Answers
1: future magic
2: future magic

But yes, that fireball would be spectacular even if the ship could somehow survive.

Starfield is more an 'Open World' rpg. Exploration on foot with fight and quest is more prominent than exploration in space. The space part is more like a mean to travel between planet where you could find quest. Sometimes, there's a space fight, or boarding other ship/station. But ship simulation isn't the purpose of this game. You can still build a ship, but you're more focused on look than : 'Will it work ?'.

This is a mod.

In the original game, flight is limited to space and is very arcade-y. Press ‘W’ to activate thrusters and move forward.

KSP, Flight of Nova, Elite: Dangerous - there are plenty sims out there catering to those who want realism.

I think that forcing a completely realistic re-entry would be a bit much for most players, though it would be awesome for the option to be available to those who want a hardcore experience.

At the end of the day, most games are more enjoyable when you suspend disbelief. This is a game where people wear spacesuits in a vacuum, get shot multiple times with blood effects, and carry on fighting without experiencing violent depressurization.

It's a shitty game that makes no sense.

Isn't that pretty par for the course with mainline Bethesda games?

i just think the idea of spreading out a Bathesda RPG over an entire galaxy was flawed even if it had seamless planet landing from the beginning. constantly flying between solar systems for different quests, often in the same quest, is just tedious as hell even if it was seamless.

In order for it to work they need to make the spaceflight/combat/space itself more compelling and worthwhile. In Elder Scrolls and Fallout, exploration between quests is fun because there are chance encounters, side quests, unmarked dungeons, easter eggs, great scenery, etc. There was almost none of that in Starfield, although you could tell they tried to inject some.

I played elite dangerous for a while, was fun. But I got tired of grinding for new ships. I was just going out to kill ships for money all the time. I dont remember exploring much... What is there to explore?

ED is OG too. One of the pioneers.

this "bethesda depends on mods" thing completely falls flat when you point out how popular the games were on console long before mods were able to work on console

Yeah, the artificial cloud transition was a bit more obvious when the terrain changed drastically from a yellowish color to a snowy white.

Keep in mind that, as outlined in the title, this is a work in progress mod.

A) The unmodified game still has to load the game world during the transition. True seamless probably requires an engine overhaul beyond the scope of a mod, cloud cover to mask the loading of assets and make it feel seamless is a fair compromise.

B) I think that forcing a completely realistic re-entry would be a bit much for most players, though it would be awesome for the option to be available to those who want a hardcore experience.

KSP, Flight of Nova, Elite: Dangerous - there are plenty sims out there catering to those who want realism.

No Man’s Sky compromises on this to keep the game casual and fun.

C) In the original game, flight is limited to space and is very arcade-y. Press ‘W’ to activate thrusters and move forward. Vertical thrusters are present in the unmodified game and visible during landing cutscenes, so the modder may be able to tap into those animations as they continue work on the mod. I recall most of those thrusters being attached to the landing gear though.

At the end of the day, this is a game and most games are more enjoyable when you suspend disbelief. This is a game where people wear spacesuits in a vacuum, get shot multiple times with blood effects, and carry on fighting without experiencing violent depressurization.

Nothing has changed enough to make it worth checking out again. If you didn't like it at launch, you still won't like it now.

It depends on where you go and how you interact with the game content, main story is the weakest part of Starfield you want to do it up to a point if you care about unlocking some extra gameplay features. Other than that, the factions storylines are much better and really fun. Also the game has few very good side quests you can google to find where they are and just go do them.

The procedural generation only control where and what POI spawn at the zone you land inside. The POIs themselves are handcrafted and they are actually well made. They are some of the best bethesda ever created in terms of dungeons and locations to explore, many of them are massive, detailed, full of stuff and pretty unique.

The problem is if you visit a POI once then if it spawn again you don't want to revisit it, because the PG won't change anything in the POI and they will feel very repetitive.

The latest update has added a few really good stuff too by introducing a new resource called X-Tech which has big effect on your character weapons, ships and powers. You get it from multiple sources, but most importantly you get it as a reward at the end of a POI. So, now you have this extra incentive and nice reward for exploring these POIs.

It also add way more handcrafted POIs to space through the new Free Lanes feature. Same thing apply from the planets POIs: They are really well made, but if you run into one you did before skip it.

It's overall a 7 out of 10 game sometimes even less, but there's some stuff that really fun and well done inside it if you are willing to look for them

Yaaaay, now we can do something No Man's Sky could do 10 years ago, yaaaaaaay!

Us space flight sim enjoyers like that kind of thing. When Starfield was announced we kinda expected it to be a default feature, so obviously when we saw it wasnt a feature it was disappointing.

Adds a hell of a lot more immersion than a loading screen.

I get what you mean, but it makes sense in context.

Immersive "Open World" Sims with ground and space exploration have a hard time tying the two together. Often they feel like two separate games, and one of them often feels like the "second class (star) citizen". Not that making them seamlessly connected actually makes the two mechanically complimentary, but separating them by a loading screen makes this dichotomy all the more obvious. Starfield was no exception.

To exacerbate this, Bethesda made its brand the "You see that mountain? You can climb it!" game makers (Which, to be honest, I think they started to lose the plot on what made their games good when they started saying this. But that's a different conversation.). So when they made their foray into space exploration, they really had no one else to blame when folks expected a similar "You see that planet? You can fly to it!" design philosophy.

Though I think it would have been overlooked if the game was... good? At the very least, if it was way less bloated with low effort copy pasted fluff content. Complaints like this only tend to become so focal when people have more disappointment to express than meaningful critique can adequately convey.

I was never too bothered by the landing animation ( or the multitude of loading screens for thag matter ) because I figured it's a limitation of their engine so they won't be able to fix it easily or at all - and besides other games have been getting away with it: Mass Effect, SW Outlaws etc.

What irks me about this is that a modder has been able to actually do it, without access to their engine and supposedly doing it in their spare time and for free. It really shows how lazy bethesda have become and frankly don't hold much hope for their future games.