I had a setup that turned on the action camera when I put my thumb on the steam decks left stick, so I was always in normal mode unless I was actively looking around or moving.
It was pretty natural and the best experience I came up with, but I still felt like it was a compromise I was frustrated to have to make.
I set up a pretty workable controller config that I played with for like two months, but even with many hours invested in fine tuning it I just felt like I was fighting the game’s UI and I gave up.
What’s really frustrating is that the game is totally playable with a controller. ANet just needs to update the menus and it would be a fantastic experience.
Physical media today isn’t really much better though, increasingly frequently all a disk gets you is a license to activate a digital copy anyways, with a “must be online for first play” requirement.
I see mention of full gamepad support, which makes me happy. When I can play it from my steam deck without wonky input customization I will finally dive back into the game.
It’s not really “both” from a space simulator perspective. There’s no option to fly down to a planet and skim the surface, there’s no option to fly from planet to planet without a loading screen (or even just to a moon), etc.
Starfield is a good RPG set in space and I’m enjoying it, but I think it’s fair to criticize that it was marketed like it was going to be a space sim by Bethesda and that’s not really what we got. If you were excited about the simulator part you are going to be disappointed.