Probably five or six years ago when I was around 20 I went with my Uncle and his family to the beach. After we were finished and the sun began to go down, we washed off in our swimsuits in the outdoor showers.
Nearby they had some benches to sit on that were made out of the same concrete as the ground, smoothly sloping up out of it to form each bench. I was walking across one of these waiting for the rest of the family to finish rinsing off, and extremely stupidly walked down the end, down the slope, which, of course, was completely slick wet from being near the showers.
As soon as my first foot touches the slope, I slip backwards, with just enough time before impact to think “I really fucked up, this might not be good at all…”
The back of my head impacted the concrete slope of the bench, and it hurt like a mother fucker, but I didn’t lose consciousness or awareness. After gripping my head and cursing for a few seconds my Uncle arrived at me and found my head to be bleeding, but the cut was not so wide as to need stitches.
We returned to his house nearby and after my head clotted up, i realized I needed to drive myself home, 40 minutes away on the freeway, and I felt… a bit dazed after the impact. I didn’t feel sleepy at all, and after waiting for about half an hour, I decided I had to go home. I felt a little foggy until the next day, or maybe I’m just that foggy now and Im used to it.
There’s a scar where hair doesn’t grow, and sometimes I wonder if my universe forked to keep me alive somehow and I was supposed to just die instead, because it was entirely created by my idiocy and if seems silly I got that lucky. Sometimes I have dreams still where I’ll slip on something and relive the sequence of slipping, accepting the imminent possibility of death, and everything sort of slows down increasingly until I fade to white and wake up.
Sad that your sticking points are making it too difficult to enjoy the game properly, but I also can’t say you’re wrong. They made it very easy to fast travel around and they gave us a jump range that hardly matters since fuel is infinite, and your ships can be teleported around with you with no problem or cost.
My reference point is Elite Dangerous, and you’re right, the sense of scale in Starfield just isn’t there. I enjoy the space setting a lot as a backdrop and change of pace from other Bethesda titles, and I love exploring space complexes, bases, and orbital stations, and the planets with flora and fauna are quite beautiful, but you definitely don’t feel like you’re in a large galaxy that you must traverse and explore, and as a result there’s no incentive to specialize your ships for exploring or anything like that.
I’m able to forgive it more because I already have Elite if I want a space game that heavily commits to having a price for exploring and object permanence in the galaxy, that game’s traversal is more time consuming and difficult and so it makes it harder to play in short bursts and more casually considering the fact that I can’t just save scum and if my ship is destroyed it can be very costly. I do like the balance Starfield brought my personal space game variety in this respect, which helps me forgive the issues youre having, but they are still real issues with the game.
I think it’s possible for a good deal of it to be alleviated eventually with mods, but the game Bethesda gave us by itself has some real caveats, absolutely.