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?
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.
Oh sorry, this isn’t a Danganronpa thread.
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.
Plays game for 2 hours, rates poorly
“How can they review it without completing it”
Plays game for 60 hours, rates poorly
“Why are they rating it poorly if they spent so many hours on it?”
2 hours is more than enough for general impression IMO. Just imagine watching a 2 hour movie that is boring AF. I can’t judge them for quiting.
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.
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.
I’m sorry, are you mocking me for replaying Chrono trigger? That shit is a masterpiece.
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.
Well they kept getting told this game is a slow burn, so they kept at it, waiting for the fun.
(Just cracking a joke here folks, based off the reports it takes a dozen hours for it to get good)
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.
Yes exactly!
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.
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.
Hello, I have 80 hours on Skyrim recorded in Steam.
I do not like Skyrim.
Why did you spend so much time with it then? Surely you would’ve stopped after a few hours of not enjoying yourself, no?
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.
That’s all I got for now.
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.
The thing is, with big RPGs like Starfield, you decide what your core gameplay loop is. It has multiple.
So if you find out the core gameplay loop is not for you after 2 hours, you can just try an other one.
You can put a ton of hours into a game and not like it. This isn’t a new concept.
Ask any LoL or Destiny 2 player.
But in all seriousness, sometimes a game is just too massive to form an opinion on in any reasonable amount of time.
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.
Modern gamers are self-destructive. Nothing is good enough, and because every AAA release gets torn down and review bombed in one way or another, most and eventually all games from developers with the resources to make something of scale will become pay to win, microtransaction based garbage.
Because if they can’t please their audience and lose all passion for the craft because of it, they’ll just say fuck it go straight for the credit cards of those that do show up.
I’ve played about 70 hours so far. If you like the genre but starfield doesn’t wow you, I don’t think you’re able to be pleased. Is it perfect? No. Is it at absolute minimum an A grade? Absolutely.
I dunno, I think it’s a game somewhat damned by faint praise. I hear “It’s good, not great” a lot and I get it. If you like Skyrim you will like Starfield. But I’d say the big achievement is to scale up a game like Skyrim into such a big playspace.
It’s certainly good quality in terms of the look and what they’ve technically achieved. But the actual gameplay isn’t that far away from what they did in Skyrim and Fallout. I get it - if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it - but to be honest it feels a little dated. And No Man’s Sky does alot of the non-RPG elements better.
It’s been a strong year for games; and look at Baldur’s Gate 3 - that game actually pushed forward narrative game play.
Starfield is huge and interesting, but ultimately a bit samey. I think the “ocean wide, inch deep” is too far and unfair but the basic concept kinda applies in a crude way. Baldur’s Gate 3 is smaller in scope but so much richer and varied. Time was Bethesda was the undisputed king of RPGs, but I think CDProject Red supassed them with the story telling in Witcher 3 (and then fell back with Cyberpunk 2077) and now Larian have supassed both with Baldur’s Gate 3.
It’s a good game, but it’s impact is dimmed a bit by what else has come. It’ll make a ton of money and probably be around for years, but it doesn’t feel the same huge leap forward as when Skyrim came out. But hey, hard act to follow to be fair.
You have not played BG3 I see.
It is actually a Role Playing Game as in you get to decide what role (aka character) you want to play, unlike some of the other “RPGs” out there (looking at you Witcher).
I agree that we should appreciate well made games. But those are already beloved all around and praised at every turn, I don’t know how the people could be more supportive.
Think BG3, think Elden Ring. Even CP77, after a very rough release, is in a pretty good state now and about to receive a dlc + update that delivers many things originally promised; allowing the developer to recuperate a lot of the lost good will with the customers.
The point is, people still love good games. Just that starfield is pretty mediocre. Not a bad game by any means, but it feels like a lot of compromises, loading screens and reused assets.
One of the major disappointments imo is that space isn’t interesting. You only really go there for the odd ship battle to progress the plot or whatever, but you can’t really fly between planets, so you miss out on the cool side stories you get with Elder Scrolls games by walking between cities. I was hoping for Firefly the Bethesda game, but it’s just Skyrim stretched across planets that you fast travel between.
I want to find ships in distress, pirate outposts among asteroid fields, scuttled ships I can scavenge, etc. In other words, space should be a mechanic, not just a setting.
