Yes, it is, I’m sorry to say. At least for now.

I have a few dozen hours in Starfield, and while I wouldn’t call it extremely dull, it’s not not dull on a regular basis. The game has an uncanny talent for reducing space travel, planetary exploration, and crafting down to a series of nearly-identical nested menus. Crafting and world interaction feel like a step down from Fallout 4 in some ways, particularly how most of the junk is just useful for decoration.

It excels at giving you less when you’re expecting more, which makes it easy to overlook what it does well. There’s still a lot of fun to be had in it; it feels tighter and more polished than Bethesda games generally do, and it’s not a bad alternate take on NMS, which also isn’t exactly a 100% compelling experience even after the work it received. (I had fun in Starfield way faster than I did in NMS, for what that’s worth.)

I don’t regret my time in it at all, but it’s kind of perfect patientgamers material. Not playing right away keeps you from burning out on it before it figures out what it wants to be.

But be careful if it has the post-Wolf-359 remodulation hotfix, because it’s really easy to end up stuck in the nutation settings menu if you press either button 5 times within a few seconds.

You can disable this behavior with a long press of the firing button, which unsurprisingly got its own hotfix shortly after that.