Some of it is organic hype and some of it is Corporate Funded social media teams / personnel who do their best to control the online narrative. Happens every time a Triple A game launches, no matter how many times that Company has betrayed it’s audience and succumbed to greedy scummy practices. People even still talk about Activision Blizzard titles as if it won’t just be another cashgrab.
Personally, I’m always super skeptical about these sort of games having a positive reception. I think the fast decline in user scores since launch is a perfect example of how unreliable the hype is.
Yeah, and I don’t get why. We quite literally got exactly what we expected with Starfield, and nobody said we would get anything different. For those of us who enjoy it, we got precisely what we were promised. For those who don’t enjoy it, nobody tried to pretend they were getting something different.
If I have one complaint, they did not manage to brand it as effectively as they branded Fallout (the blonde cartoon, music, etc). But then, they never managed to brand tES that way and we’re all still alive.
My 2c. Isn’t it a breath of fresh air that we got a complete game without $100s in day1 DLC required to make it playable?
I remember people hating on Skyrim when it came out, then Fallout 4, surprisingly not Fallout 76, you are right they never lied about it or promised stuff we didn’t get, I don’t really have interest in the game so I haven’t been following it to much but I don’t recall there being any classic Toddisms either
Starfield is as Generic Bethesda as it gets(which is a good thing) they didn’t introduce shit from other AAA games, like you said, no annoying Battle pass, day one DLC etc and other than early access, was there preorder bonuses?
The hate just seems odd, I can get the hate for most AAA shit but it seems really misplaced for StarField
You’re right about the branding, nothing to me sticks out for the series’s brand, maybe they didnt want another vault boy esq thing, so the game could stand alone, I dont know
Also, I guess also the cutscenese/animations everywhere, launching ships, docking, landing can get annoying, I understand the complaints about those
like you said, no annoying Battle pass, day one DLC etc and other than early access, was there preorder bonuses?
There were some minor cosmetic day 1 bonuses that nobody is losing sleep over not having. Basically, a skin pack for 4 items you get early on in the game’s main story. Unless people are roleplaying heavy, those items are in storage or sold to vendors by the 5 hour mark in the game. I’ve seen some people who wanted pay-to-win or pay-to-pretty bitch because this was miles from it.
The hate just seems odd, I can get the hate for most AAA shit but it seems really misplaced for StarField
Exactly. Bethesda games have never been the bleeding edge for graphics, even when they were the games crushing GPUs (Balmorra@6fps, I’ll never forget you). Nobody is even meaningfully saying that the money was spent on bonuses or moon vacations for the execs or anything, only that what they spent it on was not hyper-realistic graphics. They’ve always been a vast game. That’s where they spend their dev money.
Also, I guess also the cutscenese/animations everywhere, launching ships, docking, landing can get annoying, I understand the complaints about those
Everything is fast travel and loading screens. You’re right. This has been the complaint about every Bethesda game since day 1. I remember loading screens in Daggerfall. Yes, games with different focus and different engines have mastered seamless landing and takeoff. Yes, I’m sure Bethesda could have added that, or faked it. But they made clear a year ago we’d be seeing load screens for those things, so nobody should’ve expected otherwise.
Everything is fast travel and loading screens. You’re right. This has been the complaint about every Bethesda game since day 1. I remember loading screens in Daggerfall. Yes, games with different focus and different engines have mastered seamless landing and takeoff. Yes, I’m sure Bethesda could have added that, or faked it. But they made clear a year ago we’d be seeing load screens for those things, so nobody should’ve expected otherwise.
Sorry, I’m not talking load screens, as, well, that’s a thing you can’t avoid and it’s silly to want that, what I mean is when you dock a ship, when you land a ship, when you furniture or something, those animations, like fallout 4, there’s mods that skip these animations, they’re cool like once or twice but it’s silly that they happen all the time, just take us to a load screen as soon as we press the button :(
Ahh. But don’t those animations mask loading processing so you see fewer “spinning wheel” screens? I remember early Skyrim having minute long waits when you entered a door
I could swear I’ve definitely seen transitions happen with no loading screen, just the transition. I am pretty certain the transition is just the start of the loading-screen process.
The game seems good and mostly well made, with the best hand-crafted environments I’ve ever seen from Bethesda.
