I haven’t been able to play it yet, but I did see some reviews, so take what I’m saying with a grain of salt.
If you’re familiar with Bethesda games then starfield will feel familiar in some ways. The gunplay is close to fallout 4’s, where some enemies health scales with difficulty. There are a lot of guns you can hoard. However there have been major improvements which seem to address shortcomings of other Bethesda games.
In the cities, they’ve managed to cram more NPCs in to give life to hub areas. The lockpicking minigames and hacking have been replaced with digipicking, which is an actual puzzle and requires some thinking to solve. You can fast travel from anywhere, you no longer have to be outside. Render distance is impressive in some areas. There’s a new persuasion system. NPCs have (somewhat stiff) facial animations. You can highlight loot with a scanner, and the same scanner can act as a guide to the objective.
The real strength of the game is just how much effort has been put into it. You really can find how parts of this game look like a real labor of love. Some voice actors are big names. There’s a lot of content to constantly side track you. There are 4 factions that I know of, and each has their perks once you work with them enough. Finally, there is a ton of customization. Weapons, suits, your ship, and late game outposts you can make. The game is very pretty.
Are there bugs? Yes. They aren’t as bad as previous titles however. I haven’t heard of the game crashing. Performance seems to be pretty alright as well.
Steam itself works fine on Linux. I don’t think I have a single game in my library that doesn’t work. I’m using Arch (btw) and I’ve found that for my use case (internet browsing and video games) that I haven’t had any major issues.
The two issues I do have are:
I still have my Windows install (dual boot) as a just in case backup, but its been months since I’ve used it.