Erk

I can't speak for everyone (including you) but I just can't understand that feeling. It's hugely open, it just uses tricks to capture that openness in a few places. It's nice to, say, fly down to a planet seamlessly in NMS, but we all know it's also kind of a pain in the butt sometimes, it can be annoying to land and it can take a long time and when you've done it a bunch it essentially turns into just another loading screen. Flying to or from a planet in SF is slightly less immersive but for me, it's just a tiny detail that could have been a bit better but doesn't materially impact the game.

And I've so far never reached the edge of an on-planet instance, the fields are huge and it seems to me you have to actively go hunting for the borders.

I'm not too surprised it isn't 'the' game to play, myself, but I am surprised at the amount of backlash against it online. It seems to me to be everything it says it will be on the tin, warts and all

I mean... I think it's a pretty good space game too, depending on what you want.

Yesterday I took my custom-built ship to explore an alien world. On my way in, I was hailed by a merchant and warned there were pirates in system. I thanked them, they jumped off, and being me, I decided to go planet hopping until I ran into the pirates. Destroyed two, saw that one had a cool looking ship so I switched to EMP weapons and took out their grav drive and engines. Once those were offline, I boarded them. The damage had taken out their gravity so the whole ship was in zero-g, with pens and junk floating around, obscuring my vision. The firefight against the crew was surprisingly tough, as they had mounted auto-turrets that were at a distinct advantage against me because I was being thrown around by the micrograv, but I did eventually capture the ship. Once I got the gravity on, though, all the stuff in the interior crashed down and was scattered everywhere. I searched around to see if I could find some contraband... but it was too messy, and I guess I missed some, because when I jumped into a more civilized sector the SysDef patrols caught me. Here I am, flying a stolen pirate ship, trying to explain to the cops that the drugs in my hold aren't mine and I didn't know they were there. Usually I'd bribe the guy to let me through but that didn't work out well this time, and the next thing you know I find myself in the brig aboard the UC Vanguard under a bright lamp being interrogated by someone with far too much brass on his chest to be dealing with a reported drug runner. Looks like maybe I got myself in a bit over my head...

Anyway. If that's not a space game, I don't know what is. I can't think of any other space games that would offer that particular mix of space combat and RPG experiences. And that wasn't really an unusual play story! It's just that this isn't NMS, as I think that shows.

I hate typing this ugh... in bethesda's defense they've already started releasing key patches and announced further changes based on feedback. Here in the NMS forum I'd say people should be more sympathetic to that than usual. I don't have a lot of faith, because of who it is, but then... I knew what I was paying for, and I think most other people did too.

I also started having fun right away. The reason people say it starts slow is that the game doesn't expose you to every aspect of play right away, for reasons both good (it would be a lot to take in) and bad (the game has some sort of allergy to showing you its cool systems and seems to expect you to learn them from wikis instead). So, when people tell me they're not having a good time, I often check that they got to these systems in the main quest before haring off to do side quests without realizing they hadn't encountered key features.

This is a flaw in the game, but the flaw isn't "the game is boring", it's "the game lacks an adequate tutorial". It's still not for everyone but a lot of the people I talked to were pretty happy once they learned they were missing bits.

it seems like it's a little bit more than April? Doesn't mean it isn't the biggest in a few years, but it's not like it's head and shoulders above. August and July look like they were fairly slow months so the gain in the 30 day average is kind of a skewed stat when the article's talking about it being special int he span of years.

I don't think you need to keep your expectations low, just keep them realistic. It's a Bethesda game, it plays like their other games... it's a whole ton of jank muddled up and duct taped until it holds together just enough for launch. This time they raised the bar to what counts as "holding together" to the level of the other major studios, but a lot of the gameplay systems still feel unfinished. In this I actually think it's a lot like modern NMS, where things like outpost building feel like they're actively contradictory to things like settlements; outposts in SF feel like someone did them early in the dev cycle and was then pulled off to work somewhere else and the only attention they got from then on was making sure they didn't crash the game. Then you've also got the typical Bethesda game stuff that people are acting surprised Pikachu about. The character animations look weird sometimes, low poly NPCs especially, there are too many load screens in some places, performance is poor considering the level of graphics, etc.

However, as long as you know what you're getting into, imo it's a great game. The storyline is interesting enough to be fun, but also manages to skip that annoying thing where you're off learning to be a space pirate for months while your family is being held hostage or something. Some of the side stories are excellent, and the game rewards you well for just taking your time doing stuff. I got caught with contraband yesterday... usually I hit the grav drive and escape rather than paying the fine, but I decided I didn't care and suddenly found myself embroiled in a shockingly compelling crime drama scene instead of the usual simple dialogue options. There's shit like that everywhere. There's an entire cyberpunk mini city half-hidden beneath the main city that you can just not find for dozens of hours, and when you finally get taken there it's really cool to realize it was under your feet the whole time. And these aren't even significant spoilers, there's more that I could tell you that would wreck the surprise for you.

Basically, go in expecting a game like morrowind/Skyrim/oblivion, where it's all about a huge breadth of interestint content (and yeah a fair bit of mediocre content because there's so much of it all) rather than any specific thing being the best in the genre, and you won't have to keep your expectations low.

Yeah, recommending starfield can feel a bit like recommending a show that gets going halfway through the first season.

That is pretty much what my first hundred hours of starfield have been like as well, though, except Starfield has some story, and fewer of the systems seem to contradict each other.

Mostly I don't think it's fair to either game to compare them. They're trying to do different things for different audiences on different budgets and different timescales.

I always assumed that was a joke, because they're just kind of bland generic rock and roll that it seems like it would be comical to pretend to have any really strong negative reaction to it. Then I met a few real people who actually despise them, and realized it's not a joke.

People in general are so weird about other people eating stuff they don't like.

Listen Karen, you don't have to have a slice of my pizza.

That was such a weird one to me. I think partly they leaned too hard into trying to leverage controversy for attention, but still, the movie was fine. Like... except for the first one, they've all just been "okay" movies, in that context it's probably one of the better ones.