But when it comes to the core gameplay loop, I feel like I’ve played this game already and I got bored very, very quickly.
It truly plays like Fallout 4 but with more menus and loading screens in order to fast travel somewhere. There is space combat, but it doesn’t feel compelling to me. Click on bad ship until kaboom.
You want to fast travel? Drop some things, you can’t fast travel while encumbered. Please undock first, we have some quest events tied to undocking and we don’t want you to miss those. Please fast travel to the planet before landing at a location, we have some quest events tied to the space around planets and we don’t want you to miss those.
Again though, the game is generally well made and I can see a lot of people truly enjoying it and the many gameplay systems you can dive into like settlement, ship, crew building, and side questing.
The slower-paced looter shooter gameplay loop just really isn’t for me right now. I’d rather play Fallout or Borderlands.
Note that I haven’t commented on the story. I don’t feel like I’ve experienced enough of it to really give a good opinion on it. I’ve played 4 hours.
It isn’t really a slower paced looter shooter, hell I barely loot anything and talk my way out of most situations.
It is more of a story based RPG, where you carve your own story out of the game. You decide what kind of character you want to play, and which quests you follow and which you ditch, anything is permitted.
If the only thing you do is go inside a random dungeon, shoot anything that moves, loot anything that isn’t nailed down and then go sell it, you won’t have a great time.
If you want to enjoy the game more, I’d suggest to choose a trope for your character: diplomatic Federation Captain, cunning Bounty Hunter, vicious Space Pirate, hardened Space Trucker, curious Scientific Explorer, …
Then find a quest line that synergies with your trope and follow it all the way through. Making decisions based upon how your character would react, not just what option will give you the most loot or is the easiest to accomplish.
Starfield has all the scifi tropes imaginable, kind of like what Skyrim had with Fantasy.
Currently I am enjoying my interpretation of the backstory of Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek. Being as helpful as I can, making philosophical statements and trying to find a diplomatic solution to anything. I change the UC to be the Federation and the Vanguard to be Starfleet. And recreated the USS Enterprise to the best of my abilities.
The funny thing is that “Publisher Bethesda was not permitted to pay additional royalties for the RPG because it scored 84 on Metacritic, according to Fallout New Vegas developer Chris Avellone. It appears that Obsidian’s publishing contract included a deal that meant the studio would be issued bonuses if the game hit a Metacritic of 85.” scores matter to Bethesda a lot even enough to ruin relationships and screw developers.
Oh nooooooo, a random nobody on the internet doesnt like how I write in my second language, whatever shall I do? Is that good enough for you sire? May I get your highly esteemed stamp of approval now?
How can reviews be monetized also the overall score is what really matters and is far more trustworthy than any games reviewer. Oh you mean points, I still fail to see how that matters when a game has 10k+ reviews and some tiny portion of them are memes. There is literally nothing better in terms of reviews.
Steam reviews are generally 90% memes or circle jerking.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint had mostly negative. The reviews all complain about either no achievements or the fact that the game was locked to their Ubisoft launcher first. Not real criticism of the game, especially considering most of what people complained about on release was fixed by the time it got put onto Steam.
It’s now 7 months later and it’s finally gone up to mixed with mostly positive reviews recently, despite no changes to the game.
Compare Breakpoint to Wildlands, it’s not as good previous game, all of the recent reviews are still circle jerking but posting positively.
You do realize you are cherry picking right? The power of steam reviews it that it’s just users posting what they want and there is a score aggregate with cool tools that tell you if a game is being review bombed. There are plenty of very good reviews on steam and I use them all the time when going through my many thousands of wish listed indie games. Please don’t tell you me you think reviews done by “game journalists” getting early review copies and going to review events is better… on the whole. At least with steam reviews I know it’s people like me rating a game.
Aww man it’s actually a bummer to hear so many people are disliking the game. This has been the first game in a while where I’ve gotten hooked. I love the RPG elements in the game and the story has been brilliant. I’ve enjoyed games recently like Ragnarok and Control but this is the first one where I’m excited to just get back and sucked into the world. The last Bethesda game I played was actually Fallout 3 over a decade ago. It makes sense as Mass Effect is my favorite franchise and this feels like an evolution of that. My perfect game would probably be Starfield with ME: Andromeda combat.
