Don't get me wrong, I'm not a hater. I actually was really excited for the game. But so far I am just not having fun.
For a little bit of reference, I just finished playing thru Cyberpunk 2077 and then jumped right into Starfield. Maybe that was a mistake because I kinda just want to go back to Cyberpunk (and I will in a few weeks when the DLC comes out).
But I'm noticing two really big issues with Starfield: first, the gunplay/combat is... let's call it underwhelming. I realize it's quite probably a skill issue and I need to just git gud, but holy crap, everything is a bullet sponge and I don't have that many bullets! Stealth seems to be pretty worthless at early levels as I don't have any high-alpha guns that can take advantage of it and, most of the time, I'm detected before I even see the bad guys. I'm just not enjoying this aspect of the game at all.
The second big issue for me is that there's a loading screen every five seconds! Again, probably a me thing, but OMG, it's driving me nuts. Get into ship, loading screen. Launch from planet, loading screen. Fly to next planet, loading screen. Land on planet, loading screen. Leave ship, loading screen. I just want to go shoot things! Let me shoot things!
Okay, found some spacers, time to... oh shit, out of ammo. Let me swap to a worse gun that still has ammo. Sigh. Okay, they're dead. Let me just heal up... oh shit, out of med packs. Sigh.
Oh and wrestling with the UI is exhausting.
Anyways, I realize that this probably isn't the place to find a lot of like-minded people. But I really do want to like this game. Any tips on maybe at least ways to make the combat less of a chore?
Loading screens isn't so much for a problem if you've got fast NVMe SSD drives. The travel is very akin to old school privateer games, where you basically traveled from loading screen to loading screen., so I don't mind it that much. If you want something more spaceship focused, I'd recommend Everspace 2.
The gun play is basically a progression of Fallout 4, and if you go fully automatic instead of semi, you will have to spend those credits to purchase ammo and spec appropriately. People should be leveling their personal combat skills first, since that's what the majority of the combat in the game involves and what most of the RPG components are designed around. Ships, well, you don't even need to level anything to keep on par with them, I've found you can just slap particle weapons on those bad boys to cheese even the hardest fights - I went cruising on a minimalist ship design to test it out and was able to take down an elite pirate ship encounter I came across.
Having said that, if you go the sneaky route, well, I'm going just fine with level 4 sneak bonuses without any rifle bonuses to my suppressed semiautomatic rifles (I've leveled melee first and am waiting to see which damage type I will prefer later on, even though I'm pretty sure I will be sticking to rifles).
You also should do the main story quests enough until you get to the game's fusrodah moment, and then a few missions of that afterwards, since you will gain access to alternative ways of taking down enemies. You might also consider making use of and arming your companions with better weapons, since they don't consume the ammo you give them.
The UI, well, that might hint at a performance issue again, otherwise it's just been getting used to it for me. Most annoying thing for me has only been not being able to switch between the mission UI and the map UI easily, but I don't consider it game breaking.