I can echo that sentiment. The MQL starts really slow and has a lot of exposition overlord as is normal for Bethesda games. Once I started doing side missions for the UC Vanguard and “pimped my ride” xzibit style I got hooked.
Exactly what I experience in every Bethesda game. Boring ass main quest line where a bunch of British people telling me about starsigns or some shit and then I joined the vanguard and never touched the main plot again because exploding pirates and space hobos while exploring planets is where it’s at.
People like to claim any big ticket game that doesn’t get like 8/10 or higher is being review bombed. Seems as if people have legit criticisms of the game and it’s pretty fairly reviewed.
Metacritic’s user rating system is just shit. You see the game rated higher than deserved and you can either
give it an honest rating resulting in the total score dropping by 0.01
give it a zero rating and have the score drop by 0.1
Of course most people chose to rate it in a way that has more impact on the total score, so it’s no wonder we see 0/10 and 10/10 more than anything else.
This phenomenon will be even more exaggerated if critics ratings are undeservedly high, as is the case with Starfield.
The reason it’s lower on metacritic is mainly due to the fact that the critics rating is too high, imo. This leads to disappointed players leaving extra bad scores (i.e. 0/10) to offset the total score. In a way that’s review bombing, but only as a reaction to the inflated critics’ reviews (which I often suspect to be bought or bribed).
Usually the Steam reviews are a lot more reliable. As I said, metacritic’s system is shit and encourages rating manipulation.
Because my initial comment was about metacritic and my argument is that metacritic is a bad indicator of review bombing because it actually encourages it
So my question repeats: why mention it as if I’m defending it when I merely correctly stated its a review bomb. Like why are you trying to make that a discussion when it’s not…
I’m not even making it a discussion. You mentioned metacritic in your (now edited) comment and I explained why metacritic’s system actively encourages review bombing. So it’s no wonder you’ll see a decent amount of review bombing there.
To me it was a disaster because I expected it to be way more next gen after all these years. And it was very expensive compared to the quality I got.
Meanwhile my friend was all like “Eh, it’s fine. Pretty much what I expected.”
So I think people had very different expectations.
What I absolutely cannot comprehend is those who say “10/10, game of the century!”
Come on… No way. If you really think that, you have really low standards or haven’t played a new game in 8 years.
I’m normally very anti-grinding in games. Except with Warframe, because the regular gameplay is so fun. Definitely try and find someone more experienced to start playing with though, it throws way too much at new players way too quickly
I can't tell if I don't like Starfield, or playing games anymore. I got it on September 1st, and played it for a few hours that night. I played it for a couple hours the night after that, and then I played it for like 30 minutes yesterday. I haven't really been hardcore about any game since before the pandemic. It's not the same now that my gaming machine lives at the desk that is also my home office. I've typically wanted to just get out of this room when work is done, so a game has to be really good to keep me sitting here.
Huh. I was just watching a review for No Man's Sky that made virtually the same point about that game, down to the 50 hours. The review said that the first couple hours were very boring, but once the intro and early game was out of the way, it got way more interesting. His pinned comment reads "I have now sunk in 50+ hours into this game. It keeps showing new stuff. Please help me. My family hasn't seen me in days. "
Maybe open-world game developers need to see if they can streamline the intros somehow. Even if the intro isn't a large percentage of the time you play the game, it does make the first impression.
I made a post like this sentiment elsewhere in this thread but I agree 100%. I was kinda forcing my way through some parts because I was just barely interested enough to continue. Then I had a few ohhh shit moments like taking over my first varuhn great serpent fanatic pirate ship and some of the UC Vanguard missions. I don’t know how they could improve/streamline it but they should work on it for sure.
Not that buying more stuff is ever the answer but... As someone who also spends way too much time at the same desk, getting a Steam Deck has totally revamped my love for gaming. Most of the time I'm not bringing it out with me (although I have traveled with it), but just being able to play PC games from bed, on the couch, or even outside in the back yard has been a ton of fun for me.
That’s how mine are these days. I just noticed that my prescription expires after a year (the paper one), so if I’m tempted to get an updated pair of frames, it’s going to mean an eye exam for me.
I can’t tell if I don’t like Starfield, or playing games anymore.
I don’t know your tastes, but it’s probably the latter if you only stick to the AAA realm of games. I sure as hell have burned on them - the indie and mid-budget space is where you’ll find games focused on simply being fun. Hi-Fi Rush, Pizza Tower, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk to name a few that came out this year.
Screwed over? What promised stuff didn’t 76 deliver on?
For me it seemed like Bethesda wasn’t entirely sure what they wanted from 76, except that they wanted to create a multiplayer version of Fallout, and make money on micro-transactions. Todd tried to drag it in the PvP direction, which was ridiculous when its their first multiplayer and fallout haven’t exactly been known for being balanced. Someone internally dragged it in the coop PvE direction, someone else towards roleplaying and building. And after a backlash, they reacted by focusing on getting NPCs in and on PvE coop. And house building because that sold.
