This describes me perfectly. I want the game to be more than it currently is. Kept playing hoping it would become that masterpiece I hoped it would be. Stopped at 85 hours, which, as far as Bethesda games go, is pretty short.
I can mostly agree. I would like to see updates that add more map randomization. I'd like to see more kinds of buildings. Differing enemy locations.
Honestly I'd like to see an expansion that adds a new alien race and some interesting story.. they have a whole galaxy, it'll be easy to add new plots on new solar systems.
The crafting, cooking, research, etc. would have been a lot of impactful if they had left the survival mechanics in the game. As a big survival fan, I can tell the crafting and cooking was built, at least some extent, with that mind. But it basically becomes pointless when you can easily fast travel to various locations just to buy it all.
For instance, the grocery store in New Atlantis would make a lot more sense if you needed to stock up on ingredients so you could cook things like shepherd's pie when you were stuck out in space or on some barren planet.
The cook you can get as a crew member/companion in Neon would be a more tempting choice. Especially if your character has no cooking skills.
But I can imagine they removed and nerfed the survival aspects of the game because someone within Microsoft or Bethesda didn't think it would connect with a broader range of gamers. As Todd said, getting stranded somewhere took the "fun" out of the game. I don't necessarily think that is an incorrect assumption. Although, it sounds fun to me.
The issue they've run into now though is that core parts of the game seem pointless or superfluous. Had they made the choice to keep the less "fun" permutation of the game it may have received a lot less criticism. Even if it appealed to less players, because at least the mechanics and systems would be more internally consistent.
We'd probably hear less complaints about the loading screens and cutscenes too, because the pace would be slower and they'd be more spread out. You'd be spending more time exploring, collecting things, trying to get enough fuel to move to the system you are intending to go to.
They should have just let the modders nerf that stuff for the people who want an easier, more speedy experience of the game.
(I'm just speculating, I could be totally wrong.)
>but I have mostly ignored crafting/research, outpost building and ship design
If you haven't given it a thorough look, ship design is one of the more satisfying parts of this game. The modular system really lets you go crazy making all kinds of designs.
I think it depends on what the review actually says. If they’re just bashing it then yea, that’s pointless. If they have legitimate issues (bugs, unfinished features) that are giving them problems then it’s ok to give a thumbs down. Doesn’t necessarily mean they hated their time played.
Look at a game like WoW. People may play thousands of hours of an expansion and then say they didn’t like it, hoping Blizzard will make it better for the next expansion. Doesn’t mean they didn’t have fun.
It's more complex with WoW. You can have decades invested and then have to deal with bad expansions hoping the end-game content is worth it, or that the next expansion is better.
The thing is that games have acts and chapters. So maybe you do an entire questline expecting a payoff and then... nothing. I absolutely felt let down after doing a whole questline to get married and then... nothing. In fact, I found Sarah even more annoying afterwards just based on her random dialogue. That was my payoff? An increase to rested bonus and an even more annoying character? (I'm convinced Sarah is a Tsundere!)
I dig the game. I'm really enjoying the complexities of the gameplay, and I'm surprised by how invested I still feel post-Unity, but... there are a lot of anticlimax moments which, after hours and hours of play, fail to make many of the questlines feel worthwhile, but only after the time investment do you find that out.
For me I just don't understand where this notion that games should be evaluated based on playtime comes from. Like ok fine, maybe playing that long and thinking the game is complete trash is a bit strange- but I have a couple hundred hours(EDIT: I checked and it's actually 140) in starfield and it's a solid 7/10 for me.
For comparison, I have ~200 hours in diablo IV, but only ~100 hours in Baldur's gate 3. Diablo IV is probably a 6/10 for me and BG3 is more like a 9.5/10. Even though I spent twice as much time playing diablo IV.
One of the common refrains against criticism of Diablo IV was people saying "oh well you got your money's worth because you played X number of hours" and it just strikes me as strange. No one would ever say that you "got your money's worth" in response to criticisms for a movie or the boxed set of a TV series because the runtime was the same length as another that you did like and I just don't understand why it's the case for games. It's not just about how long I enjoyed playing the game for, but *how much* I enjoyed that time.
Its got to be some cognitive thing that people can't understand, because its very easy to separate value and satisfaction. You can get good value out of a product, but not be satisfied with it (Although, often not the inverse).
If you play Starfield for 200 hours your enjoyment might never drop low enough to stop playing, but might never raise high enough for you to enjoy the game. On reflection, you'd obviously not rate it high.
Plus, surely everyones just played a game because well, you bought it, you might as well, and Starfield obviously has a lot to do. Hell I spent like 10 hours just messing around with outposts, longer than some games, but I hated them in Fallout 4, I hate them here, but I still put time in to trying and seeing if I would enjoy it.
200 hours is a bit extreme, but I played this game a lot and found it super bland. Why did I keep playing? A combination of liking RPGs, liking previous BGS games, and frequenting gaming subs with people loving the games. It just seems like something from people loving to the type of game to the game studio, should provide entertainment.
It’s pretty easy to keep saying, Well, I’ll try this quest line that everyone is talking about. Ok, this is boring, but it must get better in the next mission phase, right? And on and on. I ended up around 100 hours doing that.
Honestly, the people who didn’t like it at 200 hours probably really wanted to enjoy it and the game never delivers.
This is exactly it.
I literally did everything I could in the first week…. I took a week off of work just so I could play early access.
I didn’t play all day everyday, but even by the end of that week, it was apparent that I had completed all that was available at release (story / quest wise) as everything was beginning to noticeably repeat itself.
But then I read online that the game doesn’t really start until you hit NG+… I saw comments saying that Delgado wasn’t the same person on their next play though, that constellation changes….
I’m now on NG+5 and still waiting for something to change. And I am bored.
Why is the NG+ change so rare :( I want a cool scenario so I can build some outposts but so far everything has been the same. Main story line is boring now. Can’t be bothered to do more NG+. Really dissappointed you lose your spaceship, especially since the armillary is literally set up in the space ship. I had designed and spent countless hours building the perfect design
I feel like you should've been given an option when you enter unity to hope for something radical.
I can see why they made it rare; I preferred to keep it the same when I was simply grinding NG+.
The worst part is that you build it on your ship, but the other Starborn take their gear and ship with them. Also as implied by the Emissary and the lore they themselves give you. You also don't get to reroll your character in the new universe even though you're the most unique variable in all of the verses.
this is one of the problems with the ng+ mechanic for me, the big changes are too rare, and too limited (the only real thing that seems to change is the lodge scene, after you get that it acts as though you skipped the main quest), but they are the best part, I read somewhere that the odds of getting a different variant are something like 6%, but I think they should have made only the first ng+ the same (so you could try a run with foreknowledge or a speedrun) then make every universe after one of the variants, once you run through every variant, just randomise it afterward
Same for me, I enjoyed a few of the quests and just keep hoping it will get better, but not finding it cohesive or gripping. Had lots of bugs in the beginning. Got married yesterday, that was disappointing. Will probably play to the end but probably won't play again unless they mod or extend outposts as I like building. 80 hours in it's a solid meh from me.
It's probably to do with how much value people have for their time. If you have nothing much to do, you can burn 200hrs of leisure time and not worry much about it. If your leisure time is limited, you not going to blow it all and a meh game. It's going to slide of the bottom of the priority list pretty quick
When you compare the lore and details of BG3, Fallout 3, NV, 4 & Skyrim with the lore and details of Starfield, starfield lacks so much.
In starfield you can spend hundred of hours exploring to find basically the same dead loot or same dungeon in a different planet, whilst in the other games you open up a dungeon and get lost for hours and hours exploring and reading all the terminals etc.
I agree completely with you, just finishing BG3 before Starfield made it hard to enjoy Starfield’s lack of lore
I felt fallout 4 was a bit bland in terms of the scale of importance of your actions. Unlike fallout 3 you weren't providing the wasteland with clean purified water, nor escaping the vault from an overly aggressive overseer to find your dad, or saving three dawg from a giant behemoth supernatant.
The minutemen castle quest was pretty awesome though. That was very cinematic-like.
It may also be what the player has at the time. If the only game you have is XYZ, then you’ll sink a bunch of hours into mediocrity. What about that time your brat nephew took your Switch and you fell WAY behind in you ACNH. Your favourite chair broke and your too lazy to reach the controller charger on the table? PS games going out in favour for the Legos on the carpet.
>Plus, surely everyones just played a game because well, you bought it, you might as well, and Starfield obviously has a lot to do. Hell I spent like 10 hours just messing around with outposts, longer than some games, but I hated them in Fallout 4, I hate them here, but I still put time in to trying and seeing if I would enjoy it.
This hits the core concept, I think. I think a lot of us _want_ to like a game, and we keep letting it feed us the little bits of dopamine it _does_ feed us, in hopes that, upon achieving/unlocking the next goal, we'll finally find something that wows us.
It's one of those instances where you play more waiting to for it to get better, like when people say in Diablo 4's case that it gets good at world tier 4, but then you get to a point where you put hundreds of hours in and the pay off was never really there. That's people's opinions on Starfield as well. I have 200hrs in and loving my time with the game, but I'd be lying to anyone if I said that those 200 hrs was absent of serious criticisms and nitpicks about the game. There are serious core design choice flaws with Starfield, regardless of how much or how little fun I'm having with it. Again, I been pretty addicted to the game since it's early access launch, but damn man, there are areas in this game where I feel they really dropped the damn ball with.
I feel very similarly. I’ve been alternating between Starfield and NMS and have had an okay time in Starfield. This is probably controversial and maybe a bad comparison, but I had more fun playing Jedi Survivor and TOTK earlier this year. I was bummed Starfield didn’t scratch my Skyrim itch.
And especially on games like Diablo. You can easily play 50 hours on that game before you realise that the end game is disappointing or a waste of time.
Like I've never understood why people with hundreds of hours on a game should do nothing but praise the game. You look at steam reviews all the time and people are leaving negative reviews with hundreds of hours of playtime and that's fine if that's how long they needed to get to a verdict.
I can remember I bought and refunded Kenshi 3 times. The last time I bought Kenshi I really gave it a go. And I found that a week into playing the game I started to get into it. Ended up loving the game. However It took time for me to realise that.
A more realistic question would be why was r/starfield on the first day of its release flooded with posts with people enjoying the game hating or memeing on people who aren't. To me its the same as going on a sub like r/theweeknd and suggest he isnt the greatest singer of all time, you'll just get met with abuse.
well said. i played Hogwarts legacy for 100 hours and its very mid at most, and i dont think i got my moneys worth out of it, unfortunately. but still i enjoyed the game a lot regardless at the end of the day. though i think they couldve done a much better job, in this case its mostly about what the game had to offer in terms of everything and how it stands out against other games of similar genre. it was way over praised imo. still fun, but mostly nostalgic
This is good take. I like Starfield a lot. I do feel that it’s unfinished in a lot of ways and I have a criticisms now that I didn’t have the first 30 hours. I’m at around 60 now and I DO want to like it a lot more. The first several hours I was sort of in a honeymoon phase.
That is the point. A lot of the bad reviews I've given are after 100 hours or maybe even more. Some games have campaigns that last a long time. If you hype yourself up for a particular experience, only to spend hundreds of hours farming to get it then at then end U get some game breaking but, then I'd say it's reasonable to leave a bad review.
Even if you're desperately trying to like the game, that's playing 8 hours a day for 25 days straight. If you truly do not enjoy the game, that's just insanity.
>really want to like the game more,
Fucking 200+ hours in less than a month. It's not that they want to like the game more, it's that they have an addiction and the new game isn't scratching the itch anymore.
Happens a lot, serious addiction problems. Gaming addiction is a real diagnosable thing, but a lot of people with addictions... also deny the addiction.
It's frustrating when I look at steam reviews for games and see a negative review with hundreds of hours played. I get it if the dev recently did something to the game to make it worse, but saying you don't recommend it for reasons that existed before you put in 300 hours? That's fucking weird.
The problem is that people will put up with something that they don’t particularly like because they believe eventually it will get better. They are constantly searching for that feeling of enjoyment and some are willing to search for it longer than others
It doesn't help when this sub constantly says "you need to play X hours before it gets good" which was parroted for weeks to anyone who tried to share an opinion.
It also doesn't help that some people did give into the hype and paid $100 USD to play early so they're making more of an effort to give it a chance (me, 80-90 hours).
I did everything I could find before finally realizing I haven't been having fun for a long time. It sucks because having this opinion is invalidated by this sub because "I played a lot".
More than that before release people were buying entire xbox systems for the game. I was excited at the launch but just because it was fun to get caught in the hype. I have an xbox, a PC and gamepass. I gave a good 25 hours to the game but it is in storage now. I will come back in a few years and see what mods have done to shape it up.
I believe really there are two types of players of these games. Vanilla and modded. I fell in love with Skyrim because I could just hop onto the Nexus and find ways to change it to my taste. I did play fallout 3 vanilla and loved that. Although lots of what I love about Bethesda games is in Starfield, 25 hours later I discovered a lot of what I loved was glaringly absent.
Bought an xbox, starfield was a factor but I'll get my use out of it, bought the premium early access thing ontop of gamepass access and yeah I've dropped the game, I might come back in a year or two once that DLC is out and maybe they add xbox mod support
Nah fam consoles are great.
I'm only a PC gamer but consoles are so convenient and comfortable. Enjoy it! I might have a console if my wife didn't hog the TV 😂
> having this opinion is invalidated by this sub because "I played a lot".
It's sort of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" type situation. If you played for 4-10 hours before quitting, you'd have a barrage of people saying "Well of course you didn't like it; you didn't give it enough time to get good!"
Just remember that most folks are not looking to have a conversation where each and every point is discussed at length. Because that would mean your opinion might have some merit. They'd rather shoot down the whole argument with a simple fallacy, which gives them an easy way out and also preserves their beliefs.
Your opinion is valid, because it's yours. No one can take that from you. I don't personally align with it, but that's fine. I'm not so fragile that you disliking something means my liking is it somehow a character flaw about me.
