Looking back at the 50 hours I spent on it, I have to contextualize how much of it wasn't spent having fun. How many of those hours did I spend building an S-class ship and outposts with 4+ materials before I discovered that all of that was utterly worthless due to the main questline destroying everything? Building the ship certainly wasn't fun. Having a planet on my screen for three hours at a time while I scout for an outpost one pixel at a time was miserable. The point of those was that the reward would be worth it, but then during the main questline it all gets erased and you have to push the stone back up the hill again.

Contrast that with the game I spent the most time on this year: Hi-Fi Rush. It took me 80 hours to FC that game, and I was having a blast almost the entire way through! The tower was a bitch and a half before I learned the meta, beating Mimosa without taking damage took a good two dozen tries, but you know what Hi-Fi Rush has that Starfield doesn't? Exciting gameplay. A soundtrack. A story worth paying any attention to. Likeable characters. The Prodigy. Even though replaying every level on every difficulty setting is tedious as all hell, the process of doing it was still fun, and I can still open the game up and admire the Wall. I can't open up my Starfield file and admire my fully customized ship, the Death of Shame. It was erased along with every outpost and every relationship with every NPC.