I really liked a lot of the mechanics of Starfield. I think some people can get a bit overly-critical and “throw the baby out with the bathwater”, even if the baby is a little ugly too and has 13 toes in this analogy.

Ultimately I think it was a game killed mostly by poor writing and, consequently, a failure to tie that writing into interesting enemy variation.

The different types of human enemies all felt the same, there wasn’t enough variation when it came to robots or aliens, and these were used in uninspired ways pretty much uniform. The randomly generated locations etc. definitely added onto this.

I had a lot of fun with the ship and weapon customization, the core gameplay felt good to me. It is a game primed for a very fun and interesting New Vegas to its FO3, if they chose to go that route (which I doubt they will, alas).

One of my biggest issues is that it feels like a game written entirely by Libertarian Atheist Redditors from 2013. It is so completely out of touch with the current culture and political landscape that I can only assume the issue is that Bethesda, or at least the people responsible for this messat Bethesda, are Libertarian Reddit Atheists who haven’t matured in their understanding of culture and politics for 15 years, like you took Hank Green, Niel deGrasse Tyson, and pre-2020 Elon Musk, threw them in a blender, and asked the resulting mush to write a sci-fi setting.

The joinable factions are obviously supposed to be exaggerated stereotypes of Democrat and Republican politics as conceived by someone with a very shallow view of politics, but the thing about the Democrat and Republican parties is that 90% of the country fucking hates both of them. What’s your other option? Get a job? The pirates could have been fun but I’m not even going to get into how they were butchered. And the snake-worshipping religious zealots are the only major faction you can’t join, despite being the only mildly interesting one.