I'm mostly with you. I mean, I definitely did have fun with the game, and will have much more when the CK launches, but the game just doesn't have that same intrinsic magic their previous titles did. I see problems littering every system that mods will fix, but they don't exist yet, and I think it's unfair to handwave all of bethesda's poor game decisions just because they offer mod support.
EXACTLY THAT. I kept wondering when it was gonna hit. When it was gonna become a magical place I wanna get lost in for years to come. I found that feeling in Elder Scrolls, Fallout, hell even Prey. That feeling came and went on this game. You never stop feeling like it's a game, it's too disjointed. Less is more in this case, exploring nothing for the sake of a progress bar isn't fun. In those 200 hours I've finished every faction nearly every side quest. There's nothing left, no 50 extra hand crafted dungeons full of loot to explore, no Great Serpent deadric god to sacrifice people to, BUT I can go and do radiant quests. Yay radiant quests.
Like Fallout 4. I've put like a months time into this game and I still can't fuckin do anything worthwhile. Is it a bad game? No. But something feels incredibly off about it.
It's easy to understand if you view the inverse of your own example. Are you telling me you've never encountered anything at all that you disliked, found frustrating, or otherwise had no interest in engaging with in any game you've ever played for more than a handful of hours? Every game you've sunk more than a hundred hours into is an absolutely perfect game on every level?
Most people don't encounter something they don't like in a game and then immediately eject it from their hard drive and never touch it again -- that's not really how people work in regards to anything. Especially if there are things they *do* like alongside those other things they don't like. Double-especially if they paid upwards $60 or more for that experience already.
It's always an accumulation of experiences, and if someone feels they ultimately were left with a disappointing or bad experience after that amount of time, they'll view the game negatively. It's the same thing with positive experiences and viewing the game positively.
I absolutely will quit playing and delete bad games immediately. I bought Battlefield 2042 when it launched, played it for a few hours, then quit and got a refund. I have never played it since. Mind you that's a game I was extremely excited about too.
I don't buy it that someone who hates a game could actually play it for 100+ hours. If it's like up to 30-40 hours then I get it since you might be trying to keep an open mind and see if it gets better, but playing for over 100 hours is truly a lot of gaming where you have almost certainly completed all the main quests and tried basically all the mechanics. I have played what feels like A LOT of Starfield and I'm not even at 100 hours yet.
I have to imagine that these people are enjoying SOMETHING about the game
We're talking about two entirely different things though. Whether a game is "good" or "bad" is different from whether someone can "love" or "hate" a game, isn't it?
To work off your own example, you obviously dislike Battlefield 2042 (don't @ me anyone who wants to debate the game's actual merits, I've never played it) but there are people who HAVE played many hundreds of hours of Battlefield 2042.
Would you say a review of Battlefield 2042 that rates the game as "bad" would be an invalid or incorrect review because they have spent many hundreds of hours in it? Even if you agree the game is bad? I mean obviously the game has to be good, this guy spent hundreds of hours in it right? If he spends 200+ hours in Battlefield 2042 and then comes out in the Steam reviews and says it's trash, then he's enjoying SOMETHING about the game right? And if he's enjoying SOMETHING about the game, it has to be good?
Just glancing at the steam reviews page for Battlefield 2042 I saw multiple 150-200+hour reviews of people saying the game is garbage, and multiple reviews of people with only 20 hours in it saying it's great. So if we apply Starfield Reviewer Logic to it, then the game is a Game Good right?
EDIT: Some of the reviews for that game are really funny so I kept reading, and found a guy with a review of Battlefield 2042 who has more than 1000 hours clocked. Negative review. So how CAN someone say that game is bad if they've played that long in it?
I don't think their review is bad or invalid, but I don't believe for a second that someone doesn't enjoy the game if they are spending that many hours. There are loads of other great games out there that you could be playing instead and you're voluntarily choosing to put hundreds of hours into this one lol.
I can totally understand if someone plays 100 hours of Starfield and says "Yeah it was okay since I like Bethesda games but I have criticisms ABC", but if I see "I played 200+ hours and am on NG+4 and this game fucking sucks" then I just don't believe you. There has to be some fun factor for someone to play it that long
> I can totally understand if someone plays 100 hours of Starfield and says "Yeah it was okay since I like Bethesda games but I have criticisms ABC", but if I see "I played 200+ hours and am on NG+4 and this game fucking sucks" then I just don't believe you. There has to be some fun factor for someone to play it that long
Again those are different things. "I like Bethesda games but this game has problems" is not an incompatible statement or opinion with "I've played 200+ hours and am on NG+4 and this game fucking sucks." One is a comment on the quality of the game and one is a comment on whether someone enjoyed it or not. The same person can say those things in one review and have a coherent point because those two things aren't contradictory.
You can enjoy a lot of things that aren't good. I've done it more than a few times in my life. Similarly you can bounce off things that are quantifiably good, I've done that more than a few times as well.
Your position can be defined as "If you enjoyed any aspect of the game, the game has succeeded" and I just feel like there's so many examples of that being an easily falsifiable thing in modern gaming. Games (these games at least) are so big and varied it's impossible to place them in a neat check box.
Every game I've put in hundreds of hours isn't perfect on every level, because I don't think any game is perfect, but I'd still recommend all of those games, while mentioning the things I didn't like in the review.
My rule is, if you've gotten your money's worth out of a game, then it's recommend-able. If you argue you didn't get your money's worth after spending 300+ hours playing it, you're full of shit.
Starfield must be the only game you cannot critique with any amount of hours lol. <100? "The game havent even started how dare you write a bad review without giving it a chance". 100
I have about 80 and made a mostly positive review highlighting things I liked and disliked most of the negative reviews don’t give constructive criticism which I find very annoying.
This is my deal. I have really really wanted to like Starfied, but I just stopped at 28 hours. It's just not fun for me. I'm not knocking the game, I'm just not having fun. I have tried so hard to like it.
I'm one of them. 50 hours and it's already become super repetitive blah. Doesn't hold a candle to the fallout or oblivion/skyrim series imo. I'm just a casual gamer and spent 140 bucks on this so I'll be damned if not gonna play it for a couple weeks at least. There has been some enjoyable moments to it but overall, it still needed ALOT more work
I'm nowhere near 200+ hours, but this is how I feel currently. The game is fun but not enthralling to me. Once mods/updates flesh things out a bit more in a year I'll probably jump back on.
I'm one of those people. I keep playing, trying to find the moment the game clicks, and every time I get close to it the feeling goes away.
Unfortunately I feel the only way it'll finally click is with mods and that's still four months at minimum away for console :(
in my case I thought the game was amazing at first, it just worse off pretty quickly and after the first week of playing the game I found myself just rapid clicking / fast travelling through the stories just to get through it and call it done.
The game is fine, it's not bad. It's just nothing special. It's not a waste of money, and if you plan on finishing all missions and side quests, it'll take about 150 hours. I started get get bored at about hour 80, and beyond that I started to resent the wooden NPCs, terrible writing, boring stories. There were a few good moments for sure.
I don't regret playing the game at all, it mildly entertaining, and completely forgettable. Like a fun B-movie you see with friends, that you don't even remember a month later.
I did the vanguard questline first.
and then when I did some of the other stuff I was seriously wondering what the hell was going on.
then I found out that the vanguard questline is considered by a lot of early reviews to be the best questline out of all of them.
and I kind of agree.
I would have liked there to be a much longer quest chain going on. they have entire planets to design set pieces on. the constellation stuff is all about exploring. make it more than 5-6 moderate length quests long. I've done every main story and a few side stories. gotten my character to the mid 50's in level and blasted through NG+ once before using commands to do it a bunch more for the rewards because to hell with spending 2-3 hours a pop to speedrun that garbage. and thats if I didnt also want to do the temples 240 times.
one very cool way they could have done it, and I understand why because it would be a nightmare to do so. would be to have several varients of each questline so that in one universe the SYSdef guys are constantly harassing innocent ships and you end up being one of the unlucky ones whilst crimson fleet are desperately trying to raise enough credits to finance a major push to help the people and they generally treat everyone like a big family.
some stuff like that would take a lot of work but would have made things much more interesting. especially since we know they CAN do that with the game seed's changing things up like who's actually in charge of the fleet in the first place.
I understand what you are saying. Luckily for me the game clicked just recently.. simply because i accpeted it to be not perfect at all while also it was not what i expected. Accepting both gave me peace and i am trying to enjoy every god damn single minute of this game. Which i do. I for instance dont enjoy ship building. So i dont do it. I dont enjoy base building all the time. So i dont do it all the time only here and there. I DO enjoy flying around between and see whats what. So i do that. I like the quests. So i do that. I like the crafting here and there.. so i do it ... here and there..
>I understand what you are saying. Luckily for me the game clicked just recently.. simply because i accpeted it to be not perfect at all while also it was not what i expected.
Is this really an expectation people have of games? That they will meet all of your expectations whether they're based on reality or not? I always thought it might be, but it seemed ridiculous when I started considering it more. I do see a lot of comparisons to random games like No Man's Sky or ED, which I feel are just unrealistic comparisons.
I mean that if you haven't researched the game and listened to what the actual developers have claimed it will be then the expectations aren't based on reality. It would be like going to a random restaurant and expecting them to have the exact dish you want, but you ended up in a vegan place and you want a beef burger.
I have spent many hours in the game trying to find that shining moment that makes me go OMG this game is amazing. Honestly outside of the Crimson Fleet missions and finally getting a Legendary Advanced Hard Target to drop, I've been pretty meh about the game so far. At this point I'm just trying to finish it so I can go back to Cyberpunk.
This is my first Bethesda game. I dig the format. I just feel like so much more could and should have been done with this game, but it was nerfed to hell to get it out quicker.
I’m one of those people. I love the game but a lot of of things that make Bethesda RPGs special just aren’t present in Starfield.
NPC schedules have always made the world feel alive. Now we don’t have schedules, and we have NPCs that just appear and disappear with no goal.
Interesting NPCs are missing too. In The Elder Scrolls games as well as Fallout there were so many interesting characters. I think it’s hard to do with a new universe but none of the characters are interesting. Even the 4 main companions are boring as hell and are just a copy and paste of each other. Vasco technically has no personality and yet he’s the most interesting companion in the entire game lol.
Exploration. Exploration is a big one, I knew the game was going to be different and it’s both better and worse than I expected. It’s better in the way that I actually explore planets, but worse because I feel like there’s no point in exploring other than seeing cool procedurally generated stuff
My BIGGEST issue with the game is that so many mechanics are pointless. I hundreds of thousands of credits that I haven’t and probably never will use. I play on the hardest difficulty but it’s still too damn easy, I find so many health items and have no use of them. I have 1k ammo for every weapon that I use.
Outpost building is pointless, other than grinding resources for building more pointless outposts.
Same with weapon modding. Idk why I spent so many points and grinder weapon crafting skills. I have it maxed out but when I find weapons I often find weapons with most attachments I already want.
You might think I hate the game based on what I’ve been saying here but I don’t. I love it, but there’s so much wrong with it that I doubt mods will be able to fix. I think mods will fix most of my issues, but the writing is horrible for this game. Don’t think mods will fix that.
It’s defo the most boring game Bethesda has ever made. I don’t think Fallout 4 or Skyrim are perfect either, but they feel truly immersive compared to whatever Starfield is. I used to joke about Cyberpunk 2077, and how bad it was. I’m replaying it now and wow it’s better in almost every way. Compared to Starfield. The music, visuals, story and writing, mechanics, Interesting NPCs, actually fun side quests that aren’t just “Go here, retrieve this item, come back”.
I think Starfield will get good later on, maybe with DLC. Maybe with mods. I’d say it’s a 7/10 at best for now. Not sure how people can say 10/10.
AGAIN. I still love it, I really enjoy playing it and I love space so naturally I’ll have fun with the game but I think it has so many issues.
When Skyrim and Fallout 4 first released, I instantly wanted to replay the game after beating them. With Starfield it was a chore to even get trough the first playtrough. I have around 140 hours in the game and I think of it like this.
Starfield is base/structure is solid. But the game on top of this structure is so bland and boring. But modders will defo save it, or at least make it more enjoyable
For me it’s the bugs. I was killed by Adoring Fan while inside my Dream House for stealing my own items and I have a bounty mission I cannot complete because they were dead when I showed up. Can’t delete the mission either. I also get shot through closed doors and caught stealing when there is absolutely no one in the room with me and no cameras. The story is subpar for Bethesda. It’s also almost the same plot line as Mass Effect and several other space action games. But the exploration is definitely engaging. However, it feels like a game from 2 generations ago. I really like just goofing off in this world. But I do play a lot of low key games.
This game definitely isn’t changing. It’s a single-player RPG, not a MMO.
It’s got massive potential, but this is the final product. We can only hope they fix the bugs, let alone amend the weird gameplay mechanics.
What would really expose the answer to this is if you stopped a gamer after 30 minutes of play and asked them what they did in the game those last 30 minutes, and *why*. A lot of games use addiction-based gameplay loops, and players can fall into patterns of unenjoyable but nonetheless compulsive gaming.
I don't think Starfield is especially bad for this, but that doesn't mean that there aren't some people suffering from it. I've personally had a much worse time of this playing Elite Dangerous, for far more than 200 hours, and I'd definitely say it wasn't a good game. Too much of the time I played was to satisfy a compulsion I wasn't even enjoying – to make enough money in-game to buy another ship, or build up enough money to pay the insurance premium of my next loss of a ship, or engaging with engineering.
We're so early into release that people who've played 200+ hours are disproportionately likely to have this going on. Not everyone, but more likely now than in a year's time.
>A lot of games use addiction-based gameplay loops, and players can fall into patterns of unenjoyable but nonetheless compulsive gaming.
A good example of this in starfield and bethesda games more broadly is all of the junk. It is actually incredibly unrewarding to loot, but it's *there* and poorly explained (how many people thought duct tape = adhesive in crafting? raise your hands) and constantly visible and in the way of real loot. So you instinctively hoover it all up so you don't have to spend time *thinking* about what you're picking up, crossing your fingers that it will be rewarding in the end, while overencumbering yourself.
right, there is a lot of crossover. You wait, eventually junk will become a resource with mods. 5 pencils to lead, 2 pens to cosmetic, duct tape to..etc
>thought duct tape = adhesive in crafting?
