I just don’t understand what people were expecting. I expected Skyrim in Space and got that. Expecting a true space sim on top of that? That’s an entirely different ask. I’ve got E:D and NMS if I want to spend hours hopping from one system to the next and deal with space physics. But if I want a story, Starfield is delivering for me.
It is so space skyrim and i’m at 70 hours in. It’s almost like space Daggerfall with all the procedural encounters. I’ve even warmed up to planetary exploration somewhat.
I think a lot of people that are extremely critical of it weren’t going to buy it anyway and just want to enjoy banding together to shit on it in camaraderie because it’s popular to hate it.
There’s also this sort of awkward dynamic that Bethesda has created with its player base where the extensive amount and kinds of mods their games end up with means people view every small facet of the game that they don’t love as something that they want to change and modify, where a different game that’s bolted down and doesn’t have guaranteed mod support would just never have those little bits talked about at all, and the players would just talk about what they like instead.
If you look at comments about Starfield even from players that enjoy it, you notice that most of the time nobody says anything about what they think it’s doing right, aside from a “and it’s still a good Bethesda RPG”, while also having a small list of things they don’t like or want to change. Just knowing that changing these things is possible makes people fixate on wanting them gone or different.
I think a lot of people that are extremely critical of it weren’t going to buy it anyway and just want to enjoy banding together to shit on it in camaraderie because it’s popular to hate it.
Ye olde Nickelback approach
Article in question: https://www.pcgamesn.com/starfield/death-videogames
It says below that hyperbolic headline: “Starfield is a sweeping, exploration-filled RPG from Bethesda, true to the Skyrim and Fallout model, but there’s nowhere else to go with this kind of videogame.”
Of course there is, the writer of this suffers from extreme lack of imagination. What I wanted in Starfield was a galaxy like Elite Dangerous, management and building like X4 Foundations, and the RPG gameplay and storytelling of Bethesda. Instead we got an attractive space part that really is all smoke and mirrors, but the gameplay is still lots of fun despite not being a good space sim.
You dropped a hyphen. I wondēr where it fell.
The hyperbole is strong with this publication.
I have no idea where people get these unreal expectations from. The game is overall good. With one big ‘but’. The engine is very outdated. If it looks this bad on release, just think about how it will look compared to other games 1 year from now.
It is just awful for a game released in 2023. The character model quality is the same as Fallout 4.
