240 times. It took me two minutes to finish the “minigame” last time I did it. That’s 8 hours of grinding to max out every skill. Not 8 hours of fun gameplay and visually interesting dragon fights and dungeon crawls, 8 hours (that’s eight hours) of flying from one shiny spot to the next. Eight. 8. Hours. Of slow-ass zero G floating.

Last time I booted the game up, I fast traveled to my ship, took off, and heard Sarah say she has something for me. Something about that same line played for the millionth time absolutely killed my motivation to play, and I haven’t started the game up in like a week. The romance system is too much too fast. I went from “flirting” with Sarah to married in like 4 hours. We’ve known each other for all of one in-game month. Maybe I’m just a broken person, but the way we talk sounds so disingenuously infatuated.

I think about the concept of playing, and it sounds fun in theory, but realistically what am I gonna get done in the next 8 hours? I’ll talk to people that I don’t care about to move through a story that I’m fundamentally disinterested in because I know that in order to max out the dragon shou–I mean, Starborn powers, I’ll need to jump through and abandon alternate universes like Rick Sanchez but not as an ironic critique of internet nihilism. Hours and hours and hours wasted on timelines I don’t care about just to get to the end game where I… have strong powers and a good ship, and can’t connect with any of the characters because they’ll be the tenth iteration of the same ones that I could never convince myself to care about before.

Maybe in a year or two after the game has been updated, I’ll check it out again. Maybe I can shut my brain off for a minute and pretend I’m not grinding through universes if it doesn’t take me eight hours to max out all the powers. Or maybe I’ll just play BG3 when it comes to Xbox and forget that Starfield ever existed in the first place

The fact BG3 came out just before Starfield made me dislike the game even more than I probably would have I think. I went from playing probably the best RPG ever to Starfield, which doesn’t even try to make you think you’re playing any role except the chosen one. The fact that you join Constellation and almost instantly become not just a full member, but the person who everyone else takes orders from is rediculous.

The story sucks, the gameplay is bland, and there are so many friction points that constantly make you think about the fact you’re playing a game. It’s honestly sad. I love sci-fi so I was reasonably excited for the game, even knowing it’d be a modern Bethesda game, and it still let me down. The sci-fi concepts in the game aren’t even done well.