Starfield

Like I said, Would have never played that much if we werent in a weird peer pressure competition with eachother for who could suffer most.

Quintessential dumb guy shit, lol

Let me use Fallout 4 as an example.

I don't actually like fallout 4. I dont think its a fallout game. It feels, to me, like a half finished shooter game that they got from some studio buyout, Threw supermuttants and radiation in it, and called it fallout 4. Its just so completely far removed from anything fallout, with the horrible new SPECIAL system and the frankly shitty legendary weapon system (that only exists, along with the radiant shit, to artificially lengthen the time played by doing the same shit over and over again, and with legendaries, to do it all to farm one thats not complete and total shit.) I also think the story is dumb, and basically a rehash of Fallout 3 with parent looking for child, instead of child looking for parent.

But I still play the shit out of it, because at its core there is fun to be had. Its fun to explore, its fun to fight, its fun to see the emergent interactions. Its even fun to build settlements (though mods make that infinitely better than vanilla), Mods don't create the fun in the game, mods enhance the fun in the game.

But for Starfield? There really is no fun in that game. Its bland, its stiff, its disjointed, and some things (like the not-magic) feel like they were thrown in last minute and not playtested because the only power I ever found useful to have hotkeyed was the one that gives you full stamina for the duration of the bubble, because it lets you get around the low weight limitations and constantly run and loot, and last of all.. It feels like you are trapped in a box. You are not in a vast open world, full of tiny boxes. You are just in a tiny box, desperately trying to cut yourway out into another tiny, unfortunately identical box.. and I just don't think theres enough core fun there, for mods to fertilize into something better. Starfield, at its core, feels like a playstation 1 game, with the loading screens and how much the world is cut into tiny chunks seperated by loading screens. its game deisgn from 25+ years ago, and a sad reversal from everything they did before it.

Much like B horror films, though, there are people that can and do have great fun watching/playing objectively bad games. and more power to them, hope they have all the fun. Just don't tell everyone else its the greatest thing god ever gifted mankind. Enjoy it for what it is, but don't try to make it what it isnt.