PS: I beat the game and played over 100 hours exploring various planets
Warning: I am going to complain alot!
For me, Starfield is another Cyberpunk Disaster. At launch, this game is buggy, uninteresting and loaded with flaws. The game will need a lot of work and updates before it can be called "a good game". The game is essentially Skyrim but in space.. and with the worst of everything. This game tries to juggle so many different things and yet isn't able to be good at anything. The story is a really long fetch quest and not much goes on in terms of character development. You literally build no emotional connection with any of your allies. It's pathetic.
The combat is mediocre and besides some neat ship and outpost building, I will simply tell anyone who is looking for a great space RPG to go back to the Mass Effect Trilogy. I even had more fun playing Mass Effect Andromeda ( which was the worst in the ME franchise) than this game.
Bethesda should fire up the Mass Effect Trilogy and learn how dialogue and proper relationships work. This game has everything wrong. Don't get me wrong, this game has some great ideas, but it's going to take half a decade before this game is fully fixed.
I am simply going to ignore Starfield for 5-6 years once enough mods, DLCs and updates have been done to the game to pick it up again, because now it's a dumpster fire with poor kindling.
The story makes no sense. One day you are mining on a colony and then some guy shows up and gives you the task of being the savior of the universe by searching for artifacts. The transition makes no sense. There is no logical progression in your story or abilities. It's literally like seeing a random stranger on the street and saying
Hey you! Random stranger! Would you like to join a clandestine organization and fight your way to retrieve special artifacts? We don't know each other but here, take my ship, I trust you! Go to that place and do what these people tell you!
Is there anything good?
Yes, there were many great ideas and things which took a turn in brand-new directions, however none of them were designed perfectly. The outposts, the ship designing and the randomly generated planetary landings are really good ideas in theory, however they were poorly implemented.
The story gets interesting midgame with alternated universes (no spoilers) but it's still not as good as what I've seen with other games.
What I really disliked:
- You have to perform certain tasks to be able to attribute skills points. For example: I wanted to upgrade my health regen, but the conditions for these upgrade is to take damage and then heal to full health, so I was purposely jumping from high cliffs in order to speed up the process just so I could unlock this skill.
- So many bugs.. I was once stuck on my ship and couldn't move because a robot NPC was blocking the door.
- After killing certain enemies on an enemy ship which I eventually took over, their corpses didn't disappear, but were lying on the floor for the remainder of the game.
- The outposts repeat multiple times, you basically get the same outposts on different planets and the missions are similar(go there and fetch some artifact). I spend half the game fetching Artifacts from mines and the other half following tremors to find temples. My problem is all outposts and temples look the same (Exactly the same).
- The NPC's look like they were made in the early 2000s. The cities look dead. They look like cheap backgrounds.
- This game excels at nothing (average combat, average quests, average spaceship encounters and average story)
- The weapons are horrible. There are around 20 types of weapons, which just look like simple reskins of other weapons. The biggest disappointment are meele weapons which include knives, axes and cutlasses???? in space? where are the energy weapons/light sabers?
- Why are resources taking weight on your character? In various games, only crucial equipment has weight, but it seems everything you pick up encumbers you even more.
- The oxygen system, where running builds up CO2 in your spacesuit. It's worse than stamina because it can build up and damage you. So imagine that running too much can not only exhaust you, but actually hurt you.
- It's extremely repetitive forcing you to teleport 10 times in order to complete a quest. Let me give you an example.
Go to your home base, talk to NPCs.Fly to Planet A, Planet A scans your ship to get approval and land, then go talk to some NPCs, Go to Planet B, land on the planet, go to an outpost, fight off some space pirates in it, go deep inside a mining complex, fetch an "artifact". Go back to your home base, talk to an NPC. NPC sends you to a space station nearby called " the eye". Talk to new NPC. Go back to your homebase. <- This process repeats 10 times before midgame.
- The NPCs all talk over each other, like a shouting match, and it's annoying.
- The game kept crashing after exiting a building and froze on "Autosave...".
- NPC's would glitch by getting stuck in walls and fly away 2km in the sky. Sometimes dialogues would start and freeze making me unable to move.
Conclusion: Come back to Starfield after 6 years once they have fixed everything, balanced the game and added some DLC's.