I totally agree. I’m having a blast with this game. Imo, the best thing Beth has ever made (yeah, suck it Morrowind stans)
I think the problem is that this game has a bit of a slow burn. It took a bit for it to open up and make sense for me, more than most Beth games. I think over time the hate cycle will die down and people will get it on a steam sale and finally sink their teeth into it and after a couple of years it’s going to be as beloved as Skyrim is today.
I think a big part of the problem is just hype cycles. People had expectations that were through the roof. They didn't tell you they had seamless transitions to space, and they didn't tell you they had BG3 caliber branching conversation trees (which we're a long way from being able to realistically do outside of a CRPG). But people seemingly expected that.
I watched the direct and we got basically what I expected (though the gunplay feels better than I expected. I definitely felt like VATS was needed in FO4.) It's Bethesda's game design philosophy of a massive world with a bunch of different play styles and a bunch of different quest lines (and smaller single quests) and locations that don't have to be done in any order. You can easily get sidetracked and go down rabbit holes. They iterated on most of their core features and adapted them to the new setting in a really well done way.
I also love the way the skill system brought back the "get better by doing" philosophy of Skyrim with challenges to unlock higher levels, and the story telling is sci fi in more than just skin.
Out of curiosity, have you played BG3 ? It seems that most people who don’t like the game are coming to starfield right from BG3 and those who do have not played it. BG3 is now just the bar that AAA story telling is held to and anyone who has experienced it is having a hard time with the story of other games.
I’m playing Baldurs Gate 3 with friends and Starfield singleplayer. And I am enjoying both.
They aren’t the same game, even though they both rely on story and some aspects of the game are the same (like coming up with your own character and wanting to see how the story affects them)
There are plenty of moons/planets with life and interesting things to see, but yes there are a lot of “barren” moons and whatnot. The game tells you what to expect when you click on a given object. It will tell you if there are flora and fauna, what the temperature is, what minerals to expect, that kind of thing. From what I can tell there is almost always some sort of structures/bases on the planets as well.
There’s both too much and too little stuff on planets. The random outposts it spawns are kind of boring but it’s annoying when I want to put down an outpost and the game has randomly put someone else on the best spot. But when I want to get to them, there’s a long walk for pretty much nothing.
Nope, not true in the slightest. There’s actually a lot of variety in biomes, flora, fauna, characteristics - and a lot of them even have multiple biomes with different life per biome.
What i expect people are complaining about is one of two things:
Planet scanning is boring.
On noes generated dungeons
To the first point, I agree planet scanning gets pretty boring if that’s all you do for 5 hours straight. But there’s a TON of content in this game. Switch it up. Once you’re done with a mission, go explore the planet you ended up on and scan the things. Or don’t. Who cares. Planet scanning isn’t necessary at all. I think a lot of people see that planet scanning gives you a ton of credits and xp, go grind that one thing, and then complain that it’s boring.
On the second point, yes every planet will have a bunch of locations that are like “Cave” or “Covered Crater” or “Abandoned Facility” and such. A lot of them are small resource troves, but the facilities actually feel pretty handbuilt - if you check them out. But I think a lot of people see “Abandoned [whatever]” and think “oh autogenerated content, meh” without checking it out. I certainly have been guilty of that. But every time I actually decide to go in, I’m surprised at how much fun I actually have in those environments, how much environmental storytelling is actually there, and how well built the levels are. I feel like they hand built a bunch of these or components of them and an engine puts it all together.
The reality is that every Beth game ever has used procedural generation. And they’ve been getting better at it with each game. Skyrim felt less empty that Oblivion. Starfield feels less empty, overall anyway, than Skyrim. The handbuilt hub planets are way busier than any location in Skyrim. The procedural worlds feel more empty than skyrim for sure, but it makes plenty of sense, theres still plenty to do, and the amount of planets makes it feel less empty. And overall, there’s a LOT more handbuilt and story content than skyrim - by several factors imo.
I’ll also point out that the procedural content is just flavor. You don’t need to engage in it but it’s there if you want it. This game has a TON of handbuilt content - more than any other Beth game. The faction quests feel like a full game in their own right. The side quests are plentiful and quite deep. Complaining about procedural content in this game feels like complaining about the number of leaves on a tree.
You can complain a lot about Starfield, but it has some of the most aggressive fast travelling options available to date. If you are walking a lot, it means you don’t understand the mechanics.
