Dragon or Draggin'

Bethesda is still searching for the right balance.

Skyrim starts with a slow five minutes, but there is this thing in Elder Scrolls games; you need to spend to first five minutes in a dungeon. Or in Skyrim's case, in a cart to your execution. The thing is, it doesn't put half the game behind a grind wall. You can go anywhere, and you can dip your toes in anything. At level one, you can use a sword or a bow or even magic, you can craft a potion or some new boots or even cook some stew.

Fallout 4 was, I believe, intended to give you a taste of future glory. Unlike Fallout 3 where there is a complete faction quest before you can get to powered armor, you can get your first suit at level 1. And a mini-gun. Which is in a place with several triggers to tempt you into wasting all of your ammunition on raiders so the spring-loaded deathclaw can twist your brand-new armor into wreckage in one epic hand-to-hand.

Starfield is generous in giving you your own ship barely ten minutes in. But, really, the game doesn't start getting fun until about twenty hours of play. It takes that much, well, grinding -- boring stupid grinding -- before you have any skills that make a difference. You aren't really doing an RPG, and you don't have a lot of options. The interesting quests are meat-gated away (you need to level up in order to tackle them), the random planet hopping turns up nothing of particular value or interest...plus of course this is late Bethesda RPG in which your responses to a quest-giver are either agree to do it, or agree but be sarcastic about it.

It simply isn't worth crafting, or collecting most of the materials you can collect, or exploring, because you don't have the skills to do anything with any of that. And those skills only come with a whole bunch of exceptionally grindy combat.

And you can't personalize your experience, because it doesn't matter if you want to be an assassin or a diplomat or a gadgeteer, you don't have any skills and won't be getting any for hours and every single enemy is dropping a leveled spray-and-pray gun for you to use instead.

About twenty hours of play. Less if you don't struggle against the railroading (always a decent recommendation for recent Bethesda games) and just follow the quest markers they throw in front of you. At that point you can start making some choices that feel worth making, and start having some skills other than "picking up gun off ground and holding down the trigger."

It isn't...good...yet. The quests are often frustratingly unfinished, stopping just when you've actually started to get involved. But you can finally survive getting out of the easy plains and into the wild where half-way interesting things to do are. It is still shallow, but I liked the Cydonia mining colony and sort-of-liked Neon and the Mantis quest is actually sort of fun.

Plus, at the end of it I expect to get a ship that might -- like the finally unlocked basic crafting skills -- make it worth doing some of the other activities the universe offers.