I liked the initial story personally. The changed story with NPCs became too disjointed from the world already built. And had no driving force in it. No reason to care except seeing one faction win.
I would guess that any platform-exclusive game is going to have some level of that, just because you've got fans of Platform A and fans of Platform B. And Starfield was purchased by Microsoft specifically to have an X-Box (well, and PC) exclusive, so...
Go back to the 1980s, and it was "Mario sucks" or "Sonic sucks".
I play games almost entirely on the PC, so the Starfield acquisition (as well as the other recent acquisitions by Microsoft or Sony or whoever that have been driving the antitrust concerns) haven't really been on my radar, but if I had a popular game coming out on my platform and then someone paid to ensure that I didn't get it, I'd be kind of irked.
I did use a Mac, many years back, and I remember being annoyed when Bungie -- then a major game developer for the Macintosh, in an era when the Mac wasn't getting a lot of games -- was purchased by Microsoft in 2000. Halo did come out for the Mac, but Halo 2 didn't, and I imagine that a lot of people who were on the Mac then were probably pretty unhappy about that.
It's apparently coming out shortly (like, this month or next). But, more to the point, the delay apparently wasn't because a platform vendor purchased it to be an exclusive, but because the dev team hit some kind of technical problems with the port. That is, it's not in the group of "Mario and Sonic" exclusives used to sell a platform, and Microsoft's acquisition was to make Starfield one of these.
EDIT: Split-screen on the XBox Series S is apparently where the problem is:
Larian has been struggling to get Baldur's Gate 3's split-screen co-op feature running smoothly on the Xbox Series S. Despite the feature working as intended on Xbox Series X, Microsoft policy demands that Xbox Series X versions of their games cannot have any features that Xbox Series S editions lack. This means that canning the feature on Series S simply isn't an option for Larian.
Metacritic user ratings have literally never mattered and never been an indicator for anything. I’m pretty sure every relatively popular game on it gets “review bombed”, because anyone who actually wanted to review it wouldn’t review it there. This is non-news.
Doesn’t metacritic aggregate reviews from other sources on their review scores as well? I havent really considered any of the big name review places a reasonable source for a long time anyway…
Everyone expects the next big game every game. How often can a studio really live up to the hype people create?
I don’t like it, so many loading screens, the faction bounties are copy/paste, the space combat is awkward, neon was a huge disappointment to me being just one long corridor with neon signs, the main quest railroads you like no other Bethesda game before it and it’s just not fun to me. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s just not for me and moved back over to baldurs gate 3 and recently started another new run in the outer worlds.
I mean, my opinion is anecdotal I suppose. I have friends that like it and some that think it’s just okay. For me, I just wasn’t having fun and that’s the point of games, to have fun. I also don’t really think their whole “NASApunk” style is very good. It doesn’t feel like it has any unique style or identity. It’s honestly baffling to me how it’s gotten some 9’s and 10’s for scores. It’s easily a 7 out of 10 for me, maybe even a 6. It’s definitely not the game Bethesda sold everyone on with marketing IMO.
The loading screens are atrocious even for a Bethesda game. Walk up a ladder, loading screen, open a door, loading screen, dock with another ship, loading screen, travel to another planet in the same system, loading screen, land on a planet that’s already loaded, loading screen, exit the ship, loading screen. Maybe it’s different on PC, but I’m playing on a series S that has pretty fast read/write speeds and that’s just absurd. Pretty sure if my character could use the toilet there would be a loading screen for the bathroom.
It’s still open world in the sense that there are plenty of places you can go to and in any order without being gated through a linear story line.
Even if you were to ignore my advice, it wouldn’t be any more open world because travelling between these areas is always gated by loading screens.
My suggestion is merely to reduce the amount of loading screens between zones.
Instead of leaving constellation, loading Jameisom, getting on the train, loading the shipyard, entering your ship, loading the ship interior, taking off, loading space, going to your map, selecting warp to sol, loading sol, selecting a landing site on Cydonia, loading your ship interior on cydonia, leaving your ship, and loading cydonia.
I’m suggesting you fast travel straight from the lodge to cydonia. Cutting 7 loading screens down to 1.
Of course, I also recommend that you take time to explore the areas you’re in.
You’re right that the loading screens can be minimized with fast travel, but also, some of the best parts of a game like this is the immersion, which doesn’t really work well with loading directly from point to point on your to-do list. I think Starfield is fine, tbh, but I do agree that the amount of loading screens is excessive. Games like NMS and Elite Dangerous have been doing seamless space travel for a long time now. There’s really no excuse.
Yeah, that tracks. I get that as a company, they’re gonna wring every resource dry before ponying up the money to redevelop, but that engine’s been showing its age for a while now, and Starfield is a great concept that deserved better.
I get what you’re saying, but eliminating loading screens in a game like this just isn’t feasible.
