Seems kind of like the game is just suffering from reactionaries, but I definitely don’t put that much stock in critic reviews these days either.
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Man some people just can’t be pleased. I’ve been playing the game all week, and it’s fantastic. It delivered exactly what I thought it was going to be.
Sure there are some bugs, and some complaints about a few minor things, but as a whole this game is spot on.
I’m just not sure what people are expecting. It’s Fallout/Skyrim in space, and it’s exactly what I thought it was going to be.
I agree that it’s a fun game – about what I expected as well (no bugs for me, though) – but my major issue with the game is that the lore is so damn boring. Unlike in past titles like New Vegas and Oblivion, I find myself skipping through the dialogue in this one so that I can go back to enjoying the game. The game doesn’t give me any reason to care about these various factions and their internal drama. Nobody ever has anything interesting or funny to say in Starfield ever. I never once felt the need to dig deeper into the lore like I do with Fallout, reading timelines and listening to developer insight and whatnot. I just skip skip skip.
Also there’s the fact that space travel is done almost entirely through menus. The only time you actually have to fly your ship is during dogfights.
If it weren’t for those two things, this would be a 9/10 game for me. I love the massive cities, how many mods there are already, and gunplay is satisfying once you tweak the damage values to make everyone less of a bullet sponge (Including yourself). Can’t wait to see what the future holds for this game once we start getting DLC and story mods.
tbf this is pretty par for the course with Bethesda, the writing just isn’t good. The people that wrote Morrowind and most of Oblivion left half way through Oblivion, from what I remember Todd Howard did not get along with the writers at all.
Everything ever since has been just, well it’s been there. Todd is more interested in spectacle and exploration than writing. And unfortunately that’s been incredibly successful for him
I just did a quest where the New Frontier and the UC put aside their differences in war to fight a common enemy. The dialog was all touching and mused on the equality of each soldier in a war.
Meanwhile I’m over here like “Dude, I have no honest idea what dumb reason there is that you two idiots are even at war with each other, and you’re writing the dumbest WW1 Christmas story I’ve heard.”
There’s something I’d like to call “the Bethesda” bar. It’s basically an industrial bar lower than most. Let’s define what that means:
- releasing the same game over and over
- make games so buggy that a release with only a couple hundred of glitches is deemed "polished*
- ignore progressive development for things like NPC AI
- put all the money in marketing and hype
- make the user think they’re getting something new, rather than just another boilerplate game
I’m sure the story writers did some characters justice, but I won’t be playing this game - especially since Bethesda claims it “can’t run on older hardware”, despite the fact that modders are proving them wrong.
The Betheada bar is a cancer upon the industry and I view it as consumer facing psy-ops, relying on brain-dead fanboys with nothing going on in their lives to squeal with glee as a new AAA-title is released to fill that void.
Ah yes the “everyone who likes something I don’t like is a brainless zombie” argument, coming from someone who doesn’t like Bethesda and hasn’t even played the game.
It’s the same game as the last several Bethesda games, no need to play it to criticize it.
But even watching a few streams and videos is really enough to see even the harsh criticisms are putting it mildly.
It’s obviously vastly different in so many aspects. You realize that Fallout 4, their last mainline game, was 8 years ago?
I’m having fun zooming around the galaxy as a tough bounty hunter/vanguard. Has all the good bits of Fallout (exploring abandoned buildings, weapon variety, base building etc). I swear people are not even playing the same game with how they describe it.
I think you mean pressing buttons in menus to teleport across the galaxy
Yeah, you’re right, they need a “fast travel to tracked quest next location” button so I don’t have to futz with the menus. But at least I’m not arbitrarily waiting several minutes to get to fun whenever I have to go somewhere.
You can fast travel to tracked quest location, I think as long as it’s not a new location. On Xbox you open the main menu/wheel thing, hover over the quests option at the bottom and just press x.
I’m 20 hours in and not having a good time. Feels like I’m forcing myself to play instead of looking forward to it.
