Don't get me wrong, I'm not a hater. I actually was really excited for the game. But so far I am just not having fun.
For a little bit of reference, I just finished playing thru Cyberpunk 2077 and then jumped right into Starfield. Maybe that was a mistake because I kinda just want to go back to Cyberpunk (and I will in a few weeks when the DLC comes out).
But I'm noticing two really big issues with Starfield: first, the gunplay/combat is... let's call it underwhelming. I realize it's quite probably a skill issue and I need to just git gud, but holy crap, everything is a bullet sponge and I don't have that many bullets! Stealth seems to be pretty worthless at early levels as I don't have any high-alpha guns that can take advantage of it and, most of the time, I'm detected before I even see the bad guys. I'm just not enjoying this aspect of the game at all.
The second big issue for me is that there's a loading screen every five seconds! Again, probably a me thing, but OMG, it's driving me nuts. Get into ship, loading screen. Launch from planet, loading screen. Fly to next planet, loading screen. Land on planet, loading screen. Leave ship, loading screen. I just want to go shoot things! Let me shoot things!
Okay, found some spacers, time to... oh shit, out of ammo. Let me swap to a worse gun that still has ammo. Sigh. Okay, they're dead. Let me just heal up... oh shit, out of med packs. Sigh.
Oh and wrestling with the UI is exhausting.
Anyways, I realize that this probably isn't the place to find a lot of like-minded people. But I really do want to like this game. Any tips on maybe at least ways to make the combat less of a chore?
So, the ship is a superfluous mechanic they shouldn't have bothered with?
I have enjoyed the few minutes of space combat I did so far. I am looking forward to being able to board and steal ships later!
Well I have plenty of fun building my ship (even if sometimes its frustrating) and winning a space combat gives me great serotonine.
I spent like 60 seconds in the ship editor and then noped out. With a controller, it's completely pointless to bother trying to figure out. That's one aspect of the game I'm going to miss out on unless someone makes a Youtube tutorial specifically for how to do it with a controller. The stuff I've seen when you use a mouse it looks intuitive enough. But trying to select specific modules or hardpoints with no points? lawl
Ah men, that's sad. It is really an aspect I enjoyed on PC.
If you want it to be. You can skip any section of this game. You don't need to build outposts, but if you want to use them you can. You don't need to build a ship, but if you want to be a cargo hauler you can. You don't need to do ship combat, but if you want to you can make that your main thing.
You can really do whatever you want in whatever capacity you want to do it in. If you just want to be an on foot land traveller, then always fast travel to settlements and not in orbit. If you want to explore space and various planets and the stations and ships that are there, you can do that too.
For me, ship building has been lots of fun and I have a strong 1/3rd of my gameplay focused on being an anti-pirate bounty hunter. There's also entire systems locked behind skill points, so you very well could be missing an entire aspect of a type of gameplay by just not knowing about it.