It is exactly what you would expect a Bethesda game on a twenty-year-old engine to be, for both better and worse. Too much fast travel required for organic exploration to be enjoyable, too few consequential player choices for the RPG elements to be enjoyable. Enemy AI is pretty much braindead. It's not "bad" per se, it's just very mediocre, and Bethesda is fine with that as a standard so long as it keeps bringing money in.
Fast travel hasn't really bothered me. There's something workman-like about inputting the location I want to go, waiting for the trip, then getting my bearings and taking a look around, scanning for interesting planets and surveying them if I feel like it. I felt/feel immersed in the world where space travel is just... A thing you do.
Player choice... It's difficult to talk about my opinions on that without spoiling the endgame, which is by far the best part of Starfield. Suffice it to say, the exploration through interaction and observation are some of my favorite parts of Starfield, I don't think "player choice" holds water as a criticism of this game in particular, but I'd rather not talk about my reasoning there.
Enemy AI is fine. I do my best to avoid fighting where possible, but when it occurs, I'm challenged by the situations I find myself in and I have fun. That's all I really need from the game.
I've enjoyed this one. Frankly, I'm hopeful that I'll live to see Starfield 2, I think the weaknesses of this game are quite easily addressed in a sequel, and the way the universe will evolve from where it is now is almost certainly going to fascinate me. Certainly, I think the stronger points of this game are all in the world-building and the lore surrounding the way humanity came to be like this, I want to see the next step, and the next after that, too. It feels like a realistic future dystopia, which is a line I don't feel many pieces of fiction really land on.
SOURCE: GBAtemp Inbox