I think the planets are fine, but I’d rather have fewer, more densely populated planets. I don’t think space-colonizing people would only make 3-4 settlements per planet, there would be dozens if not hundreds of settlements before moving to the next planet. I’d rather buy a DLC to get access to more systems then current setup where everything is spread out. In fact, just give me Sol with Earth, Mars, and maybe one of a Jupiter’s moons being inhabited with the rest working like the planets in Starfield.
But no, it’s just Skyrim set it space, with fast travel between cities. That’s fine, just not particularly special. I may play it at some point, but it’s not what I’m looking for right now.
The scale is definitely too big. I’m pretty sure most of the systems are pretty much there just to fill in the star map. I’d rather have a setting where maybe interstellar FTL requires a sublight trip first so only the nearest few stars to Sol are accessible. Really I just want Everspace 2 where I can hop out of my ship occasionally and deal with fewer annoying “puzzles”.
I want to find ships in distress, pirate outposts among asteroid fields, scuttled ships I can scavenge, etc. In other words, space should be a mechanic, not just a setting.
The problem is that they let people skip the space parts arbitrarily often (sometimes planets make me stop to get scanned, sometimes I can go from ground to ground). All of those are encounters that happen, but if you fast travel you won’t see them. I have warped in and seen each of those, with ships in distress even landing near me to ask for help when I’m on the ground. Although the only actual pirate outpost in space AFAIK is the Crimson Fleet base and Everspace 2 does everything in space way better.
Try joining the FreeStar Collective, which is Wild West Scifi just like Firefly.
You’ll get the same types of stories and encounters. Including distressed ships, pirate outposts among asteroid field and scuttled ships you can scavenge.
TBH, I haven’t missed any of the other mechanics you mention. Yeah would be cool to do a space walk, but is it really necessary?
Ehh I don’t know. We recently had both bg3 and elden ring. Both had near universal praise and no pay to win or micro transaction nonsense.
C is a passing grade. B is pretty decent. A implies you excelled.
I would say B is more than fair. It’s surprisingly not garbage for a bethesda title. It’s not the second coming of christ.
There’s a lot of gamers out there who believe they are Bethesda fans, and this is one of the first times they’ve actually had to reconcile the game’s quality vs the developer they think consistently puts out good games. The amount of comments displaying obvious buyers remorse masquerading as defense of the game is hilarious.
I guess that depends on how narrowly you define “genre.” It’s a pretty good sandbox RPG, and it’ll get even better with community mods. If that’s what you’re looking for, it’s great and way better than pretty much anything else.
But if you broaden it a bit, it has a mediocre story, mediocre combat, and mediocre exploration. So compared to other RPGs, it’s really not special.
So I’d give it a B grade. It gets Cs in many areas, but the sandbox is good enough to pull it up to a B. To get to A, it needs to excel at something, like exploration (e.g. do more with the ship in space) or economy (e.g. invest in trade routes and impact the cost of goods by flooding the market). But it doesn’t really excel at anything, it’s basically the same formula they’ve had in the past with a different setting.
It’s still a good game, it just doesn’t stand out in any particular way. For everything it does, another game does it better, and it really needs to be the best at something to get an A from me.
I love Starfield. My mates love Starfield. It’s Fallout meets No Man’s Sky meets Mass Effect.
It’s just another kick ass Bethesda game in a long list of kick ass Bethesda games IMO.
It’s another subpar Bethesda game in a long line of subpar Bethesda games. Lifeless bland NPCs, tons of glitches, bad gameplay issues, and the same “shallow ocean” criticisms we’ve been going over since Skyrim.
It’s clear to me that Bethesda thinks Skyrim was peak Elder Scrolls, when I think Morrowind was peak Elder Scrolls. Unfortunately, it seems too much to ask for a decent story and interesting side content.
So I just don’t buy Bethesda games anymore. I was disappointed in Skyrim, and Fallout 4 wasn’t really my thing. It also doesn’t help that I don’t like the leveling mechanics of RPGs either and tend to prefer ARPGs like Ys and Zelda where leveling isn’t a major part of the game loop. I know what Bethesda offers, and it’s just not what I’m looking for these days. I play RPGs for story and immersion, not for graphics, character builds, and mods, and Bethesda seems to be more interested in the latter than the former.
But that’s what I appreciate from Bethesda. They’re pretty consistent at delivering a certain experience, it just so happens that it’s not for me.
This is the moat insane thing i have ever heard. Or it’s some sort of burn because how shit they are.
