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?
I'm feeling the same way. Starfield isn't a bad game, but it's very meh. I enjoy the ship building aspect, but otherwise nothing really grabs me with this game.
Combat is a good example, too. There just doesn't feel to be any impact to the weapons. Mobs just get shot but don't really react to it. I know they will flee at times which is nice, but close range SMG fire to ones torso should illicit more of a response.
Fast travel also seems to be an detractor. Being able to fast travel anywhere you've been even if that place is across the galaxy really removes a lot of the exploration vibe the game would have otherwise. I know this isn't a space sim, but a lot of the systems they have don't really mesh well with others.
Starfield is like mediocre lite-RPG / space sim crossover that doesn't do either very well.
Edit: I also want to point out that Bethesda did not come up with the "NASA-punk" aesthetic, either. I've seen articles about that. The Expanse has been doing that for years now. Even before that, I can think of at least two Matt Damon movies from 2015 and before that used it as it's setting. Point being it's not anything new.
Yeah it's kind of weird but I feel like they're too liberal with the fast travel. You really lose a lot of the sense of scale when you can just... go anywhere from anywhere.
I mean, that said, given all the loading screens, I guess more fast travel means less loading screens so it's definitely a double-edged sword.
The RPG aspects seem really shallow after Cyberpunk. The space sim aspects are what I'm hoping keep me interested once I get deeper into it. Fingers crossed.
To make matters worse, the space around each planet is it's own load zone. Star systems are just collections of these zones. I don't think they can patch zone loading as it's done so much by design. It's like they took what they had in FO4 and just slapped a sticker on it that said "space sim".
Yeah, I was excited to go exploring space as soon as I got my ship, but it's such a slog with all the loading! Even flying from a planet to its moon while already in space requires a loading screen. Like, I just want to play the game but I feel like I'm mostly loading or wrestling the UI...