The game is aggressively Bethesda but I'm enjoying the visuals and sniffing the 3d model of every insignificant bit of detritis in the world. I saw a very nice looking bowl, maybe THE bowl of all videogames. Other than that the narrative and main story has already lost my interest after about 10 minutes and I'll be off being a space menace if the game will let me.
Once i found out I can travel using the ship in scanner mode it doesn't feel like a map simulator anymore.
Also the chef having a perk for dueling tickles me.
Game also runs like shit on PC but digital foundry showed most settings being on medium yields good performance with no noticable quality loss.
Honestly I've been playing it but also asking myself why I've been playing it. I've had an overall smooth experience for the most part, some Bethesda jank, some glitches like doors not opening but that's solved with tcl. The more I play though the more I'm finding it to be unbelievably grindy. Levels trickle in once you're in the 30s. People on Reddit were so loud to say you don't need that many resources so the complaints about carry weight and the obnoxious weight of resources was actually a good thing but in reality you need a shitload of them. If you want to do weapon modding, good luck because it's so heavily gated behind not only skills and resources, but research that like 100 hours in and I'm nowhere near close to unlocking all of it.
My goal for the game was to fly a cool ship, to shoot cool guns, and to have a cool outpost. I finally hit class C ships and built one, but it's kinda dopey looking. I don't have the resources to do all the weapon modding research and I've been a loot goblin the entire game picking up everything I can in terms of resources. Even installed a mod that removed the weight of resources.
The game also takes a bunch of steps back from Fallout's weapon modding. In Fallout you could just buy a mod and slap it on the right gun, in Starfield, there are no mod items. If I find a better rifle that's the same exact thing but scaled up, I can't transfer my mods over to it, I have to rebuild all the mods again with all the rare and annoying resources once again. Same with ship building, can't transfer parts between ships.
At this point I've mostly given up on outpost building since that's another level dump to even get to a reasonable point. I know you can harvest resources through outposts and I have been, it's just so obnoxiously boring to teleport between each one to do stuff and the resource demand is also so damn high to build anything.
Haven't touched the main quest since I was first able to just run away and do my own thing. Most stuff in the game is a fetch quest, a go talk to this person quest, or a murder everyone quest. A quest that had an interesting premise, First Contact, was so bad, I ended up putting the game down.
spoiler
You're tasked with investigating a strange ship that arrived in orbit over a resort planet, the resort is rather tiny in planetary terms. You find that the ship is a generation ship, filled with the descendants of people that set out over 200 years ago for this very planet and are shocked to find that people already are at their destination. They want to settle the planet and ask you to negotiate terms for them to be able to settle. You go to the board room and are then faced with the most disgusting shit imaginable. They refuse to give even an inch of ground stating they have a claim that goes back years and that the colonists can either fuck off and die with you doing the murder, be allowed to settle but actually they'll just enslave them, or you can go and foot the bill for a grav drive for them to find a new home on their own. If you try to murder the execs, they're immortal like almost everyone in this goddamn game.
Honestly, I'm mostly ready to just hit up Rimworld and maybe pick up Stellaris in a few days with the new patch coming out tomorrow. Once again Bethesda has made a wide but incredibly shallow experience and left it to the community to make it better. Thank god I didn't pay for it.