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 don’t understand why some key binds are random. Why am I using b to add favorites? Why not f. Or x to exit the ship. Why not q? It just seems like the binds are just chosen at random when there are available keys where my hands are already resting.
I love that 0 is to heal but O is to repair my ship. I’m constantly just mashing both because I can’t remember which is which when my shields are down and I’m trying to dodge a missile.
Until this very second I thought my game was bugged because 0 (zero) wasn’t repairing my ship. I was literally going into the menus to repair my ship mid battle.