So far about 30 hours in and I gotta say, I really fucking hate the quantity over quality of this game. They could have cut like 90% of the star systems out and the game would fundamentally be the same. The game is meant to be like 300 years into the future yet humanity is spread so thin and far across the entire universe that nothing makes sense. These aren't even minor outposts in the middle of nowhere 15 galaxies away from Sol, they're full blown factories that have taken years to construct.
It really says a lot when I had the most fun during the opening return to Sol questline just fucking around on our solar system. I'm just honestly struggling to understand the logic of the colonies, you've got one city per planet which makes absolutely no fucking sense, the first planet you arrive on is theoretically larger than Earth, and unless literally every human being was transported from Earth to the new planet then it'd take far more than 300 years to come anywhere close to filling the world. I get the concept of a corpo planet, but even then why does it have to be so far away from the new 'base' for civilization? You could have fit all the major cities onto each planet in the second solar system and absolutely nothing would be lost bar the unreasonable and unrealistic scale.
It's the No Man's Sky thing where because there's so much to take in, you can never remember where you're going or any memorable landmarks. Can anyone off the top of their head tell me which solar system Neon is in? Of course you can't, hell you might not even be able to roughly remember the general location of the solar system in the huge map either so you might never return there on that playthrough. I remember setting up a base on a planet in No Man's Sky with some weird name like D-gsihgf-WWu or something and once you move further into the universe, the chance of you ever remembering where you are or what you were doing on said outpost is useless.,
A radically reduced Starfield would have been so much more fun, they could have even added another 10ish solar systems that randomly generate depending on said playthrough if they wanted so you could get that autistic space explorer feeling out of your system if you wanted, but instead it's just horrible bloat. I can't even imagine bringing myself to go through the same slog in NG+ and repeat mission after mission and rebuild a decent inventory and bank account little by little again. If the overall goal of the game is a timeloop then why do they pad the everlasting fuck out of everything you do? Even vendors don't give enough credits to dump your loot on them unless you keep sleeping over and over again (How the fuck is 5000 credits an acceptable number for every vendor when you're amassing weapons worth 25000 by mid game?).
Leaving the story aside, I keep being surprised at the sheer stupidity of almost every single system in the game the longer I play. The menu is a game in itself to navigate, (constantly slipping up between getting to the menu screen or going one level further out of the star map), the cell based gameplay has been hideously exposed with so many fucking cutscenes in between accepting a mission and arriving on a planet, the ship builder forgets to tell you a bunch of buttons that can help you navigate through the process (namely changing the vertical axis of said object), weapon crafting sucks because you can't swap mods around, even story related things like ship docking or scanning for anomalys aren't explained, persuasion fucking sucks, there are effectively 3 different human enemy types in the universe, I'm probably forgetting something important here too because the game isn't running atm.
I expected the cast to be a bunch of woke faggots that are relatively annoying, what I DIDN'T expect was how the ship rankings go A->B->C and not the other way around.
The worst part is? By fucking around in Cheat Engine and removing the Oxygen requirements and bumping up the movement speed I'm actually having a decent time. It's a 7/10 game with elements of the Bethesda shine to it that makes it relatively easy to get immersed into the game. I just find it difficult to stop playing it despite so many minor grievances that tickle the 'tism because it does basically fill the Bethesda/Borderlands skinnerbox hole that's relatively satisfying to grind out after a long day of work.