It’s just… bland. There’s no memorable characters, no breathtaking worlds, no addictive gameplay loops or memorable story. Just go here, fight pirates, click on one thing, 30 seconds cutscene of talking, repeat.
I really, really want to love Starfield but I just don’t get it.
To me it’s less about the user reviews, and more about how as now some time is passing, listening to professional reviewers in podcasts etc, more and more the mood turns… tepid?
It’s not that anyone is underwhelmed. More just… whelmed.
The game is a solid 7 maybe 8. The performance is absolute garbage, but the underlying game is pretty good. Mods will do the heavy lifting as usual.
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From Metacritic
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.
Totally, Starfield pretty much pissed off 3 different groups at once.
You have anti-woke people losing their minds over pronouns in the character creator.
Playstation fanboys since the game is not on PS5.
The usual Bethesda haters that have been saying Skyrim sucks for over 10 years now.
This was going to happen whether Starfield was a masterpiece or complete garbage.
This was going to happen whether Starfield was a masterpiece or complete garbage.
But as expected it wasn’t either just a subpar game that a large number of people think it’s a 10/10 GOTY contender
A lot of people seem to love it and reviews are excellent, if that is subpar then we are getting some damn good games lately.
Gaming “journalism” is shoddy, low quality, biased, and untrustworthy. Every bad game coming out of a big studio will get dozens of 10/10s. Not even talking about starfield, but just every botched release.
Using gamer news or review outlets as a source is useless.
The people that are saying good things about it seem to be people that don’t play that many non-betheada RPGs so don’t have anything to compare it to, or are just excited for a space theme. People that are playing high quality RPGs like persona 5 or baldurs gate are not happy with starfield
It’s it bombing of it’s a bad game?
When is the next Mass Effect coming out?
Not soon enough 😭 Probably won’t be what we want from it anyways, they’ll take all the worst parts of Andromeda and leave the good on the cutting room floor, somehow.
I fear you’re right, but as long as the franchise is alive there’s a chance they make it right some day.
I’d love it if the franchise had an XCOM style entry.
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.
I’m with you. The intro was pretty lackluster, the main campaign doesn’t interest me at all, and new Atlantis kinda sucks imo
Then I joined the crimson fleet and suddenly 50 hours was gone.
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.
Starfield has fantastic art direction and ambience. The gunplay is really good, perhaps the best gunplay of any RPG, and a surprise coming from Bethesda. Story hits some good beats, and exploration is rewarding, though repetitive about 50% of the time in the typical Bethesda fashion (remember Draugr crypts?).
That being said, the game has some shortfalls, primarily in the roleplay aspect. The ship building and crew management is good, but it doesn’t feel great, and is sometimes just frustrating, so you never feel truly immersed in your own ship. Lack of low earth orbital and terrestrial flight is immersion breaking (even if players might opt to skip it if it were present) along with the fact that the ship is relegated to being a flying mule and most transportation is basically instant teleportation via menus, which IMO hurts the isolation and exploration RP and challenge. Ship combat is straight up mediocre for a space game in 2023. Gun selection and modding is decent, but far from top tier. I would describe the apparel as a bit on the bland side, few of the clothes and armor pickups made me go: I want to put this on, I’ll look badass (Cyberpunk 2077 syndrome).
In fact I think starfield shares a lot with Cyberpunk 2077: massive budget, AAA art direction with gameplay spread across so many systems and features that a lot of them leave you wanting more.
The gunplay is really good
Is it really though…?
I was just thinking this. The gunplay is serviceable.
I’m enjoying the game and having fun but I also have a long list of complaints. #1 for me right now is not having the right dialogue options. First bethesda rpg where a character can ask me if something is a good idea and there is no option to tell them no!
I watched some streams of Starfield, and I just can’t understand how they made a game that looks so dull and boring. Skyrim had some soul to it, I remember being wowed by the trailer. The world and music in Skyrim are really beautiful too. Yeah it’s a janky Bethesda game in many ways, but it is also more than that.
metacritics users score being as low compared to Steam’s user score, which actually requires having played the game iirc, is pretty telling