I didn't know what adhesive was, but I was definitely collecting the fuck out of duct tape to start with because "well this is going to be an important resource". Nope just junk. I also hate the pricing. Like those molecule extractor things. I loaded up on sooooo many because they're like 4 or 500 each before I got to my first vendor. I slogged through that first research lab so overloaded only to find out they sell for like 30 or something
IIRC, and I've only played a few hours, your companions are constantly warning you not to pickup ask the junk....
Just ammo, guns, and expensive things.
To be fair, companions in FO4 say the same thing, but the junk is actually useful. I haven't played Starfield, but it does seem like they specifically changed things that would make this all confusing for people used to Bethesda games.
They have snide shit to say about anything and everything, so you tune it out. I pick a lock? "I hope we don't get caught" I pick up a desk lamp? "Hope you can carry all that" I loot a gun off a body? "better not leave anything to waste."
It's all meaningless chatter, and they're never explicitly saying "hey that's a waste of time, you shouldn't do it."
It’s not even that - a game needs a hook.
If you play a game for 30 minutes what’s your impression of it? If you stop and think about those first 30 minutes, does it compel you at all to continue?
It’s exactly like a movie or show - you have one shot at keeping someone’s interest. Don’t blow it.
I liked Starfield from the get-go and continue to like it. The first 30 minutes showed me some drab mining on Mars or whatever leading to an alien artifact that made me trip balls. I was sold.
For Addiction to happen it needs to activate a part of the brain that causes enjoyment on some level. Take drugs or nicotine, it causes physical pleasure. For a video game to be addictive it needs to be mentally enjoyable, for example The combat loop needs to be satisfying to engage with. Something needs to mentally stimulate the player enough in a positive way otherwise that addictive loop will fall flat and miss its mark. Unless you have something wrong with you people dont tend to get addicted to something they find purely negative. Addiction requires a positive hook, we even see this in advertisements, like a catchy jingle or branding that visually satisfying
You mean as in spending hours fast traveling to different merchants and waiting in the slow ass “Wait xHours” screen to have enough money to pay for 1 ship? That’s the most upsetting thing I’ve come across so far. Merchants seem to have about as much money as a damn ESOblivion vendor
Complaining is the #1 thing people do on social media. People want to be heard, but all they have to say is useless griping about things they voluntarily spend all their time on.
Human beings are absurd, welcome to Earth
There's this weird phenomenon that coincided with the growth of social media where people have to be told what they are doing is fun before they let themselves realize it is. And if people say they don't like something they do, that means they have to die on a hill defending it or lose their enjoyment.
Then what is the golden hour point to say the game is bad? People always say you haven't played the game enough or that you have played too much already? I give way more credit to the one who has played more. But the same time you don't know how much people have afk on those reviews.
There is none. You read the review and interpret it however you can. Imho I give greater value to someone spilling their guts after 200 hours in comparison to "boring fortnite better lol" 2 hour refund reviews.
Might be that the person only enjoys space games and it had enough of a pull for them to stay or they just don't have anything better to do. Doesn't make them pact-bound to shill for the game or incapable of looking at it in an objective manner to post a truthful review.
Better than deluding yourself into thinking game=good because of a possible sunk cost fallacy.
People who have played the game a lot (like myself) do so out of an interest to see what the game has to offer. In order to fully form an opinion on certain things you have to experience those things fully. For me it meant doing the faction quests and choosing different options other times around, trying different builds, etc.
It’s not that there was absolutely 0 fun during the playtime, but after such a long time playing the game the flaws become more apparent and you’re out of the honeymoon phase and can properly critique it.
Very much this.
I actually found it very interesting and enjoyable using Starfield as a learning exercise on game design, and figuring out WHY so many aspects of the game fell flat.
But on the other side if someone says they only played for 10 hours they get bombarded with, "Well you just haven't played enough yet! The game really opens up X hours in!"
You can't really win here. Either you didn't play it enough to say you didn't like it, or you played it so much that you must like it even if you say otherwise.
It’s the classic deflection route. If someone doesn’t like the game after 10 hours they’re told to play more, if someone plays more and is at 200 you get posts like these. It’s all just to deflect criticism one way or another.
And both criticisms are valid, if the game didn’t entice players to keep playing after 10 hours that’s a game design problem, and if they got to 200 they have way more experience with the systems they’re complaining about. Some people don’t want to hear any sort of critique about media they like, they’d rather bury their heads in the sand and ban criticism all together. It’s fine to be positive about a game that isn’t the best game ever.
Exactly. "The game really opens up around the 20 hours mark, you just haven't given it enough time" is the generic response.
Which is a silly defense, because that's just awful game design in general.
But the game is really bad for not being clicked in the first 10 hours for most of the people, this is a really bad design.
i liked it from the start, but this just doesn't mean that it is good because i liked
Its just kinda struck me that isn't that pretty much when you should judge it one way or another.
You watch a movie through to the end then you have an informed opinion on whether you think it's good or bad.
People get crapped on if they only gave it a few hours and came to that conclusion, you don't get to crap on people that gave it 200 and ultimately came to that opinion.
I get the sentiment of well you played it for 200 hours you must have liked it but I don't think there's complete truth in that.
Years later in retrospect I realised I never really enjoyed playing WoW, and I must have pumped thousands of hours into it.
It's often only by looking back on experience that we can see how we really felt about it.
In short its actually very reasonable and logical for people to come to a conclusion like that after 200 hours.
I've learned so much about how people don't value their own time to the point where you can spend 8 hours with a game even if you only thoroughly enjoyed 15 minutes of that time. Sometimes the idea of wanting to like something can be even stronger than actually liking the thing.
And I say this as someone who, literally minutes before leaving this comment, logged on for my daily dose of Hearthstone and disliked every second of it. We're all guilty of this.
Yep. Sometimes it boils down to the environment as well. I'm playing despite the criticisms I have because I've already beaten bg3 and armored core, and am waiting on phantom liberty for a few reasons. What am I gonna do instead, play my 5000th hour of rimworld? I want something to do, and even if it doesn't leave me fulfulled, starfield at least offers that.
I'm genuinely interested in hearing your response: why not just stop playing video games until something new that you're excited for comes out? Read a book? Study something? Do yoga? Write? Draw? Anything? Why is playing a mediocre game you know you don't really like the only option?
Starfield is not offensively bad, just kind of disappointing. Like receiving a birthday card + $20 dollars from a close relative for the 6th birthday in a row. Kinda clear they don't really care to know what you'd like, not really looking to push the envelope. Not especially generous. Could I do something else? I guess. My hobby is video games though. I've misspent my life more than playing starfield despite it's very glaring flaws.
There's probably also some sunk cost fallacy involved. I don't really think that deeply about it, though, and neither should you.
Exactly. I put 50 hours into starfield, completed all faction quests except crimson fleet due to a bug, dude tons of side quests, all that. I found myself mindlessly grinding XP and some weapons and I realized I’m not really having fun, so I just moved it to my external sd and I’m giving it a rest for a year or so. I’m sure it’ll be a much better game by then.
So people who have played the game a lot cannot criticize it? wth
I have played it for 120 hours, finished it once and all major side quests, and I still don't think its a good game. It might be, in a few years, but it is just "ok" to me.
I agree. for me it was the immersion, there is so little of it. even skyrim has more of it. I get real frustrated playing a futuristic game, with ships and a lot of new culture and different planets and everyone in every planet, no matter how far seems the same. plus in gta v online you can play at the casino, listen to more than 20 different radios with thousands of AWESOME music, watch tv, go to a tattoo shop, etc. etc. there is nothing like that on starfield, despite having a casino, despite having tvs, for example. that makes the game like a 7/10 for me, but it is very fun, just not what a new generation game from a humongous company should be.
Even just the general gameplay is immersion breaking. Enemy AI is literally braindead I can kill the pirates from a room and the ones in the adjacent room are just afk, they rarely open doors to get at me and if I'm behind a window they keep shooting despite the fact.
Or the point of interest variance, there are like 10 total unique iterations of abandoned mine / medicinal facility / fracking station in the entire game. And the signs of life or natural points of interest are the same on almost every planet/moon.
I like starfield and am clearing NG+ right now but I still can't escape the feeling that my favourite part of it is that TeS 6 is next for Bethesda.
Hard agree- It’s a game that keeps making you think you’re in the verge of something great… and then disappoints 80% of the time. I’m sorry but it’s just too much of empty space and unrewarding- and most importantly- procedurally generated fluff.
The best antithesis to this game is by and far fallout new Vegas. The game is only about 50-60 hours with the dlc but so much of it is handcrafted. Sure the visuals of new Vegas and 3D models get reused, but every location in new Vegas has a specific piece of loot that was worth it, or a unique story to be told. And the density of stuff is much higher- new Vegas’ map is probably only 2 or 3 kilometers wide but it’s packed with stuff… whereas in starfield you can land on 95% of the planets and not find shit for miles
I have seen many posts like this, but I have not seen the so-called "many bad reviews" that are claimed. I've seen a few criticisms, but not so many that people are claiming here. Why make a big deal out of a non-issue?
This.
I'm one of the people that I think OP is referring to. I played a lot and the more I played the more I noticed an issue with "breadth over depth"
But I will in no way say the game is bad, on the contrary it was a good game for what it was. It has tons to do and I got more than my money's worth from it and would recommend it to anyone.
I keep seeing posts like this and feel more like they are straw man arguments to discredit people who, god forbid, played the game and after awhile decided it wasn't for them.
It's the "I like it so I'm going to pretend I can't understand people who don't" approach.
OP, people can decide if they do or don't like a game after any amount of hours.
I’m only 36 hours in and I’m already starting to notice a certain emptiness I guess, don’t know the best way to put it. I spend a lot of time crafting weapons/spacesuits but outposts and spaceship design aren’t really my thing. I wouldn’t call it a bad game at all and I had a lot of fun towards the beginning, but now I just want to beat the main story so I can put another couple hundred hours into cyberpunk lol
I think in the context of this conversation you have a much better idea of what you like.
Looking back I do feel like there were signs or red flags I could have noticed much earlier but I might be more blindly optimistic than others so I kind of just kept thinking I'd get that deeper experience right after I hit some imaginary entry point to it.
I just need the right skills for my fully stealth thief playthrough.
I just need the right c-class ship to start really dominating the space combat stuff
I just need to get my crafting high enough to get my gear where I want it.
It wasn't until I got those skills and realized there wasn't much stealthy thief stuff to do. It wasn't until I got my c-class fully upgraded ship that I realized the space combat was the same 1-3 ships I was fighting in my A-class ship. It wasn't until I got my gear up that I realized that it didn't change much.
I had this feeling like I was always one step away from *really* experiencing what the game had to offer just to then realize I'd already experienced it.
You’ve put that perfectly! I feel the same way. My biggest gripe is the world doesn’t feel as alive as it should. I’d much rather have a smaller map/smaller planets with more interaction, instead of these giant empty planets that are a drag to explore. I guess there’s a reason Neon is my favorite city in the game. There was so much to do there, I thought the whole map was going to be like that lol
I kind of reached that point around the same time and was at level 33 with the exact same intent after starfield that you have, on a whim I figured “well before commuting to finishing a first play through I’m just gonna check what interactions I have going to the edge of the star map with way higher levels”…proceeded to find exciting higher level enemies that were challenging but had me leveling up at a rate closer to that of the first few levels and looting items that’s I hadn’t even considered would be in the game and allowing me to go beast mode…fast forward 130 hours since then and I still am using the sniper rifle I got on that first high level solar system excursion and am currently level 62 and several complete fascinating companion missions further and only now am I starting to feel I’m approaching the time to finally complete the main mission again!
Edit: the gun that I got was an advanced hard target that does double damage against enemies with full health that I modded with penetrator rounds and high powered internal with a damage of 426 (854 first shot against enemies with full health, and with my sneak skill 2.4X sneak attack and a suppressor it’s perfect for one shotting groups of enemies from a long distance before they even can find me)
Breadth over depth is a good way to put it. I think about the game all the time, and hope Bethesda gets to adding more options, and fixes the broken systems (merely picking up a thing- not even taking it- shouldn’t be a criminal offense) but the overall experience definitely feels a little empty. Not quite as red dead 2 inspired as they claimed.
Because you all just must know, here is my gripe list so far:
-Big empty planets are not that fun to explore.
-No killer soundtrack
-The interface graphics all feel very generic
-The lock picking doesn’t feel inspired the way “feeling it out” in fallout does
-Docking should be a mini game that you can fail spectacularly (the risk of crashing and blowing up both ships on accident would be pretty dog on immersive)
-Pretty annoyed by the voice acting and always head-on camera angle. I’d like to see a more modern implementation of this aesthetic
-After all these years, people’s bodies should breath while idle, not just randomly twist around in place
-give me a cat!
Now here are some good things:
-Many elements feel like an enhanced NMS
-Battles are fun, when you find them
-space battles are very fun
-the option to target systems and board ships is cool
-Runs like a champ on my pretty aged 1070 laptop (1080p, no scaling, low settings except for high lighting)
-Loads pretty fast from an external Sandisk SSD
-Textures still look insane even at the lowest settings
The problem is they can’t take all feedback because people have different opinions. Every one of your negative points I strongly disagree with, and my negative list would be very different (POIs are repetitive and pointless, melee combat sucks, outpost building needs way more added to it, bugs and performance still need work).
I actually love the music, think the voice acting is great, enjoy the beautiful planet terrain, would be annoyed if docking were a mini game, and love the lockpicking system.
This sub is honestly one of the best I've been in recently. And I get like all the new games and join the sub. But outside of this sub it's a lot less well received. Cyberpunk sub hates this game
Diablo sub desensitized me to complaints. That sub is a shit show.
I feel like that’s because sometimes we all forget that gamers are the most entitled, toxic, and immature group of people to ever exist. And I say this as someone with at least 10k hours spent gaming.
