I can’t say much on behalf of the game. I played a total of an hour or so, game was non-appealing and I could tell I wasn’t going to like the skill/weapon system. It was just meh on all sides. I can see why it hit mostly negative.
its seems like most of those negitive reviews have 60+ hours, some of the top negitive reviews are 250+ hours. the standard for boring seems a little funny to me.
I mean, we see this kind of review all the time. It’s generally people that run out of things to do and start complaining that the game doesn’t have infinite content.
Oh for sure, a lot of that too. But I’ve also noticed an overall essence of boredom and disappointment especially when compared to initial expectation, so it wouldn’t do to dismiss most criticism in this way. Bethesda really fed into the “big immersive universe 25 years in the making” thing and even, for example, emphasized the player’s ship in marketing, even though you hardly really fly the ship at all in-game. NPCs feel flat and buggy, most planets are largely empty, and most quests are just… Fetch quests.
I feel like, as with most Bethesda titles, mods are going to breathe new life into this one eventually.
I feel like Bethesda really missed the mark on what makes their games special.
You can see the improvement in quest design and writing with questlines like the crimson fleet but it’s missing the glue holding everything together, the fantastic open world map that’s always there and Starfield does not have.
I think mods are eventually going to make Starfield into another timeless classic but they’ve never felt necessary before, Skyrim took everyone by storm as soon as it came out.
You play for a while because you feel like you should and really want to like it. Quest after quest you start to figure out that you don’t actually enjoy what you’re doing, and it takes a while to first figure out why, and then to break your addiction
I think it’s a fair shake to play the entire game before giving it a review. A game this size, 100-250 hours seems like enough time to have done everything to confirm it is, indeed, boring as shit.
NG+ was a pretty big disappointment. There are a couple of dialogue choices which reference [Starborn] but for the most part you have to play questlines all over again as if you weren’t Starborn at all. Seriously, I’ve lived through this situation seven times already - why can’t I cut to the fucking chase that I know exists.
I liked it well enough. I didn’t even hate the loading screens all that much.
Flying and docking gets really old, really fast. I’d be willing to bet that most of the people who complain that they have a loading screen for docking probably forget that within a few hours into Elite Dangerous they probably just hit the auto-dock key because repeatedly doing it yourself gets boring as hell.
What disappointed me was that there is simply no reason to replay it post-starborn. Sure…some things “might” be a little different. But it’s fundamentally the same experience. So if you’ve completed most of the questlines before moving to the final mission (like I usually do), there is no reason to keep playing the game.
New Universes is just wasted potential. I wanted my post Starborn life to have the ability to jump between universes, like we were able to in that one mission in the research lab. That was great. And it’s a power that should definitely exist.
Imagine you jump into a universe where Sam Coe is somehow the leader of the Crimson Fleet, and in order to accomplish a mission in one universe, you need to steal/get something from the Crimson Fleet, and instead of fighting your way through, you are able to go to the Universe where Sam Coe is the leader and use what you know about him to gain his trust so that he gives it to you and you can take it back with you.
THAT is what I wanted post-starborn; the ability to fundamentally change HOW I complete missions I had already done. What I got was…hey, this person dies instead of this person. So frustrating
It certainly seems telling that everytime a news story about Starfield comes up, the picture with it is just a boring headshot of some normal looking person (or occasionally a pic of the ship builder). Bethesda’s other games at least had distinct looks, some sense of art and aesthetic that gave them identity, even Oblivion’s potato people.
I was very confused, when it was nominated in the steam awards for most innovative game. Made me a bit sad when people do not know what great games are out there that only cost 1/5 of a AAA borefest.
How is ng+ innovative? Have you played many other games this year? Dave the diver, boneraiser Minions or Astrea have shown me more innovation in gameplay than any AAA game in years.
RDR2 was nominated this year for at least one category
It came out years ago, hasn’t been updated significantly, and the online component was abandoned. It’s a fine game but why the fuck was it in on the ballot for anything? There were a few games this year like that. So weird.
Really, really wanted to like this game. Morrowind was like, my entire childhood. Bethesda have been on a downward spiral for so long to me and I've completely lost my faith in their titles. Starfield felt soulless to me when I played. A game that's supposed to be about an organization of explorers, where the exploration consists of fast travel and loading screens. Starfield did a lot of things and it didn't do any of them phenomenally, and only a few of them adequately.
I'm curious as to how exactly the space exploration differs from Elite Dangerous.
Because in that nearly decade old game, space exploration does largely consist of fast travel warping to systems, scanning them and potentially any planets from your ship, scooping fuel from the stars, avoiding white dwarfs and neutron stars... And its absolutely enthralling.
Curious as to how they screwed up a proven formula.
The weird one to me is that they made it sound like a space survival game where the ship and its maintenance was going to be a primary game element, but other than the ship builder and random encounters outside a planets, it seems like it's hardly a thing.