You can literally look at a waypoint and teleport to it.
I went from inside a dungeon, and teleported all the way to the commercial district on a different planet in a different system to sell everything in like 10 seconds.
I think this is an accurate way to put it. I happen to like that game but if it's not what you were expecting or you're tired of it you're not going to like the game.
I have to say the best change from FO4 is ditching the voiced protagonist. That was a big mistake at the time.
What a wierd take, given that people STILL play Skyrim, Morrowind, and Fallout games in droves to this day. And that there are a ton of YouTubers that have made careers exclusively off of Beth lore and build videos and such.
Also given the post is about the game shifting to “mostly positive” on Steam. Which means the vast majority of reviews on steam are actually positive. And a lot of the negative reviews have to do with performance and technical issues, not the gameplay itself.
Also the fact that other “open world story-based shooters with rpg and crafting mechanics” are actually really popular - you know like Cyberpunk, or Mass Effect, or RDR2, or arguably, Jedi Survivor.
If you don’t like Beth games, that’s fine. They’re not for everyone. But it doesn’t mean your opinion is universal.
If this game had dropped in 2016, I’d be ecstatic. But… I played Elden Ring & it felt a bit like a modded Skyrim, that was better than Skyrim. Now, Bethesda games feel stale.
You must have such a refined taste to not waste more than 90 minutes on starfield. May I recommend Elden Ring or Baldur’s Gate 3 for a discerning individual such as yourself.
Because they’ve been making the same game just with different settings for 20+ years and it been overused. You may have fun with the game if you didn’t play the last few Bethesda games or you still enjoy that type but it is stale for most who have played fallout 3, nv, 4 and the elder scrolls games for most of their lives. There’s just nothing new.
If you can already know the game is boring after 1.5 hours, the game is indeed not for you.
I thought it was yet an other boring scifi shooter, but gave it a try after seeing someone else playing it. Then I saw how much of a Star Trek TNG vibes it had.
I don’t understand the people who spend a hundred hours on a game to then give it a bad rating, calling it boring. Why don’t they just quit much earlier and play Chrono Trigger or something?
I have about 30 hours in it now. I wouldn't say it gets any better over that time, if you didn't like it at the beginning you won't like it after 30 hours.
With some games after 20+ hours the honeymoon phase is over. But I want to finish it so that all this time doesn’t feel wasted. And there’s hope that the game will get better. I mean everybody else loves it so it must be a great game right?
However, often it just feels like work and it makes the flaws of the game even more obvious. And I just end up despising it.
This is the best answer, players are invested after a certain point, but the realization that they don’t like the game comes later in the process. The more you play the game you don’t like the more you’re frustrated with it and the more likely you are to give it a poor rating, especially when the things that are your biggest complaints feel like obvious bug fixes that should have already happened, but continue to exist.
That is a great question! I’ve certainly asked myself the same thing and the only answer I can come up with in 2 parts.
1: The game is compulsive. While you are playing you want to keep playing. And while the moment to moment interactions are dull (imo) but not so dull as to drive me away. There may be plenty of Oblivion nostalgia keeping me playing.
2: Many of the games problems appear in retrospect. The dumbing down of the subsystems, for example. Much like Outer Worlds; it feels fine while you’re in there but once you stop and step back you realise how crappy they are.
Yes, this was exactly how I felt when playing Fire Emblem Engage. God. I hated how the hub world basically sucked an equal amount of time for each map I cleared. Sure, the mini-games are optional,But so is brushing your teeth.
I may be getting older but it feels like a lot of games are just padding their runtime with gameplay that doesn’t mesh well at all.
To be fair, the game is so massive, any review (positive or negative) done on less than 60 hours probably won’t do the game justice. It’s entirely possible to hold hope for redeeming qualities only to be a bit disappointed in the end.
Customers aren’t professional reviewers. Paying customers are entitled to have their opinion at any time. Tiny Tina’s Wonderland immediately put me off with that lame overworld. I think I clocked around 3 hours and then uninstalled it. Never ever would I spend dozens of hours in a game where a significant portion massively annoys me.
IDK, I think 10 hours is plenty for any game, and 2 hours is enough for most. By two hours, you’ve likely discovered the core gameplay loop and seen how it handles progression, and by 10 hours you’ve seen whether that core gameplay loop changes throughout the game.
