I am not far enough in to have some real QOL thoughts. so if the below is in the game but I haven’t gotten there yet…my bad!
I spend a lot of time in inventory mgmt.
some nice to haves, to start:
consume item along with pick up (game changer for food)
split food from medicine, eat all button
split magazines from notes; can we get a bookshelf? A
places that I have visited should have a vendor $ amt based on the vendors I have visited.
I should be able to fast travel to key POI - my homes, outposts, vendors, lodges, etc from some sort of grid view with sorting (including $$$)
location variants — seems like a biggy
trenchcoats (for hiding my shotty from the po po) & capes (for my crimson drip). I love the poncho & farm hat, very very nice.
shoe cosmetics (we see slippers…) - how about a Mikey Dunx shoe designer?
A more fine tuned method to place clutter, both in and out of base mode; lockers, fridges & desks should auto stack instead of “toss the orange…oops”
an option to keep ship clutter, demotivating to clutter a ship then…poof
ship hab door placement but I get why there is an autopather…
…how about a walk ship mode in ship builder to change hab door placement?
Resource cargo that stays in a specific ship.
NPC feet on coffee table animation; NPC bathroom usage?
basic ammo manufacturing in an outpost
an aliens style radar sweep BECAUSE why not
my watch should have some craftable bitz, like a communicator for talking to my peeps back on the ship, or they can tell me what their ship scanners are picking up. Maybe as a drone controller, other cool stuff.
There is a ton in this game and I feel guilty, so much is done so well. The above are relatively minor — I imagine things to do over QOL in DLC.
be able to save a half-built ship design rather than having to finish it in a single sitting
highlighting which parts are triggering a particular error or warning
all parts you've encountered to be visible in the build lists even if they're not available at the current shipyard, marked as not available but with a way to see which shipyard has them
a way to override the automatic placement of doors and ladders
a way to do a walkthrough of the partially built interior of a ship so you can see how the layout works before having to fit engines, gear, fuel tanks, etc
some way for players to share / trade ship designs
I feel like Bethesda has released the game with Minimum Viable Product systems in some areas (ship-building, outpost-building, inventory management in particular) knowing that the modding community will massively improve the barebones.
God we need survival mode desperately. Atm exploration feels pointless and aimless, a survival mode would make it so we have a reason to build outposts and range out, which in turn would justify resources and just make the game more cohesive.
There's a great post on the other site that explores these problems, but it honestly strikes me that these were ripped out before release, as so many of these systems don't make sense.
Yeah, the whole thing seems like they ran it past some focus group at the last minute, and someone said "ewww, I don't like fuel. ewww." and so they scrambled to rip out the offending code in an effort to appease the lowest common denominator.
Then again, the fact that so much supporting code was left in makes me think maybe they were leaving the foundations to replace the missing systems once the game was established/ I have hope :)
Main issues I have after 120+ hours:
Badly needed:
character stats screen, especially the bonuses we've collected for magazines - like they could be doing nothing and we'd never know lol, do they stack over multiple NG+?
some way to manage what materials we are tracking - it's absurd right now like do I need Titanium still? Do I need 1 or 10? Have no way of knowing (might have to start using notepad or something) Bonus points for including the item and upgrade that I want to craft
Nice to have:
a list of fast travel points would be nice
catalogue of visited systems and what resources are there (even if it's only for surveyed resources)
You can totally fast travel to your outposts, both by selecting it in the star map and by using scanner mode while on the same planet and facing the correct direction.
It would be nice if you could see which of your quests are in the same settlement that you're currently in, I have to read the description or track the quest to see where it's sending me and it's a bit annoying
A big catalogue of everything I've scanned. We're part of constellation and we go around scanning everything so it makes sense that we'd build up a catalogue of systems, planets, moons, and everything on them.
I'd like a kind of draft mode or 'save as draft' option when building a ship. Sometimes Im not quite happy with a design and I want to come back to it later. But currently the only options seem to be cancel the whole design or make it pass the flight checks.
I just finished building a ship where I wanted a cockpit available on New Atlantis, but a reactor I could only get on Akila. So I had to buy a shitty reactor in NA, only to sell it a minute later in Akila (for a fraction of the price). That's just terrible design, imo.
Honestly a way to browse parts across multiple vendors you have visited. Even if you can't buy them the ability to make a design is something I struggle with when I can't see what other parts are available
I haven't played Starfield for very long (20 hours maybe) but I'm already tired of inventory management. Moving stuff between the ship, your backpack, and a container near a craft table is so exhausting that I just lost interest in the whole game.
And not knowing what to collect and what to set aside is frustrating. Satisfactory really spoiled me with their easily accessible recipes and the to-do HUD.
There is a lot of freedom in Starfield so there are ways to mitigate that. I've gotten to the point where I just don't pick up most stuff aside from credits and ammo.
Better placement for clutter and deco would be real nice, help add to the live-in nature of the world.
Same with the NPC animation, though I doubt bathroom usage would work, as some of the bathrooms aren't even big enough to close the door while occupied.
I've been jotting down notes for when the Creation Kit becomes available, but I may as well add them to this post - maybe someone more talented than I will tackle some of my ideas faster!
Ship landing on pads changed to orient the bay door towards the city/settlement/whatever. The pads are round, why must my rear-entry ship park nose-in?
Make the headlamp-looking thing on the Settlers Hat able to light up the way helmet lights do.
More shipboard controls from inside - for example: the ability to disable the artificial gravity (as per Cora Coe's request) so we can play in zero-G.
Option to automatically EQUIP and UNEQUIP suit/helm in safe environments.
Visible holstered pistols.
Landing a ship never auto-ejects you to the planet's surface.
Some way to upgrade suit environment protections so that they actually function. I want to amble around a frozen wasteland without getting frostbite and hypothermia!!
Ship subsystem power controls available BEFORE liftoff.
Ability to assign specific crew to specific habs/stations - possibly for a (minor) related buff, but also to give that crew member a part of the ship to gravitate towards. Perhaps this will lead to less instances of the entire crew loitering in my captain's quarters?
Scan jammer should still give a 50% chance to avoid detection of contraband aboard ship but not in cargo! SO many times I've warped into a system with like one bottle of Aurora on my person...