It doesn't matter if you are on Jemison right next to New Atlantis, the capital of the universe, or on some random moon in nowhere, you'll get the same abandoned buildings with spacers/pirates/mercenaries in them. And literally zero of them will have any sort of story or writing attached to them. Walking around on random planets is unbelievably repetitive.
peppersky
There are no "levels of simulation systems" in Starfield. NPCs don't even have schedules in this game, they literally just stand around in the same spot 24/7.
First game to just have constant crashes on my seven year old RX480, which is great since otherwise the game runs completely fine. Support doesn't seem to want my crash reports either, I guess in Todds world, I should just throw the thing in the trash for a game that does literally nothing special in the tech department.
This is something that other games by much smaller companies (like NMS) have already solved. Seems frankly ridiculous that Bethesda can't fix up their damn engine and their big space game consists entirely out of instanced bubbles, with no way to move between them besides loading screens. Even within your owns ship there are loading screens.
But I want to hang out with the weirdos
Halsin will literally confess his love for you after you ask him about his romantic life once. It's ridiculous. And it is way too easy otherwise to have maxed out affinity with everyone in your camp, everyone loves the player being a good-two-shoes. Seriously have no idea where these articles come from that praise the companion mechanics in any way.
Except you can't make it wider than five slots and not taller than ten. Considering you can easily have hundreds of items in there it's terribly inadequate. The whole inventory management is terrible, is it really too much to ask to have tabs for different item types? This is stuff I really can't believe they kept through three whole years of early access.
One really cannot underestimate how important presentation and production values is to the vast majority of players, even those taking the hobby seriously enough to read reviews and post on serious gaming forums. If a game is all textboxes, doesn't feature decent enough graphics and isn't fully voiced people just won't be impressed with it or won't even give it the time of day.
Baldur's Gate 3 is just a CRPG with AAA production values, which we haven't really gotten since Dragon Age: Origins, which is 14 years old at this point. And there is something to it, going into some random cave and starting a questline with unique character models, voiced dialogue and cutscenes is kind of more fun than only getting textboxes, even if the actual things you do aren't any more involved or deep.
What happens if you take a well done video college course, every subject, and train an AI that’s both good working with people in a teaching frame and is also properly versed on the subject matter. You take the course, in real time you can stop it and ask the AI teacher questions. It helps you, responding exactly to what you ask and then gives you a quick quiz to make sure you understand. What happens when your class doesn’t need to be at a certain time of the day or night, what happens if you don’t need an hour and a half to sit down and consume the data?
You get stupid-ass students because an AI producing word-salad is not capable of critical thinking.
Baldur's Gate 3 is the living proof that - at least as far as RPGs are concerned - absolutely nothing happened in the last fifteen to twenty years of gaming. Make one good AAA RPG and people lose their minds over it. I mean it certainly is better than the slob Bethesda served up in the last two decades.
"keeping track of lots of variables" doesn't cost CPU time though, since nothing that isn't on the same map as you is ever relevant for anything. Their engine just fucking sucks.