Starfield is the shiny new thing, so despite me talking shit about it I gave it a try anyway. There's maybe a little more to it than that--I've been slowly working through Noah Caldwell-Gervais' Fallout retrospective and it's gotten me to thinking about how much I loved Fallout 3 at the time (as well as how Fallout 4 compares to it.) A sci-fi Bethesda game seems like a natural thing to mull over alongside all that, I think.
The hour I put into it through the game pass cloud gaming doodad (which worked great, btw--I legit forgot that I was playing it this way by the time I wrapped up for the night) was totally ok for what it was, which is the first hour+ of a Bethesda game. What I'm starting to feel about this thing--and maybe it's the thematics of the game that makes me feel this way about it more than any other given Bethesda product--is that it's truly a bunch of mostly-ok versions of games I'd rather be playing just held together with massive amounts of money. A trite narrative RPG next to a serviceable shooting game next to a stripped-down Satisfactory clone all wrapped up in something resembling No Man's Sky but less interesting to look at. Maybe that's me being a hater, but idk.