NMS or Elite Dangerous style space travel might be, but then it would have a similarly cartoonist reduced scale. I wouldn’t mind that personally, but I get why they didn’t do it.
My primary complaint is that the cities themselves are split up into multiple zones. If Skyrim can be entirely open, so to should Jameison.
I’m not saying they need to eliminate them entirely, just agreeing that there are way too many, and “fast travel to the plot” isn’t a reasonable solution in a game like this. I do think (mostly) seamless space travel would go a very long way to helping the overall experience.
It would seem so to me. When there’s a big disparity across the ratings - positive and negative are similar on metacritic with little in between - it raises a lot of red flags to me.
Not sure if it’s evidence of organized review bombing. but yeah, it seems like most people are just being as extreme as possible because they know it’s a scale of averages.
For PC, game optimization is very inconsitent. When I’m in a smaller space like a dungeon or the Constellation Lodge, it’s actually pretty great and runs smoothly. When I go into the city though, the framerate is terrible. The graphics also become significantly worse. So yeah, wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of those negative reviews are from PC players having to deal with Bethesda jank again.
It's reasonable to expect high framerates in 2023. If people want the game to run smooth there's nothing wrong with that. Hell, doom eternal was a Bethesda game and it looked gorgeous and ran like butter, so we know they can pull it off.
A lot of people also seem to not know that you can’t just spend 80% of your budget on a graphics card and buy whatever CPU you can afford with whatever is left.
I have a 3080 and the game runs noticeably worse in the cities than it does in small rooms. And that's with everything at low-medium and 75% rendering resolution which seems ridiculous. And the game doesn't even look that good.
I dunno, TLoU2 definitely got it harder but there’s still that massive gap in middle range reviews (see image) that made me question it with Starfield.
Early Bethesda games in general focused on giving you more freedom and the tools to do what you want. Where later games tried to give you more cool things to do. I think the quality decline is obvious from the change.
ESO is great, though? It just has a shitty combat system with attack weaving. Even 76 isn’t that bad anymore. Honestly just seems like you get your opinion out of gaming journalism.
I have literally never watched or read a review of ESO or Fallout 76.
I played both.
ESO fails at being a solid Elder Scrolls game because it’s tailored more toward an MMO experience. The writing is awful, and the quests are boring. The combat sucks, and the social features are abysmal given you can’t even share quests. Literally the only reason I could imagine anyone playing this game is because they want to grind out an MMO every day that’s set in the Elder Scrolls universe.
Fallout 76, I don’t even know where to start. Again, the MMO mechanics tear out everything good about Fallout games to deliver a bland, grindy MMO with bad combat.
I really dislike most of the games Bethesda makes . Skyrim I found glitchy and the sword play felt really bad . Fallout 3 the gameplay seemed like walk backwards and shoot. I did like death loop thou
I felt the same until I modded the shite out of Skyrim this year and now my mod list hit critical mass and I‘m having an absolute blast with it. Starfield runs worse and looks worse for me so that game needs some time in the patch and mod oven before I dive into it… I‘m patient.
I don't disagree that the mods for Bethesda games are cool, but problem is that the barrier to getting a massive mod list set up and working after years of mods have come out is considerable.
I feel like, given the sheer size of the mod library, mod managers need something like a list of base, curated set of mods to start with, kind of what Wabbajack does, but then have the ability to add mods to it. That way, to get you most of the way to a heavily-modded game, you just pick from among a few popular modlists.
Choosing that curated set to start with would let you avoid spending hours poring over reviews of different mods and culling obsolete information to determine what you think the current-best, say, lighting mod is.
And have the ability to update to the latest version of the modlist, or roll back to an earlier.
Once that's up and going, then if you want to go tweak it or add or remove a particular mod, you can.
This is the way to be. I won’t be buying Starfield for at least a year, likely longer. By that time GPUs will be able to run it easier and I’ll be due for a new one. The game will have also seen its most significant bugfixes in that time.I haven’t bought a new game hot off the press in almost a decade. #patientgamers
Don’t eat your burger hot off the grill, let it cool and allow it to congeal the fats a little bit. That way it doesn’t fall apart on the first bite. ;)
You should try Prey if you enjoyed Deathloop, it’s DLC “Moon crash” was made a few years prior to Deathloop and incorporates similar mechanics except the map is randomized on each playthrough so it’s always a little different.
Same company, but it feels like Moon crash was a more interesting version of what DL did. Plus Prey occasionally just goes on like 90% off sales (one time I snagged it and the DLC free on Epic Games.)
I can see why the reviews are between ‘Best game ever’ and ‘worst game Bethesda made’ and it’s so strange. I personally love Starfield and it’s universe while my friend hates it because it’s boring for him.
Tbh, me and at least 2 other people I know bounced off it hard, even after giving it multiple chances in 10+ hours of playing. Some people just aren’t jelling with it even with playtime.
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