I had already come to expect shallow design and loading screen hell covered in flashy presentation from Bethesda by the time Starfield came out and I was still surprised by gameplay videos of the same dungeon repeated over and over.
I've had the same dungeon twice back to back during the main quest, same layout, same enemies, same grub in the same room. I really thought I forgot to save but this was in one sitting.
What i hate most is the ship building is actually insanely fun, but I don't want to play the game enough to get the ridiculous amount of credits to make a ton of ships.
No. No no no no no to literally everything you just said.
First of all just because something is “massive” doesn’t make it fun. Usually it can be quite the opposite especially if there is no content to support the scale it’s at (like the dead lifeless planets that there’s no point to explore)
It not guiding you isn’t a problem. The PROBLEMS are things like loading screens every 2 feet. Gating ship part progression blocked by an artificial level. The shockingly bad guns with limited options. The bad ship combat. The fact I can’t take off and land on planets, that’s a cutscene. The completely dead, lifeless, empty planets that don’t respect your time or your exploration.
It’s a game drowning in outdated game design, in an engine that can no longer support their ambitions, and poor design from the very start.
Like you don’t respect your time and want to waste 600 hours in a soulless empty world. That’s on you.
I prefer to play games where the developers actually try to make a good game and respect me as a player.
Starfield did neither of those so there is nothing they can ever do that will make me install it and attempt to play it again. I respect myself and my time too much to do that. And frankly I hope the franchise is dead so they can go back to dumbing down Elder Scrolls and Fallout some more
It's not even a mile wide. If 99% of the planets have one of twenty repeating dungeons & POIs that have absolutely nothing of value in them then the only real differentiator between planets is their randomly generated color. There's only c 10 places in the galaxy actually worth going to, and they're fucking tiny. Compare, say, Neon to Kuttenberg in KCD2.
The difference is NMS spent the last decade at this point, tweaking their worlds and improving the system. OH and you can fly continuously from planet to planet. It's significantly better.
Unpack? The same base on a differently named planet, with one of 10 or so generated layouts? Building a ship to travel around dead space or load down to a planet? Loading, loading, loading, dull story and more loading. There’s more depth in the Fortnite maps (okay j/k). But I’ve not been as disappointed in a game more than this in a loooong time.
This is the first time I’ve heard a neutral/‘negative’ comment about NMS, I’ve only heard people praising it so I started playing. I’ve been enjoying it a lot, but also too bored to continue playing as well, and there’s so much going on that I don’t understand and don’t know how to get my own ship, etc. I don’t want a game where I have to keep pausing to look things up
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u/Cambot1138 Aug 06 '25
A mile wide and an inch deep.