Starfield user score drops to "mostly positive" on steam

This might be the most concise and accurate review I've seen. Nothing long winded, no excuses, no fanboyism, being fair and holding it up as it is.

Personally I'd give it like a C or maybe B- at the top. It's fine, but there are so many missing basic quality of life features that should be there.

My biggest gripes are all focused on outposts though. Outposts seemed to be one of the focuses from the marketing material, but they're a pain in the ass to actually use. There's somehow no list of the outposts you have, let alone a way to view what they're producing. Outposts need to be linked together, but there's no way to sort or auto-delete items, so it all eventually will get clogged up with lead, or whatever other resource doesn't get used often. You'll have to manually go through your containers to remove the clog and just dump it on the ground, where it'll remain for the rest of your playthrough. There's no snapping for anything except storage containers and the habitation modules. Everything else has to be placed by hand with manual rotations, so nothing is ever lined up. The alignment will also change after you place an object, so literally nothing will ever be aligned.

I have issues with many other parts of the game too, but outposts seem so incomplete, and somehow generally worse than what we had in FO4. Yet, outposts were prominent in their marketing. How?

I’m not sure where you’re from, but in the US a 75/100 is a C. B would be 80-89.

It's clear to me that Bethesda thinks Skyrim was peak Elder Scrolls, when I think Morrowind was peak Elder Scrolls. Unfortunately, it seems too much to ask for a decent story and interesting side content.

So I just don't buy Bethesda games anymore. I was disappointed in Skyrim, and Fallout 4 wasn't really my thing. It also doesn't help that I don't like the leveling mechanics of RPGs either and tend to prefer ARPGs like Ys and Zelda where leveling isn't a major part of the game loop. I know what Bethesda offers, and it's just not what I'm looking for these days. I play RPGs for story and immersion, not for graphics, character builds, and mods, and Bethesda seems to be more interested in the latter than the former.

But that's what I appreciate from Bethesda. They're pretty consistent at delivering a certain experience, it just so happens that it's not for me.

You want bland NPCs then you should play BG3.

Ah, a fellow N'wah.

Their only great game since Morrowind wasn’t even made by them.

I will agree, Morrowind was an amazing game.

My guilty pleasure is to install Morrowind again and commit to replaying it, but to instead do another Skyrim playthrough because I just have more fun for some reason.

There's something about the newer Bethesda games. I'll go and install legacy games from other companies all the time for the sense of nostalgia, but despite having beaten almost all of them going back to Arena, if I want a Bethesda game I always end up playing Skyrim or FO4. And now (I presume) Starfield

They were certainly Bethesda games. I'm not even remotely fond of multiplayer fallout. But for 4, it's a marvelous modding world that I've sunk over a thousand hours into.

Fallout 4 was a great game, but like Fallout 3, was a terrible Fallout game. Fallout 4 is what Fallout 3 should have been.

This is the moat insane thing i have ever heard. Or it's some sort of burn because how shit they are.

Bethesda made way more games than that. Are you new to gaming? You should check out their website.

Anything is better than No Man Sky, after a trillion updates they still haven’t fixed the one issue the game has. There is only a single planet but a million copies of it with different colors.

i know that one, and my comment was 100% not about that none, really just about people really

It's such a bizarre, but real issue. I've always been boggled by the idea that you can't offer your opinion on some games without first giving them a full work week. "I know you just sat there for the length of 5 movies and didn't like it, but it doesn't really get good until you sit through another 10."

If you give it 2 hours, a game should have made it worth your time.

2 hours is more than enough for general impression IMO. Just imagine watching a 2 hour movie that is boring AF. I can't judge them for quiting.

This is the best answer, players are invested after a certain point, but the realization that they don't like the game comes later in the process. The more you play the game you don't like the more you're frustrated with it and the more likely you are to give it a poor rating, especially when the things that are your biggest complaints feel like obvious bug fixes that should have already happened, but continue to exist.

