People are being entitled taint-lickers. It does suck that its optimization is poor, but I’m on a 4 year-old PC build and my CPU was not top-end even then, with a 3070 and I have had zero issues running it. The space travel should be more interesting, they really fucked up by making space piracy basically impossible, so you can’t ever profit by taking the ships of people who actively try to murder you. There’s a lot that could be more engaging, but also the reviews of Elex are mostly positive and it’s one of the worst, most quest-bugged half finished pieces of shit I’ve ever played, with basically nothing going for it beside decent art and a unique story. The game is trash and I wasted way too much time on it. Starfield is vastly better. Not amazing, but solidly OK. Without the social-media circle-jerk, there is no way the reviews would continue to get worse as they continue to address performance issues and fix bugs.
the reviews of Elex are mostly positive
Yes, and Piranha Bytes is small AA German game studio with a staggering 33 people as of 2021 (according to wikipedia) that have always stuck to their lane and made very niche games in the background that are basically only appealling to their audience. They know damn well who they’re aiming at with their stuff too, because they’re not trying to change the formula much as of Elex 2 or grab as much people as possible.
You can compare that to Bethesda (that according to inside sources, wants to act like a AA when they’re acctually AAA in manpower, budget, and project scope), with it’s 450 people on staff and different subsidaries that work together with them as needed, to Piranha Bytes, but that’d be disingenuous as all hell.
Its insane to me that you just compared those two games
If only because a lot of the positive reviews for elex are extremely vocal about the way the game falls flat and fails to give a good experience, and that the thumbs up is because of the knowledge of the devs small size.
There is something to be said for the game to be hyped for YEARS and to come out being much less than what the hype seemed to imply. Running on the old and tired poorly-optimized “not Gamebryo” engine, a bunch of fetch quests punctuated by fast travel “exploration”, and mostly empty procedurally-generated planets bolted in to make Todd Howard’s vision of 1000 planets a hollow reality… all of that can get people feeling pretty underwhelmed with the game.
It isn’t necessarily that Starfield is bad, but that it is not great, and that it continues to be pushed as some amazing experience it isn’t. Sorry Todd, but I’ve been to some of the Wonders of the World before. I’m not going to be in awe of your virtual empty planet and the vastness of space and how beautiful it is through a computer screen. It just doesn’t hit the same way that you want it to, especially in the way most gamers will experience it.
Here’s the kicker, though… some parts of Starfield can become great. Fallout 76 was bad and got better when Wastelanders added NPCs, so it stands to reason they could make some sizable shifts that make the game more enjoyable.
It couldn’t possibly be the fact that the game is just mid as all fuck, and people are far enough past the honeymoon phase that they’re finally having to accept it.
People posting OPINIONS on a site made for posting OPINIONS?!
How DARE they?!
No. It’s got nothing to do with “Haters being Haters”. The camel’s back just finally broke.
Frankly, it’s something that I’m surprised didn’t happen sooner. People got tired of excusing Bethesda’s many blunders since they joined Microsoft (because after that, they should have no excuse for mediocre…anything, especially on the technical side) Bethesda also got too used to people giving them a pass and going “oh, silly Bethesda!” when they saw a severe bug or just bad/mediocre mechanics, where if it was anyone else, they’d be rightfully upset that they paid fully AAA price and the game was a broken, bug filled mess (sometimes with bugs that date back to Morrowind, at that), and is finally feeling that burn others normally get. It was cute (apparently) in 2006 with Oblivion, it’s no longer cute in 2023.
It’s also likely to do with Bethesda’s attitude. Them responding to criticism about some planets being empty and boring to explore with things like “it’s not boring. When Armstrong and the gang landed on the moon IRL, they weren’t bored” or just passive aggresively in general to negative reviews with actual critisms of the game instead of taking the critisim to heart and striving to maybe add some content to them as an update (or DLC, but them charging $70, then asking for more money to fix a problem in the base game would bring em more heat than anything) being some examples.
Or the fact that, instead of fixing severe bugs or optimizing their game, they’re introducing this Creations thing and basically doing what i said in parenthesis above.
Fair, but here’s the thing:
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It’s a big release with a life cycle. Big release by the guys who made Skyrim? it’s going to continue to get new people even after it’s life cycle officially ends. So as long as Bethesda keeps digging themselves deeper instead of out the hole they made, the negative reviews and press will keep coming; by these new folks and the current players who see Bethesda basically making the situation worse in order to give any curious buyers a warning to be mindful at what they’re going to throw money at. Do some people sometimes go a bit too scathing in their takes? Sure. But honestly? I’m not gonna blame em. I know a disillusioned person when i see one, and disillusioned or otherwise, they’re still not at all wrong with most of their complaints.
