El Soupo

TLDR - Creation engine is showing its age. Right off the hop, at character creation, I immediately felt the age of the engine used. Graphically for 2023, on a AAA budget, the graphics are very underwhelming. CP2077 (bugs aside) released 3 years ago absolutely blows starfield out of the water visually. AA larian with baldurs gates released a month prior also does. It is time to create a new engine, or pony up for licensing unreal. Space travel is a lie, it is mostly just navigating menus to fast travel from point to point. Planet layout is varied enough to be interesting, along with all the xeno flora/fauna, that part is nice. This game doesn't scratch on space exploration like NMS. Outpost building is very generic, and also seems to be a trivial part of the game, can totally ignore it, and still reach endgame god-tier builds just fine. Ship building on the other hand is quite fun, altho some quirks are present (ship pathing/doors/ladders are all chosen at random it seems by the game), the in-ship decorative items/armoriess are useless, since everything gets stuffed into the cargo bay upon any modification or swapping ships, totally renders trying to decorate a ship, or have a fancy war room a moot point. I would have settled for a 3 star rating, but I encountered a game breaking bug, deep into the game, at lvl 65, all my save/load times increased by 500%. a simple quicksave was taking near up to 30 seconds to process. I tried a various number of fixes (reinstall, adjust page size file, cleared game cache etc etc), but the bug persisted, and then it spread over to game frame rate, tanking down to single digit fps lows. decided to call it and completely abandon the playthru. overall, the game isn't modern AAA quality. in typical bethesda fashion the modding community will have to polish it up and make it liveable. Wait for a sale, or play it on gamepass.