this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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While the game does have a lot of loading screens, I think the disappointment mostly comes from people having wrong expectations.
The people complaining mostly seem to be people that expected a game that feels like an open galaxy Star Wars game. Starfield is not that. Starfield is more like a 2009 Space Odyssey game. It leans farther into "realistic" space games like Elite Dangerous and less into "fantasy" space like Star Wars. For example, planets in real life are mostly just lifeless barren rocks, as Elite and Starfield both depict. Actually, there is more to explore in Starfield than Elite due to the procedural cave systems and outposts on planets being more plentiful in Starfield. Elite feels bigger because there are other players playing with you, and both politics and economy change in realtime in response to collective player actions. Not so in Starfield. Elite is also very good at hiding its loading screens so that, for the most part, they do not interrupt gameplay like they do in Starfield. In actuality, Starfield is a bigger game than Elite. Not in that there are more planets or anything, but that there is more to explore. More NPCs to interact with in a meaningful way. Because Elite was built as a space sim and not an RPG, this is by design.
Starfield itself is quite good. The end user experience suffers due to loading screen fatigue and players expecting planets to not be barren lifeless rocks like they would be in reality. This is where I believe the problem lies.
Regarding the lifelessness argument: one of my favorite and most played games ever is space engineers, which is essentially a Minecraft like sci fi sandbox in a largely procedurally generated map.
The game has no concept of npcs in the expected sense, the only real pve component are randomly spawned hostile vessels. There are no cities or inhabited planets, no actual story. Actual planets and moons are maybe a dozen overall, everything else is procedurally generated asteroids. The physics are only a rough approximation to real life.
And still, the game has hooked me for literally thousands of hours, simply because I can actually do shit. Once you are loaded into a map there isn’t a single loading screen to deal with. Piloting your ship is wholly your responsibility and you do it from start to orbit to wherever you want to go. And you can actually go anywhere you want, no railroading or handholding period. You are fully in control at all times.
Even just taking off in a random direction in space is fun: What might happen? Find a resource rich asteroid and make a mining station? Encounter a pirate fleet and get into a firefight? Accidentally slam my fuel tank into an asteroid, causing me to lose my fuel? Do I freeze to death in space or do I chance into an asteroid with more?
It lacks almost everything starfield has, on paper, but is still miles ahead as a game about exploring space.
As a realism enthusiast that is obsessed with simulations, there's one question that needs to be asked of every game regardless of how realistic and ambitious it aspires to be: "Is it fun?"
If it's not fun, then it's not worth playing.