I’ve basically never seen a free to play title cost less than a paid one (for similar content). Typically free to play has some sort of completely uncapped money-sink as well. Given that Sims 4 already costs $500+ for all content, I can only surmise that Sims 5 will cost thousands for the same amount of content.
I said this would happen back when it was just the ISPs having data caps and cell phone companies charging for every text/data caps/ peak hours. Oh, but I was just a raving lunatic then. Fuck the human race. We get what we deserve.
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.
The Sims 4 base game is already free. So if I’m understanding this correctly, EA, of all game publishers, is announcing that, against all odds, a free-to-play game with in-game MTX is an efficient business model that they want to promote? This might not be related at all that the Sims has always been a license that caters to the general, not particularly gamer audience.
With Sims 4 already being F2P this announcement just means they are once again going to resell the same content back to you at a premium. Piecing up their game even more.
While playing Final Fantasy X the first time, I got to Old Zanarkand and inside the dome, I saved behind a sealed door in the Cloister of Trials. I wasn’t savvy to good saving practices and after solving the puzzle, got into a battle I was completely hopeless to defeat. There was no way to walk back out the door from which I entered, the only way out was through; and with my existing inventory, spells, charged up aeons, etc. I absolutely could not defeat the boss.
It was pretty crushing because this moment is so close to the end of the game, but I gave up and had to come back months (years?) later to fully start the game over. I think maybe I played 99+ hours of Final Fantasy VII and then decided to give X another try. The second time, I was much smarter with maintaining multiple save games for safety. Not to be bested again, I grinded up all of my limit breaks and aeons for safety and completely obliterated the boss in one go the next time around.
Oh I vaguely remembered it being beyond the ¾ point, but also I wouldn’t have known and it certainly FELT like that was the case when I got soft locked.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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