Ser_Salty

Only wack suckas like Cory and Trevor steal gas

There have been a couple of mods for Fallout 4 and New Vegas to add vehicles. IIRC the only one that wasn't just an object floating across the ground was in that big expansion mod made by sex perverts, I forget what it's called. New something?

Power Armor in FO4 is actually classed as furniture in the engine, IIRC

Same. It's cool for maybe 5 times before you just stop caring. Only thing I miss is actually flying around the planet, and that's purely for finding the best basebuilding spot.

Yup. People will always bring up some games like Witcher 3 as "better than Skyrim" and in terms of the roleplay elements within the story? Sure. Do the games have some similarities? Sure. They're both open world RPGs in a medieval fantasy setting. But beyond that, the comparisons fall apart. Somebody just looking for any RPG experience might well prefer Witcher 3 over Skyrim, but somebody looking for another Skyrim experience is not gonna find it in Witcher 3. Same goes for comparisons for NMS and Starfield. Does NMS have seamless planetary flight and Starfield doesn't? Absolutely. Can you scan plants and wildlife in both? Sure. But, again, beyond that the comparisons fall apart.

They do have ladders in Starfield, actually

Starfield has made me very disappointed with the planet designs in NMS, unfortunately. Like, a lot of it boils down to "This planet has purple dirt, but this other planet over here has blue dirt and is cold!" and they're always one biome only. In Starfield, one planet can have several different biomes realistically spread out (like snow/ice region on the polar caps, etc.), and it also has a bigger pool of structures to pull from. I last played No Man's Sky a year or so ago, and it always felt like there were only a handful of structures that could generate on a planet.

I legit spent hours in the ship builder in Starfield, trying to come up with a new design for my ship

"Search your feelings, you know it to be true"

I mean, they straight up said that 90% of planets will be empty.

As far as spreading out the handcrafted content goes, in my 60 hours it's been pretty good, but I also deliberately stick primarily to actual quests, only dipping into random exploration and proc-gen mission board quests like bounties and cargo delivery on occasion. I was initally worried that the handcrafted stuff would be limited to the three major cities, but there's plenty of other towns and locations out there. I think there's like three small towns just in the Sol system. It feels like every other system has one or two big handcrafted locations or questlines. I came across stuff like a resort town, a small assortment of settlers I had to negotiate a mutual defense pact for, an abandoned zero-g casino space station, a mercenary bar/motel with the absolute motherload of contraband (and a free ship), just to name a few.

The side and faction quests also are almost entirely handcrafted locations and not just clearing out enemies in generic locations like half the stuff in FO4 was. All the proc-gen quests have been relegated to Mission Boards, so every quest you get from an NPC will be an actual quest, although I had to do one single proc-gen mission to join one of the factions.

Also I'm surprised you saw that many game breaking bugs on streams, because it's actually a very stable release. There's some of the usual Creation Engine physics stuff, or an NPC might stand on a table or something, but I haven't really encountered all that many bugs.

I'd say Starfield is in a lot of ways a return to form. So far, none of the actual quests I got from NPCs were as simple as "Go there and kill bandits", like the majority of quests in Fallout 4. Those proc-gen quests have been relegated to Mission Boards for various factions (and there's also more variety of them. Beyond killing, you have smuggling missions, cargo transport, passenger transport, surveying and some other stuff). Most of the quests I've done so far have also been very interesting, I've talked my way out of multiple confrontations/bossfight and I've robbed a valuable trophy and bank credentials from a luxury cruise ship with not a single shot fired, just using my cunning, persuasion and a little bit of blackmail and bribery. I keep thinking that I am going to get those "please kill those raiders" quests, like when I got a distress call from somebody having trouble with spacers (this games version of generic raiders or bandits), but instead I had to repair communication satellites and negotiate a mutual defense pact with the settlers of that system. Like, I'm 50+ hours in (yes, genuinely) and the game keeps surprising me with new and interesting content. I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of the content available.

Sure, you can't completely fuck everything up and go murder everyone in the game like in BG3 or FNV or something, but it is actually a really solid RPG. The writing isn't as deep, philosophical and politically charged as New Vegas, but it's good. Way better than Fallout 4s main story (and better than Fallout 3s main story, which secretly sucks.) I actually had some interesting conversations in the game and chuckled quite a few times at some of the responses I could choose. My background and traits actually do come up in conversation, even had one of my traits help me win a persuasion minigame (which is actually quite interesting in this as well). Skills like Persuasion, Intimidation and Bribery actually matter and allow you to finish quests in different ways. I get a little bit angry everytime somebody calls it Fallout 4 in space, because unlike Fallout 4 Starfield is actually a roleplaying game, even if it doesn't live up to the heights of Baldurs Gate 3. If you're gonna call it anything in space, Oblivion would probably be the most apt comparison.

There are no (known) gamebreaking bugs