• @fosforus
    link
    English
    287 months ago

    Based on everything I’ve heard of it, this seems a bit too high.

    • all-knight-party
      link
      fedilink
      337 months ago

      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.

      • BolexForSoup
        link
        fedilink
        1
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        It’s Solo the video game in that regard. It’s not bad, it’s just…definitely a space video game.

    • @chunkystyles
      link
      English
      147 months ago

      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.

      • @SquirtleHermit@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        20
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        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.

        • BolexForSoup
          link
          fedilink
          2
          edit-2
          7 months ago

          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.

          • VR20X6
            link
            fedilink
            English
            07 months ago

            So was Witcher 3 at launch, but that doesn’t stop all the people with goldfish memory from sucking its dick either.

            Cyberpunk’s launch shouldn’t even have been that much of a surprise. People set their expectations for Cyberpunk’s launch based on Witcher 3 after it had years of post-launch work put into it, not based on how Witcher 3 launched.

            • BolexForSoup
              link
              fedilink
              17 months ago

              No need for the homophobic description but that aside, I did play W3 at launch and while it definitely had serious issues, cyberpunk is truly a benchmark in disastrous launches.

              • VR20X6
                link
                fedilink
                English
                3
                edit-2
                7 months ago

                There’s nothing inherently gay about sucking dick. And yeah, Witcher 3 was definitely buggy on launch, particularly for consoles what with the crashing, and while it was marginally more stable on PC (sounds familiar, right?), there was a massive controversy about them silently downgrading PC graphics between the trailers and launch.

                • BolexForSoup
                  link
                  fedilink
                  1
                  edit-2
                  7 months ago

                  That’s not the problem. You are describing it as a bad thing. Are you trying to say that people “sucking the Witcher 3’s dick ” are doing a good thing? Of course not. Which is why people tell guys “suck my dick” as an insult. It’s almost exclusively men saying it to men. You can’t possibly argue it’s anything less than a pejorative statement.

                  It’s a homophobic and/or sexist insult. Plain and simple. A cursory google search would show you that.

                  • VR20X6
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    17 months ago

                    It’s normally a desirable thing being done to an undeserving party, which is exactly the colloquial use of the metaphor and why it’s used in a negative context. I don’t have a problem with sucking dick, personally.

          • @Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            07 months ago

            They only pulled the game off their stores because people were asking for refunds en masse, otherwise they would’ve happilly kept selling it like other platforms.

            • BolexForSoup
              link
              fedilink
              3
              edit-2
              7 months ago

              Yes I know, it is indicative of how big the problem was. Even NMS and Anthem didn’t trigger that.

      • BolexForSoup
        link
        fedilink
        16
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        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

          • @Honytawk@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            English
            1
            edit-2
            7 months ago

            I don’t get it, I spend like +40 hours in the game and didn’t touch the randomly generated content even once.

            Why is it an argument when it should be obvious that it is end-game stuff?

            • VR20X6
              link
              fedilink
              English
              27 months ago

              Sometimes it feels like people had the entirely unrealistic expectation that they were going to be landing on Planet Skyrim and wander around a handcrafted world full of quests. And then have a completely new experience of the same scale on the rest of the 999 planets.

              It was clearly put in to play interspersed with the questlines and for some endgame looting, but some people wanted to be able to just wander planets endlessly as if it could possibly have the scale of content that would make it worth playing like that. Maybe they’ll come back when modding lets them insert hundreds of new POI prefabs off the workshop into the procgen pool.

                • VR20X6
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  27 months ago

                  Yeah, I do wish they had variation within the prefabs they did have. That would have helped a lot.

                  I’m similarly hoping Creation Kit mods breathe some life into the variety of surface procgen stuff.

      • @aksdb@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        77 months ago

        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:

        1. 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.
        2. 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!
        • @Honytawk@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          27 months ago

          That no maps thing really got me. It is so stupid.

