Personally, I didn’t like it. I think a lot of it comes down to two things: Do you care about the writing and the world they’ve built? If so, how critical of it are you (or alternatively, have you seen the sci-fi tropes done well).

Starfield has some really bad world building. In particular, it doesn’t understand why we use sci-fi, and why it’s tropes are interesting. it’s to create an anologue of our world and to break it down, criticize, and point out it’s flaws and ways to fix them.

Starfield is the least critical writing I’ve ever seen I think. The Earth is destroyed, and instead of using this to discuss us destroying the planet right now, it’s just some technobable that has no parallels. Also, when fleeing Earth, they don’t try to solve issues. They just set up new corporations doing the exact same stuff in other places. When the game presents a problem where taking down a CEO would be one of the best possible outcomes, it isn’t an option. Literally everything you do in the game is maintaining the status-quo of the modern world, despite it being the source of so many issues in the game. You can’t change anything and no one wants to either.

Starfield doesn’t understand sci-fi. Fallout does a better job as a sci-fi series than Starfield does. If you’re still interested, the gameplay is also slow and boring and there’s almost no interesting stories or characters. Continue if you want, but I regret spending time on it for the price of $0, and I generally love Bethesda games and the sci-fi genre (although, as mentioned above, I think this is part of why I don’t like it).

I enjoyed it.

The criticisms are valid, but I still think it was a fun time.

Depends if you like starfield

Unless you’re getting a 5090 the pcie bottleneck should be negligible compared to your CPU or other things.

On pcie 3 the 4090 gets about a 5% performance penalty. I’d assume the 5080 is about the same performance as the 4090 so the hit should be similar. Unless you’re like me with a 5800x3d on a garbage B450 motherboard your CPU is probably going to be holding you back so much more than the pcie version.

Motherboards aren’t cheap, nor is the top of the line CPUs. The 7950x3D is still $600 on amazon. X670e boards start at like $200 and go up over $500 easily. If you just say fuck it and buy the best you can easily hit that number, especially if you throw in some high end storage drives.

I’m looking to replace my CPU, mobo and ram and I’m looking at at least $1200 for that.

Oh I totally see how you CAN do it. I’ve done it. A lot. Just nowadays i don’t see why you would need to. Maybe a true 4k multi monitor setup but a 7800xt is cheap and great for 1440p and you can build a 1500 dollar rig (minus the monitor) and be pretty damn ok.

I tend to spend my money on homelab shit so my priorities have changed these pay few decades lol