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?
My main complaint is the writing and worldbuilding. So far I’ve been exploring new Atlantis and picked up exclusively fetch quests from NPCs so generic and uninteresting I don’t really feel like continuing to talk to them. And the uncreative worldbuilding of authoritarian capitalists Vs libertarian capitalksts vs religious crazies. Can Bethesda not even imagine an alternative to capitalism?
Name me one sci-fi that has had an alternative to capitalism without access to something god-tech level like Treks replicators, which would break the setting entirely.
Not saying there should be fully automated luxury gay space communism, but that every faction is different flavours of capitalism is very disappointing. Sci-fi is usually a medium that criticizes the current society.
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Out of those, The Expanse, Star Wars and Firefly all very much feature capitalism.
Battlestar doesn’t feature large scale capitalism due to most of the human race being destroyed but it definitely exists within the fleet, as we see in the episode where Lee investigated the black markets.
Starship Troopers and Warhammer are both authoritarian fascistic states where everything is controlled by the government, which granted is something different from capitalism, but not the time this game went for.
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They all also feature an alternative to capitalism alongside capitalism, which is exactly what you asked for.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed
It took like a 30 seconds of web search to find the dispossessed by Ursula le guin.
Your argument is actively supporting the other commenters point about boring world building in sci fi.
Capitalism works great with RPGs leveling system.
But I’d love to have seen a cashless society where the only way to get stuff was to trade other goods.
Or some sort of social credit system, where the nicer you are and the more quests you complete, the higher your status and the more free items you unlock.
Or some authoritative system that binds you into a contract whenever you make a trade it forces you to work off your debt in all matters of ways.
Capitalism is the best system you can really have when you have multiple factions who’s economies work together though. What you describe is great if the whole world trades in that manner, but when you have multiple factions you needs someway for commerce to work between them for world building. To be fair, it’s not like the factions in stafridls are just boring capitalists. The more I’ve learned about the UC, my assumption that they were just democratic socialist types has been undermined totally.