I have to agree. Games tend to resort to violence immediately now, no need for justification. I didn’t imagine Starfield would be a shooter at all in fact. Ultimately it was almost exclusively shooting
I loved Morrowind when I was 12, replayed it recently and it was just as good as I remembered. I was hyped on Starfield and bought it blind for 40e. I don’t usually make mistakes like these but I got cocky this time. I still can’t fathom how uninteresting Starfield was. I literally dropped it out of boredom. How can you manage to do this with a space game ? seriously ? how do you create something so bland from a premise so exciting ? with the funds and time you have ?
There’s travel and discovery in Skyrim, which imho makes up a bit for its many flaws. Starfield on the other hand was stripped of that, in the sense that you always land directly on points of interest, so there’s never a process of “getting there”, or even “getting around”, which to me was the whole point of Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. Also the landscape is almost never handmade, but procedurally generated, so it has very little appeal. That sense of discovery I had in Morrowind was still there in Skyrim,… but completely gone in Starfield
I’m commenting on RDR2 because it’s my last finished game, and I also had trouble getting into it at first three years ago. Particularly the slower pace and the pretty low intensity of events, initially when you’re at Horseshoe Overlook (the first camp the gang stays at). The thing is it builds up slowly, bit like a movie, or a show. And it never stops upping the ante, at some point it throws at you spectacle after spectacle, and at this point you are possibly so invested in the characters (character writing being nothing short of excellent) that you’re all in this cowboy fantasy. Basically it’s a slow first quarter and then you’re in for surprises
You can also do overscan, but that’s costly since you’re rendering a bigger picture (I am not a rendering engineer but have experience with offline rendering)