          I encountered like 10 more shops after I thought I already explored New Atlantis completly. And then it turns out there is an entire sewer system full of people.

        • BolexForSoup
          link
          fedilink
          11
          edit-2
          7 months ago

          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.

            • BolexForSoup
              link
              fedilink
              8
              edit-2
              7 months ago

              And honestly? Rightfully so! They made a game that would’ve been incredibly impressive 5 to 8 years ago. Their peers outdid them. And peers is generous. This is Bethesda bankrolled by Microsoft to make a system seller competing with a reputation-battered CDPR and Larian Studios, the latter of which most people had never heard of until recently.

          • @Honytawk@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            English
            07 months ago

            Where did Bethesda overhype?

            They marketed it as Skyrim in Space and delivered it exactly like that.

            Most overhyping happened because of the players.

            • BolexForSoup
              link
              fedilink
              3
              edit-2
              7 months ago

              I am not getting bogged down in interpreting their words. They absolutely acted like this is the next big leap forward, and it really wasn’t. If you don’t agree with that that’s fine it’s an opinion. One that i think is wrong, but an opinion nonetheless.

              Though I do think it bears mentioning that I highly doubt they they literally meant “a 12 year old game, but in space.” If that’s your bar then yeah it’s a noticeable improvement.

        • Neato
          link
          fedilink
          87 months ago

          After so much time and so many iterations Bethesda hasn’t improved much on the things they suck at. This is just fallout in space with all the issues previous games have.

        • @distantsounds@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          77 months ago

          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

        • @Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          67 months ago

          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)

      • @Stamau123@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        37 months ago

        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.

        • @GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          27 months ago

          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

          • BolexForSoup
            link
            fedilink
            17 months ago

            It took cyberpunk like 18-24mo to feel like a complete game lol but yeah it got there.

      • @ComradeWeebelo@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        27 months ago

        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.

      • @ISOmorph@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        -27 months ago

        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.

        • BananaTrifleViolin
          link
          fedilink
          97 months ago

          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.

          • verysoft
            link
            fedilink
            27 months ago

            Witcher was also bug riddled and still is. The combat was sloppy as shit, but the story was great and it wasn’t a pain to just stick to it, so the game worked overall. Starfield is just an expanse of nothing with a subpar plot and nothing to do but build on empty moons. Bethesda should have took the time to either adopt/adapt/create a new engine, I don’t know how much longer they can go just patching the creation engine.

            • @Honytawk@lemmy.zip
              link
              fedilink
              English
              07 months ago

              Witcher 3 had boring slow combat and an awful magic system.

              To me that is more important than a good story.

              Plus, it wasn’t an RPG the same way Tomb Raider isn’t one. Because you aren’t playing a role.

              Witcher 3 is an open-world adventure game, not an RPG.

              • verysoft
                link
                fedilink
                07 months ago

                I agree, couldnt get through the game myself, ended up watching it on the side. Was just trying to be fair to it (but I secretly think it was very overrated).

        • BolexForSoup
          link
          fedilink
          27 months ago

          People on forums were not kind to fallout 4 lol but I enjoyed it a lot.

          • @chunkystyles
            link
            English
            17 months ago

            I enjoyed FO4 a lot myself. I enjoyed Starfield more.

            • BolexForSoup
              link
              fedilink
              17 months ago

              See I’m the opposite currently. I got about five hours into starfield and found myself supremely bored. The mystery is interesting but it’s just not enough for me to look past the stuff I’m not enjoying. I’m giving it like 12 months and waiting for some good mods to come out before I dive back in (though apparently Bethesda has dropped the ball on mod support so it might take a little longer). I’m sure there’s a game I would enjoy at some point, but right now I’m just not mentally there and I’m not enjoying what is offered

        • @cyanarchy@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          2
          edit-2
          7 months ago

          Fallout 4 is fun to explore. I can still get lost in its world. There’s nothing interesting to find in starfield and it’s all locked behind the same sequence of jump drives, loading screens, and barren landscapes.