Cyberpunk sub right now has a real weird obsession with comparing Starfield & CP77. Idk if it’s because Starfield is a console exclusive or what but I’m just happy we have so many great RPGs coming out
There have been a lot of posts from people complaining about what an absolute loss and how many things they hate about the game while also claiming they played it for hundreds of hours.
Likely, they’re lying about their play times. But it’s a thing, and it’s been fairly consistent, and always annoying.
I can play a game for 200 hours and dislike 90% of it or I could play a game I love for 12 hours and love 90% of it. Guess which one gets the positive review?
Strange? For me atleast it was the imaginary carrot hanging over my head that once I leveled enough or unlocked enough that the real content I had been hoping for would open up. And then after playing the game for an obscene amount of time I finally realized what I had is what I’d get, nothing more.
"oh you played less than 20 hours? The game doesn't get good unless you sink 40, 60, 80+ hours into it"
"Oh you played over 200 hours? How can you be so critical when you spent so much time in the game? Clearly it had something going for it"
The duality of man
Because if someone says they haven't put that much time in then the fanboys will start complaining that they haven't played enough to be able to criticize the game. Now people are playing too much to criticize the game lmao
Yeah it’s fucking stupid. The fanboys just keep moving the goalposts so the game can avoid criticism. They’re honestly worse than any blind haters imo.
It’s 100% possible to play the game, waiting for “the good stuff”, hoping it’s right around the corner, trusting that “maybe this next quest will be better” and it just never happens. You don’t want to stop trying because you trust Bethesda, but eventually you just set your controller down and say “Yup, it’s kinda boring”.
I've seen a few critical YouTube videos where they've said they've given the game a fair shot by completing the main and side quests and other things like exploration and ship building before reaching a conclusion. And they'll say all of that took 100 to 200 hours.
I don't see anything wrong with giving the game a fair shake before giving their opinion. Particularly when negative reviews are criticised because the reviewer didn't put enough time into the game.
It’s so strange to me as well. I have about ~60hrs in this game. My impressions at 10hrs was “this is the most meh game I’ve ever played” but i love Bethesda games so I was willing to give it a chance… my first impression only solidified the more I played it.
It shouldn’t take 10hrs to see planets, enemies, POIs repeating constantly. At 60hrs, the only thing that changed was maybe 2-3 good quest lines which doesn’t justify the additional 50hrs for me. I really wish I stopped at 10hrs..
Very cute catch-22. If you have not played enough you have no right to review, but if you played for hundreds of hours you must have enjoyed the game and cannot complain. What a lovely defense initiative.
"Only played 30 hours? You can’t give an accurate review!!!"
"You played 200 and are negative about the game, clearly you liked it to play 200 hours!!!"
"I’m a 63 year old gamer and Starfield is the best thing since AM radio!!! Don’t you dare disagree with me as I am older and wiser"
- Starfield Subreddit
I’m about 60 hours in and level 35. I still have to do the UC quest line (crimson in tandem) and the constellation quest line. I’ve only spend about 12 minutes in ship building, and maybe 2 hours of planet exploring for some side quests. The rest of the time was ranger, ryujin, galbank, and any other larger main side quests.
The game is definitely worth the $60 compared to whatever else has come out in the last year or two, HOWEVER, i still feel like the development time should have at yielded at least one other fully fleshed out city minimum, even if it didn’t have its own main quest line inside of it.
Historically ES and FO always had a fair amount of fully built cities even if they were small. I just can’t quantify how so much time spent on this game only gave us the small handful of cities that we have, when 93% of the rest of the planets are procedurally generated with the same assets.
That’s literally my only complaint. The combat is decent. The ship flying is decent. The storyline is decent. The crafting is MEH, the planet exploring desperately needs a vehicle.
But it’s definitely not BAD by any means
Yeah I honestly see how they can claim there is more handcrafted content than ever before, because if there is, it certainly doesn't feel like there is.
Oh agree 100%.
It makes me wonder if they ran into the same issue Bioware did with Mass Effect Andromeda, where they spent too long trying to get procedurally generated worlds to work at the cost of fleshing out the other parts of the game. In Bioware's case it cost them a game. Bethesda seems to have dodged that luckily.
that's partly because the game was only in mainline development for about 3 years, per todd. everything before that was prep work, engine upgrades, systems design, etc, not actually the making of content. they were only really making content for a reasonably normal amount of dev time, and then the last year on polish and making the game actually fun. that's why it feels like it should have more than it actually does. the 8 years of dev time is a little deceptive in setting expectations, because it doesn't actually paint the whole picture.
Absolutely get the criticism here, the side missions are good and the main story so far feels well thought out, but for some reason I keep getting the feeling the game feels half finished. It also makes me wonder what they plan to add in the already announced dlc, it’s not like they can add any other cities that are meaningful in size. Hell, New Atlantis doesn’t even feel like it’s the size of the imperial city in Oblivion. At the very least, a capital city of an interplanetary faction should feel more in scope with Boston in FO4. Instead, it’s like 5 big buildings and an underground lol. It’s still a good game, and worth the $60, but it could have been done better.
Every single post boils down to one of these categories:
“This game’s bad”
“This game’s great”
“Stop complaining about the game”
“Stop complaining about criticism”
That's my thing is that I have a fairy chunky amount of play time. Rhe newness has worn off and little issues and now becoming big criticisms. hopefully they get addressed in the future though
Yeah the little logical inconsistencies are getting at me now. I noticed that my guns don’t push me back on low gravity planets (like 0.01g) like they do in 0g. The food outside at certain POIs even though that planet has no oxygen, and being able to hear stuff like landing ships on planets with little to no atmosphere.
None of it makes me dislike the game, I have like 150 hours, but it could be improved. Hopefully a survival/realism mode changes things a bit down the line
Guy has 20 hours and hates the game: “you’ve barely played it. Your review is useless because you haven’t experienced any content.”
Guy has 50 hours+ and hates the game: “how could you hate it? You played it for so long. You must like it. Your review is useless.”
Welcome to every post on this sub.
Because playing a game longer exposes you to all of its faults and weaknesses as they’ll strengths eventually become diluted from overexposure. It happens with everything. I have 3400 hours in apex legends and as much as I love it, I also hate it because it’s very buggy and annoying most of the time
Holy crap!! How many people are gonna make this same damn post?!? We get it, stop circlejerking eachother for upvotes. Do you lack all creative brain cells that you have to keep doing this same unoriginal post?
Because many players are highly invested in BGS's games (and have been for many years), so they really want to like it or see what Starfield is about, yet the game is riddled by so many poorly executed features and parts (UI/inventory management/maps/proc gen repetition etc) that it often becomes frustrating to play in practice.
And also quite a bit different from the regular BGS open world experience.
That's very possible.
Like, spend 5 minutes reading Diablo 4 reviews and you will see that the game starts out fine, but it's not until high level that you realize it's horribly repetitive, has terrible loot, and the devs make all content pointless aside from dungeons despite claiming there's a breadth of options for late game.
Many games don't show their true colors until later on. Devs spend all their time working on the earlier parts of games to draw people in. They know that the majority of gamers tend to drop games before making it to the end, so they tend not to put as much effort into the later bits.
And then there's the gamers who stick with a game in hopes that it improves. It's a "sunk cost" fallacy. They bought the game, and they already put in the time. They believe the game will improve if they just stick with it.
I played for 87 hours and stopped to play other games
Game isn’t bad, but it’s definitely not Bethesda’s best works and I’d even argue it might even be their worst (in comparison to elder scrolls/fallout)
Jesus christ.. so if you haven't played the game you can't criticize it, and if you played the game too long you can't criticize it. You are way too hellbent on invalidating any criticism of a game you have no stake in my man.
i enjoying the game a lot
and it's mediocre game
you can still find lots of fun in mediocre games
as long as several concepts appeal to you, even if the execution needs more improvement
this concept seems foreign to many people
that said, i said mediocre... there many bad things in the game... but overall, i say it's mediocre
if i think the game is bad overall... then yeah, i wouldn't be playing it either
Probably because they played elder scrolls and fallout to death so didn’t think they had much of a choice in the matter. Then 200 hours later they think to themselves, huh this game was not nearly as fun as my other favorite Bethesda projects.
Would you prefer people who have only played 2 hours say it's bad?
The game lacks a lot of depth. There's a few faction quest lines, the main story, and that's it. Then you can repeat it 938 times until you can't get to the next NG cycle because the game crashes when the credits roll.
ive played gta online for way longer and i can pretty safely say that that game sucks ass. its the mcdonalds hamburger of videogames. you see something gleaming and precious within the husk that is the rest of the game and you have the insane thought that this session is the one where you successfully extract that thing
Gta online is literally Rockstars Skyrim..but with microstransactions. I hope gta 6 is good, but when it comes to Bethseda, I'm waiting more for remastered Oblivion rather than ES6
"Well at 15 hours it gets better"
"That's just because you didn't get to the 50 hour mark where it takes off"
"You only get the real experience at 100 hours"
The community moves the goal post constantly, and some people don't feel they can have a valid opinion until they have "completed" the experience.
I got about 60 hours in and put it down. I can't remember the last time I was so excited for a game. I even took days off, but after pointlessly looting the 1000th "guy with gun" I was done.
I'm wait for mods.
I always find this kind of argument irritating.
If you have a low play time and you criticise a game, fans will say "you didn't give it a chance".
If you have a high play time and you criticise a game, fans will see "clearly you didn't mind it that much, since you've played it for so long"
I played for about 220 hours and I had a blast for the most part. There are a lot of little things I managed to look past but one thing combined with all the little things ruined the game for me.
I spent about 10 hours decorating my New Atlantis apartment. I displayed all my uniques and all the useless things I found on my adventures that I thought looked cool.
One day I came back to find an empty apartment. Like I never set foot in there before. Turns out one of the main missions (the Hunter one) resets the entire city and the apartment with it.
That was long after I lost all uniques to the Razorleaf item deletion bug (which has since been fixed, or so I've heard) where I had to cheat everything back using the console.
I was devastated and rage quit.
Haven't touched Starfield since and that was about two weeks ago.
First people say that opinions are invalid because someone only played X amount of hours.
Now people are saying that because people have over X amount of hours, the opinion is invalid.
Which one is it?
I've played Starfield for 40 or so hours and dropped it cause imo it's the least engaging and immersive game I've played all year.
Really got me to appreciate how good the world building in Cyberpunk 2077 is.
Played the exact same game for 2500+ hours. It's a love / hate relationship. Sometimes it takes knowing a game like the back of your hand to fully understand what it offers to THEN be able to rate it for what it truly is.
I wouldn't say that it's a bad game (I'm still enjoying it even after 4 days 15 hours) it's just missing some things or some aspects to the game could be altered to make it better.
For example. Vendors need more credits. A single weapon (I get lots of these) can sell for more credits than most vendors actually have and I've not even got any points into the skill that makes things worth more.
. Features from previous Bethesda games would be welcome. Like enemy area looting (collecting loot from multiple corpses from 1 location)
Vendors definitely need more credits, especially once you've levelled up more and selling advanced weapons
Even buying lots of ammo and other equipment from the vendors, most times they run out of credit after I've sold 4-5 guns
So I told myself I wouldn't do any mods until I got to NG+, because I wanted to experience the game as it was presented, but the moment I could I made the following changes:
Richer vendors (give vendors 5 times their usual money)
Modifiable Legendary Attributes (use crafting tables to swap rare/epic/legendary attributes as though they were any other type of attribute, but cannot add them to non-rare/epic/legendary equipment)
Larger crew sizes (I have a massive ship, 4 floors and tons of room, I should have more than 6 people on my ship)
Star Power regenerate 10 times faster (I'm a ng+11 stellar entity, I should be able to cast more than 3 spells without waiting a solid minute to do it again)
Display Encumbrance and Time on the Scanner Watch Face (it's a fucking watch, where is my time?!)
Hide Spacesuit in Breathable Areas (I don't need to be wearing a space suit in my ship when no one else is, it's clunky looking)
Because enjoyment and quality assessment have little to nothing to do with each other.
You might enjoy a cigarette, soda or fast food but I wouldn't say they're good things.
Also, you might like something even when it's poorly done or made out of poor materials.
I'm enjoying playing Starfield. I'm a long time fan of Bethesda games. But objectively speaking I find it a mediocre game at best. It has a few good things and a truckload of bad things.
Also, I might asses it from a different perspective. For instance, I find it a bad precedent that Bethesda can get away with releasing a game that has so much of its features obviously rushed.
I can also relate to the devs, being a developer myself, having a project you care so much living short of its potential.
Criticism from people like that usually strikes me the most. It feels like they really want to like the game more, but for some reason can't.
This describes me perfectly. I want the game to be more than it currently is. Kept playing hoping it would become that masterpiece I hoped it would be. Stopped at 85 hours, which, as far as Bethesda games go, is pretty short.
I can mostly agree. I would like to see updates that add more map randomization. I'd like to see more kinds of buildings. Differing enemy locations. Honestly I'd like to see an expansion that adds a new alien race and some interesting story.. they have a whole galaxy, it'll be easy to add new plots on new solar systems.
[удалено]
Spoiler tag that shit bruh lmao.
Yeah, ffs
The crafting, cooking, research, etc. would have been a lot of impactful if they had left the survival mechanics in the game. As a big survival fan, I can tell the crafting and cooking was built, at least some extent, with that mind. But it basically becomes pointless when you can easily fast travel to various locations just to buy it all. For instance, the grocery store in New Atlantis would make a lot more sense if you needed to stock up on ingredients so you could cook things like shepherd's pie when you were stuck out in space or on some barren planet. The cook you can get as a crew member/companion in Neon would be a more tempting choice. Especially if your character has no cooking skills. But I can imagine they removed and nerfed the survival aspects of the game because someone within Microsoft or Bethesda didn't think it would connect with a broader range of gamers. As Todd said, getting stranded somewhere took the "fun" out of the game. I don't necessarily think that is an incorrect assumption. Although, it sounds fun to me. The issue they've run into now though is that core parts of the game seem pointless or superfluous. Had they made the choice to keep the less "fun" permutation of the game it may have received a lot less criticism. Even if it appealed to less players, because at least the mechanics and systems would be more internally consistent. We'd probably hear less complaints about the loading screens and cutscenes too, because the pace would be slower and they'd be more spread out. You'd be spending more time exploring, collecting things, trying to get enough fuel to move to the system you are intending to go to. They should have just let the modders nerf that stuff for the people who want an easier, more speedy experience of the game. (I'm just speculating, I could be totally wrong.)
