Starfield early impressions

my thoughts after about a week of playing:

• It's definitely one of the least buggy Bethesda games I've played at launch, but it's still a Bethesda game so you'll see the usual "npc vibrating into a wall" type bugs. An amusing one I just encountered was my companion getting stuck talking with that spacesuit filter on her voice, so even though she's standing right next to me and we're not wearing spacesuits her voice she still sounded like she was talking over a radio lol.
• I've seen a lot of complaints about performance, and I don't know if I just got really lucky with my PC config but the game runs really well for me (max settings, 1440p with FSR2 enabled and it never goes below 60fps).
• Loading screens galore. I'm playing on an SSD so they only take like 1-3 seconds max but it's still annoying to see so many. I feel like Bethesda needs to just bite the bullet and create a brand new engine from scratch (which would take a ton of time and resources so it will probably never happen).
• The "fast travel everywhere" system is strange. I agree that it's a little immersion breaking to fast travel light years away with a short loading screen. I don't really know how you'd get around it though because manually traveling everywhere in a space game would get boring very quickly.
• I like the ship builder. They make it pretty easy to snap parts together and it's really satisfying to design a cool looking ship that actually has useful features on the inside (like the workshop for the crafting stations or the armory for showing off rare weapons). I just wish the ship builder controls were a bit better. It's also pretty neat to put windows on your ship and then go out in space and look through them at a huge planet or other ships flying around you, or come back to your ship and see members of your crew hanging out in the living area or engineering bay.
• I like customizing guns too but it's really easy to make guns that are super overpowered, especially if you start with one that has really good effects. That's kinda expected in a Bethesda game though.
• I'm not sure how I feel about the procedural generation on planets. On one hand, a lot of the "random" structures you can walk to are actually pretty detailed and some are WAY bigger than they look from the outside. In fact some of my best pieces of gear came from exploring them. On the other hand, the longer I've played the more I find reused set pieces. It's also strange that even on severely inhospitable planets there are still NPCs living there or ships landing and taking off.
• After I did a specific side mission, I now see a random encounter related to it all the damn time and they have the exact same dialogue every single time. I don't know if it's a bug but if not it's a really strange design choice.
• Visually the NPCs don't look that great, and the environments are okay, but the items like guns and miscellaneous objects are very detailed. The ships also look (and sound) incredible. At one point I climbed on top of my ship and noticed there are a ton of small details all over it that most players won't even see
• I haven't played a ton of the main story, but the side quests are usually pretty interesting. IMO they're the best story-related parts of the game. However I agree with another comment here that Akila city is weird because it's like the 24th century and they still have dirt roads.
• The companions are okay. I like Andreja and Vasco.
• I think people will make some really cool mods for this game. Once the creation kit is released I plan on making a few myself (I really want to add an infinite-volume storage container near the crafting stations on my ship).

Overall I don't think this game is GOTY material or anything, but I usually have a good time with Bethesda games (with the exception of Fallout 76) so just like Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallout I'll probably come back to it every once in a while and have fun, especially once more mods start rolling out.