No. Not by a long shot. You’re better off playing Fallout 4.
what is a good space exploration/trading game that doesn’t require a huge learning curve?
Freelancer. It’s old (2003), but it’s still effectively the Explore/Trade/Fight space sim that every other game gets compared to. I’ll note that it’s focus is on getting good combat ships and flying around, exploration exists but is the least developed aspect, I’d say. Gotta get it thru the high seas, tho.
Evochron Legacy is an indie game that might scratch your itch, it also lets you fly into planets’ atmospheres and it accounts for the friction, so while you can fly fast, doing so will damage your ship. I don’t think its learning curve is too steep, but it can take some time to get used to. Try the demo before buying it, as one negative review suggests
Lastly, check out Underspace’s demo. Still in Early Access, but seems promising.
Not really an engine problem, but Bethesda not caring to make the setting even remotely believable and making the mechanical parts feel isolated and meaningless is what hurts the game the most.
Exploring and collecting materials almost serves a purpose, as you need them to craft/upgrade armor and weapons, or to create stuff around your base, but you can just buy the stuff you need off vendors, which makes both the exploration and the point of having a base pointless. Crafting is almost something you might care about, but you can buy pretty much anything you need off vendors (heal kits, drugs) or get them as drops. None of the crafting targets the ship or its parts, for whatever reason.
If the game was just Dungeon -> Vendor -> Dungeon loop, it’d be much, much better rated and less hated. The lack of variety is felt very early on anyway, it’s not like cutting the bullshit would make it worse to endure.
Also, considering how nearly everyone using UE besides Epic themselves seem to do a really shitty job, including Bethesda with Oblivion Remaster, I’d expect that SF remaster to be even worse than the original 😆
I don’t have a problem with people who like and enjoy the game, I just don’t understand your reason to say the game is something that it actually is not
The game isn’t good, but reading how bad it is is a certain entertainment to me, not gonna lie.
Funny thing is that I decided to pirate it around February 2024, after seeing how much people were hating it. “It can’t be that bad, can it?” - my low expectations were disappointed by reality
Sounds like an AI generated blurb and very far from reality, especially as you have almost no choice in anything, exactly zero of them feel meaningful in any way, can’t “antagonize anyone” (yay for essential npcs 😒), aren’t saving the galaxy and the “hidden story” is one of the worst “ITS THE MULTIVERSE LOL” stories I’ve seen.
Their overall premises differ a lot, but it’s very easy to see that a lot of the “exploration” in SF tried to copy NMS, but did so in the worst way possible.
Scanning plants and wildlife? Turn on scan mode and find those. Only in Starfield, you have to do it several times to complete, because FUN!
Points of interest dotting the planet surface? Sure! Just make sure they have zero connection to anything in both games!
Space exploration? Just a random dice roll when you enter a planet orbi, clearly better than using an item to search for a random POI in space!
My main gripe with the universe of starfield is that it works on fallout logic, as in, everyone acts as if telephones and cameras don’t exist, despite being 300 years in our fucking future without any tech loss.
That “don’t you guys have phones?” Blizzard meme is ironically spot on here. They don’t. Communication only happens face to face while out of a ship.
The other thing is how a lot of the game runs on “nobody cares”. Alien ship showing up on orbit? Nobody cares. Another alien ship showing up and attacking you? Nobody saw it, nobody cares. Alien space magic? Nobody cares. Alien space magic being used to wreak havoc in a big city? Not a word on it, instant amnesia after the attack.
Very true. So long as your shots don’t hit anybody, or your powers affect anybody, you can show them off all the time on the big cities and nobody gives a fuck. Using the whirlwind Sprint shout on Skyrim makes everyone around comment and a guard desperately asking you to stop.
I don’t know how videogames managed to get different rules.
A lot of people in those offices really don’t understand the technical mumbo jumbo that can be summed up as “doing something that already exists, but on a computer”
Like scanning a document on a printer and immediately sending it as email. That was patented