Monkey!

I decided my Starfield  character would be an incarnation of Sun Wukong. I'd already decided this during character creation -- and it turned out to work quite well.

Bethesda games. You go around solving problems that have been there for decades. Going one-man army on the enemy that somehow has experienced Marine units pinned down. Doing errands and helping people and everyone is amazed at your exploits.

In Fallout 4 you get the reputation as the Vault Survivor (or you can even go around in costume as the Silver Shroud, but only a few people recognize it). In Skyrim you are the literal Dragonborn. So at least there's an in-game reason for you to be so heroically capable in that game. I was starting to have a sort of standard backstory for my Fallout 4 characters that basically the world had gone to shit and one competent person from the past could kick ass. Helped that I tended towards engineers; people who could make their own advanced weapons and elaborate settlements, which I hand-waved as me having had a pre-war education.

And in Starfield you pretty soon get alien powers. But it doesn't matter. You are already both scary competent and also the savior to pretty much every obsequiously thankful colonist out there.

So it worked being the Monkey King. Being a demi-god already, a legendary trickster and warrior, even if I did have to work my way to my first ship as a street rat in the cyberpunk city of Neon.

Incidentally, that's the most fun I've had in the game so far; going around playing with the gangs and corruption in Neon as an ex street rat. So basically a cut-rate Cyberpunk 77. Only with worse graphics, worse stories, worse missions, and much, much, much worse NPCs.

It helped a lot with suspension of disbelief. Why this penniless street kid and one-time Argos Consortium miner is suddenly beating up twenty-year veteran pirate captains. And why all those worshipful colonists are getting stars in their eyes whenever I offer to help out. Because I'm already a legendary hero. Reincarnated, maybe, but after the Journey to the West this shit is easy.

Did make for some weird moments around the alien artifact, though. The Constellation Group kept asking how I suddenly felt so different now that I had alien powers, and I'd shrug because, hey, I was already a supernatural being. Bethesda had not planned for those dialog options.

***

It is a basic problem with games. Somehow the entire Third Army can't move unless Private Jones can chuck a grenade through a window successfully. Sometimes it is acceptable in context. Commander Shepard is a highly. highly, highly trained soldier, top of her class, survivor of legendary battles. And hasn't figured out how to use a rifle, but never you mind. The Doom Marine, on the other hand, just is. It's his thing.

Aloy has her Focus and spent a lot of time learning its tricks -- so even when she runs into other Focus users, she is able to do things they can't. 2013's Lara Croft, on the other hand, is just a student. Even the movie gave her an athletic background. The game does handwave that Roth taught you how to shoot, but still, you should not be doing so well against experienced survivors. "She's just one girl!" ("This one girl is kicking our ass!")

The bigger problem is RPGs. And this is a game design problem. You need situations for the protagonist to solve. In the real world, there would still be problems occurring. There's always business for the long-runner detective show or whatever. But games are cast in bronze before you start playing. When you fix the current issues...there are no more.

And they have to be fixed, too. There has to be that moment when the thing is concluded and you collect XP. So that leaves late-game in a weird place where none of the NPCs have much to say to you (because you already did their quest), but the world hasn't really changed despite all of that (because quests can happen out of order and they can't design for every single option. In Just Cause 3, you can liberate the entire nation but the dictatorship still has cars full of soldiers patrolling around.)

Character AI, as exciting as it is, won't solve all of this. As already implemented (and only in third-party mods, oddly enough, not in any current release) it allows conversations to continue and the NPC to remember and refer back. And, eventually, to have their personality shaped (because that's already happening, but the trigger is actions, not unscripted dialogue). But this stays at a Sims sort of level, as AI is not the tool to create new scenarios, new quests.

Oh, sure, they've been trying. Bethesda has had ongoing open quests using their Radiant system for a while now...and it sucks. A good quest is sculpted, with unique options, locations, dialogue. Not "Another settlement needs your help."

At some point activity ceases. The world becomes static. Might as well go invest in the base building at that point...