And despite this I still fear the game is going to do gangbusters.
No doubt about that one. People complain but they will be back when the first additional content packs are announced. And they will be hyping for the next Bethesda game again once it is announced. A lot of them talk about their disappointment with Starfield being a 'learning experience', but they did not learn from Skyrim and Fallout 4 & 76, so why would they learn now?
I'm probably going to get game pass on PC just so I can play it (and I'll be installing it on my HDD cause fuck you Bethesda, I'm not wasting 120+ gig of my SSD for your piece of shit game, optimize your god damn file sizes) but I dunno how much I'll be able to play it for cause it just looks soooooooooo boring.
Why? You yourself already admit what you expect the experience to be like? So why not go for a game that has positive feedback and actually sounds good to you? Go play Rodina for example. Maybe somewhat 'worse' looking but you have no loading screens when traveling between planets and you have a lot more freedom.
Funny enough it is being made by a former Bethesda employee.
He wasn't wrong about FF 8 though, that game is just dogshit.
I liked some of the fun he had with it such as renaming the love interest girl and her dog
Final Fantasy 8's world building sounds so dumb in so many ways, its as if the lead writer forgot what he wrote down a couple of pages earlier in his design document.
I tried to 'acquire' Starfield myself a couple of times now, but each time I thought about how I had grown bored with Fallout 4 and at some point no longer wanted to play it even more despite that I managed to pull myself through Fallout 3. A couple of times over the years I have even considered reinstalling that game to explore its map and DLCs again. But I just can't as most of it is a shoot and loot game, a boring shoot and loot game.
Starfield is perhaps better when it comes to the shooting mechanics though after reading how Bethesda has cleaned up the damage mechanics (even if I am not obsessed with gore), it sounds like they took a few steps back on that. I'd be better off reinstalling Borderlands again.
And for a sci-fi adventure experience I would be better off with Mass Effect 1, how linear and overblown it may be. Or Mass Effect 2. Actually that makes you wonder what a more open world Mass Effect experience would have been like with the player being an independent space pilot, free to choose their own jobs and contracts. (Bioware actually considered a spin off series or companion series to the main Mass Effect series in which the player would explore the world from its 'seedy underbelly' as a smuggler or mercenary. I think an opportunity was lost here)
I would like to compare the player's quest of collecting the artifacts with the main quest in No Man's Sky but I am not sure if that is a fair comparison. But it feels like someone wanted to go for something 'artistic' because it sounds so grandiose without even really knowing what it really means.
Starfield definitely does not deserve the hype that it is being given by a lot of people. For the price that is being asked for it Bethesda could have give players a more involving experience, even if it was just side content.
