Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
I mean to do smuggling right, you need at least some version of supply and demand; not necessarily a dynamic economy, just stuff that is cheap but legal at A, and expensive and illegal at B. And some sort of meaningful system for getting it from A to B without getting caught. These are totally normal features in space games, but ain't really part of the Bethesda Package. And boy does Starfield not stray from the package.

It probably would also help to not have the standard singleplayer RPG economy, where the question isn't if you end up wealthy beyond all practical application, but whether you get there at hour 6 or are all slow and don't go Scrooge McDuck until hour 7. You know, might make doing illegal stuff and running risks for money mean something in game.
Yeah, the core gameplay loop just overwhelms everything. I mean, you can smuggle contraband from place to place, and you can even make a bunch of money doing it, but at the end of the day that doesn't accomplish anything in game. I mean, yes you can buy ships and houses and deck them out like you're playing futuristic pimp-my-ride, but it's all totally optional. It's very much like how, in Fallout 4, you can build a giant network of incredible settlements full of people and huge skyscrapers and greenhouses, but, the game has absolutely no mechanism to reward you for doing so (it is possible to abuse the outpost system for lots of XP, but that won't result in any real construction, just a giant pile of components in boxes).

Starfield is a standard open-world game with a very basic gameplay loop: get a quest prompt, go to a map marker, murder everything that moves at said marker, turn in quest, earn XP, use XP to power up. In typical Bethesda fashion the 'murdering' rapidly outpaces the 'quest completion' aspect of the XP equation too, meaning you can just dispense with talking to people entirely and seek out procedurally generated map markers to kill as many mobile bags of XP and loot as you want.