Starfield 3/10
Oh my word, what a steaming pile of horse manure Bethesda. WTF.
Fascinating how polarizing this game has been.
I rate Starfield an 8.5/10 - not my favourite Bethesda game (that's
New Vegas - Obsidian's game really) - but I rate it at least as high as
Fallout 3 and (for me) Starfield is a better overall game than
Skyrim.
Things I loved:
Huge amount of scripted quests - at least as much as Skyrim, probably more - the quality varies and (as seems the norm) the side-quests are better written than the main story *but* the main story's still more engaging than either Fallout 3 or Skyrim and has a much better payoff IMO.
Ship building is enormously fun and I've sunk countless hours into the game just tinkering. Whilst the actual space mechanics are pretty basic, the changes you make to your ship
are significant and if you want to make a lumbering hauler or a nimble fighter (or anything in-between) you can. The UI is initially quite opaque but once you get into it, it's pretty easy to grasp.
Companions - Starfield has a bunch of them and besides certain missions, you're not stuck with any of them. Each named companion has a backstory that will reveal itself the more time you spend with them (admittedly, some are pretty slight). You also pick up new companions in the most unexpected of places. Yes, some of them can be a bit moralising, but if that bothers you there's always Vasco, the robot (who doesn't give a ****).
Speaking of morals, Starfield excels when it comes to presenting the player with moral choices both large and small. The easy option is frequently violence and intimidation but it's seldom the *only* option - for me, Starfield is the closest Bethesda has come to capturing the sheer range of possibilities that New Vegas had -
it's not as good as NV but it does this better than their previous efforts.
Gun combat - it's simple but it's fun. The range of weapons is impressive, as is the modifications you can make to them. Also there's skills that allow you use your boost pack strategically in combat that just makes encounters hugely fun. The AI *is* kinda weird - vacillating between being as dumb as a box of rocks and then pinning you down and lobbing a ton of grenades at you. Companions are likewise a bit random in combat - they *can* be quite effective if you give them a decent weapon/some armour - they can also get stuck on the scenery quite a bit
if the jank bothers you, you'll hate it. If (like me) it doesn't, then you might find it as amusing as I did.
Things I didn't love:
The loading - it's intrusive. Not so much that I couldn't enjoy the game, but enough that you can clearly see the game would have been better had it not been there.
Inventory and storage in general - this is incredibly miserly. Only one location in the game has infinite storage and you can only access that storage in that location. I spent a lot of time managing my inventory and hauling stuff around - looking back, I didn't mind it (there was always a goal in mind for what I was doing) but if stuff like that bothers you you'll *hate* Starfield.
Loot - the loot tables are just *bad*. This is somewhat offset by the fact that you can mod stuff yourself using crafting tables but there's some really useful buffs that are only available as loot drops and as a result I spent at least half of the game wearing the same space suit (eww..) and a good third of it using the same weapons.
Outposts - there's a whole bunch of content (crafting, skills, gameplay mechanics) dedicated to outposts and actually *building* outposts is quite fun - but they serve no practical purpose in the game other than as an end-game
'I'm going to tinker with this because I've done everything else'. It's amazing to me that they had a system from Fallout 4 that seemed tailor-made for Starfield and yet somehow they completely failed to make it work. Such a wasted opportunity.
The skill tree - Starfield has 82 separate skills each with 4 tiers - you get one skill point with every level you gain. I stopped playing after nearly 300 hours at level 79 - so yeah - a lot of stuff still to unlock. Having additional things to do in a game isn't bad but the problem with Starfield's skill tree is that a lot of useful and fun skills are locked behind a bunch of fairly useless ones. The skill tree didn't prevent me from having fun with this game (and I never felt the need to grind XP) but it did unnecessarily gate-keep some of that fun.
TL;DR? It's a Bethesda game - for me, one of their better ones, but YMMV.