As you noted, Fallout 4 is the outlier. But Starfield, attempts to immitate Fallout 4 in many ways. As did Fallout 76. Starfield though, has far more junk. Not only that, most, by most I mean damn near everything, has no use or value. It is almost double the amount of total junk items. One way to check for items is to scan the room. When you scan the room, it highlights all junk. Everything. And there is a whole lot of it. So you are left, until you learn exactly what to look for, with a room full of junk, as you sort through what you can and can't use. Even when you know exactly what you need and how it looks to the naked eye or on a scan, each room is so crammed full of this kind of lived in clutter (while it certainly looks nice in many ways if a bit busy and inappropriate in many cases), where each desk has personal knick-knacks, pirate rooms have slippers neatly placed under their bed ready for their feet to slip into as they wake, coffee cups, the amount of fucking coffee cups, the list goes on and on. It is a real slog to get through and the polar opposite of fun. Tag me if you can when you do get around to playing.
If I'm reading you right, the issue is that a scanner feature should highlight interactive items on the assumption that they're useful, but if everything's interactive with or without an use, it becomes pointless. I get it, leave it to Todd to push out a half-arsed implementation, and then to modders to fix it, like Vic said.
I'll get around to playing it myself, that's pretty much a definite, just waiting for the mod scene to settle.
Nothing has damaged indie games more than the notion that games should be valued according to how much money was spent developing them, rather than a game's quality and duration. All too many people are willing to pay $60-70 for AAA games while insisting that an indie game should cost perhaps $15-20, even if the indie game provides better quality for a similar length of time relative to AAA games. Indie games are intrinsically aimed at a narrower, niche audience, but a good indie game will provide this target audience with the quality it seeks in a manner that cannot be found in AAA games that appeal to a wider, lowest-common-denominator audience.
I'm not making an argument of objective value, Murray was, and doing it disingenuously, to boot. Products cost as much as the market is willing to pay for them to maximise profits, I know.
The problem is that, like it or not, a price tag is also a component of advertising and self-classification - when you price yourself in an established market segment, potential customers expect similar levels of content, polish and production value, you are
telling buyers what sort of experience you mean to supply relative to other offerings. Beyond all other issues, bugs, the vacuous game loop, Murray's own "overly optimistic" statements, the reality is that the primary reason for NMS's immense backlash was that AAA price tag. It cost as much as a contemporary AAA production, like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, so gullible customers ignored certain aspects of what they were seeing and expected
that caliber of experience. If NMS had come out with a $30 asking price, it'd have gotten all the leeway indie productions get and there'd have been no scandal.
And I have a hard time believing that HG fell so deeply in love with their little indie art game that they forgot that, doubly so when Murray comes out and makes said disingenuous argument of objective value.