I don’t like negative reviews for games when they’ve spent double the time HLTB gives for a playthrough. I don’t expect to play much more than “main + extras” on any game, so any review that’s expecting content beyond that just isn’t useful for me.
But it doesn’t excel at any of those play styles. It’s the classic case of “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
I guess it’s fine if it’s the only game you play, but if you have choice, I don’t see why you’d pick Starfield over other games you could get. It’s kind of like the cult around Minecraft, you can play pretty much any style you want with mods (e.g. soccer, Pokemon, roller coaster, etc), but every style is done much better in a standalone game.
So I give Starfield an 8/10 or a B, it’s pretty good, but it doesn’t really stand out in any particular way.
Honestly, the games that take the most time I often have more negative opinions about. The Assassin’s Creed games, for example, purposefully waste your time. They shove a bunch of junk in and try to make you interact with it when I could be doing something enjoying with my time. Enjoyment per hour should be the measure of a good game, not hours alone. If the game takes me 300h to complete and I only enjoyed 10h of that, it’s a bad game.
Games are meant to entertain. If they aren’t fun or force you to do unfun things, then why waste your time on them?
I got the same with collectibles in games. Chasing collectibles is boring to me, and you will never see me going for one that isn’t directly on my path. It is meaningless fluff.
Chrono Trigger was the first example of a game that came to my head that’s just great. I replayed it a few weeks ago as well. It’s time better spent than playing a shitty game for 100 hours.
IDK, I bailed around halfway through. I got to the Magus fight, and it felt really RNG dependent. If he attacked in a certain order, I would lose a team member and eventually lose because I couldn’t keep up with healing.
Maybe I was too low level, or maybe I didn’t have the right items equipped, IDK, but I completely lost interest when I failed several times without knowing what to do differently except hope that he attacked in a different order. So I bailed.
Maybe I’ll try it again sometime. I originally played on my phone, but maybe I’ll have more patience on my Steam Deck. I really enjoyed the game up to that point, but I just couldn’t bear the RNG. I have no problem failing over and over (I love the early Ys games and some bosses took a dozen tries), but I need to see some sort of progress.
If a narrative-heavy game takes 60 hours and then fucks it up on the third act, it deserves the hate. Games having a bad payoff 200% warrants bad reviews.
Wait you think danganronpa fucks up it’s third act? I was absolutely hooked from start to finish for danganronpa 1 and 2. Not yet had the time to play 3 properly yet though but I’ve looked what I’ve played so far.
If a narrative-heavy game takes 60 hours and then fucks it up on the third act, it deserves the hate. Games having a bad payoff 200% warrants bad reviews.
2 hours doesn't let you experience even 10% of what a game like this usually offer, less alone giving you time to tinker with the systems and see if they actually work, and furthermore if they are actually fun once you're good at them.
Of course I agree. But it’s still not that great game design, if you are bored for hours. It’s like people telling me about tv show that gets good after first season. What should I do until then… :)
How else do you explain to someone what dwarf fortress is, for example? You need dozens of hours just to get the grasp of mechanics and UI, less alone to figure out whether you even like the game. Same goes for many bigger games, for example mount and blade (bannerlord) starts off strong with a promise of you establishing and leading a kingdom but once you actually reach that part through tedious grind, you realize it was all for nothing and the game's a badly designed, shallow, unfinished sandbox with absolutely no vision or execution in that regard. Good luck getting to that conclusion without already investing at least 50 mediocre hours in it though.
You need dozens of hours just to get the grasp of mechanics and UI, less alone to figure out whether you even like the game
The problem with this thinking is that you split the game in 2 parts: first a tedious learning process of dozens of hours, and then an enjoyable experience once you know how to play, and imply that you need to get over the first part before being able (or allowed) to rate the game. But the learning part is the game, even more so if you need to invest dozens of hours.
Many players will simply enjoy the grind of Mount and Blade, because they don’t care about the endgame. Many players (maybe the same) will uninstall Dwarf Fortress after half an hour, because they will estimate that the learning curve isn’t worth their time, even if it was the greatest game ever.
