"Despite the fact that AI has been nerfed since its initial conception, many players are still frustrated with how difficult Starfield's space combat can be, especially on higher difficulty levels."
Starfield is like soft serve ice cream: mostly air.
The main story line is pretty short. Some of the side quests are interesting but bloated and would benefit from fewer but longer more in-depth quests. The NPCs start repeating themselves pretty quickly. Hearing Sam's daughter repeat her stupid skyscraper joke for the hundredth time made me wish I made a different choice at the end of Act One.
But what I find most frustrating is that for as big as the map is, there just isn't much there. Many of the star systems are barren. Those that have something to do choose from a set of about four things: abandoned (science/industry/military) outpost, farm, geological feature. Fun the first twenty times; great for farming credits; not so fun the next sixty times.
The weight/mass limits on inventory make a good chunk of the game simply managing the inventory of your tune: become encumbered --> slow travel to your ship --> fly to some city --> slow travel to a trader --> sell what you can (which is not much) before the trader runs out of credits --> go find another shop. PRO TIP: when the trader runs out of credits, buy ammo, then start selling the rest of your loot to get your money back (basically trading loot for ammo). Why couldn't Bethesda just include a salvage system so that loot could be broken down into mats?
The outpost build interface is clunky and often breaks on XBOX. You run out of mats way too quickly and as far as I can tell, there's very little value to spending a lot of time on building an outpost other than it looks cool. I basically played the whole way through with a weapon I found early in the game and the armor you get from the Mantis quest line so trying to build storage to store a bunch of mats is mostly a waste of time.
Speaking of more time wasting, the quest where you have to survey the planet is just brutal. Like, who thought "Hey, let's make users walk all over the planet looking for mobs and resources that they can click on!"?
Ship-to-ship combat is kinda-sorta fun? It's sorta cool but not very challenging. The ships were cool looking and customizing them was reasonably entertaining.
But mostly, after finishing the game, I was left with an impression of a game where the designers had loftier goals and abandon half of them to get the game to market in a reasonable amount of time. That and Starfield's version of the hourglass loading icon.
Should have titled this game: Call of Duty: Derivative
As others have noted, the need to crowbar modern sensibilities into a quasi-historical game is as tired as it is predictable. We've got the dumb ignorant American who has to be awoken to the valiant fighting done by black troops, natch. We've got the heroic Russian heroine with her cutesy pigtails, cloaked but implied rockin' bod, with a need to kill Nazis because daddy got smoked. And of course, we've got the black team leader, Oxford trained, upper-crust accent who can be the counterpoint to Nazi racial tropes with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face. Hell, the only interesting guy in the whole squad is the Australian, and they even go with the cliché rebel against incompetent British commander and his elitist attitudes towards the colony. Dumb.
And just so it's clear before someone makes the inevitable dumb reply: I have zero problem with the ethnicity or sexes of any of the characters.
Oh, and our good guys? No problem burning a guy alive.
It's not that modern game developers are applying modern sensibilities to an earlier time; it's that they do it in such a ham-fisted and uninteresting way. But you know what, as contrived and unimaginative as that writing is, I could live with it if it weren't for the utter lack of originality elsewhere. How so? Let me count the ways.
The whole Russian flashback is almost a complete ripoff of Enemy of the Gates; but even worse, it's recycled straight from the first CoD game. Ugh.
The killing of Novak is a straight up rip off of Neegan smoking Glenn in TWD.
The D-DAY scene is basically 'Day of Days.'
I mean, come on. Wasn't a global war that lasted (at least) six years big enough to come up with some new ideas?
Throw in some not-so-trivial gameplay issues: you don't die when you bounce your plane off the ocean and 300mph (speaking of which the aircraft controls are simply awful); your AI squadmates can stand directly in front of the NPC enemies and not get shot if you're stealthed. Incredibly short campaign.
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