And some people were annoyed it didn’t win game of the year…
Most average game of the year.
Bethesda hasn’t innovated in years, they depend nearly entirely on the name alone
Let us all remember that one time that they thought that monetizing the mods was a good idea and a massive amount of Steam users demolished them online. Like oh you want to make awful games, make that money, then have modders make cool content that makes it worth playing, and then have the balls to ask for a cut of what they’re selling it for?
And guess what? They still do that. And the fallout 76 store and subscription is something I will never forget.
Some people will worship anything Bethesda puts out, even when it’s mid at best
Some people worship the turd products released by Apple, some the perfect games from Bethesda 😉
The universe of Elder Scrolls: Spacerim just feels… strangely sparse and uninteresting, even in a lot of the places that should be interesting.
If this came out 5-6 years ago, it’d be a different story, but there’s frankly too many competitors that have done space RPG as good or better than Todd has with his latest entry.
I mean, I actually like the game, but I will say that anyone that thought it deserved GOTY awards is delusional and presumably in a tiny minority to think it. It wasn’t even plausible that it would even win best RPG when it came out the same year as Baldur’s Gate 3. Starfield may not be a terrible game, but it’s definitely not great either. It’s thoroughly mediocre.
Based on everything I’ve heard of it, this seems a bit too high.
It’s not. I personally love the game, but it has a lot of flaws and that number seems about right to me. I think it’s a better game than Fallout 4.
Some of the storylines are fantastic, but they’re pretty disjointed from the rest of the world. Some of them feel like they have loose ends that didn’t get finished in time.
There are several game systems that are neat, but unfinished, and superfluous.
I really don’t understand the dog pile this game has gotten.
I’m in the same boat. I feel like most new games that come out that aren’t a clever indy title or on par with Witcher 3 need to be perpetually shit on. People were kinder when Fallout 4 released, while it was buggier than starfield at launch, and also has disjointed mechanics und a subpar story. I personally enjoyed Starfield more as well but both are more than ok games.
It’s how hyped it was and expectations set by Skyrim. Starfield was seen as the next step on from Skyrim in terms of game scale, and Bethesda hyped it up as their biggest and best game ever. It’s neither of those things.
Also frankly in terms of RPGs, it feels dated. Witcher 3 set a new bar for what an RPG should be, but Starfield doesn’t seem to have learnt those lessons. Baldurs Gate 3 has also set a high bar for RPGs this year, and Cyberpunk 2077 (for all its own flaws) also set a high bar for RPGs.
Starfield is an ok game but when it’s hyped as it going to be the greatest game ever from Bethesda and going to be biggest game of the year, I’m not surprised it’s being shat on when it turns out it’s not.
But hopefully Starfield will be an important bump on the road for Bethesda. Bigger is not necessarily better and hopefully that lesson will carry in to Elder Scrolls VI.
The problem with Starfield is, I think a lot of us expected Bethesda to take a big step forward, and they dropped a B to B+ game.
Sure, we can blame hype, but it’s not like they didn’t contribute to it. And dropping right after BG3 certainly didn’t help.
Credit where credit is due though. It’s definitely the most stable release they have dropped on day one by a large margin. I commend them for that.
30 of those 70 hours were spent on loading screens. Seriously though, it takes time to give the game a chance and with all they hype behind it, I thought I was missing out on something and kept telling myself “maybe it’ll start getting good after this mission” …I wasn’t missing anything, it was the game that was lacking
Come on, when was the last time you played a 4 for 70 hours. A 6 or 7 sure, but you played and talked about the game non-stop for 3 weeks. Talking about how you didn’t want to work, just wanted to play all day. A 4 does not do that to you.
There have been plenty of games over the years where I got hooked on one aspect that was fun or compelling, only to tire of it much later and realize the overall game was actually mediocre and just happened to scratch the right itch for a while.
Open world RPGs tend to make up a lot of that list since they have repeated content that draws you in the first time you encounter it, but wears out its welcome by the hundredth. It sounds like Starfield had this problem, combined with a terrible fast travel system that gutted exploration and threw the samey content into the spotlight. Once the new game shine wore off a lot of players were like “is this it?”
(I’ll note that I haven’t played the game yet, this is just the gist of the complaints I’ve read)
Man flying my ship has been a massive disappointment. I did not expect NMS, but it is truly soulless and seemingly pointless. The only positive thing I can say about it is sitting in your cockpit floating around is incredibly eerie and the sound design is cool. That’s about 60 to 90 seconds of entertainment.
A buddy of mine on a gaming discord also put it really well: The game has little to no culture. Cyberpunk, for all of its flaws, drips with culture. There’s language, fashion, architecture, just so much style and feel. Starfield is very same-y outside of 1 or 2 locations. Very little variety.
Character models are also a little iffy. The look and the changes in expressions/movements are not on the same level. You get some really uncanny valley moments
I really don’t understand the dog pile this game has gotten.
