• Yup, this. I’ve played two runs by myself and on my fourth with some buddies and I’m still finding out meaningful stuff I didn’t do on my solo runs. Starfield is an upgrade in tons of aspects over previous beth titles (big exception is planetside exploration), they fixed tons of issues both Skyrim and F4 had. Skill checks, while not as present as they should be, pop up once in a while. Skill tree isn’t as boring as F4 but build variety suffers, same as in Skyrim. Character background pops up in convos sometimes (but isn’t as deep as it could be).

      That’s starfield. It has the makings of a good game, and it is, but it plays it very safe. And because of that, NPCs are boring, as is the story, as is combat, as is pretty much everything else in the game. The only thing that impressed me was that one mission in the main quest but even that one was limp dicked on the finish. And ship costumization, but if I wanted in-depth ship mechanics I’d play KSP.

      Like the game was too ambitious and too chicken shit at the same time.

      • I really like this, honest feedback to them. The game is obviously made by committee. That’s exactly what my wife and I have been saying, that they did a lot of cool ideas - and then dropped them half way through. None of the ideas are fully thought out or finished, it all screams “Some suit said ‘no this is great, move on’”. Some quick examples

        • Base building, awesome concept, I want to build a base on a foreign planet.
          • But what do I do there?
        • Automated crafting. Awesome, I love Satisfactory! I can do this.
          • Wait, I can’t limit items in transit, so I can really only transport one item over a link? So it can’t really be automated.
        • Oh sweet, I can build my own spaceship?!
          • But you are rarely actually in space and really when you are it’s just a mini game between planets.
        • and you get companions to hang out with you on your ship?
          • But they don’t interact with each other or do anything like help you fight other ships.
        • Oh and we get to have a fleet of ships?!
          • but they aren’t actually a fleet. You never get to assign someone as captain of another ship to help you fight pirates. You just… pick which of your ships you want to fly right now.

        And that’s just some. Like so so so many cool awesome fun ideas that were just… “I don’t want to play with this anymore.” The fleet one especially stings. I was really hoping I could assign someone as captain of another ship, and when we jumped/spawned in space there it would be on my left, and it could help me fight pirates. I mean, how hard would it be to program that? They already have the ship, they have AI for dogfighting other AI, it would just follow behind you until you entered combat.