The 84 isn’t from people fighting console wars, though - these are the reviewer scores, not user scores. So as more actual reviewers are finishing and writing up their impressions, the scores are dipping. The scores aren’t bad by any means, but they aren’t as good as when only a handful of reviewers that got review copies had their reviews out.
Yeah it’s pretty easy to understand that the 84 is the professional reviews. I guess there aren’t just 64 people who put a comment, but 6190 who put a comment (from the image in the post).
The more professional reviews come out the more the score has a chance to go down compared to the first reviews if they were very high. And give some sort of average.
However profesional review scores don’t always align to what most users think, as people like different things, but also the users get very much bothered by a bad start. While the reviewers will give a score on the entire game.
I trust the scores that come after release over the ones that came before, because post release scores aren’t concerned with biting the hand that feeds re: getting future review copies for titles down the line. It’s telling that a lot of the earlier ones are higher but just say “great game, Bethesda’s knocked it out of the park again” with a sentence or two, and later, lower ones are a lot meatier with specific criticisms.
I think it’s worth noting that there are a lot of irrelevant low reviews from the review bombers too, as well as zeroes from the people who are upset that you can choose your pronouns. I’ve played the game. I don’t like the game - I think it’s bad on its own merits, or lack thereof. Where I think FO4 was a ‘meh’ because of the less impactful character building and stripped-down dialogue system, doubling down on the clutter looter aspects, I call Starfield bad because the same clutter looting and character building with a new coat of paint is now gated behind repetitive tasks and mostly barren procgen maps. There’s more layers of obligatory fast travel between the parts of the game that are enjoyable, and that’s in service of the parts of the game that aren’t. The game is objectively worse than FO4 for those reasons, and in the case of the leveling system, it didn’t even need to be.
And you know, while I’m airing my grievances here, I also think it’s fair to have higher standards in the eight years between the two games - Bethesda doesn’t get to hide behind their own old engine the same way Obsidian gets a pass for the issues FNV runs into - it’s their engine. They should know from the get-go whether the game they want to make can be supported with a system built over a decade ago, and if it’s not, they should be prepared to go back to square one. They had plenty of time; I don’t believe for a second they couldn’t have made this game right, but they were hell-bent on getting one more game out of the Creation engine, and by god did they, for better or (much, much) worse. So when people say “It’s Bethesda, what did you expect?” I will answer, from the top of this hill where I’m already carving my fucking epitaph, “Something more and better than what we got last decade.” And people give shit for that expectation? I’m supposed to be impressed that they plugged the random number generator that puts cartons of cigarettes in trashcans into a random planet generator? That in the eight years between FO4 and this samey, shallow, mediocre mess, two more than the development time between Daggerfall and Morrowind, that arguably set the standard for this kind of game with its masterfully crafted world, with huge setpiece cities full of bespoke characters and encounters, they’ve managed to stretch the disappointment of randomized containers full of vendor trash and blocky bases full of raiders over thousands of empty maps? Give me a break. Game bad. Emperor Todd has no clothes and I’m fucking calling it out.
I’ve played Starfield (PC) a good bit by now and I’d say that mid 80s is probably fair.
The gameplay is great fun - the combat, gear, etc. is really quite similar to Fallout 4 (though without the VATS), with a Skyrim style talent tree.
The base building and ship building is quite like Fallout 4, though much improved (thankfully!) but still a bit janky.
The worldbuilding is immersive but the world itself is just okay - it’s really predictable, they play it a bit too safe, every faction is nothing we haven’t seen a dozen times before, and society hasn’t advanced at all ~400 years in the future apparently.
Characters are exactly what you expect from a Bethesda game - a bit two dimensional, but nice enough.
Graphics are good, sound design is good, music is nice but a bit too similar to Skyrim IMO.
The story is also really quite safe and derivative, reminds me simultaneously of Mass Effect and Skyrim.
The exploration is cool, but does get a bit repetitive after a while. I think more interesting “random” locations would be really good - after a few abandoned, flavourless civilian bases, you’ve seen them all.
I’m a sucker for customisable bases/houses/etc. especially for space ships, giving me all those building blocks and letting me loose in the sandbox (starbox?) is honestly hours of entertainment.
Space combat is fun, but IMO the space part of the game would be way more immersive if I did all of the ship piloting stuff in-character rather than in the UI menues, seems like a big oversight - why not have something like the galaxy map from mass effect, or have everything on displays in the cockpit? It would be much more immersive, but I guess it would have delayed the game quite a bit.
A lot of the game is juggling menues and interfaces which aren’t the best designed. very similar to Skyrim - I imagine UI redesign mods will really shine once they start coming out. It’s pretty tricky trying to figure out what stuff in your inventory is junk you accidentally picked up (looking at you, Fire Extinguisher!) and which items have a surprisingly good value-to-weight ratio (like some - but not all - of the books, or the deck of cards, surprisingly)
There are occasionally little bugs and glitches, but it’s not too bad for 2023 - nothing that makes the game unplayable or breaks major things, it’s just been stuff like glitchy animations, containers placed in the wrong place/orientation, weird physics behaviour, and I’ve noticed a couple missing textures here and there.
If you’re looking for more of a story/RPG game, I’d suggest something more like Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic.
For exploration and space combat, I think No Man’s Sky is better, but with much less customisation.
For more customisation and sandbox style gameplay - but less action-oriented - Space Engineers is probably a better choice.
