I keep coming back to the idea that Starfield is very.. uneven. Ash posted a bunch about that and again now that I'm playing it a little bit more I'm noticing something that's bugged me. So you know how modern FPS games have a ton of conveniences to give audio and visual feedback to the player? That's important for a good FPS, it keeps the action smooth and the player on their toes because when a weapon's running dry it will start making a different sound, which is signaling "you're gonna need to reload soon" and some players will catch onto that and keep track or even count their rounds, that stuff's great! Starfield has that and visually, it has hit markers, as you can see in the screenshot above.
My main problem is that Starfield is uneven in all of its design, so sure it has hit markers, it has ammo running out sounds (on some weapons), but what's missing are kill markers, which I can't remember at the moment if Fallout 4 had, but Starfield could've really benefited from them. The only reliable way to know you've killed an enemy is the XP gain, which works most of the time and most human death animations/ragdolling are clear signalers that they're no longer a threat in that fight, but with the alien enemies.. it varies a ton. It doesn't help that every single enemy in the game has a downed state, and sometimes you think you've killed one but they're just downed and still limping towards you. Humans usually bleed out and you have perks that improve their chances of succumbing to their gunshot wounds, grim but cool feature, but aliens I'm not so sure.
A lot of the XP gain in this game comes from murdering aliens as you're exploring and especially if you're using a sniper weapon you're at a disadvantage for knowing when an alien's dead and no longer a threat, because the only reliable "kill marker", the XP gained pop-up does not pop up in scope view, which is a good thing because it's not gonna distract your aim and interrupt that way, except you have no other clear signal that an enemy's died so it feels awkward to put three bullets in a space bug, move onto the next one because you think the first one's dead and then having to go back to finish it off. It's not terrible or anything but it's a thing you'll always have to deal with if you're using this kind of weapon, and you might wanna use this kind of weapon because you can spec into sniper perks, sneak attacks, that sort of thing.
I would've appreciated a kill marker, thinking about it even a game such as GTA V (from 2013 remember) had kill effects where the reticle changed shape and the screen flashed to a different color briefly so you had 0 doubts that an enemy was downed and could move on, that sort of "minor" thing helps a ton more than you realize when playing, I only notice its absence in starfield cause I've played games that had it. so yeah! uneven design, they almost got there.