I must say it is not the best RPG out there, but I feel like it would have earned more. I personally have a lot of fun playing.
While it was not a Cyberpunk-grade overhype, I think it must still have been overhyped. Because if you see it as Skyrim with better graphics, it is pretty much what you’d expect.
Some of the common criticism seems to be intrinsic to the sci-fi genre. In Skyrim, you walk 100 meters and then you find some cave or camp or something that a game designer has placed there manually with some story or meaning behind it. And as a player, you notice that, because most locations in Skyrim feel somehow unique. Even though for example the dungeons have rooms that repeat a lot. Having a designer place them manually with some thought gives them something unique.
In interstellar sci-fi, a dense world like this is simply impossible. Planets are extremely large so filling them manually with content is simply not possible. And using procedural generation makes things feel meaningless. Players notice that fast. So instead, Starfield opted for having a few manually constructed locations that are placed randomly on planets, unfortunately with a lot of repetition. But that is a sound compromise, given the constraints of today’s game development technology. The dense worlds that we are used to from other genres simply don’t scale up to planetary scale, and as players, we have to get used to that.
I messaged my friend a couple hours into the game and said “…I dunno dude. This feels like Fallout 4 but in space.” I’ve never finished an FO game, despite trying many times, because they just feel boring and overwhelming at the same time (for me anyway). I was late to the Skyrim party, first played it on Switch and loved it - loosely because the story drove me forward and kept me engaged.
Witcher 3 and CP2077 had me hooked the entire time. Even though they’re entirely different games, I also miss the little nuances in NMS - like actually flying into a planets atmosphere and landing, being able to zoom around the planet in my ship, engaging “warp.” All without a whole lot fewer loading screens or opening menus. To be fair, I got tired of NMS super quickly because resource mining and grinding aren’t my thing.
All that to say that I’m enjoying it though I’m not sure how long it’ll stick with me. It’ll hold me over until Phantom Liberty comes out.