Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a hater. I actually was really excited for the game. But so far I am just not having fun.
For a little bit of reference, I just finished playing thru Cyberpunk 2077 and then jumped right into Starfield. Maybe that was a mistake because I kinda just want to go back to Cyberpunk (and I will in a few weeks when the DLC comes out).
But I’m noticing two really big issues with Starfield: first, the gunplay/combat is… let’s call it underwhelming. I realize it’s quite probably a skill issue and I need to just git gud, but holy crap, everything is a bullet sponge and I don’t have that many bullets! Stealth seems to be pretty worthless at early levels as I don’t have any high-alpha guns that can take advantage of it and, most of the time, I’m detected before I even see the bad guys. I’m just not enjoying this aspect of the game at all.
The second big issue for me is that there’s a loading screen every five seconds! Again, probably a me thing, but OMG, it’s driving me nuts. Get into ship, loading screen. Launch from planet, loading screen. Fly to next planet, loading screen. Land on planet, loading screen. Leave ship, loading screen. I just want to go shoot things! Let me shoot things!
Okay, found some spacers, time to… oh shit, out of ammo. Let me swap to a worse gun that still has ammo. Sigh. Okay, they’re dead. Let me just heal up… oh shit, out of med packs. Sigh.
Oh and wrestling with the UI is exhausting.
Anyways, I realize that this probably isn’t the place to find a lot of like-minded people. But I really do want to like this game. Any tips on maybe at least ways to make the combat less of a chore?
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.