Starfield

Wasn't quite sure at first, but I kinda knew what to expect from a BethRPG - slowly grew on me and now i'm pretty into it. About 22 hours in and I feel like i'm getting thru most of the main quest. Seen some cool stuff, and I guess there's a NG+ so i'll probably push thru the main plot and then go a bit slower in the next game.

Wish you could traverse planets a bit faster, it can be a bit tedious. Felt like too much fast travel at first, but once you embrace it, it does move things along. (Wouldn't want to play with a HDD and not an SSD) Gunplay isn't bad. The companions are annoying and seemingly turn into stalkers lol.

I'm holding back till more mods start coming out to improve it like all other bethesda games

I have a recommendation for running out of ammo and health packs: spend the time searching everything. There are boxes of ammo everywhere to the point that I've never gotten close to worrying about running out.

Yes, it's tedious, yes, it's probably not great gameplay to have to spend so much time searching rooms, but it helps you not run out of ammo.

It took me quite a few attempts to get into the game, but I'm really enjoying it now. For me it's the first 3D game I'm properly playing on the xbox so there's a bit of a learning curve there (I'm used to mouse and keyboard on pc).

The biggest things that helped me enjoy it: when navigating cities or buildings that are all super maze-like, you can use your scanner to actually guide you in the right direction with little arrows on the ground as pathfinding. I kept getting lost and giving up on quests until I saw this in a video.

In the beginning I'd spent most of my money every time i was in town to pretty much fully fill my inventory with ammo, lockpicks and med packs. Especially since I'm trying to learn how to aim with a controller I'll waste a lot of clips missing completely. Just maxing out on ammo makes it a lot easier (and using a shotgun early on, just run at them and blast em point blank, lots of dmg / bullet)

Looking up how the UI / systems work online.. i wanted to do a pure experience, but holy crap is the UI hard to figure out sometimes. Especially things to do with ship building and traveling.

I'm really liking the random side quests though, and was just wasting away my entire Saturday playing, which hasn't happened in years for me.

I think it makes great use of the engine. The game is super fun, way better than Cyberpunk 2077 (which is basically just Grand Theft Auto). The worlds are cool. The stories are great.

I think it's a great game.

I'm a social pariah for not even enjoying old Bethesda rpg games. So much loot fatigue.

It definitely feels "meh".

The characters are flat and tropey, the story itself isn't very compelling, there doesn't seem to be a lot of narrative freedom in the quests and the quests themselves are fairly cookie cutter. I was told the "First Contact" quest was really cool and well done. Nonsense! I'd like to be able to go back and talk to the NPCs about the progress of the quest, take their temperature on the options available. It didn't feel like there was much of a point in getting the opinions of the entities aboard the ship as they had zero say in the outcome.

The game feels very much like a fantasy setting wrapped in sci-fi aesthetics, especially with the way the main quest doles out powers.

I like building a ship. I wish the ship had more functionality. I like building outposts, though I have no idea what for, I can't see much of a use for harvesting and automating the production of resources.

The gun combat feels alright, but it seems health scales up really quickly on enemies.

I dislike how so much content is gated behind perk level ups, but it does keep me playing to see if the next unlock is cool.

It's a little known fact that if you look up "meh" in the dictionary there is a picture of Starfield.

I'm liking it more than Cyberpunk 2077 currently. I couldn't even bring myself to finish CP2077 and yet I'm playing multiple hours of Starfield every day.

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.