Don't get me wrong, I'm not a hater. I actually was really excited for the game. But so far I am just not having fun.
For a little bit of reference, I just finished playing thru Cyberpunk 2077 and then jumped right into Starfield. Maybe that was a mistake because I kinda just want to go back to Cyberpunk (and I will in a few weeks when the DLC comes out).
But I'm noticing two really big issues with Starfield: first, the gunplay/combat is... let's call it underwhelming. I realize it's quite probably a skill issue and I need to just git gud, but holy crap, everything is a bullet sponge and I don't have that many bullets! Stealth seems to be pretty worthless at early levels as I don't have any high-alpha guns that can take advantage of it and, most of the time, I'm detected before I even see the bad guys. I'm just not enjoying this aspect of the game at all.
The second big issue for me is that there's a loading screen every five seconds! Again, probably a me thing, but OMG, it's driving me nuts. Get into ship, loading screen. Launch from planet, loading screen. Fly to next planet, loading screen. Land on planet, loading screen. Leave ship, loading screen. I just want to go shoot things! Let me shoot things!
Okay, found some spacers, time to... oh shit, out of ammo. Let me swap to a worse gun that still has ammo. Sigh. Okay, they're dead. Let me just heal up... oh shit, out of med packs. Sigh.
Oh and wrestling with the UI is exhausting.
Anyways, I realize that this probably isn't the place to find a lot of like-minded people. But I really do want to like this game. Any tips on maybe at least ways to make the combat less of a chore?
I think part of this is what it's being compared to. The combat is significantly better in starfield than past Bethesda (BGS) games. People who are saying it's great are generally comparing it to their past games.
I don't have experience with Cyberpunks combat yet (waiting for the update to finally play it) but I wouldn't be surprised if it's better.
Shouldn't you be comparing to other current games in the genre, rather than past games of the company? Because if the game is better than their past games, but nothing close to current games in the genre, then that just means it's a bad game and their past games were worse.
BGS game is a genre unto itself really. With a few exceptions for games made by another developer there really aren't any other games that play or work the same. That said the most recent game in the genre I can think of would be Fallout 4 and the gunplay is definitely better.