I must say it is not the best RPG out there, but I feel like it would have earned more. I personally have a lot of fun playing.
While it was not a Cyberpunk-grade overhype, I think it must still have been overhyped. Because if you see it as Skyrim with better graphics, it is pretty much what you’d expect.
Some of the common criticism seems to be intrinsic to the sci-fi genre. In Skyrim, you walk 100 meters and then you find some cave or camp or something that a game designer has placed there manually with some story or meaning behind it. And as a player, you notice that, because most locations in Skyrim feel somehow unique. Even though for example the dungeons have rooms that repeat a lot. Having a designer place them manually with some thought gives them something unique.
In interstellar sci-fi, a dense world like this is simply impossible. Planets are extremely large so filling them manually with content is simply not possible. And using procedural generation makes things feel meaningless. Players notice that fast. So instead, Starfield opted for having a few manually constructed locations that are placed randomly on planets, unfortunately with a lot of repetition. But that is a sound compromise, given the constraints of today’s game development technology. The dense worlds that we are used to from other genres simply don’t scale up to planetary scale, and as players, we have to get used to that.
Space Engineers and Empyrion let you do that and it’s very fun. Empyrion is more of a game, Space Engineers is more about engineering. In Empyrion we have a big capital ship as our base, it has a landing platform on the back with 2 fighter ships, and a vehicle bay and ramp in the belly with mining hovercraft. Everything is block based and there is a ton of freedom, we could stack 6 fighters on the back if we can get the landing gear to latch. Or make the landing platform bigger.
Empyrion would be much closer to our dream game if you could fly ships while other people were onboard and not forced to sit in meaningless passenger chairs. It feels really bad.
Space Engineers is so much more fun with the right mods, just way more punishing to get messed up in combat!
