I'm still in early-mid game, but the spaceship flying mechanics and gameplay is pretty basic in Starfield and the content is thin. Space combat is more of a minigame than an alternate to the primary gameplay mode of shooting/exploring.
If I want to pull out the spreadsheets, trojan condom, energy drinks, divining rod and abacus to calculate space combat, I got Eve online. Space combat is usually super boring. NMS basically just had you pull your mouse back and hold mouse button 2 and you auto killed enemies. X I think you made the huge leap forward of pointing your mouse at the enemy and holding button 1.
The most interesting thing about ulfric you discover during the main quest when you raid the Thalmor embassy and discover that during the war when Ulfric was captured he was turned via torture and gave up his compatriots and all the intel he had. That shame and his hatred for the Thalmor more than anything lead to the Stormcloak rebellion, and the outlawing of talos worship is just a rallying cry that he uses to frame the rebellion but has nothing to actually do with it.
I'd say that a space enthusiast would enjoy Starfield because you get to explore planets / moons in a semi-realistic universe. That was one of my favorite parts of Mass Effect 1. One of the things I kind of miss is that in Starfield there aren't verbose descriptions of the planets that expand the game's lore. I loved the variety of these in Mass Effect 1, where some were really interesting snippets of SciFi, ex:
For some reason I reminded myself of the yearly Eve-Online PVP tournament, where the team I was captaining knocked out the favorites to win the tournament. They had a pretty strong set of ships they had brought against all the trash unknown teams. I made a super gimmicky speed setup designed to counter their setup specifically. They would have raped our team if they brought anything other than the ships they brought in all their other fights. Every single one of our ships was kitted for ridiculous speed with extremely little armour or shields, but their team was exclusively using missiles, which do huge damage, but in extremely edge cases will do no damage at all to ships flying faster than their blast waves.
I actually think there are too many structures in Starfield. I expected a mechanic where you'd use your ship to scan for structures on a planet and there'd be like, 4 on a shithole planet. Instead you can drop into an arbitrary location and surprise surprise there's a huge factory a kilometer away.
I remember doing this build in Mechwarrior. Pick the fastest mech, put all points into speed, have some needledick weapon and just run at mach3 and the enemy couldn't hit you as your jousted them down.
I love that within the span of a couple months two games were released that tried to push the boundaries on facial dialog animations. BG3 with their full mocap for all the things and Starfield for procedural stuff. BG3 obviously looks way better, but Starfield's procedural stuff serves as a better platform for mods, especially with ElevenLabs. I'm curious about what it takes to add facial animations to modded dialog and how that works, but I think it's intended to be easy to do?
