whoa now, don’t take away Elite:Dangerous one claim to fame. They have an entire milky way of procedurally generated planets with no POIs!

The biggest pain point there is the real lack of meaningful space interaction. Your ship, while being entirely personalizable, is largely useless. My play thrus saw a fight every 7-10 jumps, at best. Theres a lot of emulation of E:D and SC in power management but because of the flight dynamics, that entire sidebar is largely binary. Either you engage and win or you jump out. The flight dynamics are rough enough that theres no room in the conversation for being a skilled pilot. Then the interior loses a significant amount of meaning in auto-gen’d doors. you shouldnt be forced to put blank squares in just to get a layout that is traversable.

the veneer of a space game is there but it really lacks the extra thought into how a cornerstone mechanic should work and that causes the largest part of the downfall in my eyes.

Well, guess what? You can walk to the starport, open the door to your ship, walk into the cockpit, sit down, launch into space, target your next system navpoint, power up your grav driv, and jump to the next system. You won’t be on a planet, you will be in space. Will you find a trader? System security fighting pirates? A bounty hunter wanting to cash in on you? An old lady that wants you to come over for tea? Dunno. But you aren’t fast traveling. Genuinely the crux of your complaint has been “i dont know how it works but its bad and I dont like it”

transit in EVE isn’t really anything to write home about though. Target, align, warp, jump, target, align, warp, jump.

Gate camps are player based RNG with a difficulty slider. Do you take the shorter run thru Niarja or do you add an extra 30 jumps for relative safety barring CODE affiliates.

if what you want is a completely bespoke experience where a system has only explicit experiences then you immediately lose out on the design intent behind Starfield and the storyline within is immediately hollowed out and meaningless.

besides, its a video game. everything is a generic random encounter rolled on a table hidden from the player. if you want a better experience, Starfinder is there.

The best answer I have to minimizing the interaction is setting routes from your mission list. On PC this cuts down to L > click mission > R > hold X.

It is still 4 discrete inputs, which sucks, but it is substantially better than navigating by the star map which is how my brain defaulted to fast travel for most of my first play through.

you cant really compare gate-to-gate traversal to the other primary space games though. unless you are in a capital ship, generally you have a warp around 3-5 so even Niarja (minus dock workers) only takes a few seconds to cross. If we just focus on hub routes, I don’t recall the exact number, but Amarr to Jita/Dodi is between 25-60 jumps depending on your risk tolerance. That is 25 discrete load screens, with a Leopard and no 0 tick gate camps thats still around 10-20 minutes of just loading. EVE is an exceptionally bad example to pull and why I excluded it.

If you want something like Star Control then running the bubble in E:D is your best option, just never install a fuel scoop.

taking the other side of the argument, planetary landings in E:D are just loading screens at 10x the length. Travelling to a planet at .3 C is neat the first time but then you look at trade routes as “how long do I sit paying attention in case of an interdiction?” StarCitizen falls into the same trap. QD is neat but then it takes you 5 minutes and a fuel stop to go from one side of a system to another. Its mundane trudging for reality rather than getting the boring monotony out of the way of the player.

Just because the tech exists doesn’t mean it makes for compelling gameplay.

Personally it feels like a lot of the promise of Mass Effect: Andromeda was channeled into Starfield and they took the launch version of the story in No Man’s Sky and ran with it. It definitely stands on the shoulders of other games but it is a reasonably solid iteration.

Yep, the linux driver issue is either crash on 535 or get a rock solid 26-31 FPS on 525 irrespective of settings with frame timings being so smooth you get a more pleasant experience chewing sand.

which is hilarious because the game plays better on a steam deck than on my 3080

I would wager yes as Starfield is currently unplayable on Linux with an nvidia gpu.