The space exploration for Starfield only happens in orbit of another planet. From the few hours I played before I gave up on it you couldn’t even fly to a station nearby the planet, you had to fast travel to it which was a loading screen then you had a loading screen for docking on to the station and then another loading screen for getting into the station
Elite has a sense of scale and seamless transitions between places (even if they are just well-disguised loading screens). The planets feel planet sized, and you can move around them or between them freely in hypercruise (or whatever the system for traveling inside systems was called). There isn’t any fast travel system as far as I’m aware – if you want to get to the other side of the galaxy, the journey will take you days or weeks, even with a kitted out exploration ship. This, combined with the sense of scale and incredibly well made map system, makes it feel like an expedition, even if the journey itself is extremely lonely and repetitive. Despite Elite’s many, many flaws - they absolutely nailed this aspect of a space game.
Starfield feels like clicking through menus to get to boring minigames with different skyboxes. It cannot be overstated how non-immersive the travel and “exploration” is compared to ED.
*Edited disclaimer: I gave up a couple of hours in. If there’s a good game in this mess that you get to after 100 hours, as some people have said, I’m sure as fuck not sticking around to find out. More likely it’s just the sunk cost coping mechanisms kicking in.
I wanted to like it too. I did like my first playthrough after I learned to navigate its ridiculous menu diving, I thought it had some cool concepts and I liked the gameplay well enough for how I played it. Some aspects clearly had cool intentions then just forgot about, like unique NPC followers.
Then after over 100 hours or so I tried out NG+.
It shows all the flaws of the game at 10,000 nits, they are blinding. My first realization that things were bad was one of the first dialogue options that was different was pretty close to, “hey, i already know all of this lets move this along”. And the response is, like, “wow, well okay then.”.
My second realization it was going to get worse was that continued style of dialogue choice for each follower you can play with - which by the way if you don’t like some of them then you’re gameplay time is severely limited. I didn’t really care about Sam or the religion guy, and the characters that were interesting were locked behind quests that I’d already done and decided whether I wanted them or not.
My third and final realization was that all the items and customizations I put into my ship are also worthless, since now I have to re-find each part and rebuild my ship. Could have done a save mechanic for shipbuilding…
I stopped not long after that. There is just no point to the game after the first playthrough because everything that was interesting about the game was the philosophy. But it’s not that motivating as a game. Especially when you’re going through copy-paste maps that are totally like that one other place. It’s. All. The same.
Also from like a gameplay perspective, what the fuck? You’re trying to tell me that *I have all of my knowledge of previous interactions, but none of my blueprint knowledge?" How does that track? It doesn’t, and it’s bullshit. There were so many ways the NG+ could have played out and they took the absolute laziest possible one.
P.S. the scrooge dream sequence ending of seeing the future of your outcomes was buggy and boring.
I didn’t find it boring, in fact I enjoyed it a lot. But once you finish all the main+side quests and maybe try out new game + a couple times there’s not really any reason to continue. They need to really work at making the planets and their pre-fab buildings more diverse. I can understand it if the structures themselves are pre-fabs based on templates, but having the exact same layout down to dead bodies and storage containers was really bad. Fix that and add in a survival mode that makes resource gathering necessary, and let the modders fill in the gaps with new quests and locations and I’ll be back. But probably not for a couple years.
Well if you play skyrim and fallout 4 after the dlcs you can get a ton more than 100 hours. I’m hoping Stanfield ends up the same way, I enjoyed my time playing it but still felt a bit short
High dozens to hundreds, and you might not actually get to see some of the uniques that are radiantly placed too.
Dozens to hundreds of hours of guided content at the least.
On a game that came out on September and already has 6 week updates planned out for 2024 starting as early as February, nearly a full dev team, and a Megacorp already prefunded it all.
They did make the PR mistake of being a brand saying any opinion at all within a user score system, that was dumb.
I make stupid comebacks too when gaslit with things like Cyberpunk or Skyrim having a better launch.
Otherwise, literally (Way back machine it if you ever want to see History rhyming) Same complaints every BGS game gets.
The same ones that years later turn to praise. It’s demented
Yes, you can see a lot of the expected ‘shareholders said to fix this in 2024, they need holiday bonuses first’.
But somehow the 3–that’s less than a handful–of truly disrupting to game play choice bugs (extremely frustrating, but appearing and worsening over dozens to hundreds of hours of gameplay on average) means the rest of the package might as well not exist, let alone be a topic you can discuss online.
Impossible to have a nuanced conversation on anything actually related to the playing of the game.
Especially on nearly every space that dares declare itself as a place to discuss Starfield.
The subreddit of the same name, Steam page, Xbox club page, game effing faqs page.
Just copies of the same toxicity filled–not negative mind you, I’d happily debate a lot of the games negative–disingenuous takes.