I’ve never played 76, but 4 is one of my favorite games of all time. I think most people who didn’t like it were going into it desiring for it to be something it wasn’t. What it was impeccably good at was being a scavenging looter shooter with addicting weapon and armor modification and a fun outpost building system that wasn’t for me, but did let me make my own little home.
They were certainly Bethesda games. I’m not even remotely fond of multiplayer fallout. But for 4, it’s a marvelous modding world that I’ve sunk over a thousand hours into.
Bethesda made way more games than that. Are you new to gaming? You should check out their website.
But those are their most recent offerings. I care more about the quality of what they produce now and not their glory days decades ago.
Bruh, Bethesda arguably peaked like 20 years ago with Morrowind. Everything else since has been more or less downhill lol.
My guilty pleasure is to install Morrowind again and commit to replaying it, but to instead do another Skyrim playthrough because I just have more fun for some reason.
There’s something about the newer Bethesda games. I’ll go and install legacy games from other companies all the time for the sense of nostalgia, but despite having beaten almost all of them going back to Arena, if I want a Bethesda game I always end up playing Skyrim or FO4. And now (I presume) Starfield
its a solid B
75/100
It’s good.
It’s not earth shattering, its not game of the year.
It scratches that Skyrim RPG itch but in space.
It’s less buggy and less crashy than people were expecting.
It’s not without its flaws.
It’s a solid B
Personally I’d give it like a C or maybe B- at the top. It’s fine, but there are so many missing basic quality of life features that should be there.
My biggest gripes are all focused on outposts though. Outposts seemed to be one of the focuses from the marketing material, but they’re a pain in the ass to actually use. There’s somehow no list of the outposts you have, let alone a way to view what they’re producing. Outposts need to be linked together, but there’s no way to sort or auto-delete items, so it all eventually will get clogged up with lead, or whatever other resource doesn’t get used often. You’ll have to manually go through your containers to remove the clog and just dump it on the ground, where it’ll remain for the rest of your playthrough. There’s no snapping for anything except storage containers and the habitation modules. Everything else has to be placed by hand with manual rotations, so nothing is ever lined up. The alignment will also change after you place an object, so literally nothing will ever be aligned.
I have issues with many other parts of the game too, but outposts seem so incomplete, and somehow generally worse than what we had in FO4. Yet, outposts were prominent in their marketing. How?
This might be the most concise and accurate review I’ve seen. Nothing long winded, no excuses, no fanboyism, being fair and holding it up as it is.
That wasn’t a review, it was a bunch of statements stringed together. At most it could be the conclusion of a review.
A review needs to offer some explanations about what’s good (or bad) and why.
I’m not sure where you’re from, but in the US a 75/100 is a C. B would be 80-89.
Anything is better than No Man Sky, after a trillion updates they still haven’t fixed the one issue the game has. There is only a single planet but a million copies of it with different colors.
From what I’ve seen that’s also starfield lol, the same desert planets copy/pasted with different colored smoke/sand
Steam has long since proven itself it be a useless metric to get any valuable statistics from.
It’s reviews have always been filled with memes, but especially now that reviews can be monetized.
Even poorly done negative reviews rake it a lot of Steam Points.
How can reviews be monetized also the overall score is what really matters and is far more trustworthy than any games reviewer. Oh you mean points, I still fail to see how that matters when a game has 10k+ reviews and some tiny portion of them are memes. There is literally nothing better in terms of reviews.
Steam reviews are generally 90% memes or circle jerking.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint had mostly negative. The reviews all complain about either no achievements or the fact that the game was locked to their Ubisoft launcher first. Not real criticism of the game, especially considering most of what people complained about on release was fixed by the time it got put onto Steam.
It’s now 7 months later and it’s finally gone up to mixed with mostly positive reviews recently, despite no changes to the game.
Compare Breakpoint to Wildlands, it’s not as good previous game, all of the recent reviews are still circle jerking but posting positively.
As soon as Steam embraced the memes and shit reviews by adding a Funny button its reviews went to shit.
You do realize you are cherry picking right? The power of steam reviews it that it’s just users posting what they want and there is a score aggregate with cool tools that tell you if a game is being review bombed. There are plenty of very good reviews on steam and I use them all the time when going through my many thousands of wish listed indie games. Please don’t tell you me you think reviews done by “game journalists” getting early review copies and going to review events is better… on the whole. At least with steam reviews I know it’s people like me rating a game.
I think I’m just getting old. Games like Starfield are boring the hell out of me. I played it for about 1.5hrs then uninstalled it.
I did the same thing with fallout 4, I think it’s just todd that’s boring.
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.