I don’t know if you noticed, but everything became more expensive in the last year. Food, housing, etc, it’s called inflation and PC parts aren’t immune.
PC gamers enjoyed a bit of a respite from constantly needing to upgrade during the PS4/Xbone era. Those machines were fairly low end even at launch and with them being the primary development formats for most games, it was easy to optimize PC ports even on old hardware.
Then the new consoles came out that were a genuine jump in tech again as consoles used to be, and now PCs need to be upgraded to keep up and people that got used to the last decade on PC are upset they can’t rock hardware for multiple years anymore.
I assume you’re talking about Rage, which had an open world map, but no where near the level of simulation systems as a Bethesda game. In fact I remember back at the time most of us saying the map was pointless as it was just a way to travel between levels with nothing to do in it.
You realise custom engines are built for specific game types right? iD Tech is great for creating high fedelity FPS games with linear levels and little environment interactivity. That’s not what Bethesda make though.
The difference being that was NMS whole loop at launch. Exploring barren and mostly empty planets is just side content to a lot of directed story and side missions here.
Yout have to factor in the life sim-element of Bethesda RPGs too. You can theoretically become a mining magnate in Starfield using those planets and resource extraction outposts. That content is there for those kind of players. If you just want to do the directed side content, then as you say, you’d just follow the markets and not need to interact with it. Your exploration will be in the “dungeons” looking about for lore and loot.
Yeah, it’s all part of the freedom the game offers for what you want to do. If you want to be a cargo hauler you’ll rarely see a barren planet as you’re delivering to settlements. If you want to be a bounty hunter, you may see them once or twice when a bounty has holed up there, but if you want to be a space prospector, you will need to spend more time exploring and locating resources to set up extraction plants for.all valid methods of interacting with the universe with different needs for the barren planets.
Save points stopped being an issue when game suspension/quick resume became standard. I’ve left my Series X mid game before, powered it off at the wall and gone away for a week, the game loaded back exactly to the point I left it still.
Day one patch is fine. It’s just an odd remnant of buying physically as the discs have to be pressed and shipped several months ahead of launch while the Devs carry on working. Digital owners just download the latest build on launch.
If there’s a patch and the game is still full of issues, thats another story.