All in all, Starfield is a fun game - Skyrim in space is a good starting point for describing it, but it’s a lot closer to “Fallout 4, but the bombs didn’t drop”, though the game has a lot of cool extra systems beyond that. I’d be happy to recommend it to someone who would enjoy a single player sci-fi themed looter-shooter sandbox game with some mild RPG elements and player-constructed ships and bases, and I’m sure there are hundreds of hours of enjoyment there, and, as with the Elder Scrolls or Fallout games, it’s likely a game that I will return to for many, many years to come
At the very least, they could have added viewable maps at those terminals in the cities, a lot like how some zoos usually have a fairly readable map, often with a “you are here!” marker to help out.
I would love to know what shops are selling rather than guessing based on the shop’s name. I remember running around Jemison for like a half hour trying to figure out who the fuck sold ammunition when I started.
Yeah, I’m not happy about the Switch 2, but the amount of cope is unbelievable. I’ve seen multiple people claiming, “the Wii U sold out a launch too,” even though the Wii U sold worse than the Wii on opening weekend. The sales might still fall off a cliff in a month, but breaking the PS4’s record for launch sales is not a great sign.
I don’t even find the price too bad, i haven’t owned a console in over a decade, so i don’t really know. But paying to use their online service, and the lack of games is really off putting to me. And that aside, as far as i understand it, it was such a pain in the ass to get a ps5, that i don’t really understand why so many people bothered in the first place.
I will admit it’s not only the price that is a deterrent, even if that’s now competing with a perfectly capable gaming PC that can do significantly more, doesn’t have an additional charge to play online, doesn’t have to deal with increasingly standardised subpar controller longevity, commonly have cheaper games, better sales, and will have a longer shelf life. I already thought the PS5 was a bit pricy at launch, at a time when I was still considering buying one. That time has been and gone, I’ve spent the money on upgrading my already decent computer into an absolute beast because I figured “why not?” and I still have yet to see a reason to buy the PS5. It’s no secret that consoles are commonly loss leaders for the manufacturers while the exclusives are the money-makers. It’s a way of doing business, that’s fine, but to this day, I can only claim to have seen them release maybe 4 exclusives that I’d deem worth playing. That’s already a bad deal. No-one in their right mind can justify paying full price for a console to play 4 games. On top of that, 1 already got ported to PC, one’s got a release date, one’s already had public response from the developer to be working on the port, and the last has really strong odds of getting ported too. 4 is my number, and I don’t doubt other players would swap my own picks for something more their taste, or maybe even bolster the numbers, but I don’t think anyone could make it as high as 10 without naming a game that was also released for the PS4 and/or got ported. So unless Sony gets their shit together, the PS5 tells us that the PS6 will be a bad deal.
I think it’s pretty clear what the game is from the trailers, and it looks awesome. Hopefully the temple puzzles are actual puzzles, as opposed to something like Uncharted where Drake always has the answers in his deus ex machina book.
This is going to be straight garbage. Not only will it be overstuffed with every microtransaction possible, there’s no way to balance the characters while still keeping them true to the comics. Thor vs. Mantis? Dr. Strange vs. Punisher? Maybe you can help it a bit by having some of the classes be dps/healer/tank, and constrain them somehow, but I don’t see how this would ever work.
Outside of a mobile game. If they are making it a mobile game, it will make $2 billion and be a completely unbalanced piece of shit, and everyone will love it anyways and play it for the next two years.
Just Hawkeye and Black Widow. They don’t have powers, they’re just good at their jobs. It’s already silly in they other games they appear but at least there they don’t fight each other.
I’m so tired that this kind of opinion has infested lemmy discourse. Reddit wasn’t this bad.
Wait for shit to come out before getting mad at it. You don’t have to write fan fiction on how mad you are about something just so you can get your anger based serotonin fix early.
Please. I’m pointing out how all you want to do is get mad about things and are in such a fervour to do so that you won’t even wait for the thing to exist to get mad about it.
You want to get mad? Fine, but don’t write fan fiction then get mad about that.
I’m not the original commenter with the “rage fan fiction”. I’ll answer my own question though. Naraka: Bladepoint. You ever play Naraka: Bladepoint? What about Last Light? I’ve played both, both are hot garbage and microtransaction filled. If a company has a history of putting out shoddy work, why the heck should any of us expect this new game to be any different?
What’s the best dopamine rush you’ve ever gotten from hating on something? How long did it last? When you looked back on it the next day, was it a fond memory for those two minutes?
Well, I really hated it when someone’s intensely human matriarch from a parallel universe wouldn’t give me a snowball after. Although, the dopamine could have come from the climax and not the hating…not too sure. 😂😂
Reddit was definitely worse than one person’s opinion on a obvious cash grab mobile game. I’m not mad. I’m likely not the target audience for this game. If you are excited about it, be excited. Go play it. Give them your money. They will be excited too. Have fun. Spend. Enjoy.
Awesome proposal. Some indie games would suck me dry and I’d be paying 1/4 of the price for AAA releases! Is this the redistribution of wealth Marx has been talking about?
Good to hear. I always new the lie the AAA publishers push that no one wants single player rpgs anymore, but numbers like this prove it out. No AAA we aren’t skipping your games because we don’t want the stories m, we are just tired of spending $70 only to discover it is full of micro transactions, always online issues, and all the other AAA predatory tactics!
AND, didn’t actually wrapping up the story, for sequel sake.
BG3 is so huge even if it’s only the beginning arc(Larian tends to taper off at the end, lol), I had to “replay” some decision making and see how outcome and the exp net gain and to decide how I proceed.(yep I save scum, don’t hate me I have limited time and want to explore content and choices to my desire outcome. Then my other play through I can be more free form, and I bet there are something I haven’t seen yet from this good guy talk things out approach.)
Created by netease, which means it will be a piece of fucking shit flush with micro transactions designed to suck as much of your life away for as little possible effort
It’s a real shame because the premise could be awesome if done right but instead they went with the quick cash grab approach.
forbes.com
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