Five hours in. Todd Howard, you son of a bitch.
Went to explore the dark side of some random moon and watched a ship land far off on the horizon. I was really impressed with the sense of scale the game throws around, so, I went in and chatted with the Captain. She was just running repairs on her ship, so I traded for some meds and wandered off. As I'm walking off, I see another ship land over near what looked like a half-buried run-down oil refinery. As I arrive, it turns out these are mercenaries, bounty hunters setup by my Wanted trait. We trade harsh words and then battle it out, and just as I'm getting the groove of the combat, the fight is over. So, I head onto their ship only to find the crew in place. We battle out close quarters, and eventually I take out their Captain and make it onto their bridge... where I find boxes of harvested organs. They're worth a lot, but their contraband (I know what I'll be trading in later) so I leave them. As I leave the ship, I see a little dust-covered door on the refinery. This leads down into a spawling multi-level complex, and there's a whole gaggle of pirates in there! I fight my way through the levels, eventually running low on health, meds, and ammo, having to scrounge for things in the environment to keep fighting. I re-program a security bot, and it helps me take down the last of them, and I score a legendary helmet from the boss. I head back to my ship with the bounty.
From the presentation, the low-gravity rag dolls, the sound effects, the sheer damn scale of it all - it's hard not to walk away impressed from just this series of random encounters strung together. It sets off the imagination in such a way I haven't really felt since I first played Oblivion, where the scale and presentation was just so far ahead of anything I'd ever seen before that it felt like the game was filled with endless possibilities. Fallout 4 was a big disappointment for me, but with Starfield, Bethesda have more than redeemed themselves.
This game fucks.
.