The long awaited Starfield game has dropped for early pre-order access today and I'm playing in now. But is it the Star Citizen / SQ42 killer people have deemed it to be? Short answer: HELL TO THE NO. Now, I've not playing enough through the into story to compare this to SQ42 (and frankly I wouldn't be in the first place, because nobody player or heard anything about that game). The first hour tutorial is pretty good and gives you insight on almost all the game mechanics. Thus, I can already compare what I've seen to Star Citizen. Ships: - Entering a ship gives you access to a ramp which has a hatch inside. The hatch is a loading screen to the interior. - Ship combat is absolutely nothing like it is in SC. It's dumbed down to 2 buttons. - Starmap is cool, but there is no actual flying between planets or landing on planets like in SC. EVERYTHING is a loading screen, even boarding other vessels. You EVA in to their airlock and its a loading screen to their ship. - Docking with other ships is a loading screen animation. - NPCs and your pets that exit the ship with you automagically appear next to the ship when you disembark. No animations, etc, etc. - Your ship is pretty much like your outpost in space. You can only really do anything with it from the pilot chair. The rest stations and seats either don't allow you to do anything or are just used to access certain game mechanics like navigation and crafting (which can also be accessed from your status screen). I.e. no turrets, no putting vehicles into ships, no co-piloting, nothing like that. - The MFDs on your ship are just eye candy and are non-interactable. You do everything through your status screen. On foot: - Movement feels a bit clunky. - FPS weapons sometimes reload 4-5 times before actually reloading (I am guessing Bethesda will fix this sometime soon) - FPS weapons feel kind of like ED: Odyssey. You have shields and armor and dead. Lol. Very arcadey. - AI NPCs actually do stuff, but only if they see you and try to kill you. The rest is scripted on-rails stuff. But it's a single player game. - Harvesting and scanning everything involves a button press and a click. But you can do this until your mouse dies. Exploration: - You get a random 10 km or so radius area around your skybox instance "planet" (landing site you load-screen into), which has a few randomly generated outposts, a few hand-placed critters that seem to be only at the place you landed, and the rest is littered with harvestables that don't really have much variation to them. Science/research/crafting: - Is locked behind a timer with (insert 2/3 harvested resourrces of whatever kind here). Graphics: - No HDR support (SC supports it!) - No WQHD. The game takes 3/4s of my ultra wide 5120x1440 screen, the rest is just black canvas - No fine tuning of color and etc. Graphics settings are very limited - Graphics-wise, SC ships and attention to detail are above Starfield by at least a few dozen years. - Planet clouds and backdrops are simply moving skybox 2D textures. There is no depth. On everything at Ultra (I am playing on a 13900KS / 96GB 7200 RAM / 4090 OC) it feels like I was put back in the early Half Life. There, that's what you get by appealing to consoles first and foremost. I will finish SF storyline and add more comparison later. My faith in Star Citizen is reinstated. Hoping to see some epicness at CitizenCon. P.S. Adding the truly next gen planet graphics on all settings ultra HDR. Compare this to the Ultra HDR (Very High) settings in SC 3.20 I created for a bug report - watch on HDR-enabled monitor for full picture.