Games

People like to claim any big ticket game that doesn't get like 8/10 or higher is being review bombed. Seems as if people have legit criticisms of the game and it's pretty fairly reviewed.

This game is just ridiculous. Overhyped advertising, terrible optimalization, 10 years old graphics, so many loadscreens, plain story, no real space exploration, perk wall to do anything, horrible UI and they call it next gen open world space exploration RPG. I stopped playing after 10 hours so I can make a good assumption but it got only worse and worse. I don't have time to waste it on this. Even if it starts being more enjoyable later it doesn't excuse all the issues.

From Metacritic

Metacritic user ratings have literally never mattered and never been an indicator for anything. I'm pretty sure every relatively popular game on it gets "review bombed", because anyone who actually wanted to review it wouldn't review it there. This is non-news.

Why? It's a pretty bad game in many ways. Also good in other ways. I can totally see why it's polarising

I watched some streams of Starfield, and I just can’t understand how they made a game that looks so dull and boring. Skyrim had some soul to it, I remember being wowed by the trailer. The world and music in Skyrim are really beautiful too. Yeah it’s a janky Bethesda game in many ways, but it is also more than that.

No, it's just an overhyped game that doesn't deliver.

Man some people just can't be pleased. I've been playing the game all week, and it's fantastic. It delivered exactly what I thought it was going to be.

Sure there are some bugs, and some complaints about a few minor things, but as a whole this game is spot on.

I'm just not sure what people are expecting. It's Fallout/Skyrim in space, and it's exactly what I thought it was going to be.

I don't like it, so many loading screens, the faction bounties are copy/paste, the space combat is awkward, neon was a huge disappointment to me being just one long corridor with neon signs, the main quest railroads you like no other Bethesda game before it and it's just not fun to me. I've come to the conclusion it's just not for me and moved back over to baldurs gate 3 and recently started another new run in the outer worlds.

I can't tell if I don't like Starfield, or playing games anymore. I got it on September 1st, and played it for a few hours that night. I played it for a couple hours the night after that, and then I played it for like 30 minutes yesterday. I haven't really been hardcore about any game since before the pandemic. It's not the same now that my gaming machine lives at the desk that is also my home office. I've typically wanted to just get out of this room when work is done, so a game has to be really good to keep me sitting here.

I'm enjoying the game and having fun but I also have a long list of complaints. #1 for me right now is not having the right dialogue options. First bethesda rpg where a character can ask me if something is a good idea and there is no option to tell them no!

Somehow they made a shittier NoMansSky.

I was so prepared to love this game today. Woke up early and fired it up almost two hours ago. It's crashed 5 times and I've only made about twenty minutes worth of progress into the intro.

I'm playing on a Series X. There's no reason for this type of bullshit.

Sure, it's a first world problem, but this has really set a bad tone for the day and this game in general.

I might try again later, but I'm probably already over it.

Starfield has fantastic art direction and ambience. The gunplay is really good, perhaps the best gunplay of any RPG, and a surprise coming from Bethesda. Story hits some good beats, and exploration is rewarding, though repetitive about 50% of the time in the typical Bethesda fashion (remember Draugr crypts?).

That being said, the game has some shortfalls, primarily in the roleplay aspect. The ship building and crew management is good, but it doesn't feel great, and is sometimes just frustrating, so you never feel truly immersed in your own ship. Lack of low earth orbital and terrestrial flight is immersion breaking (even if players might opt to skip it if it were present) along with the fact that the ship is relegated to being a flying mule and most transportation is basically instant teleportation via menus, which IMO hurts the isolation and exploration RP and challenge. Ship combat is straight up mediocre for a space game in 2023. Gun selection and modding is decent, but far from top tier. I would describe the apparel as a bit on the bland side, few of the clothes and armor pickups made me go: I want to put this on, I'll look badass (Cyberpunk 2077 syndrome).

In fact I think starfield shares a lot with Cyberpunk 2077: massive budget, AAA art direction with gameplay spread across so many systems and features that a lot of them leave you wanting more.

It's janky as hell, but the game I've played the most this year. Take that for what you will.

There's something I'd like to call "the Bethesda" bar. It's basically an industrial bar lower than most. Let's define what that means:

• releasing the same game over and over
• make games so buggy that a release with only a couple hundred of glitches is deemed "polished*
• ignore progressive development for things like NPC AI
• put all the money in marketing and hype
• make the user think they're getting something new, rather than just another boilerplate game

I'm sure the story writers did some characters justice, but I won't be playing this game - especially since Bethesda claims it "can't run on older hardware", despite the fact that modders are proving them wrong.

