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.