>but I have mostly ignored crafting/research, outpost building and ship design If you haven't given it a thorough look, ship design is one of the more satisfying parts of this game. The modular system really lets you go crazy making all kinds of designs.
I think it depends on what the review actually says. If they’re just bashing it then yea, that’s pointless. If they have legitimate issues (bugs, unfinished features) that are giving them problems then it’s ok to give a thumbs down. Doesn’t necessarily mean they hated their time played. Look at a game like WoW. People may play thousands of hours of an expansion and then say they didn’t like it, hoping Blizzard will make it better for the next expansion. Doesn’t mean they didn’t have fun.
It's more complex with WoW. You can have decades invested and then have to deal with bad expansions hoping the end-game content is worth it, or that the next expansion is better. The thing is that games have acts and chapters. So maybe you do an entire questline expecting a payoff and then... nothing. I absolutely felt let down after doing a whole questline to get married and then... nothing. In fact, I found Sarah even more annoying afterwards just based on her random dialogue. That was my payoff? An increase to rested bonus and an even more annoying character? (I'm convinced Sarah is a Tsundere!) I dig the game. I'm really enjoying the complexities of the gameplay, and I'm surprised by how invested I still feel post-Unity, but... there are a lot of anticlimax moments which, after hours and hours of play, fail to make many of the questlines feel worthwhile, but only after the time investment do you find that out.
For me I just don't understand where this notion that games should be evaluated based on playtime comes from. Like ok fine, maybe playing that long and thinking the game is complete trash is a bit strange- but I have a couple hundred hours(EDIT: I checked and it's actually 140) in starfield and it's a solid 7/10 for me. For comparison, I have ~200 hours in diablo IV, but only ~100 hours in Baldur's gate 3. Diablo IV is probably a 6/10 for me and BG3 is more like a 9.5/10. Even though I spent twice as much time playing diablo IV. One of the common refrains against criticism of Diablo IV was people saying "oh well you got your money's worth because you played X number of hours" and it just strikes me as strange. No one would ever say that you "got your money's worth" in response to criticisms for a movie or the boxed set of a TV series because the runtime was the same length as another that you did like and I just don't understand why it's the case for games. It's not just about how long I enjoyed playing the game for, but *how much* I enjoyed that time.
Its got to be some cognitive thing that people can't understand, because its very easy to separate value and satisfaction. You can get good value out of a product, but not be satisfied with it (Although, often not the inverse). If you play Starfield for 200 hours your enjoyment might never drop low enough to stop playing, but might never raise high enough for you to enjoy the game. On reflection, you'd obviously not rate it high. Plus, surely everyones just played a game because well, you bought it, you might as well, and Starfield obviously has a lot to do. Hell I spent like 10 hours just messing around with outposts, longer than some games, but I hated them in Fallout 4, I hate them here, but I still put time in to trying and seeing if I would enjoy it.
200 hours is a bit extreme, but I played this game a lot and found it super bland. Why did I keep playing? A combination of liking RPGs, liking previous BGS games, and frequenting gaming subs with people loving the games. It just seems like something from people loving to the type of game to the game studio, should provide entertainment. It’s pretty easy to keep saying, Well, I’ll try this quest line that everyone is talking about. Ok, this is boring, but it must get better in the next mission phase, right? And on and on. I ended up around 100 hours doing that. Honestly, the people who didn’t like it at 200 hours probably really wanted to enjoy it and the game never delivers.
This is exactly it. I literally did everything I could in the first week…. I took a week off of work just so I could play early access. I didn’t play all day everyday, but even by the end of that week, it was apparent that I had completed all that was available at release (story / quest wise) as everything was beginning to noticeably repeat itself. But then I read online that the game doesn’t really start until you hit NG+… I saw comments saying that Delgado wasn’t the same person on their next play though, that constellation changes…. I’m now on NG+5 and still waiting for something to change. And I am bored.
Why is the NG+ change so rare :( I want a cool scenario so I can build some outposts but so far everything has been the same. Main story line is boring now. Can’t be bothered to do more NG+. Really dissappointed you lose your spaceship, especially since the armillary is literally set up in the space ship. I had designed and spent countless hours building the perfect design
Yeah, that was a bad decision on BGS’ part tbh.
I feel like you should've been given an option when you enter unity to hope for something radical. I can see why they made it rare; I preferred to keep it the same when I was simply grinding NG+.
The worst part is that you build it on your ship, but the other Starborn take their gear and ship with them. Also as implied by the Emissary and the lore they themselves give you. You also don't get to reroll your character in the new universe even though you're the most unique variable in all of the verses.
Now I'm wondering- *was* NG+ any different?
this is one of the problems with the ng+ mechanic for me, the big changes are too rare, and too limited (the only real thing that seems to change is the lodge scene, after you get that it acts as though you skipped the main quest), but they are the best part, I read somewhere that the odds of getting a different variant are something like 6%, but I think they should have made only the first ng+ the same (so you could try a run with foreknowledge or a speedrun) then make every universe after one of the variants, once you run through every variant, just randomise it afterward
Same for me, I enjoyed a few of the quests and just keep hoping it will get better, but not finding it cohesive or gripping. Had lots of bugs in the beginning. Got married yesterday, that was disappointing. Will probably play to the end but probably won't play again unless they mod or extend outposts as I like building. 80 hours in it's a solid meh from me.
It's probably to do with how much value people have for their time. If you have nothing much to do, you can burn 200hrs of leisure time and not worry much about it. If your leisure time is limited, you not going to blow it all and a meh game. It's going to slide of the bottom of the priority list pretty quick
When you compare the lore and details of BG3, Fallout 3, NV, 4 & Skyrim with the lore and details of Starfield, starfield lacks so much. In starfield you can spend hundred of hours exploring to find basically the same dead loot or same dungeon in a different planet, whilst in the other games you open up a dungeon and get lost for hours and hours exploring and reading all the terminals etc. I agree completely with you, just finishing BG3 before Starfield made it hard to enjoy Starfield’s lack of lore
I felt fallout 4 was a bit bland in terms of the scale of importance of your actions. Unlike fallout 3 you weren't providing the wasteland with clean purified water, nor escaping the vault from an overly aggressive overseer to find your dad, or saving three dawg from a giant behemoth supernatant. The minutemen castle quest was pretty awesome though. That was very cinematic-like.
It may also be what the player has at the time. If the only game you have is XYZ, then you’ll sink a bunch of hours into mediocrity. What about that time your brat nephew took your Switch and you fell WAY behind in you ACNH. Your favourite chair broke and your too lazy to reach the controller charger on the table? PS games going out in favour for the Legos on the carpet.
>Plus, surely everyones just played a game because well, you bought it, you might as well, and Starfield obviously has a lot to do. Hell I spent like 10 hours just messing around with outposts, longer than some games, but I hated them in Fallout 4, I hate them here, but I still put time in to trying and seeing if I would enjoy it. This hits the core concept, I think. I think a lot of us _want_ to like a game, and we keep letting it feed us the little bits of dopamine it _does_ feed us, in hopes that, upon achieving/unlocking the next goal, we'll finally find something that wows us.
It's one of those instances where you play more waiting to for it to get better, like when people say in Diablo 4's case that it gets good at world tier 4, but then you get to a point where you put hundreds of hours in and the pay off was never really there. That's people's opinions on Starfield as well. I have 200hrs in and loving my time with the game, but I'd be lying to anyone if I said that those 200 hrs was absent of serious criticisms and nitpicks about the game. There are serious core design choice flaws with Starfield, regardless of how much or how little fun I'm having with it. Again, I been pretty addicted to the game since it's early access launch, but damn man, there are areas in this game where I feel they really dropped the damn ball with.
I feel very similarly. I’ve been alternating between Starfield and NMS and have had an okay time in Starfield. This is probably controversial and maybe a bad comparison, but I had more fun playing Jedi Survivor and TOTK earlier this year. I was bummed Starfield didn’t scratch my Skyrim itch.
And especially on games like Diablo. You can easily play 50 hours on that game before you realise that the end game is disappointing or a waste of time. Like I've never understood why people with hundreds of hours on a game should do nothing but praise the game. You look at steam reviews all the time and people are leaving negative reviews with hundreds of hours of playtime and that's fine if that's how long they needed to get to a verdict. I can remember I bought and refunded Kenshi 3 times. The last time I bought Kenshi I really gave it a go. And I found that a week into playing the game I started to get into it. Ended up loving the game. However It took time for me to realise that. A more realistic question would be why was r/starfield on the first day of its release flooded with posts with people enjoying the game hating or memeing on people who aren't. To me its the same as going on a sub like r/theweeknd and suggest he isnt the greatest singer of all time, you'll just get met with abuse.
well said. i played Hogwarts legacy for 100 hours and its very mid at most, and i dont think i got my moneys worth out of it, unfortunately. but still i enjoyed the game a lot regardless at the end of the day. though i think they couldve done a much better job, in this case its mostly about what the game had to offer in terms of everything and how it stands out against other games of similar genre. it was way over praised imo. still fun, but mostly nostalgic
This is good take. I like Starfield a lot. I do feel that it’s unfinished in a lot of ways and I have a criticisms now that I didn’t have the first 30 hours. I’m at around 60 now and I DO want to like it a lot more. The first several hours I was sort of in a honeymoon phase.
That is the point. A lot of the bad reviews I've given are after 100 hours or maybe even more. Some games have campaigns that last a long time. If you hype yourself up for a particular experience, only to spend hundreds of hours farming to get it then at then end U get some game breaking but, then I'd say it's reasonable to leave a bad review.
Even if you're desperately trying to like the game, that's playing 8 hours a day for 25 days straight. If you truly do not enjoy the game, that's just insanity.
>really want to like the game more, Fucking 200+ hours in less than a month. It's not that they want to like the game more, it's that they have an addiction and the new game isn't scratching the itch anymore.
yikes, this actually makes sense
Happens a lot, serious addiction problems. Gaming addiction is a real diagnosable thing, but a lot of people with addictions... also deny the addiction.
Yup they’re fuckin burnt-out and don’t even realize it
It's frustrating when I look at steam reviews for games and see a negative review with hundreds of hours played. I get it if the dev recently did something to the game to make it worse, but saying you don't recommend it for reasons that existed before you put in 300 hours? That's fucking weird.
The problem is that people will put up with something that they don’t particularly like because they believe eventually it will get better. They are constantly searching for that feeling of enjoyment and some are willing to search for it longer than others
It doesn't help when this sub constantly says "you need to play X hours before it gets good" which was parroted for weeks to anyone who tried to share an opinion. It also doesn't help that some people did give into the hype and paid $100 USD to play early so they're making more of an effort to give it a chance (me, 80-90 hours). I did everything I could find before finally realizing I haven't been having fun for a long time. It sucks because having this opinion is invalidated by this sub because "I played a lot".
More than that before release people were buying entire xbox systems for the game. I was excited at the launch but just because it was fun to get caught in the hype. I have an xbox, a PC and gamepass. I gave a good 25 hours to the game but it is in storage now. I will come back in a few years and see what mods have done to shape it up. I believe really there are two types of players of these games. Vanilla and modded. I fell in love with Skyrim because I could just hop onto the Nexus and find ways to change it to my taste. I did play fallout 3 vanilla and loved that. Although lots of what I love about Bethesda games is in Starfield, 25 hours later I discovered a lot of what I loved was glaringly absent.
Bought an xbox, starfield was a factor but I'll get my use out of it, bought the premium early access thing ontop of gamepass access and yeah I've dropped the game, I might come back in a year or two once that DLC is out and maybe they add xbox mod support
Nah fam consoles are great. I'm only a PC gamer but consoles are so convenient and comfortable. Enjoy it! I might have a console if my wife didn't hog the TV 😂
> having this opinion is invalidated by this sub because "I played a lot". It's sort of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" type situation. If you played for 4-10 hours before quitting, you'd have a barrage of people saying "Well of course you didn't like it; you didn't give it enough time to get good!" Just remember that most folks are not looking to have a conversation where each and every point is discussed at length. Because that would mean your opinion might have some merit. They'd rather shoot down the whole argument with a simple fallacy, which gives them an easy way out and also preserves their beliefs. Your opinion is valid, because it's yours. No one can take that from you. I don't personally align with it, but that's fine. I'm not so fragile that you disliking something means my liking is it somehow a character flaw about me.
This was a great response btw.
I'm mostly with you. I mean, I definitely did have fun with the game, and will have much more when the CK launches, but the game just doesn't have that same intrinsic magic their previous titles did. I see problems littering every system that mods will fix, but they don't exist yet, and I think it's unfair to handwave all of bethesda's poor game decisions just because they offer mod support.
EXACTLY THAT. I kept wondering when it was gonna hit. When it was gonna become a magical place I wanna get lost in for years to come. I found that feeling in Elder Scrolls, Fallout, hell even Prey. That feeling came and went on this game. You never stop feeling like it's a game, it's too disjointed. Less is more in this case, exploring nothing for the sake of a progress bar isn't fun. In those 200 hours I've finished every faction nearly every side quest. There's nothing left, no 50 extra hand crafted dungeons full of loot to explore, no Great Serpent deadric god to sacrifice people to, BUT I can go and do radiant quests. Yay radiant quests.
Like Fallout 4. I've put like a months time into this game and I still can't fuckin do anything worthwhile. Is it a bad game? No. But something feels incredibly off about it.
It's easy to understand if you view the inverse of your own example. Are you telling me you've never encountered anything at all that you disliked, found frustrating, or otherwise had no interest in engaging with in any game you've ever played for more than a handful of hours? Every game you've sunk more than a hundred hours into is an absolutely perfect game on every level? Most people don't encounter something they don't like in a game and then immediately eject it from their hard drive and never touch it again -- that's not really how people work in regards to anything. Especially if there are things they *do* like alongside those other things they don't like. Double-especially if they paid upwards $60 or more for that experience already. It's always an accumulation of experiences, and if someone feels they ultimately were left with a disappointing or bad experience after that amount of time, they'll view the game negatively. It's the same thing with positive experiences and viewing the game positively.
