I mean, from what OP said it kinda sounds like the player wants to be a Sparking Targe Magus to me and just doesn’t know it exists

“You are now manually breathing” works substantially better

for commercial releases? absolutely deader than Cobain.

Clone Hero is super active, has people actively mapping new songs and is the only path forward at this point

nah, used to be that was closed beta. Palia is currently in “open beta” but its actually just PC exclusive launch because there are no further wipes.

Used to be the terminology was strict and easily understood. Now its just whatever the dev wants to claim it is.

Open Beta used to be “game is free for a week then we will wipe, do any backend fixes we identified, and then launch”. Last MMO that did that that I can concretely remember was SWTOR.

Well, guess what? You can walk to the starport, open the door to your ship, walk into the cockpit, sit down, launch into space, target your next system navpoint, power up your grav driv, and jump to the next system. You won’t be on a planet, you will be in space. Will you find a trader? System security fighting pirates? A bounty hunter wanting to cash in on you? An old lady that wants you to come over for tea? Dunno. But you aren’t fast traveling. Genuinely the crux of your complaint has been “i dont know how it works but its bad and I dont like it”

transit in EVE isn’t really anything to write home about though. Target, align, warp, jump, target, align, warp, jump.

Gate camps are player based RNG with a difficulty slider. Do you take the shorter run thru Niarja or do you add an extra 30 jumps for relative safety barring CODE affiliates.

if what you want is a completely bespoke experience where a system has only explicit experiences then you immediately lose out on the design intent behind Starfield and the storyline within is immediately hollowed out and meaningless.

besides, its a video game. everything is a generic random encounter rolled on a table hidden from the player. if you want a better experience, Starfinder is there.

The best answer I have to minimizing the interaction is setting routes from your mission list. On PC this cuts down to L > click mission > R > hold X.

It is still 4 discrete inputs, which sucks, but it is substantially better than navigating by the star map which is how my brain defaulted to fast travel for most of my first play through.

you cant really compare gate-to-gate traversal to the other primary space games though. unless you are in a capital ship, generally you have a warp around 3-5 so even Niarja (minus dock workers) only takes a few seconds to cross. If we just focus on hub routes, I don’t recall the exact number, but Amarr to Jita/Dodi is between 25-60 jumps depending on your risk tolerance. That is 25 discrete load screens, with a Leopard and no 0 tick gate camps thats still around 10-20 minutes of just loading. EVE is an exceptionally bad example to pull and why I excluded it.

If you want something like Star Control then running the bubble in E:D is your best option, just never install a fuel scoop.

taking the other side of the argument, planetary landings in E:D are just loading screens at 10x the length. Travelling to a planet at .3 C is neat the first time but then you look at trade routes as “how long do I sit paying attention in case of an interdiction?” StarCitizen falls into the same trap. QD is neat but then it takes you 5 minutes and a fuel stop to go from one side of a system to another. Its mundane trudging for reality rather than getting the boring monotony out of the way of the player.

Just because the tech exists doesn’t mean it makes for compelling gameplay.

Personally it feels like a lot of the promise of Mass Effect: Andromeda was channeled into Starfield and they took the launch version of the story in No Man’s Sky and ran with it. It definitely stands on the shoulders of other games but it is a reasonably solid iteration.

Is it bad that I can still read these shitposts in the correct tone?

Looks like copium. Has nostalgia goggles for the game in the early life cycle, back when Karagga’s Palace didn’t have textures and EV blue balled you on the final boss for fun, where it took 6 months for the first content patch of a dungeon.

Dunno, I see the author singing praises of Broadsword before they’ve done anything and decrying BioWare for giving up when beta flights showed us their directors knew what was right and player feedback was wrong…

Game will undoubtedly be better away from BW but that’s a very relative marker and mostly influenced by BW as a whole turning into a smoked out wreck of a once legendary dev studio