There are nine reviews on metacritic from various outlets that score the game 100/100. I would love for every single one of those reviewers to look me in the eye and with a straight face, repeat the claim that Starfield is perfect and there is absolutely nothing in the game that could possibly be improved on. If you want to know who’s not conversing honestly, that’d be a good kicking-off point.
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 mean, to be fair, Starfield doesn’t do it well either. In the 15 hours I played, especially toward the latter end, I ran into plenty of texture pop-in, bad culling, bodies without heads and arms, heads and arms without bodies, bad shading patches, t-posing, stutter, lots of other goofy shit. And granted, my rig’s not the best but I’m playing on medium with a 9600K, 3070, 32GB RAM, and the game’s installed on a Samsung 870 SATA.
Disco Elysium is probably the best implementation of the ‘Fail Forward’ ideology I’ve seen in a game - not ‘Game Over’ per se, because running out of Health or Morale will give you a game over, along with some nonstandard endings, but failing important story-related checks doesn’t lock you out of the story, you’re just encouraged to go explore other parts of the world - raising the skill associated with the check you failed opens it up again, and certain objects, thoughts, or interactions can also open them up again. In the same vein, failing noncritical checks can often lead to more interesting and/or advantageous outcomes than succeeding. As an example:
spoilerOne red check (noncritical, can’t be retried) you make early on is to try to remember your name via Conceptualization. Succeed, and you’ll just admit to yourself that you can’t remember. Fail, and you immediately land on ‘Raphael Ambrosious Cousteau.’ You can then spend the rest of the game referring to yourself as RAC, with humorous reactions from pretty much everyone who hears it, and if you do it enough, you unlock a thought that raises your Savoir Faire and Espirit de Corps skills.
It looks like a shitpost with how often it uses colors and textures that seem to want to hurt the player with how godawful they look, but if you can get past that, the core gameplay is really good.
Well you can already fast travel between planets. I’d be okay with the happy medium of intersystem travel if it meant I could actually land on a planet. The problem is the way Bethesda has set it up, the planets themselves aren’t real, there’s just a handful of zones around POIs.
I mean, that’s still pretty much the case, it’s just emulated very well, with lots of polish. It’s a lot like Minecraft in that you have to make your own fun, but once you find it it’s a very nice flow. It’s definitely better with friends, and fights with real players especially are fun, and make you realize just how bad you are.
I would give My Friendly Neighborhood a try - it’s very much in the vein of Resident Evil 4 with just-different-enough Sesame Street puppets that give you a jumpscare and damage when they make contact. Put together by John and Evan Szymanski (brothers to and collaborators with David Szymanski, of several New Blood titles fame,) it’s made explicitly to be horrifying without relying on gore and excessive violence.
Weren’t they floating codename Deckard a while back? If they can make a handheld that plays modern titles reliably, a standalone headset on par with the Quest seems about the right speed as far as next steps goes.
The you’re addressing here is The four-point scale, which exists primarily because rating a low score on a big developer’s game is a good way to ensure you don’t receive review copies ahead of release, something reviewers live and die on because their fans want to know ahead of time whether the game is any good. In that sense, it’s a bit of a paradox - you can’t be sure at face value whether the 4 out of 5/8 out of 10/83% was something that the reviewer genuinely levied against the game as a fair criticism of flaws and/or commendation of positive experiences, or if they give it a high number because they’re afraid of biting the hand that feeds.