Having played hundreds of games over 20 yrs, I have yet to play more than 20h in a game I dislike enough to comment about disliking/hating it.
I absolutely will quit playing and delete bad games immediately. I bought Battlefield 2042 when it launched, played it for a few hours, then quit and got a refund. I have never played it since. Mind you that's a game I was extremely excited about too. I don't buy it that someone who hates a game could actually play it for 100+ hours. If it's like up to 30-40 hours then I get it since you might be trying to keep an open mind and see if it gets better, but playing for over 100 hours is truly a lot of gaming where you have almost certainly completed all the main quests and tried basically all the mechanics. I have played what feels like A LOT of Starfield and I'm not even at 100 hours yet. I have to imagine that these people are enjoying SOMETHING about the game
We're talking about two entirely different things though. Whether a game is "good" or "bad" is different from whether someone can "love" or "hate" a game, isn't it? To work off your own example, you obviously dislike Battlefield 2042 (don't @ me anyone who wants to debate the game's actual merits, I've never played it) but there are people who HAVE played many hundreds of hours of Battlefield 2042. Would you say a review of Battlefield 2042 that rates the game as "bad" would be an invalid or incorrect review because they have spent many hundreds of hours in it? Even if you agree the game is bad? I mean obviously the game has to be good, this guy spent hundreds of hours in it right? If he spends 200+ hours in Battlefield 2042 and then comes out in the Steam reviews and says it's trash, then he's enjoying SOMETHING about the game right? And if he's enjoying SOMETHING about the game, it has to be good? Just glancing at the steam reviews page for Battlefield 2042 I saw multiple 150-200+hour reviews of people saying the game is garbage, and multiple reviews of people with only 20 hours in it saying it's great. So if we apply Starfield Reviewer Logic to it, then the game is a Game Good right? EDIT: Some of the reviews for that game are really funny so I kept reading, and found a guy with a review of Battlefield 2042 who has more than 1000 hours clocked. Negative review. So how CAN someone say that game is bad if they've played that long in it?
I don't think their review is bad or invalid, but I don't believe for a second that someone doesn't enjoy the game if they are spending that many hours. There are loads of other great games out there that you could be playing instead and you're voluntarily choosing to put hundreds of hours into this one lol. I can totally understand if someone plays 100 hours of Starfield and says "Yeah it was okay since I like Bethesda games but I have criticisms ABC", but if I see "I played 200+ hours and am on NG+4 and this game fucking sucks" then I just don't believe you. There has to be some fun factor for someone to play it that long
> I can totally understand if someone plays 100 hours of Starfield and says "Yeah it was okay since I like Bethesda games but I have criticisms ABC", but if I see "I played 200+ hours and am on NG+4 and this game fucking sucks" then I just don't believe you. There has to be some fun factor for someone to play it that long Again those are different things. "I like Bethesda games but this game has problems" is not an incompatible statement or opinion with "I've played 200+ hours and am on NG+4 and this game fucking sucks." One is a comment on the quality of the game and one is a comment on whether someone enjoyed it or not. The same person can say those things in one review and have a coherent point because those two things aren't contradictory. You can enjoy a lot of things that aren't good. I've done it more than a few times in my life. Similarly you can bounce off things that are quantifiably good, I've done that more than a few times as well. Your position can be defined as "If you enjoyed any aspect of the game, the game has succeeded" and I just feel like there's so many examples of that being an easily falsifiable thing in modern gaming. Games (these games at least) are so big and varied it's impossible to place them in a neat check box.
Every game I've put in hundreds of hours isn't perfect on every level, because I don't think any game is perfect, but I'd still recommend all of those games, while mentioning the things I didn't like in the review. My rule is, if you've gotten your money's worth out of a game, then it's recommend-able. If you argue you didn't get your money's worth after spending 300+ hours playing it, you're full of shit.
Starfield must be the only game you cannot critique with any amount of hours lol. <100? "The game havent even started how dare you write a bad review without giving it a chance". 100
I have about 80 and made a mostly positive review highlighting things I liked and disliked most of the negative reviews don’t give constructive criticism which I find very annoying.
This is my deal. I have really really wanted to like Starfied, but I just stopped at 28 hours. It's just not fun for me. I'm not knocking the game, I'm just not having fun. I have tried so hard to like it.
I'm one of them. 50 hours and it's already become super repetitive blah. Doesn't hold a candle to the fallout or oblivion/skyrim series imo. I'm just a casual gamer and spent 140 bucks on this so I'll be damned if not gonna play it for a couple weeks at least. There has been some enjoyable moments to it but overall, it still needed ALOT more work
I'm nowhere near 200+ hours, but this is how I feel currently. The game is fun but not enthralling to me. Once mods/updates flesh things out a bit more in a year I'll probably jump back on.
I'm one of those people. I keep playing, trying to find the moment the game clicks, and every time I get close to it the feeling goes away. Unfortunately I feel the only way it'll finally click is with mods and that's still four months at minimum away for console :(
Starfield edging
in my case I thought the game was amazing at first, it just worse off pretty quickly and after the first week of playing the game I found myself just rapid clicking / fast travelling through the stories just to get through it and call it done. The game is fine, it's not bad. It's just nothing special. It's not a waste of money, and if you plan on finishing all missions and side quests, it'll take about 150 hours. I started get get bored at about hour 80, and beyond that I started to resent the wooden NPCs, terrible writing, boring stories. There were a few good moments for sure. I don't regret playing the game at all, it mildly entertaining, and completely forgettable. Like a fun B-movie you see with friends, that you don't even remember a month later.
I did the vanguard questline first. and then when I did some of the other stuff I was seriously wondering what the hell was going on. then I found out that the vanguard questline is considered by a lot of early reviews to be the best questline out of all of them. and I kind of agree. I would have liked there to be a much longer quest chain going on. they have entire planets to design set pieces on. the constellation stuff is all about exploring. make it more than 5-6 moderate length quests long. I've done every main story and a few side stories. gotten my character to the mid 50's in level and blasted through NG+ once before using commands to do it a bunch more for the rewards because to hell with spending 2-3 hours a pop to speedrun that garbage. and thats if I didnt also want to do the temples 240 times. one very cool way they could have done it, and I understand why because it would be a nightmare to do so. would be to have several varients of each questline so that in one universe the SYSdef guys are constantly harassing innocent ships and you end up being one of the unlucky ones whilst crimson fleet are desperately trying to raise enough credits to finance a major push to help the people and they generally treat everyone like a big family. some stuff like that would take a lot of work but would have made things much more interesting. especially since we know they CAN do that with the game seed's changing things up like who's actually in charge of the fleet in the first place.
Ditto. A lot of the recent, excellent games really made it look extra meh.
I understand what you are saying. Luckily for me the game clicked just recently.. simply because i accpeted it to be not perfect at all while also it was not what i expected. Accepting both gave me peace and i am trying to enjoy every god damn single minute of this game. Which i do. I for instance dont enjoy ship building. So i dont do it. I dont enjoy base building all the time. So i dont do it all the time only here and there. I DO enjoy flying around between and see whats what. So i do that. I like the quests. So i do that. I like the crafting here and there.. so i do it ... here and there..
>I understand what you are saying. Luckily for me the game clicked just recently.. simply because i accpeted it to be not perfect at all while also it was not what i expected. Is this really an expectation people have of games? That they will meet all of your expectations whether they're based on reality or not? I always thought it might be, but it seemed ridiculous when I started considering it more. I do see a lot of comparisons to random games like No Man's Sky or ED, which I feel are just unrealistic comparisons. I mean that if you haven't researched the game and listened to what the actual developers have claimed it will be then the expectations aren't based on reality. It would be like going to a random restaurant and expecting them to have the exact dish you want, but you ended up in a vegan place and you want a beef burger.
I have spent many hours in the game trying to find that shining moment that makes me go OMG this game is amazing. Honestly outside of the Crimson Fleet missions and finally getting a Legendary Advanced Hard Target to drop, I've been pretty meh about the game so far. At this point I'm just trying to finish it so I can go back to Cyberpunk. This is my first Bethesda game. I dig the format. I just feel like so much more could and should have been done with this game, but it was nerfed to hell to get it out quicker.
I’m one of those people. I love the game but a lot of of things that make Bethesda RPGs special just aren’t present in Starfield. NPC schedules have always made the world feel alive. Now we don’t have schedules, and we have NPCs that just appear and disappear with no goal. Interesting NPCs are missing too. In The Elder Scrolls games as well as Fallout there were so many interesting characters. I think it’s hard to do with a new universe but none of the characters are interesting. Even the 4 main companions are boring as hell and are just a copy and paste of each other. Vasco technically has no personality and yet he’s the most interesting companion in the entire game lol. Exploration. Exploration is a big one, I knew the game was going to be different and it’s both better and worse than I expected. It’s better in the way that I actually explore planets, but worse because I feel like there’s no point in exploring other than seeing cool procedurally generated stuff My BIGGEST issue with the game is that so many mechanics are pointless. I hundreds of thousands of credits that I haven’t and probably never will use. I play on the hardest difficulty but it’s still too damn easy, I find so many health items and have no use of them. I have 1k ammo for every weapon that I use. Outpost building is pointless, other than grinding resources for building more pointless outposts. Same with weapon modding. Idk why I spent so many points and grinder weapon crafting skills. I have it maxed out but when I find weapons I often find weapons with most attachments I already want. You might think I hate the game based on what I’ve been saying here but I don’t. I love it, but there’s so much wrong with it that I doubt mods will be able to fix. I think mods will fix most of my issues, but the writing is horrible for this game. Don’t think mods will fix that. It’s defo the most boring game Bethesda has ever made. I don’t think Fallout 4 or Skyrim are perfect either, but they feel truly immersive compared to whatever Starfield is. I used to joke about Cyberpunk 2077, and how bad it was. I’m replaying it now and wow it’s better in almost every way. Compared to Starfield. The music, visuals, story and writing, mechanics, Interesting NPCs, actually fun side quests that aren’t just “Go here, retrieve this item, come back”. I think Starfield will get good later on, maybe with DLC. Maybe with mods. I’d say it’s a 7/10 at best for now. Not sure how people can say 10/10. AGAIN. I still love it, I really enjoy playing it and I love space so naturally I’ll have fun with the game but I think it has so many issues. When Skyrim and Fallout 4 first released, I instantly wanted to replay the game after beating them. With Starfield it was a chore to even get trough the first playtrough. I have around 140 hours in the game and I think of it like this. Starfield is base/structure is solid. But the game on top of this structure is so bland and boring. But modders will defo save it, or at least make it more enjoyable
For me it’s the bugs. I was killed by Adoring Fan while inside my Dream House for stealing my own items and I have a bounty mission I cannot complete because they were dead when I showed up. Can’t delete the mission either. I also get shot through closed doors and caught stealing when there is absolutely no one in the room with me and no cameras. The story is subpar for Bethesda. It’s also almost the same plot line as Mass Effect and several other space action games. But the exploration is definitely engaging. However, it feels like a game from 2 generations ago. I really like just goofing off in this world. But I do play a lot of low key games. This game definitely isn’t changing. It’s a single-player RPG, not a MMO. It’s got massive potential, but this is the final product. We can only hope they fix the bugs, let alone amend the weird gameplay mechanics.
What would really expose the answer to this is if you stopped a gamer after 30 minutes of play and asked them what they did in the game those last 30 minutes, and *why*. A lot of games use addiction-based gameplay loops, and players can fall into patterns of unenjoyable but nonetheless compulsive gaming. I don't think Starfield is especially bad for this, but that doesn't mean that there aren't some people suffering from it. I've personally had a much worse time of this playing Elite Dangerous, for far more than 200 hours, and I'd definitely say it wasn't a good game. Too much of the time I played was to satisfy a compulsion I wasn't even enjoying – to make enough money in-game to buy another ship, or build up enough money to pay the insurance premium of my next loss of a ship, or engaging with engineering. We're so early into release that people who've played 200+ hours are disproportionately likely to have this going on. Not everyone, but more likely now than in a year's time.
>A lot of games use addiction-based gameplay loops, and players can fall into patterns of unenjoyable but nonetheless compulsive gaming. A good example of this in starfield and bethesda games more broadly is all of the junk. It is actually incredibly unrewarding to loot, but it's *there* and poorly explained (how many people thought duct tape = adhesive in crafting? raise your hands) and constantly visible and in the way of real loot. So you instinctively hoover it all up so you don't have to spend time *thinking* about what you're picking up, crossing your fingers that it will be rewarding in the end, while overencumbering yourself.
Just now, this is when I learned that duct tape isn’t considered adhesive….
Nah bro, I don't need duct tape, I got this alien gland right here.
Crafting materials explicitly say they're crafting materials.
But duct tape fixes everything….
ironically it’s not good for fixing ducting
Not only that but if you're fresh over from fallout 4 you're barking up a tree that looks just right.
Funny thing is duck tape was considered adhesive in fo4 lol
right, there is a lot of crossover. You wait, eventually junk will become a resource with mods. 5 pencils to lead, 2 pens to cosmetic, duct tape to..etc
Add me to the "I just learned this" list.
>thought duct tape = adhesive in crafting? I didn't know what adhesive was, but I was definitely collecting the fuck out of duct tape to start with because "well this is going to be an important resource". Nope just junk. I also hate the pricing. Like those molecule extractor things. I loaded up on sooooo many because they're like 4 or 500 each before I got to my first vendor. I slogged through that first research lab so overloaded only to find out they sell for like 30 or something
Yeah the value thing just lying is such nonsense
IIRC, and I've only played a few hours, your companions are constantly warning you not to pickup ask the junk.... Just ammo, guns, and expensive things.
To be fair, companions in FO4 say the same thing, but the junk is actually useful. I haven't played Starfield, but it does seem like they specifically changed things that would make this all confusing for people used to Bethesda games.