I understand your point. But, if I take your example of mount and blade. If it’s starts off strong with 50 hours of fun, that’s a win in my book. But yes, in this regard steam ratings fail, because of binary recommend or not recommend voting. On the other hand, you can see how many hours did the user that posted a review played, so you can kinda make your own decision.
Also, I would like to add that games like dwarf fortress, rimworld, factorio and similar, all start of fun, if you’re into this genre….at least for me, they did. Thinking back, I think I never experienced playing a game for X hours having a horrible time, and somewhere in the middle changing my mind. At least from the gameplay standpoint. Maybe sometimes story had some unexpected bump in quality (thank god), but not really core gameplay.
Overall, I agree with you, 2 hours is too little for a complete review of a video game. But these are user reviews that can be helpful as well. For an example, for someone who hasn’t that much time to invest in a game to get to the good part. Professional reviewers (or people who have themselves as professional) should play the game for a suitable amount of time, before making an informed review.
If I game can't keep you engaged while doing that for the first 2 hours it's not a good game, at least for that person. You don't need to know everything the game has to offer if it's bored you for 2 hours.
I think there are too many exceptions to this that the best way to truly know is to play it for yourself. I hated Death Stranding, Control, Days Gone, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Fallout 3 and many other games in their initial few hours, but as they opened up they quickly became my one of my favourites. I’ve started my first playthrough of Witcher 3 and in the first 3 hours I’m not yet impressed, but I’ll give it a good chance before dropping it. Not sure if Starfield is any good but given its systems, it’ll probably need some buildup time I guess.
It’s such a bizarre, but real issue. I’ve always been boggled by the idea that you can’t offer your opinion on some games without first giving them a full work week. “I know you just sat there for the length of 5 movies and didn’t like it, but it doesn’t really get good until you sit through another 10.”
If you give it 2 hours, a game should have made it worth your time.
Personally I’d give it like a C or maybe B- at the top. It’s fine, but there are so many missing basic quality of life features that should be there.
My biggest gripes are all focused on outposts though. Outposts seemed to be one of the focuses from the marketing material, but they’re a pain in the ass to actually use. There’s somehow no list of the outposts you have, let alone a way to view what they’re producing. Outposts need to be linked together, but there’s no way to sort or auto-delete items, so it all eventually will get clogged up with lead, or whatever other resource doesn’t get used often. You’ll have to manually go through your containers to remove the clog and just dump it on the ground, where it’ll remain for the rest of your playthrough. There’s no snapping for anything except storage containers and the habitation modules. Everything else has to be placed by hand with manual rotations, so nothing is ever lined up. The alignment will also change after you place an object, so literally nothing will ever be aligned.
I have issues with many other parts of the game too, but outposts seem so incomplete, and somehow generally worse than what we had in FO4. Yet, outposts were prominent in their marketing. How?
They were certainly Bethesda games. I'm not even remotely fond of multiplayer fallout. But for 4, it's a marvelous modding world that I've sunk over a thousand hours into.
Oh, so you ARE aware of their other games and you were just cherry picking the ones that weren’t as popular? Now with that brought to light, you’re changing the date parameters to suit your narrative?
Technically Skyrim has also been published in the past decade, and even more recently than Fallout 4. In fact it's been released 5 times since Fallout 4.
I've never played 76, but 4 is one of my favorite games of all time. I think most people who didn't like it were going into it desiring for it to be something it wasn't. What it was impeccably good at was being a scavenging looter shooter with addicting weapon and armor modification and a fun outpost building system that wasn't for me, but did let me make my own little home.
Definitely not Bethesda's strong suit and not what I go to their games for. Their NPC interaction is made up of tons of awkward TMI introductions and dialogue too quirky to take seriously most of the time. That's a valid criticism, I would not say Fallout 4 is well written. I think it has some interesting premises like the whole synth idea, but not a well executed story.
The only overall story I really thought was good in that game was Paladin Danse's quest chain.
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you filthy Imperial? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in House Telvanni, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Black Marsh, and I have over 300 confirmed farm equipment kills. I am trained in Dunmer warfare and I’m the top battlemage in the entire Vvardenfell armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision spells the likes of which has never been seen before in this realm, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across Cyrodiil and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the ash storm, scrib. The ash storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with conjuration. Not only am I extensively trained in alchemical combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the Sixth House and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn N’wah. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
My guilty pleasure is to install Morrowind again and commit to replaying it, but to instead do another Skyrim playthrough because I just have more fun for some reason.
