I pirated this game. Twice. Was it worth it? No, not really but it's more about the principle of the matter. Todd and Micro$lop don't deserve a shiny red cent for this shit! It's not that this game is just mid (which it is) , but it's just irritating to play. I mentioned the hailing mechanic in an earlier post, and maybe this is just a "me" thing, but the map really pisses me off. Playing these games has taught me to use "M" to open the map, then I press "Tab" to close the map, however in this game when you press tab you go from surface map to the system map, then to the star map. So I just end up frantically mashing the tab button to get back to the game. You should only be able to access the system map from your ship, but I'm sure they didn't want the player to have to sit thru a loading screen to fast travel back to their ship, but their way is less immersive, and it creates another problem like I just outlined. Maybe if they had some sort of document that explains design, they might of been able to polish this turd better.
To be fair to Starfield, there isn't anything egregiously stupid like Billy the fridge kid (at least what I saw, which wasn't much), but overall I think this game is stupider than Fallout 4. At least with F4, you could make the cope argument that it's supposed to be a homage to the campy Sci-Fi and creature features of the 50's , but Saarfield was their super serious big brained grounded NASA punk experience. Take Hadrian. She's not a clone because Emil wanted to say something about the ethics of cloning, but because it's supposed to be a sHoCkInG ReValAtIoN. Not to mention all the other clones happened to die conveniently offscreen, plus it would be hard to explain why there's a bunch of people running around that look like a infamous war criminal. And despite Az's famous Fuck your Pronouns meltdown, she's not a tranny. She doesn't refer to herself as trans, and even Space Obama refers to her as her daughter. And despite having the tech to clone people that have been dead for centuries, they couldn't clone any cows and chickens, and instead had to hunt giant armored beak things to near extinction.
Let me put it another way. Think of the thousands of games that have been made in the past three and a half decades. From solo indie dev projects to multi-million dollar AAA releases. Everything from arcade, strategy, platformers, simulations, RPG, FPS, 4X, RTS, etc. Everything from ROMhacks to demakes to remakes. One of those games has to better use of your time than Saarfield. Even if you're a lifelong gamer that has played everything under the sun, I'm sure you could find something!