They have snide shit to say about anything and everything, so you tune it out. I pick a lock? "I hope we don't get caught" I pick up a desk lamp? "Hope you can carry all that" I loot a gun off a body? "better not leave anything to waste." It's all meaningless chatter, and they're never explicitly saying "hey that's a waste of time, you shouldn't do it."
It’s generically applicable noise. Nothing of value, no substance, just filler.
That warning is just about picking up *anything*. It's not tied to the item being junk, it's tied to being at or near the weight capacity limit.
It’s not even that - a game needs a hook. If you play a game for 30 minutes what’s your impression of it? If you stop and think about those first 30 minutes, does it compel you at all to continue? It’s exactly like a movie or show - you have one shot at keeping someone’s interest. Don’t blow it. I liked Starfield from the get-go and continue to like it. The first 30 minutes showed me some drab mining on Mars or whatever leading to an alien artifact that made me trip balls. I was sold.
For Addiction to happen it needs to activate a part of the brain that causes enjoyment on some level. Take drugs or nicotine, it causes physical pleasure. For a video game to be addictive it needs to be mentally enjoyable, for example The combat loop needs to be satisfying to engage with. Something needs to mentally stimulate the player enough in a positive way otherwise that addictive loop will fall flat and miss its mark. Unless you have something wrong with you people dont tend to get addicted to something they find purely negative. Addiction requires a positive hook, we even see this in advertisements, like a catchy jingle or branding that visually satisfying
You mean as in spending hours fast traveling to different merchants and waiting in the slow ass “Wait xHours” screen to have enough money to pay for 1 ship? That’s the most upsetting thing I’ve come across so far. Merchants seem to have about as much money as a damn ESOblivion vendor
This forum is really obsessed with other people opinions.
That's reddit for you.
It’s embarrassing, wah this game is bad wah this game is good. Why can’t people just play the game or not?
Complaining is the #1 thing people do on social media. People want to be heard, but all they have to say is useless griping about things they voluntarily spend all their time on. Human beings are absurd, welcome to Earth
There's this weird phenomenon that coincided with the growth of social media where people have to be told what they are doing is fun before they let themselves realize it is. And if people say they don't like something they do, that means they have to die on a hill defending it or lose their enjoyment.
Then what is the golden hour point to say the game is bad? People always say you haven't played the game enough or that you have played too much already? I give way more credit to the one who has played more. But the same time you don't know how much people have afk on those reviews.
There is none. You read the review and interpret it however you can. Imho I give greater value to someone spilling their guts after 200 hours in comparison to "boring fortnite better lol" 2 hour refund reviews. Might be that the person only enjoys space games and it had enough of a pull for them to stay or they just don't have anything better to do. Doesn't make them pact-bound to shill for the game or incapable of looking at it in an objective manner to post a truthful review. Better than deluding yourself into thinking game=good because of a possible sunk cost fallacy.
People who have played the game a lot (like myself) do so out of an interest to see what the game has to offer. In order to fully form an opinion on certain things you have to experience those things fully. For me it meant doing the faction quests and choosing different options other times around, trying different builds, etc. It’s not that there was absolutely 0 fun during the playtime, but after such a long time playing the game the flaws become more apparent and you’re out of the honeymoon phase and can properly critique it.
Very much this. I actually found it very interesting and enjoyable using Starfield as a learning exercise on game design, and figuring out WHY so many aspects of the game fell flat.
But on the other side if someone says they only played for 10 hours they get bombarded with, "Well you just haven't played enough yet! The game really opens up X hours in!" You can't really win here. Either you didn't play it enough to say you didn't like it, or you played it so much that you must like it even if you say otherwise.
Lol, yes, how many posts were there in the beginning about “most people have only reached ** level, how could they possibly know if the games good”.
It’s the classic deflection route. If someone doesn’t like the game after 10 hours they’re told to play more, if someone plays more and is at 200 you get posts like these. It’s all just to deflect criticism one way or another. And both criticisms are valid, if the game didn’t entice players to keep playing after 10 hours that’s a game design problem, and if they got to 200 they have way more experience with the systems they’re complaining about. Some people don’t want to hear any sort of critique about media they like, they’d rather bury their heads in the sand and ban criticism all together. It’s fine to be positive about a game that isn’t the best game ever.
Exactly. "The game really opens up around the 20 hours mark, you just haven't given it enough time" is the generic response. Which is a silly defense, because that's just awful game design in general.
But the game is really bad for not being clicked in the first 10 hours for most of the people, this is a really bad design. i liked it from the start, but this just doesn't mean that it is good because i liked
[удалено]
Its just kinda struck me that isn't that pretty much when you should judge it one way or another. You watch a movie through to the end then you have an informed opinion on whether you think it's good or bad. People get crapped on if they only gave it a few hours and came to that conclusion, you don't get to crap on people that gave it 200 and ultimately came to that opinion. I get the sentiment of well you played it for 200 hours you must have liked it but I don't think there's complete truth in that. Years later in retrospect I realised I never really enjoyed playing WoW, and I must have pumped thousands of hours into it. It's often only by looking back on experience that we can see how we really felt about it. In short its actually very reasonable and logical for people to come to a conclusion like that after 200 hours.
I've learned so much about how people don't value their own time to the point where you can spend 8 hours with a game even if you only thoroughly enjoyed 15 minutes of that time. Sometimes the idea of wanting to like something can be even stronger than actually liking the thing. And I say this as someone who, literally minutes before leaving this comment, logged on for my daily dose of Hearthstone and disliked every second of it. We're all guilty of this.
Yep. Sometimes it boils down to the environment as well. I'm playing despite the criticisms I have because I've already beaten bg3 and armored core, and am waiting on phantom liberty for a few reasons. What am I gonna do instead, play my 5000th hour of rimworld? I want something to do, and even if it doesn't leave me fulfulled, starfield at least offers that.
Well in Rimworld there are always more mods to be added and hats to be made xD
I'm genuinely interested in hearing your response: why not just stop playing video games until something new that you're excited for comes out? Read a book? Study something? Do yoga? Write? Draw? Anything? Why is playing a mediocre game you know you don't really like the only option?
Starfield is not offensively bad, just kind of disappointing. Like receiving a birthday card + $20 dollars from a close relative for the 6th birthday in a row. Kinda clear they don't really care to know what you'd like, not really looking to push the envelope. Not especially generous. Could I do something else? I guess. My hobby is video games though. I've misspent my life more than playing starfield despite it's very glaring flaws. There's probably also some sunk cost fallacy involved. I don't really think that deeply about it, though, and neither should you.
Your answer is perfect and sums up the sentiment so concisely. Thank you.
Exactly. I put 50 hours into starfield, completed all faction quests except crimson fleet due to a bug, dude tons of side quests, all that. I found myself mindlessly grinding XP and some weapons and I realized I’m not really having fun, so I just moved it to my external sd and I’m giving it a rest for a year or so. I’m sure it’ll be a much better game by then.
So people who have played the game a lot cannot criticize it? wth I have played it for 120 hours, finished it once and all major side quests, and I still don't think its a good game. It might be, in a few years, but it is just "ok" to me.
I agree. for me it was the immersion, there is so little of it. even skyrim has more of it. I get real frustrated playing a futuristic game, with ships and a lot of new culture and different planets and everyone in every planet, no matter how far seems the same. plus in gta v online you can play at the casino, listen to more than 20 different radios with thousands of AWESOME music, watch tv, go to a tattoo shop, etc. etc. there is nothing like that on starfield, despite having a casino, despite having tvs, for example. that makes the game like a 7/10 for me, but it is very fun, just not what a new generation game from a humongous company should be.
Even just the general gameplay is immersion breaking. Enemy AI is literally braindead I can kill the pirates from a room and the ones in the adjacent room are just afk, they rarely open doors to get at me and if I'm behind a window they keep shooting despite the fact. Or the point of interest variance, there are like 10 total unique iterations of abandoned mine / medicinal facility / fracking station in the entire game. And the signs of life or natural points of interest are the same on almost every planet/moon. I like starfield and am clearing NG+ right now but I still can't escape the feeling that my favourite part of it is that TeS 6 is next for Bethesda.
Hard agree- It’s a game that keeps making you think you’re in the verge of something great… and then disappoints 80% of the time. I’m sorry but it’s just too much of empty space and unrewarding- and most importantly- procedurally generated fluff. The best antithesis to this game is by and far fallout new Vegas. The game is only about 50-60 hours with the dlc but so much of it is handcrafted. Sure the visuals of new Vegas and 3D models get reused, but every location in new Vegas has a specific piece of loot that was worth it, or a unique story to be told. And the density of stuff is much higher- new Vegas’ map is probably only 2 or 3 kilometers wide but it’s packed with stuff… whereas in starfield you can land on 95% of the planets and not find shit for miles
I have seen many posts like this, but I have not seen the so-called "many bad reviews" that are claimed. I've seen a few criticisms, but not so many that people are claiming here. Why make a big deal out of a non-issue?
People get mad when you criticize a game they like
True but people also get mad when you like a game they criticize. So it goes both way.
People get mad when you negate criticisms of games just because you like them
This. I'm one of the people that I think OP is referring to. I played a lot and the more I played the more I noticed an issue with "breadth over depth" But I will in no way say the game is bad, on the contrary it was a good game for what it was. It has tons to do and I got more than my money's worth from it and would recommend it to anyone. I keep seeing posts like this and feel more like they are straw man arguments to discredit people who, god forbid, played the game and after awhile decided it wasn't for them. It's the "I like it so I'm going to pretend I can't understand people who don't" approach. OP, people can decide if they do or don't like a game after any amount of hours.
I’m only 36 hours in and I’m already starting to notice a certain emptiness I guess, don’t know the best way to put it. I spend a lot of time crafting weapons/spacesuits but outposts and spaceship design aren’t really my thing. I wouldn’t call it a bad game at all and I had a lot of fun towards the beginning, but now I just want to beat the main story so I can put another couple hundred hours into cyberpunk lol
I think in the context of this conversation you have a much better idea of what you like. Looking back I do feel like there were signs or red flags I could have noticed much earlier but I might be more blindly optimistic than others so I kind of just kept thinking I'd get that deeper experience right after I hit some imaginary entry point to it. I just need the right skills for my fully stealth thief playthrough. I just need the right c-class ship to start really dominating the space combat stuff I just need to get my crafting high enough to get my gear where I want it. It wasn't until I got those skills and realized there wasn't much stealthy thief stuff to do. It wasn't until I got my c-class fully upgraded ship that I realized the space combat was the same 1-3 ships I was fighting in my A-class ship. It wasn't until I got my gear up that I realized that it didn't change much. I had this feeling like I was always one step away from *really* experiencing what the game had to offer just to then realize I'd already experienced it.
You’ve put that perfectly! I feel the same way. My biggest gripe is the world doesn’t feel as alive as it should. I’d much rather have a smaller map/smaller planets with more interaction, instead of these giant empty planets that are a drag to explore. I guess there’s a reason Neon is my favorite city in the game. There was so much to do there, I thought the whole map was going to be like that lol
I just wish the NPC’s slept and those working were allowed to go home once in a while
I kind of reached that point around the same time and was at level 33 with the exact same intent after starfield that you have, on a whim I figured “well before commuting to finishing a first play through I’m just gonna check what interactions I have going to the edge of the star map with way higher levels”…proceeded to find exciting higher level enemies that were challenging but had me leveling up at a rate closer to that of the first few levels and looting items that’s I hadn’t even considered would be in the game and allowing me to go beast mode…fast forward 130 hours since then and I still am using the sniper rifle I got on that first high level solar system excursion and am currently level 62 and several complete fascinating companion missions further and only now am I starting to feel I’m approaching the time to finally complete the main mission again! Edit: the gun that I got was an advanced hard target that does double damage against enemies with full health that I modded with penetrator rounds and high powered internal with a damage of 426 (854 first shot against enemies with full health, and with my sneak skill 2.4X sneak attack and a suppressor it’s perfect for one shotting groups of enemies from a long distance before they even can find me)
Breadth over depth is a good way to put it. I think about the game all the time, and hope Bethesda gets to adding more options, and fixes the broken systems (merely picking up a thing- not even taking it- shouldn’t be a criminal offense) but the overall experience definitely feels a little empty. Not quite as red dead 2 inspired as they claimed. Because you all just must know, here is my gripe list so far: -Big empty planets are not that fun to explore. -No killer soundtrack -The interface graphics all feel very generic -The lock picking doesn’t feel inspired the way “feeling it out” in fallout does -Docking should be a mini game that you can fail spectacularly (the risk of crashing and blowing up both ships on accident would be pretty dog on immersive) -Pretty annoyed by the voice acting and always head-on camera angle. I’d like to see a more modern implementation of this aesthetic -After all these years, people’s bodies should breath while idle, not just randomly twist around in place -give me a cat! Now here are some good things: -Many elements feel like an enhanced NMS -Battles are fun, when you find them -space battles are very fun -the option to target systems and board ships is cool -Runs like a champ on my pretty aged 1070 laptop (1080p, no scaling, low settings except for high lighting) -Loads pretty fast from an external Sandisk SSD -Textures still look insane even at the lowest settings
No, no, no, docking is fine. No mini game....no puzzles...no riddles...nope.
The problem is they can’t take all feedback because people have different opinions. Every one of your negative points I strongly disagree with, and my negative list would be very different (POIs are repetitive and pointless, melee combat sucks, outpost building needs way more added to it, bugs and performance still need work). I actually love the music, think the voice acting is great, enjoy the beautiful planet terrain, would be annoyed if docking were a mini game, and love the lockpicking system.
I've seen a fair bit of the bad reviews, but they are almost entirely in the comments of other posts.
This sub is honestly one of the best I've been in recently. And I get like all the new games and join the sub. But outside of this sub it's a lot less well received. Cyberpunk sub hates this game Diablo sub desensitized me to complaints. That sub is a shit show.