The Betheada bar is a cancer upon the industry and I view it as consumer facing psy-ops, relying on brain-dead fanboys with nothing going on in their lives to squeal with glee as a new AAA-title is released to fill that void.

Didn't watch the video, just wanted to know if the unofficial law works again and every title that contains a question can be answered by "no".

I'm having fun zooming around the galaxy as a tough bounty hunter/vanguard. Has all the good bits of Fallout (exploring abandoned buildings, weapon variety, base building etc). I swear people are not even playing the same game with how they describe it.

I'm 20 hours in and not having a good time. Feels like I'm forcing myself to play instead of looking forward to it.

It's just... bland. There's no memorable characters, no breathtaking worlds, no addictive gameplay loops or memorable story. Just go here, fight pirates, click on one thing, 30 seconds cutscene of talking, repeat.

I really, really want to love Starfield but I just don't get it.

Totally, Starfield pretty much pissed off 3 different groups at once.

You have anti-woke people losing their minds over pronouns in the character creator.

Playstation fanboys since the game is not on PS5.

The usual Bethesda haters that have been saying Skyrim sucks for over 10 years now.

This was going to happen whether Starfield was a masterpiece or complete garbage.

It would seem so to me. When there’s a big disparity across the ratings - positive and negative are similar on metacritic with little in between - it raises a lot of red flags to me.

Most of the negative commenters I've heard from have been reactionary. Most who play it say anywhere from pretty good to amazing.

For the record, I'm a Playstation fanboy who thinks Bethesda's best work is Morrowind and Fallout 3.

I am really enjoying it. The emergent story-lines that have cropped up just from me doing stuff is great. Having to really focus my skill points into perks forces me to stick with a play style and the gunplay and upgrades are fantastic. I love just fucking off to some random corner of the galaxy and finding a whole entire storyline to explore. Yes, the lack of low orbit flying is glaring since I played a lot of NMS but the story telling here is top tier and I just keep wanting to go back and play. Even now, I am just writing this one comment and then I am off to betray the Crimson Fleet >:)

To me it's less about the user reviews, and more about how as now some time is passing, listening to professional reviewers in podcasts etc, more and more the mood turns... tepid?

It's not that anyone is underwhelmed. More just... whelmed.

I don’t know why but the game is not fun, I was bored in like 2 hours… the controls were a mess and everything looks tinted and hard to see.

Add to that the poor optimisation on PC. I’m going to pass on that one

The game is a solid 7 maybe 8. The performance is absolute garbage, but the underlying game is pretty good. Mods will do the heavy lifting as usual.

It's it bombing of it's a bad game?

Are user reviews on places like Metacritic or Steam ever relevant? Review bombing happens consistently any time anyone is slightly miffed at something, which in gaming is literally all the time.

I'm not exposed to that many "gamer takes" lately, luckily. I watched a recent dunkey video on Starfield reviews, that had some thumb-headed idiot screaming in falsetto about the pronoun switch (oh, the horror, for such a thing to exist! oh, the humanity!). Other than that I haven't seen that much complaining about that specific thing. While it could still be about that, I also think it could easily be getting underwhelming scores because it's... a bit underwhelming. (So far, anyway, I haven't played a lot yet)

I would guess that any platform-exclusive game is going to have some level of that, just because you've got fans of Platform A and fans of Platform B. And Starfield was purchased by Microsoft specifically to have an X-Box (well, and PC) exclusive, so...

Go back to the 1980s, and it was "Mario sucks" or "Sonic sucks".

I play games almost entirely on the PC, so the Starfield acquisition (as well as the other recent acquisitions by Microsoft or Sony or whoever that have been driving the antitrust concerns) haven't really been on my radar, but if I had a popular game coming out on my platform and then someone paid to ensure that I didn't get it, I'd be kind of irked.

I did use a Mac, many years back, and I remember being annoyed when Bungie -- then a major game developer for the Macintosh, in an era when the Mac wasn't getting a lot of games -- was purchased by Microsoft in 2000. Halo did come out for the Mac, but Halo 2 didn't, and I imagine that a lot of people who were on the Mac then were probably pretty unhappy about that.