I’ve played the thing for just over 200 hours.
I know the bugs, the systems, how to avoid them, and how to make my fun when the trek to Riften flight to Elos is being considered versus fast traveling there.
Because that’s the rub, the scene transitions are awkward (but even on console 2-4 seconds, because they’re a mall store in construction window dressing and not engine limitations as is often touted) but you can explore and take them sequentially. Things will and do happen in-between.
I love this game.
But my love pales in comparison with even a billionth of a billionth of a percentage of the number of times the word ‘hate’ is etched in each ‘nanoangstrom’ of the neurons making up the collective video games and video game industry discussion… industry.
Why is it important that this game be declared bad? It seems so odd that articles about a game’s steam reviews get attention. It’s like there’s a group of people that are dying to say ‘I told you so’ but no one outside the group really cares.
It was a huge title, massively anticipated for years, so it warrants being covered. A title like this by a huge studio slipping into mostly negative reviews is news, imho.
Because if it is bad, pretending it's great is doing everyone except Bethesda a disservice. Early on, the hype and fanboyism were relentless, they pumped it up as a "huge game" and their "most polished" or some such shit... and it just isn't really. They have had ages and a lot of capital to try to make it a good game, but a lot of people aren't convinced that it is. Let alone as good as the massive marketing pushes ahead of release would have you believe.
"Remember: they're still Bethesda", "remember the Skyrim hype?" etc was met with denial, eye-rolling and condescension, so the temptation to go "told you so" is pretty strong when proven right five minutes later.
Since then, their PR goons have been going around passive-aggressively sniping at reviews and explaining e.g. that ackchyually the dullness is intentional, and what do gamers know about games anyway (therefore it's actually good and it's the players that are wrong). I didn't think that was particularly classy, either.
Some people still like it for whatever reason, but there are also tons of valid reasons not to.
In short: the backlash against all of this is pretty predictable, and is being shared in a community where it's fairly on-topic.
It’s not about Starfield specifically. It is about the people who have seen Bethesda for what they are and have constantly told people to temper their expectations only for them to be ignored.
We want the industry to change. We want games to be released mostly bug free and with engaging content. We want people to stop hyping up games where all signs point to it being subpar. We want people to stop feeding the machine before it even gives you anything.
I really hope we don't have to go through this crap again with Elder Scrolls 6. If they release a lackluster game that doesn't live up to Skyrim, I hope we're able to just say that outright and move on without fanboys clinging to their copium about it actually being super great if you play it for 200+ hours.
The worst thing a video game can do is be boring. Buggy games can be fun as you laugh at the absurdity of the physics. That was honestly one of the reasons I stuck with fallout 3, because I loved that you could turn someone supersonic with enough landmines. Even if the game crashes and you lose progress, you can’t lose the fun you had playing the game.
I recently replayed fallout 3 after starfield failed to scratch my Bethesda itch, and I realized how much more alive the world felt (and how much less often I saw a loading screen when doing quests).
I think Fallout 3 has the best execution on atmospheric storytelling and plenty of unique, branching quests to compliment that. The takeover of Tenpenny Tower where you let the ferals in will go down as one of the most memorably crazy quests I’ve played in a game. Completely unrestrained in its brutality. Modern Bethesda is so sanitized and as a result, utterly boring.
I have many times and it’s easy to see they made a stronger rpg with better writing, but it’s harmed by the setting. Wandering through the desert doesn’t hit the same for me as the capital wasteland nor are the stories told by random scenes you can find as compelling.
I know that I’m probably supposed to say that New Vegas is perfect, but I gotta say that Fallout 3 is my favorite. Now if we could have a Fallout 3 made by Obsidian…
the problem with Fallout 3 is the world is dead, because nothing you do at X matters in Y.
Its a collection of segregated short stories,isolated in their own little worlds with no contact or interaction with eachother, all plopped into a single map, with nothing connecting to anything else. The only lasting impact of anything outside their own isolated containers is to your nebulous karma stat, which only affects peoples general disposition towards you.
I am going to make a fallout 3 mod that brings the starfield experience, you can now only fast travel and it adds two loading screens between every location. It will also remove every NPC that isn’t strictly quest related and make them immortal. It will also level the wasteland and replace it with a procedurally generated landscape with absolutely nothing to discover in it.
Haven’t the modders, who in general always fix all of bethesda’s bullshit, mostly gotten bored of this game? I know it was big news when the guy behind the big Skyrim multiplayer mod started working on this star field one and then declared the game stupid and quit.
I mean, if a modder has so much ability and creativity that they can essentially rewrite the whole game (because nothing short of that will save this absolute snoozefest of a story) they might as well create their own game and make bank in the process.
Modding a game doesn’t make much sense if the foundation sucks. So much wasted effort, making mods for already good games is much more rewarding in my experience (released about two dozen for different games)
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