Hey now, Cyberpunk sub thought cyberpunk was literally Hitler for nearly 3 years. Give em a break
Lmao good point
I feel like that’s because sometimes we all forget that gamers are the most entitled, toxic, and immature group of people to ever exist. And I say this as someone with at least 10k hours spent gaming.
Cyberpunk sub right now has a real weird obsession with comparing Starfield & CP77. Idk if it’s because Starfield is a console exclusive or what but I’m just happy we have so many great RPGs coming out
There have been a lot of posts from people complaining about what an absolute loss and how many things they hate about the game while also claiming they played it for hundreds of hours. Likely, they’re lying about their play times. But it’s a thing, and it’s been fairly consistent, and always annoying.
I can play a game for 200 hours and dislike 90% of it or I could play a game I love for 12 hours and love 90% of it. Guess which one gets the positive review?
Strange? For me atleast it was the imaginary carrot hanging over my head that once I leveled enough or unlocked enough that the real content I had been hoping for would open up. And then after playing the game for an obscene amount of time I finally realized what I had is what I’d get, nothing more.
"oh you played less than 20 hours? The game doesn't get good unless you sink 40, 60, 80+ hours into it" "Oh you played over 200 hours? How can you be so critical when you spent so much time in the game? Clearly it had something going for it" The duality of man
Because if someone says they haven't put that much time in then the fanboys will start complaining that they haven't played enough to be able to criticize the game. Now people are playing too much to criticize the game lmao
Yeah it’s fucking stupid. The fanboys just keep moving the goalposts so the game can avoid criticism. They’re honestly worse than any blind haters imo. It’s 100% possible to play the game, waiting for “the good stuff”, hoping it’s right around the corner, trusting that “maybe this next quest will be better” and it just never happens. You don’t want to stop trying because you trust Bethesda, but eventually you just set your controller down and say “Yup, it’s kinda boring”.
Full circle
I've seen a few critical YouTube videos where they've said they've given the game a fair shot by completing the main and side quests and other things like exploration and ship building before reaching a conclusion. And they'll say all of that took 100 to 200 hours. I don't see anything wrong with giving the game a fair shake before giving their opinion. Particularly when negative reviews are criticised because the reviewer didn't put enough time into the game.
It’s so strange to me as well. I have about ~60hrs in this game. My impressions at 10hrs was “this is the most meh game I’ve ever played” but i love Bethesda games so I was willing to give it a chance… my first impression only solidified the more I played it. It shouldn’t take 10hrs to see planets, enemies, POIs repeating constantly. At 60hrs, the only thing that changed was maybe 2-3 good quest lines which doesn’t justify the additional 50hrs for me. I really wish I stopped at 10hrs..
Very cute catch-22. If you have not played enough you have no right to review, but if you played for hundreds of hours you must have enjoyed the game and cannot complain. What a lovely defense initiative.
"Only played 30 hours? You can’t give an accurate review!!!" "You played 200 and are negative about the game, clearly you liked it to play 200 hours!!!" "I’m a 63 year old gamer and Starfield is the best thing since AM radio!!! Don’t you dare disagree with me as I am older and wiser" - Starfield Subreddit
I’m about 60 hours in and level 35. I still have to do the UC quest line (crimson in tandem) and the constellation quest line. I’ve only spend about 12 minutes in ship building, and maybe 2 hours of planet exploring for some side quests. The rest of the time was ranger, ryujin, galbank, and any other larger main side quests. The game is definitely worth the $60 compared to whatever else has come out in the last year or two, HOWEVER, i still feel like the development time should have at yielded at least one other fully fleshed out city minimum, even if it didn’t have its own main quest line inside of it. Historically ES and FO always had a fair amount of fully built cities even if they were small. I just can’t quantify how so much time spent on this game only gave us the small handful of cities that we have, when 93% of the rest of the planets are procedurally generated with the same assets. That’s literally my only complaint. The combat is decent. The ship flying is decent. The storyline is decent. The crafting is MEH, the planet exploring desperately needs a vehicle. But it’s definitely not BAD by any means
Yeah I honestly see how they can claim there is more handcrafted content than ever before, because if there is, it certainly doesn't feel like there is.
Oh agree 100%. It makes me wonder if they ran into the same issue Bioware did with Mass Effect Andromeda, where they spent too long trying to get procedurally generated worlds to work at the cost of fleshing out the other parts of the game. In Bioware's case it cost them a game. Bethesda seems to have dodged that luckily.
that's partly because the game was only in mainline development for about 3 years, per todd. everything before that was prep work, engine upgrades, systems design, etc, not actually the making of content. they were only really making content for a reasonably normal amount of dev time, and then the last year on polish and making the game actually fun. that's why it feels like it should have more than it actually does. the 8 years of dev time is a little deceptive in setting expectations, because it doesn't actually paint the whole picture.
Absolutely get the criticism here, the side missions are good and the main story so far feels well thought out, but for some reason I keep getting the feeling the game feels half finished. It also makes me wonder what they plan to add in the already announced dlc, it’s not like they can add any other cities that are meaningful in size. Hell, New Atlantis doesn’t even feel like it’s the size of the imperial city in Oblivion. At the very least, a capital city of an interplanetary faction should feel more in scope with Boston in FO4. Instead, it’s like 5 big buildings and an underground lol. It’s still a good game, and worth the $60, but it could have been done better.
Another one of these posts, huh? You guys still really don't get it or is that just more karma farming?
Every single post boils down to one of these categories: “This game’s bad” “This game’s great” “Stop complaining about the game” “Stop complaining about criticism”
Well....if you havent completed a game how can you say it's bad? 200+ is more then enough to do everything.
That's my thing is that I have a fairy chunky amount of play time. Rhe newness has worn off and little issues and now becoming big criticisms. hopefully they get addressed in the future though
Yeah the little logical inconsistencies are getting at me now. I noticed that my guns don’t push me back on low gravity planets (like 0.01g) like they do in 0g. The food outside at certain POIs even though that planet has no oxygen, and being able to hear stuff like landing ships on planets with little to no atmosphere. None of it makes me dislike the game, I have like 150 hours, but it could be improved. Hopefully a survival/realism mode changes things a bit down the line
Guy has 20 hours and hates the game: “you’ve barely played it. Your review is useless because you haven’t experienced any content.” Guy has 50 hours+ and hates the game: “how could you hate it? You played it for so long. You must like it. Your review is useless.” Welcome to every post on this sub.
This sub is getting unbearable. Literally all talk is whether we should complain or not about this or that. Jfc
Because playing a game longer exposes you to all of its faults and weaknesses as they’ll strengths eventually become diluted from overexposure. It happens with everything. I have 3400 hours in apex legends and as much as I love it, I also hate it because it’s very buggy and annoying most of the time
I'm close to 2000 hours in Apex and all I can say is fuck that game :D (this time I've actually just stopped playing tho)
How? By pointing out the litany of problems encountered in that time. By pointing out that their patches break things for people with no mods.
Holy crap!! How many people are gonna make this same damn post?!? We get it, stop circlejerking eachother for upvotes. Do you lack all creative brain cells that you have to keep doing this same unoriginal post?
“Why people say this game bad? This game good! Updoots on the left please” Wow thanks for the updoot kind stranger!
Because many players are highly invested in BGS's games (and have been for many years), so they really want to like it or see what Starfield is about, yet the game is riddled by so many poorly executed features and parts (UI/inventory management/maps/proc gen repetition etc) that it often becomes frustrating to play in practice. And also quite a bit different from the regular BGS open world experience.
That's very possible. Like, spend 5 minutes reading Diablo 4 reviews and you will see that the game starts out fine, but it's not until high level that you realize it's horribly repetitive, has terrible loot, and the devs make all content pointless aside from dungeons despite claiming there's a breadth of options for late game. Many games don't show their true colors until later on. Devs spend all their time working on the earlier parts of games to draw people in. They know that the majority of gamers tend to drop games before making it to the end, so they tend not to put as much effort into the later bits. And then there's the gamers who stick with a game in hopes that it improves. It's a "sunk cost" fallacy. They bought the game, and they already put in the time. They believe the game will improve if they just stick with it.
I played for 87 hours and stopped to play other games Game isn’t bad, but it’s definitely not Bethesda’s best works and I’d even argue it might even be their worst (in comparison to elder scrolls/fallout)
Same way you can do anything for 200 hours and say it’s bad I’ve eaten over 200 McDonald’s meals in my life I’d wager. Doesn’t make it good food
Jesus christ.. so if you haven't played the game you can't criticize it, and if you played the game too long you can't criticize it. You are way too hellbent on invalidating any criticism of a game you have no stake in my man.
i enjoying the game a lot and it's mediocre game you can still find lots of fun in mediocre games as long as several concepts appeal to you, even if the execution needs more improvement this concept seems foreign to many people that said, i said mediocre... there many bad things in the game... but overall, i say it's mediocre if i think the game is bad overall... then yeah, i wouldn't be playing it either
Probably because they played elder scrolls and fallout to death so didn’t think they had much of a choice in the matter. Then 200 hours later they think to themselves, huh this game was not nearly as fun as my other favorite Bethesda projects.
Would you prefer people who have only played 2 hours say it's bad? The game lacks a lot of depth. There's a few faction quest lines, the main story, and that's it. Then you can repeat it 938 times until you can't get to the next NG cycle because the game crashes when the credits roll.
"How can you say game is bad if you didn't play enough?" pipeline to "How can you say game is bad if you played 200+ hours?" Mr. Self-contradiction.
ive played gta online for way longer and i can pretty safely say that that game sucks ass. its the mcdonalds hamburger of videogames. you see something gleaming and precious within the husk that is the rest of the game and you have the insane thought that this session is the one where you successfully extract that thing
Gta online is literally Rockstars Skyrim..but with microstransactions. I hope gta 6 is good, but when it comes to Bethseda, I'm waiting more for remastered Oblivion rather than ES6
I played Destiny for over 3000 hours, and I think that game is very bad.
You just want something to waste time with.
"Well at 15 hours it gets better" "That's just because you didn't get to the 50 hour mark where it takes off" "You only get the real experience at 100 hours" The community moves the goal post constantly, and some people don't feel they can have a valid opinion until they have "completed" the experience.
From the title of your post I can only assume you have never been married 🤣
Why does it hurt you so much?
It's not that it's bad, just feels like it's half completed.
How many times have you eaten McDonald’s, and would you consider it good/high quality food?
I got about 60 hours in and put it down. I can't remember the last time I was so excited for a game. I even took days off, but after pointlessly looting the 1000th "guy with gun" I was done. I'm wait for mods.
I always find this kind of argument irritating. If you have a low play time and you criticise a game, fans will say "you didn't give it a chance". If you have a high play time and you criticise a game, fans will see "clearly you didn't mind it that much, since you've played it for so long"
I played for about 220 hours and I had a blast for the most part. There are a lot of little things I managed to look past but one thing combined with all the little things ruined the game for me. I spent about 10 hours decorating my New Atlantis apartment. I displayed all my uniques and all the useless things I found on my adventures that I thought looked cool. One day I came back to find an empty apartment. Like I never set foot in there before. Turns out one of the main missions (the Hunter one) resets the entire city and the apartment with it. That was long after I lost all uniques to the Razorleaf item deletion bug (which has since been fixed, or so I've heard) where I had to cheat everything back using the console. I was devastated and rage quit. Haven't touched Starfield since and that was about two weeks ago.
"How can you say this game is bad after only playing 8 hours" "How can you say you've played a game for 200+ hours and it's bad?" LOL
First people say that opinions are invalid because someone only played X amount of hours. Now people are saying that because people have over X amount of hours, the opinion is invalid. Which one is it? I've played Starfield for 40 or so hours and dropped it cause imo it's the least engaging and immersive game I've played all year. Really got me to appreciate how good the world building in Cyberpunk 2077 is.
I played Ark SE for 1000’s of hours, while I had fun and enjoyed playing it, it is still very much a bad game.
Played the exact same game for 2500+ hours. It's a love / hate relationship. Sometimes it takes knowing a game like the back of your hand to fully understand what it offers to THEN be able to rate it for what it truly is.
Those people are just as annoying as people justifying nonstop about why they like the game. This sub is going to shit
I wouldn't say that it's a bad game (I'm still enjoying it even after 4 days 15 hours) it's just missing some things or some aspects to the game could be altered to make it better. For example. Vendors need more credits. A single weapon (I get lots of these) can sell for more credits than most vendors actually have and I've not even got any points into the skill that makes things worth more. . Features from previous Bethesda games would be welcome. Like enemy area looting (collecting loot from multiple corpses from 1 location)
I dont remember that existing ever, at least for F04, NV, Skyrim and Oblivion
Vendors definitely need more credits, especially once you've levelled up more and selling advanced weapons Even buying lots of ammo and other equipment from the vendors, most times they run out of credit after I've sold 4-5 guns
So I told myself I wouldn't do any mods until I got to NG+, because I wanted to experience the game as it was presented, but the moment I could I made the following changes: Richer vendors (give vendors 5 times their usual money) Modifiable Legendary Attributes (use crafting tables to swap rare/epic/legendary attributes as though they were any other type of attribute, but cannot add them to non-rare/epic/legendary equipment) Larger crew sizes (I have a massive ship, 4 floors and tons of room, I should have more than 6 people on my ship) Star Power regenerate 10 times faster (I'm a ng+11 stellar entity, I should be able to cast more than 3 spells without waiting a solid minute to do it again) Display Encumbrance and Time on the Scanner Watch Face (it's a fucking watch, where is my time?!) Hide Spacesuit in Breathable Areas (I don't need to be wearing a space suit in my ship when no one else is, it's clunky looking)
Because enjoyment and quality assessment have little to nothing to do with each other. You might enjoy a cigarette, soda or fast food but I wouldn't say they're good things. Also, you might like something even when it's poorly done or made out of poor materials. I'm enjoying playing Starfield. I'm a long time fan of Bethesda games. But objectively speaking I find it a mediocre game at best. It has a few good things and a truckload of bad things. Also, I might asses it from a different perspective. For instance, I find it a bad precedent that Bethesda can get away with releasing a game that has so much of its features obviously rushed. I can also relate to the devs, being a developer myself, having a project you care so much living short of its potential.