Starfield is the closest I’ve gotten to my idea of a perfect game.

Morrowind is my favorite game of all time, and I’ve at least enjoyed every other elder scrolls game and fallout new vegas. But I’ve always wanted Bethesda to give us a more free sandbox type of game set in their vast worlds.

I remember talking to friends about it when we would play Skyrim, “I wish they would just make a game with no main story and let me run around and hunt, or bake or pick flowers. Granted you could do all those things but you were either compensated poorly for it or they weren’t in depth enough (for instance you can hunt all day but you will make barely enough money to justify it or you could be a master alchemist but you can’t set up a shop or anything like that.)

But Starfield came around, and there is definitely a lot still missing, but I spent the first 200 or so hours being a surveyor/cartographer. I ignored the entire story and would land in town, grab some survey quests, and go map the stars. I would set up little outposts so that when I retired I could spend my days farming the best plants, mining the most expensive minerals, and raising the weirdest alien creatures I could find.

I was able to do that, never in my life have I played a game that just let me wander off and do any profession like that AND get rewarded. You get tons of money surveying and I’d say even too much XP.

You can’t be in ANY profession but you can get pretty damn close. You can drop everything and be a bounty hunter, a cargo hauler, a homesteader, an intergalactic bus driver, an archeologist, a petty thief, a space miner, you get it.

I think Starfield is so close to making this dream of mine come true, it gives me so much hope for future Bethesda titles.