I bought a series x just for this game and I couldn't have been more disappointed with just how empty and soulless everything feels. It reminds me a bit of NMS at launch but unlike NMS, the dev team at Bethesda won't spend the next 10 years making the Starfield experience right for fans. I have no doubt they'll re-release monetized anniversary editions of essentially the same game with player made content over that span of time but don't think for a second they'll make the game what it should have been from the start.
Despite Bethesda being kinda weird and shitty, I remain excited about the game myself. It still blows me away they decided to release without modding tools. But I'm looking forward to that quite a bit
To be honest, I really enjoyed my run (100 hours in). If you omit the bugs, it’s a nice alternative to Skyrim with a very different setting (space) and some quality of life improvements (eg: having your ship to store shit anywhere you go, instead of traveling back and forth to your house if you have any).
But I admit the game feels very old in general (especially because of those loading screens, which should be a thing from the past in 2023), and is not original at all on its FPS mechanics. There is also this odd feeling that the game does not want to block you access to anything (while the new game plus, which is a very good idea and introduced in a clever way, should have been enough to be more « punishing » with the player).
As an « old » gamer, it was not a big issue (especially because I play ton of retrogaming games, along with recent releases), but I totally understand what a player expecting a modern SF RPG game might feel.
I enjoyed the first playthrough too but I just got so tired of everything the second go around. Not much had changed so I was just redoing quests I'd done but now I "knew" things and made it go by faster. Yay?
It's so dull, I did everything the first time around so now I just get to watch it again, but it's "fun" cause there's one changed dialogue option? Meh. The game has an incredible philosophy, a terrible philosophy for its relationship to the gameplay.
In regards to gameplay, it was fine. I liked the flying, ship building was fun, gunplay felt okay. Walking around areas is mostly pretty. But like everyone else my issue was all the menu diving, and I found a few ways to mitigate how often I used it but man was it frustrating to have to menu dive so much, sometimes in situations where it doesn't even make sense, like arriving and landing on a planet.
And then again, to lose everything about your character that makes the game interesting (built ship, weapons, etc) during NG+ is just disheartening. I understand why, that doesn't make it easier lol.
This game was originally going to release two years ago without Microsoft making sure it got more QA than Bethesda is known for. Microsoft or not, the game design and feature completeness likely wouldn't have moved an inch.
Hi-Fi Rush, for a counter example, was one of the best games of the year.