Wait you think danganronpa fucks up it's third act? I was absolutely hooked from start to finish for danganronpa 1 and 2. Not yet had the time to play 3 properly yet though but I've looked what I've played so far.

80 hours? Have you even made it to Whiterun?

Why did you spend so much time with it then? Surely you would've stopped after a few hours of not enjoying yourself, no?

Yes, this was exactly how I felt when playing Fire Emblem Engage. God. I hated how the hub world basically sucked an equal amount of time for each map I cleared. Sure, the mini-games are optional,But so is brushing your teeth.

I may be getting older but it feels like a lot of games are just padding their runtime with gameplay that doesn't mesh well at all.

I have about 30 hours in it now. I wouldn't say it gets any better over that time, if you didn't like it at the beginning you won't like it after 30 hours.

Customers aren't professional reviewers. Paying customers are entitled to have their opinion at any time. Tiny Tina's Wonderland immediately put me off with that lame overworld. I think I clocked around 3 hours and then uninstalled it. Never ever would I spend dozens of hours in a game where a significant portion massively annoys me.

IDK, I think 10 hours is plenty for any game, and 2 hours is enough for most. By two hours, you've likely discovered the core gameplay loop and seen how it handles progression, and by 10 hours you've seen whether that core gameplay loop changes throughout the game.

I don't like negative reviews for games when they've spent double the time HLTB gives for a playthrough. I don't expect to play much more than "main + extras" on any game, so any review that's expecting content beyond that just isn't useful for me.

Yes exactly!

Games are meant to entertain. If they aren't fun or force you to do unfun things, then why waste your time on them?

I got the same with collectibles in games. Chasing collectibles is boring to me, and you will never see me going for one that isn't directly on my path. It is meaningless fluff.

Chrono Trigger was the first example of a game that came to my head that's just great. I replayed it a few weeks ago as well. It's time better spent than playing a shitty game for 100 hours.

Yeah, and I don't get why. We quite literally got exactly what we expected with Starfield, and nobody said we would get anything different. For those of us who enjoy it, we got precisely what we were promised. For those who don't enjoy it, nobody tried to pretend they were getting something different.

If I have one complaint, they did not manage to brand it as effectively as they branded Fallout (the blonde cartoon, music, etc). But then, they never managed to brand tES that way and we're all still alive.

My 2c. Isn't it a breath of fresh air that we got a complete game without $100s in day1 DLC required to make it playable?

It's been in the top 10 (and often in top 5) concurrent players on steam since release so I think you just don't like it, but many others still do.

I think a big part of the problem is just hype cycles. People had expectations that were through the roof. They didn't tell you they had seamless transitions to space, and they didn't tell you they had BG3 caliber branching conversation trees (which we're a long way from being able to realistically do outside of a CRPG). But people seemingly expected that.

I watched the direct and we got basically what I expected (though the gunplay feels better than I expected. I definitely felt like VATS was needed in FO4.) It's Bethesda's game design philosophy of a massive world with a bunch of different play styles and a bunch of different quest lines (and smaller single quests) and locations that don't have to be done in any order. You can easily get sidetracked and go down rabbit holes. They iterated on most of their core features and adapted them to the new setting in a really well done way.

I also love the way the skill system brought back the "get better by doing" philosophy of Skyrim with challenges to unlock higher levels, and the story telling is sci fi in more than just skin.

Not gonna lie, I’m not a huge fan of turn based combat anymore. I feel like I’ve been burnt out after playing Pokémon for over 20 years.

I'm playing Baldurs Gate 3 with friends and Starfield singleplayer. And I am enjoying both.

They aren't the same game, even though they both rely on story and some aspects of the game are the same (like coming up with your own character and wanting to see how the story affects them)

Nope, not true in the slightest. There's actually a lot of variety in biomes, flora, fauna, characteristics - and a lot of them even have multiple biomes with different life per biome.

