Comment by saigot@lemmy.ca on Starfield review controversy traces game journalism's orbital decay

More concerning than Bethesda’s decision to withhold early review codes from certain outlets is how heavily some sites are relying on the game to drive their business.

I don’t understand the purpose of big company reviewers (for subjective stuff like media at least). If I’m watching a smaller reviewer my goal is figure out their tastes so I can ignore the criticisms that I know don’t bother me, and pay very close attention to where their tastes align with mine. Like if dunky calls a game buggy or slow paced, that’s probably more a positive than a negative, but if he says the controls are clunky, I’ll probably agree. ACG tends to like games that are less mechanically adventious and easy compared to what I like, and we have evry different tastes in storylines, but he’s a really good barometer for sound and graphics.

If kotaku or whatever releases a review it’s really hard for me to understand whose voice I’m getting, so the review is pretty useless, how do I know if the guy calling the game a challenge is that infamous cuphead reviewer or a guy that has been beating dark souls since he was 4.

I have a hard time when people complain about loading screens. I’ve been gaming since the 70s guys, let me tell you about load times:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starpath_Supercharger

You’d start loading a game from tape and then you might as well go have dinner with your family because it would be 30 to 60 minutes before you could play.

Or, it could hit a loading error 5 minutes after you walked away and now you have to start all over again…

I bet you’d complain about your new car having roll up windows or no ac. Times have changed and we can do better. Especially with their budget and 6 years. It’s pathetic.

yeah the half a second to 2 second loading screens are horrible. any game with loading screens i immideately uninstall

This shows you’ve missed the point and haven’t researched the game.

It’s all the animation transitions between space and ground. No Man’s Sky had fifteen developers and accomplished this years ago. Bethesda is pathetically incompetent.

no mans sky had deep quests and deep conversations with unique characters? and they also used creation engine? i had no idea no mans sky was so brilliant! youve changed my mind!

Bethesda doesn’t have deep quests either. The creation engine is a weight around the devs necks. I’m not sure what you’re trying to say but you’re making my points for me.

Also, the Commodore 1541 floppy drive had a serial transfer rate of 2 bytes per second. Nothing loaded quickly in the 80’s either.

Cool dudes had fastload cartridges.

But it was soooo much faster than tape! ;)

Same here,

Unfortunately most of the folks in gaming media that I follow don’t write or produce proper “reviews” anymore. Reading a review from IGN or Gamespot… I don’t know anything about the reviewer so I take it with a grain of salt. Like with Starfield, I give the same weight to IGN giving it a 7 as I do with some no-name whatever tiny website I never heard of giving it a 9.5

Just have to read through the reviews. If someone docks the game for not letting you fly manually between solar systems like you do in Elite Dangerous then I just have to write-off the negativity because… of-course fucking not, did anyone expect that? With something like, the repeated knocks against the barren nature of the procedural generation leading to repetitive tedious travel - I take that more seriously, because it was something I was hoping they would have addressed when moving that direction. Something like the story sucking or the NPCs having cringey dialogue is completely subjective and means nothing without knowing the reviewer’s tilt.

If someone docks the game for not letting you fly manually between solar systems like you do in Elite Dangerous then I just have to write-off the negativity because… of-course fucking not, did anyone expect that?

I think a lot of people expected that. This is the see-that-mountain-you-can-go-there studio.

Expecting anything that particularly in-depth without being shown explicit pre-release footage of it is an expectation trap. Bethesda was never going to make a space sim, any space sim features are a bonus and were far from guaranteed.

That surprises me… each BGS game is extraordinary iteritive over the previous one ever since Morriwind. They’re like 20 years into iteritive design and arguably each iteration, while doing some interesting new things also takes a step or two back. Very obvious looking back over their history. They’re really a one-note-studio.

To all of a sudden expect Starfield would manage to be that revolutionary (to their formula) seems shortsighted. Even the concept of having a fully-realized BGS RPG with a near infinitely open space exploration system seems like an impossible feat. On a technical level, sure, but the space between planets would be empty and desolate… and even expecting an interesting procedurally generated continent is a big ask today, let alone a planet, let alone a solar system, let alone a quarter of a galaxy.

I wasn’t expecting it to be revolutionary. I expect Bioware RPGs to be on dozens of finite maps, and I expect BGS games, other than interiors, to be seamless maps. I was expecting procedural generation to cover the difference, and I expected that if No Man’s Sky could do it with maybe two dozen employees, BGS probably could too, especially given when the game went into full production. I was not, and still am not, expecting the vast majority of their planets to have something interesting on them just due to how many there are.

I can understand the link between seamless exteriors and the equivalent of what that would mean in the context of a space game for Bethesda, but the technological implications of having a galactic system flight mode and seamless planet to space transitions are both completely new ideas to Bethesda and are also technically complex to implement in a game already knee deep in new tech and systems only from what we’d been shown.

There’s a reason things like seamless planet transitions are only something you might be able to expect in recent years. While Bethesda could totally make that happen, it’s not where I’d expect them to put their money, or they’d have probably dropped a line showing it off in the pre release footage.

At once, I understand why you might’ve expected that, but expecting anything not explicitly shown is never a good idea when it comes to tempering expectations.

They showed so much of the game that I was bored before I could sift through anywhere near all of it (not to say I wouldn’t enjoy the game, but I know what I’m getting with a Bethesda RPG). I’m not knocking it for having a load screen between space and landing on the planet, but because we’ve seen that done a handful of times in recent years, as well as expectations set up from their previous games’ maps, it makes perfect sense to me to expect that to be in the game.

I see what you’re getting at, I could see how someone might assume an seamless outer space based on that. As soon as you realize how much of a technical undertaking that is though, it’s easy to assume they wouldn’t go that route and not have blown that horn 2+ years ago as a huge feature. Something like that combined with a BGS RPG would be massive and I can’t imagine a world where a company like BGS or Microsoft would be wanting to keep that a secret until release.

PC Gamer shows clearly who wrote the article, and generally they’ll be clear about what subjective reasons they had for their final verdict.

Personally, I feel they are prone to buying into marketing hype, but at least you can tell when that is the case.

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