them is useless and - even worse - you can't fucking swap parts into your own ship!
Having a crew is cool, but they do fuck all.
Flying around in space is cool, but the game goes out of its way to make sure that you know that "space" is not a vast openness but little boxes in front of the planet sprite.
You can have multiple ships but not have AI fly them and have a cool squadron you jump around with
You can build a base, but no snap to grid
Nothing in your base moves stuff around, it just gets teleported along imaginary wires. Conveyors are a thing, you know?
I could go on and on, but I'm too busy playing no man's sky which I restarted after 29 hours in Starfield.
It dips its toe into a lot of things but doesn't go deep enough to make any of them feel meaningful.
Sure, Starfield has space combat, but if that's what you're looking for, why not play Elite Dangerous?
You can build an outpost in Starfield to harvest materials and make items/upgrades with, but I could also just play Satisfactory.
Starfield allows you to explore a variety of randomly generated planets, but so does No Man's Sky, and it's not like it's significantly better compared to how NMS launched.
You can enjoy rich worldbuilding, investigate political intrigue, and party up in the cyberpunk station of Neon...but Cyberpunk 2077 just had its 2.0 update and I could do that instead.
You can enjoy a barebones RPG story with a crew of forgettable companions in Starfield, or you can enjoy the best RPG in recent memory with a solid cast of companions to adventure with in Baldur's Gate 3.
It really is the epitome of "jack of all trades, master of none". Especially in its skill system, which feels the most restrictive of any Bethesda RPG yet.
I'm one of the few people for which this is a "strength" of the game. I have severe thalassophobia and games like No Mans Sky where I'm allowed to free-roam in space actually make me feel super anxious and nauseous. I get the same feeling when swimming in large bodies of water, or in big underwater levels in video games.
So like, a real space sim like NMS is so hard for me to face without feeling ill, but somehow, these fake little boxes in Starfield make it so I don't feel that way enough that I can actually play it. I still get twinges of anxiety, but it's nowhere near as bad.
TIL thalassophobia also triggers in space, that's interesting