It’s similar to the situation Cyberpunk 2077 faced. When expectations are set extremely high, nothing can meet them, and Starfield fell far short of the immense hype it generated. And frankly, the mistakes Starfield made are the same issues people have been criticizing Bethesda for since Fallout 3, and even earlier with Oblivion, depending on who you ask. Combined with Fallout 76’s disastrous PR and release, this has left many people frustrated with Bethesda. Consequently, there’s a strong wave of negativity surrounding the game.
For what it’s worth, I’m a big fan of Bethesda’s formula, and I genuinely enjoyed Starfield. However, I’m not surprised by the negative reactions. In fact, I’m somewhat glad that people are expressing their disappointment because Bethesda has a unique style, and I don’t want to see them stay stuck in this creative rut. If they finally genuinely listen to the complaints, there are a lot of valuable suggestions they could benefit from.
This will sound weird, but I believe these complaints stem from a place of love for Bethesda’s games. People know that Bethesda is capable of so much more, and that’s why they are so passionate. Other game companies don’t inspire this level of passion. Hence why I feel it is reminiscent of the negativity that surrounded Cyberpunk 2077. Both games were genuinely good, but they felt generic, safe, and they were overhyped and well below the potential of their respective developers.
The negativity doesn’t make it a bad game, it really is a lot of fun. But it is warrented all the same.
P.S. I agree that some of the story lines in Starfield were fantastic, especially the faction quest lines.
Edit: Someone replied to this and then deleted it saying something to the effect of, “Cyberpunk’s biggest issue is that it tried to run on old consoles, while Starfield’s biggest issue is that it feels old and outdated”.
Which in a lot of ways is very true. In adding my 2 cents regarding the “complaint dog pile” on Starfield, I only intended to compare the two games hype and lack of quality compared to what fans expect from their respective publishers as a way to explain why Starfield (and Cyberpunk) got more vocal hate than worse games.
I realize that my comment makes it sound like I’m saying both games have similar design issues, which I do not believe to be the case. Fwiw, I think Cyberpunk was a much more enjoyable and polished game than Starfield.
Ehhh I’m not sure cyberpunk is a great example in this regard. It was truly busted at launch. Sony forced CDPR to pull the game from PS4 listings, which is incredibly rare in general and completely unheard of for a AAA release. Not even NMS or Anthem got that treatment.
I am fine with most of the game. It’s basically what I expected from a Bethesda game.
Two things stand out for me in different ways:
- The space travel feels implemented in a way that seems to show their helplessness in getting it right. It ends up with a weird mix of Freelancer and just lazy fast travel and the game doesn’t portrait a clear line for me what it would actually expect me to do with it and how they would like me to travel. Especially since even the “manual” travel involves a lot of kinda-fast-travel steps. It’s just weird.
- No maps in cities. It’s the damn future with space travel across the universe and they forgot how to cartograph cities or planets? Come on!
To me, beyond being very generic (freestar collective and united colonies, had to regoogle them to remember), the very basics of the game felt not fun; from tedious resource collection to the world’s first joint loading screen and fast travel ‘space exploration’ system. I felt like I was missing something, but it really was just a worse no man’s sky. When the very basics are this boring of course a large amount of people will have something negative to say. I don’t want to explain how quickly I was done with the crafting systems, both for weapons and colony building, which they somehow made less fun than I had in fallout 4.
Like cyberpunk I got this game for free and I still felt ripped off. But unlike cyberpunk I wasn’t hyped, so now I’m left standing just wondering where all the time spent on this went.
As for cyberpunk, after the completely botched release it actually found its stride somewhat. The phantom liberty expansion is a lot of fun and the accompanying update has revamped a lot of lacking systems.
Supposedly the game is now in the state it should have been in during launch. It’s still not perfect, but very enjoyable in my opinion
When fallout 4 was in development, Bethesda had to crunch and have non-developers who had little to no experience in the engine (like writers) work in the creation kit to flesh out the rest of the game. This led to many quests being implemented entirely separate from each other with little to no input from other teams or staff members and is a major reason why fallout 4 base game feels so disjointed once you actually start exploring it.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they had to do the same thing with starfield.
It’s probably about right. It’s a decent game, it just doesn’t hit the heights of Skyrim, and it doesn’t completely deliver on an immersive, excellently executed space game either. It’s just… enjoyably mid.
In my experience and talking with friends, it’s a very love it or hate it game. I stand firmly in hate it but others think it’s the best Bethesda game
Good!
The worse the reviews, the faster the price will fall. Looking forward to playing this one when It drops from console price to PC game price.
Western game prices usually tank super quick though. With call of duty usually being an exception.
Which is weird, since there’s a new cod almost every year (or at least it feels like that)
In my opinion, it isn’t even worth your time to play it, even if it’s free. It’s just bland. There are games that do interesting things, but Starfield was so safe and boring.
I enjoyed my time with Starfield. It definitely was worth the price of 0€.
It may not be a masterpiece, but so are many things people enjoy.
Not surprised. It’s OK. Played 40 hours and then got bored. Haven’t touched it since. No real incentive to go back to it.