What i expect people are complaining about is one of two things:

1. Planet scanning is boring.
2. On noes generated dungeons

To the first point, I agree planet scanning gets pretty boring if that's all you do for 5 hours straight. But there's a TON of content in this game. Switch it up. Once you're done with a mission, go explore the planet you ended up on and scan the things. Or don't. Who cares. Planet scanning isn't necessary at all. I think a lot of people see that planet scanning gives you a ton of credits and xp, go grind that one thing, and then complain that it's boring.

On the second point, yes every planet will have a bunch of locations that are like "Cave" or "Covered Crater" or "Abandoned Facility" and such. A lot of them are small resource troves, but the facilities actually feel pretty handbuilt - if you check them out. But I think a lot of people see "Abandoned [whatever]" and think "oh autogenerated content, meh" without checking it out. I certainly have been guilty of that. But every time I actually decide to go in, I'm surprised at how much fun I actually have in those environments, how much environmental storytelling is actually there, and how well built the levels are. I feel like they hand built a bunch of these or components of them and an engine puts it all together.

The reality is that every Beth game ever has used procedural generation. And they've been getting better at it with each game. Skyrim felt less empty that Oblivion. Starfield feels less empty, overall anyway, than Skyrim. The handbuilt hub planets are way busier than any location in Skyrim. The procedural worlds feel more empty than skyrim for sure, but it makes plenty of sense, theres still plenty to do, and the amount of planets makes it feel less empty. And overall, there's a LOT more handbuilt and story content than skyrim - by several factors imo.

I'll also point out that the procedural content is just flavor. You don't need to engage in it but it's there if you want it. This game has a TON of handbuilt content - more than any other Beth game. The faction quests feel like a full game in their own right. The side quests are plentiful and quite deep. Complaining about procedural content in this game feels like complaining about the number of leaves on a tree.

There's both too much and too little stuff on planets. The random outposts it spawns are kind of boring but it's annoying when I want to put down an outpost and the game has randomly put someone else on the best spot. But when I want to get to them, there's a long walk for pretty much nothing.

Steam reviews are generally 90% memes or circle jerking.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint had mostly negative. The reviews all complain about either no achievements or the fact that the game was locked to their Ubisoft launcher first. Not real criticism of the game, especially considering most of what people complained about on release was fixed by the time it got put onto Steam.

It's now 7 months later and it's finally gone up to mixed with mostly positive reviews recently, despite no changes to the game.

Compare Breakpoint to Wildlands, it's not as good previous game, all of the recent reviews are still circle jerking but posting positively.

As soon as Steam embraced the memes and shit reviews by adding a Funny button its reviews went to shit.

Hi-Fi Rush, Remnant 2 as well in the AA area. It's been a pretty good year tbh

One of the major disappointments imo is that space isn't interesting. You only really go there for the odd ship battle to progress the plot or whatever, but you can't really fly between planets, so you miss out on the cool side stories you get with Elder Scrolls games by walking between cities. I was hoping for Firefly the Bethesda game, but it's just Skyrim stretched across planets that you fast travel between.

I want to find ships in distress, pirate outposts among asteroid fields, scuttled ships I can scavenge, etc. In other words, space should be a mechanic, not just a setting.

I think the planets are fine, but I'd rather have fewer, more densely populated planets. I don't think space-colonizing people would only make 3-4 settlements per planet, there would be dozens if not hundreds of settlements before moving to the next planet. I'd rather buy a DLC to get access to more systems then current setup where everything is spread out. In fact, just give me Sol with Earth, Mars, and maybe one of a Jupiter's moons being inhabited with the rest working like the planets in Starfield.

But no, it's just Skyrim set it space, with fast travel between cities. That's fine, just not particularly special. I may play it at some point, but it's not what I'm looking for right now.

BG3 has very weak rpg and story telling elements.

There's a lot of gamers out there who believe they are Bethesda fans, and this is one of the first times they've actually had to reconcile the game's quality vs the developer they think consistently puts out good games. The amount of comments displaying obvious buyers remorse masquerading as defense of the game is hilarious.