Today's game is some more Starfield. I neglected the Main quest for a bit to go off and join a faction along with decking out my Crew. I found the Adoring fan, immediately he was the first addition to my crew. Love the guy and i'm so happy to have him back. I also had Sarah join the crew just to fill out the slots.
At the bar in New Atlantis, i picked up two other people as well. The first is Simeon Bankowski. He used to be some sort of Field Weapon's Tester for the UC Military. He decided he was tired of going off to deserted planets to test weapons and retired. That's when i found him and hired him.
The second one is Marika Boros. I didn't pry too much into her past though and just hired her (responsible practice, i know). She's had a big problem with sleeping the bed in the Captain's Quarters. I mean, i rarely use it so okay i guess. But it's still a bit creepy to sleep in someone else's bed.
I've been spending a lot of time in New Atlantis doing diplomatic work after joining the Vanguard and fighting off a terrormorph invasion. After a long questline, i walked out of the building, and just stopped to chill. I wandered up to this tree, and man. Say what you will about the gameplay but this game really gets it's graphics right. The whole game feels really prettily made, at least from what i've seen so far.
I ended off for the night by finally picking up the main story and going to the moon. Or, well, a space station orbiting the moon. I play in first person, and it was really cool to see the scale of it upfront. I'm a sucker for Sci-Fi things with massive scale, that's part of what made Star Trek one of my favorite series growing up. They really had some moments that showed off the scale of ships.
There was one last thing i wanted to show off though and that is that i discovered the ship builder and bastardized the Frontier. It's now 3x as long and as a result of the extra mass i had to give it a better engine. I don't think this thing counts as the "Classic" it was anymore. I'm loving the stupid ship builder because despite all the regulations i can make the stupidest looking ships ever and no one can tell me no. At some point i want to just try and make a horribly long one and see if it will let me.
My impression of Starfield (after release, at least) was, that it was a bunch of pretty well intended and implemented subsystems (as is, to my knowledge quite common in game development; each team works on a different one), but they just don't fit really well together. All the subsystems are good parts of a theoretically good overall big picture, but the complexity seemed too high for them to actually flesh out the big picture.
Technically it all works, but IMO you feel the conceptual gaps whenever you transition (UX wise) from one gameplay mechanic to the next. It just doesn't (or didn't) feel like a cohesive game.