There’s something about the newer Bethesda games. I’ll go and install legacy games from other companies all the time for the sense of nostalgia, but despite having beaten almost all of them going back to Arena, if I want a Bethesda game I always end up playing Skyrim or FO4. And now (I presume) Starfield
It’s another subpar Bethesda game in a long line of subpar Bethesda games. Lifeless bland NPCs, tons of glitches, bad gameplay issues, and the same “shallow ocean” criticisms we’ve been going over since Skyrim.
It’s clear to me that Bethesda thinks Skyrim was peak Elder Scrolls, when I think Morrowind was peak Elder Scrolls. Unfortunately, it seems too much to ask for a decent story and interesting side content.
So I just don’t buy Bethesda games anymore. I was disappointed in Skyrim, and Fallout 4 wasn’t really my thing. It also doesn’t help that I don’t like the leveling mechanics of RPGs either and tend to prefer ARPGs like Ys and Zelda where leveling isn’t a major part of the game loop. I know what Bethesda offers, and it’s just not what I’m looking for these days. I play RPGs for story and immersion, not for graphics, character builds, and mods, and Bethesda seems to be more interested in the latter than the former.
But that’s what I appreciate from Bethesda. They’re pretty consistent at delivering a certain experience, it just so happens that it’s not for me.
Anything is better than No Man Sky, after a trillion updates they still haven’t fixed the one issue the game has. There is only a single planet but a million copies of it with different colors.
Yes but planets like that are realistically quite common. The ones with special features and biomes however are few but quite well done. Really not comparable.
Modern gamers are self-destructive. Nothing is good enough, and because every AAA release gets torn down and review bombed in one way or another, most and eventually all games from developers with the resources to make something of scale will become pay to win, microtransaction based garbage.
Because if they can’t please their audience and lose all passion for the craft because of it, they’ll just say fuck it go straight for the credit cards of those that do show up.
I’ve played about 70 hours so far. If you like the genre but starfield doesn’t wow you, I don’t think you’re able to be pleased. Is it perfect? No. Is it at absolute minimum an A grade? Absolutely.
I agree that we should appreciate well made games. But those are already beloved all around and praised at every turn, I don’t know how the people could be more supportive.
Think BG3, think Elden Ring. Even CP77, after a very rough release, is in a pretty good state now and about to receive a dlc + update that delivers many things originally promised; allowing the developer to recuperate a lot of the lost good will with the customers.
The point is, people still love good games. Just that starfield is pretty mediocre. Not a bad game by any means, but it feels like a lot of compromises, loading screens and reused assets.
One of the major disappointments imo is that space isn’t interesting. You only really go there for the odd ship battle to progress the plot or whatever, but you can’t really fly between planets, so you miss out on the cool side stories you get with Elder Scrolls games by walking between cities. I was hoping for Firefly the Bethesda game, but it’s just Skyrim stretched across planets that you fast travel between.
I want to find ships in distress, pirate outposts among asteroid fields, scuttled ships I can scavenge, etc. In other words, space should be a mechanic, not just a setting.
I think the planets are fine, but I’d rather have fewer, more densely populated planets. I don’t think space-colonizing people would only make 3-4 settlements per planet, there would be dozens if not hundreds of settlements before moving to the next planet. I’d rather buy a DLC to get access to more systems then current setup where everything is spread out. In fact, just give me Sol with Earth, Mars, and maybe one of a Jupiter’s moons being inhabited with the rest working like the planets in Starfield.
But no, it’s just Skyrim set it space, with fast travel between cities. That’s fine, just not particularly special. I may play it at some point, but it’s not what I’m looking for right now.
The scale is definitely too big. I’m pretty sure most of the systems are pretty much there just to fill in the star map. I’d rather have a setting where maybe interstellar FTL requires a sublight trip first so only the nearest few stars to Sol are accessible. Really I just want Everspace 2 where I can hop out of my ship occasionally and deal with fewer annoying “puzzles”.
I want to find ships in distress, pirate outposts among asteroid fields, scuttled ships I can scavenge, etc. In other words, space should be a mechanic, not just a setting.
