Starfield is a game that was chalked full of potential that the developers refused to work with, resulting in a game worse than on-launch Cyberpunk.

On the surface, it's not that bad. Granted it takes quite the pc to load anything, but we'll ignore that in the spirit of fairness. The game looks great, the dialogue is pretty good, and the movement of the NPCs definitely felt more real than those from Skyrim. (I will be comparing this to Skyrim a lot). But there's almost no depth to the game, especially if you don't care about the lore. It's like the developers didn't know what game they were trying to make. Let me dive into a handful of issues I myself had trouble with after 33 hours of playtime.

|:| Combat |:|
The combat in Starfield genuinely feels bad. All of the guns have weird ammo types and requirements, scrounging for ammo is extremely difficult because for whatever reason they decided we needed more looter in our shooter. There are melee weapons and 'guns' that dont use ammo (Like the plasma drill) but these become extremely obsolete at higher levels, forcing you to rely on guns that you do not have any ammo for. Speaking of higher levels, as you progress through the story, you will encounter higher-level enemies. You, however, will not be higher leveled. The game throws you into the story via the tutorial missions but never tells you when you exited the tutorial and entered the free-roam section of the game. If you decide to just grind through all the story missions, you'll notice that you physically can't fight against the enemies you're up against because they're level 45 and you're still level 10. This is because the game doesn't give you nearly enough XP from the main storyline. It expects you to go off and do side quests but there's 0 indicator of this, and anyone who wants to do the story first will not be able to. This ties in with the ammo problem. Imagine you're hardstuck in a mission with 0 way out (your last save is probably also in this mission, or quite a few hours ago). Your only way to get out of the mission is to complete it, but the people you fight are super high level and way stronger than you. You spend almost all your ammo just to kill one guy, only to find that he had a total of 3 damn bullets on him. Now, you might think "Oh, why not just buy it at vendors?" and that's a great question! So lets get into it.

|:| Economy |:|

Compared to Skyrim, I'm pretty damn certain the Starfield economy is in SHAMBLES. In Skyrim, a whole house WITH upgrades and furnishings could cost you maybe 10000 gold on the higher end. If you want to buy 6000 arrows, it'll set you back a couple thousand but that's it. Money is very easy to get, because you just loot weapons and armor from enemies and sell them. Not in Starfield. Weapons and armor sell for dirt cheap but the buy-back price is through the roof. A single magazine of 9mm ammo is almost 300 f*cking credits. Vendors barely have anything good for sale, and the few times you'll find a vendor that has ammo in the first place or maybe a set of clothing you want, you'll find that it's 2000 credits for a helmet with 1 extra armor than what you have. But your helmet can be sold for 40 buckaroonies. A similar problem existed in Skyrim but it was NOWHERE near as bad. And all of these economical problems are even more noticeable when you try to do anything with the shipbuilding. Speaking of shipbuilding-

|:| Space ships and space combat |:|
I'll give the devs credit for this one, the space combat was actually really fun. I haven't had as much fun fighting flying things in awhile. Granted, it's nowhere near as good as the space combat in similar titles (COUGH COUGH nms COUGH COUGH) but it is still substantial enough to keep someone like me entertained. Glazing aside, here's a couple issues.
THE. ECONOMY. SUUUUUUUUCKS!!! When you go to buy new ships, it is beyond expensive, and would take a couple irl DAYS of farming money to get close to. I spent a whole week of my free time (working a 9-5, coming home, playing this game) doing a bunch of side quests and long storyline parts and I could BARELY afford a ship. Which happened to be WORSE than the ship I already had! Speaking of which, why in the world is any obtainable ship gonna be worse than the one they give you in the tutorial? That makes 0 sense. The only remotely-good ship I was able to get was through a stupid long side quest, and even then the game wouldn't let me equip it until I transferred all of my stuff from my first ship into it. But I couldn't transfer it until I landed on the planet that I found it on and did it manually. It took an hour. This may have changed, it's been over a year since I played, but knowing Bethesda it more than likely has not.
When it comes to upgrading your ship, it's even worse. Starfield was hyped up heavily in it's customization of space ships, and yet you can't customize! If you want certain parts, you need other types of parts on your ship to begin with or it just won't let you put it on. And if you want parts so you can get parts? You can't put it on your type of ship anyway because the ship itself isn't compatible! BUT it'll still let you buy the part! So you can spend 40k on one singular engine (Not to upgrade your engineS, no, just to upgrade ONE of them) and then be told that you can't equip it. If you go to leave, you don't get your money back AND you don't keep the part! Isn't that spectacular? Even if you tried to get around this by going into the settings or by using mods, you can't. Speaking of mods, lets get into my #1 reason why I don't like Starfield.

|:| The Modding community |:|

Doesn't exist! Simple as. If you go to Nexus right now you will see jack sh*t that actually ADDS stuff to the game. The reason being that Starfield hasn't released it's coding stuff the same way Skyrim has. Starfield did "recently" get its in-game modding section that I forget the name of, but even in there you won't find anything good. All of the mods just change aspects of the game or rename stuff in the steam files because the base game is genuinely bad. Skyrim lives off of mods, every single Bethesda game is basically nothing without mods, we know this. But at least Skyrim can hold its own. You can play through Skyrim unmodded and the only major issues would be a few bugs and the awful (in todays standards) graphics. But Starfield isn't like that. The base game is just dogsh*t and makes me want to rip my eyes out. It's impossible to have fun. Even with mods, your experience will be bad, because the code isn't publicly available like it is for Skyrim, there are no mods that add anything new (we get retextures. Thats kinda it) and even the mods that change stuff in game 6 times out of 10 won't work. And it's not even the fault of the modder, the game's code is just made of fettuccine alfredo with extra sauce. I can't even say it's Dead on Arrival, this game died before they put anything on paper. "Years in the making" my *ss.
-----------------
|:| Conclusion |:|

As someone who tried her absolute best to enjoy this game, who pre-ordered the premium edition, who modded the sh*t out of it to try and make it bareable, I just can't recommend it. If you're wanting a space-Skyrim, you won't find it here. This game looks better, sure, but that's all it has. There won't be a space-Skyrim for years to come if this is the standard of Bethesda now. If you want a good space exploration game, go play No Man's Sky. Not only is it infinitely better but the replayability and creativity of the developers knows no bounds. Go show them some love.