Space travel and exploration (space and ground, seemlessly), as well as space combat? Elite: Dangerous.
Story? Literally anything.
Combat? Damn near any shooter made in the last 20 years.
Dungeon looting? Just play Fallout 4, which has plenty of issues but none as bad as Starfield.
It’s not bad. It’s just not good at anything. I have no reason to play it over so many other games. It feels like it doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be, so it doesn’t do anything well or interesting.
In my opinion, having played both at launch, it’s a pretty similar experience, except I could see what NMS wanted to be. It wanted to be an exploration game. It just didn’t have any systems to make that interesting.
Starfield doesn’t want to be an exploration game I don’t think, but it does have things to explore but it never makes it interesting or necessary. It’s sci-fi, but that genre is supposed to be used as a lense to look at real-world issues, and it doesn’t critique anything except maybe saying pirates are bad. None of the companions are interesting enough to care about, and they’re almost all identical, so it isn’t about them. The looting gameplay is pretty bad where you just do the same five dungeons over and over, so that obviously wasn’t a priority. I just can’t think of a single thing it actually makes important to the experience, so I don’t know what it’s trying to be.
Everything it does other games do better.
Space travel and exploration (space and ground, seemlessly), as well as space combat? Elite: Dangerous.
Story? Literally anything.
Combat? Damn near any shooter made in the last 20 years.
Dungeon looting? Just play Fallout 4, which has plenty of issues but none as bad as Starfield.
It’s not bad. It’s just not good at anything. I have no reason to play it over so many other games. It feels like it doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be, so it doesn’t do anything well or interesting.
I haven’t played Starfield. But that was pretty much what I felt playing No Man’s Sky.
In my opinion, having played both at launch, it’s a pretty similar experience, except I could see what NMS wanted to be. It wanted to be an exploration game. It just didn’t have any systems to make that interesting.
Starfield doesn’t want to be an exploration game I don’t think, but it does have things to explore but it never makes it interesting or necessary. It’s sci-fi, but that genre is supposed to be used as a lense to look at real-world issues, and it doesn’t critique anything except maybe saying pirates are bad. None of the companions are interesting enough to care about, and they’re almost all identical, so it isn’t about them. The looting gameplay is pretty bad where you just do the same five dungeons over and over, so that obviously wasn’t a priority. I just can’t think of a single thing it actually makes important to the experience, so I don’t know what it’s trying to be.