The problem is that they let people skip the space parts arbitrarily often (sometimes planets make me stop to get scanned, sometimes I can go from ground to ground). All of those are encounters that happen, but if you fast travel you won’t see them. I have warped in and seen each of those, with ships in distress even landing near me to ask for help when I’m on the ground. Although the only actual pirate outpost in space AFAIK is the Crimson Fleet base and Everspace 2 does everything in space way better.
The fact that you can’t space walk without cheats is what I’m getting at. I want to be able to leave the ship to go investigate some wreckage, get into someone’s airlock to bring some needed supplies to a stranded vessel, or set up a mining outpost on an asteroid. Basically, the same feel you get when walking between towns in Elder Scrolls games, but with the unique mechanics space allows.
Starfield does a lot of things pretty well, but doesn’t really stand out in any of them. There’s a lot of elements of a great game there, but it just ends up being pretty good instead. That’s still awesome and it’ll sell well, but I am looking for that special something, and I’m basically seeing Skyrim in space. Not a lot of innovation, just a mapping of that formula into a space setting.
Try joining the FreeStar Collective, which is Wild West Scifi just like Firefly.
You’ll get the same types of stories and encounters. Including distressed ships, pirate outposts among asteroid field and scuttled ships you can scavenge.
TBH, I haven’t missed any of the other mechanics you mention. Yeah would be cool to do a space walk, but is it really necessary?
It would be more immersive, just like flying into and out of planets with no loading screen would. Their Elder Scrolls games nailed that immersion, yet Starfield went backward with a bunch of loading screens and limitations.
It’s still a pretty good game, like an 8/10 or so, but to really get that GOTY 10/10 rating, they need to excel at something. Either have better immersion, or limit the scope in some way to improve other aspects of the game.
There’s a lot of gamers out there who believe they are Bethesda fans, and this is one of the first times they’ve actually had to reconcile the game’s quality vs the developer they think consistently puts out good games. The amount of comments displaying obvious buyers remorse masquerading as defense of the game is hilarious.
I dunno, I think it's a game somewhat damned by faint praise. I hear "It's good, not great" a lot and I get it. If you like Skyrim you will like Starfield. But I'd say the big achievement is to scale up a game like Skyrim into such a big playspace.
It's certainly good quality in terms of the look and what they've technically achieved. But the actual gameplay isn't that far away from what they did in Skyrim and Fallout. I get it - if it ain't broke, don't fix it - but to be honest it feels a little dated. And No Man's Sky does alot of the non-RPG elements better.
It's been a strong year for games; and look at Baldur's Gate 3 - that game actually pushed forward narrative game play.
Starfield is huge and interesting, but ultimately a bit samey. I think the "ocean wide, inch deep" is too far and unfair but the basic concept kinda applies in a crude way. Baldur's Gate 3 is smaller in scope but so much richer and varied. Time was Bethesda was the undisputed king of RPGs, but I think CDProject Red supassed them with the story telling in Witcher 3 (and then fell back with Cyberpunk 2077) and now Larian have supassed both with Baldur's Gate 3.
It's a good game, but it's impact is dimmed a bit by what else has come. It'll make a ton of money and probably be around for years, but it doesn't feel the same huge leap forward as when Skyrim came out. But hey, hard act to follow to be fair.
It is actually a Role Playing Game as in you get to decide what role (aka character) you want to play, unlike some of the other “RPGs” out there (looking at you Witcher).
You sound like you need to play more games. Gamers generally have every right to hate AAA games these days, as they are, categorically, not A grade games.
I guess that depends on how narrowly you define “genre.” It’s a pretty good sandbox RPG, and it’ll get even better with community mods. If that’s what you’re looking for, it’s great and way better than pretty much anything else.
But if you broaden it a bit, it has a mediocre story, mediocre combat, and mediocre exploration. So compared to other RPGs, it’s really not special.
So I’d give it a B grade. It gets Cs in many areas, but the sandbox is good enough to pull it up to a B. To get to A, it needs to excel at something, like exploration (e.g. do more with the ship in space) or economy (e.g. invest in trade routes and impact the cost of goods by flooding the market). But it doesn’t really excel at anything, it’s basically the same formula they’ve had in the past with a different setting.
It’s still a good game, it just doesn’t stand out in any particular way. For everything it does, another game does it better, and it really needs to be the best at something to get an A from me.
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