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the “hater” thing…yeah, most of these aren’t haters. If they were bringing up BS claims, sure (See: The Pronouns thing). But the majority of “hate” this game is getting is…actual shortcomings the game has, or for the pretty crappy responses the devs put out in response. Dare I say it, most of the “hate” is by actual fans of Bethesda. Again, very disillusioned likely now former fans, but yeah. Haters don’t spend the energy to go this indepth about something, fans passionate about the thing typically do tho.
Like i said in my other comment, the camel’s back broke for a lot of people after 13 long years. Not 5 or 3 years, 13. Even more if you were a Bethesda fan before Skyrim.
People leave steam reviews when they’ve played a game. There’s no deadline. So why wouldn’t new reviews be coming in? It happens to all games. Why should Starfield be different?
Its getting regular updates. I think every 6 weeks. Each new update will disturb the water, when it either breaks what few mods are out already and someone quits fixing it, or when the update fails to fix/creates a new bug and someone finds that to be too much.
Then a new wave of annoyed people will reignite the conversation.
Youre also going to see each time that more and more people start talking praise on the game. As some people do just like it as is, and as updates repair or add enough things that some people are willing to consider “enough” to undo the previous flaws.
How much of each depends on if those updates are actually ever good, or if theyre lackluster or fail to stick to the called shot schedule.
I love when people actually critique games, that’s how you get better games. Just refund and leave a non-aggressive negative review, let them know the concerns, blind fans are still going to call ‘hate’, but their claim has no foundation if you are just genuinely being a critic. People really settle for average and ‘rinse and repeat’ games, you can demand more, don’t bend over to these AAA companies.
Seriously though, stop buying games in the first week or two of them releasing, let the dust settle first, they aren’t going anywhere.
Yup. That second bit should be a golden standard, but…honestly? Knowing companies hire psychiatrists and all that jazz that tell them exactly what they need to put out there to get people to buy, install FOMO, hit addicts where it hurts, or just wear them down till they eventually say “yes”, and that its not just for games, it becomes kinda murky for me to just throw all the blame at the people buying. Not saying that people shouldn’t do their do dilagence (and after a while, to learn to ignore said marketing tricks. Fool me once and all that), they absolutely should, just that the other side are also hitting bellow the belt every chance they can in order to make a sale.
No! Why would you say that? What a weird Idea. People are saying it’s a shit game because it is a shit game.
If it was a shit game, why does it need to keep getting mentioned?
It sucks, move on with your life.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m not even saying it sucks really, to me it’s just not super compelling so far. End of story. Not gonna talk about it anymore. And I’ve decided after this thread that Starfield is going in my Lemmy content filter. I don’t care in the least how much people hate it so I don’t need to read about it every 4 days.
It keeps getting mentioned because it’s the new Bethesda game (also its kind of a big deal being their first new IP in, what, 20 years?), it hasn’t been even a year since it dropped (so it’s still fresh to people), and it has more content coming. And because every new update will stir the old users again and bring a new wave of users that will also keep mentioning its improvements and its flaws.
And i mean, even aside from that, Oblivion and Morrowind still get mentioned to this day (in both good ways and bad), and they’re much older. Same’s going to happen to Starfield. It’s just the way it is.
i had a lot of fun. i think people just expect too much from this type of game and bethesda. look at no mans sky, i still think its just as boring as when it released but it has gained a great following. people now seem to just assume if a game is made by a AAA team everyone must love it regardless of personal taste. in my opinion that mind set is the reason most AAA get focus grouped to death. im scared that people are going to kill off the type of games i like because everyone acts like its crime to release a game that doesn’t appeal to everyones exact tastes/desires.
i will say though starfield is my least favorite bethesda game. starfield 7/10
look at no mans sky, i still think its just as boring as when it released
I get opinions are subjective, but I don’t believe this is a fair opinion to have, based on the amount of new content they have released over the life of the game. They’ve added more quests and more things to do and explore.
It’s a very sandboxy game, which may be what you’re speaking towards (if you don’t enjoy sandbox games that is)?
There’s no voiceover work to be spoken of. You’re constantly just reading dialog and menus. The loop isn’t that different from almost any other open world survival crafting game, except it has spaceships you can fly from planet to space - just like in Space Engineers an arguably better space sandbox game that’s actually a sandbox.
My comment was directed towards this though, and not what you mentioned …
i still think its just as boring as when it released
… I was challenging the before and after nature that the OP was commenting about, especially after all the new content that was added to NMS over the years.
When I mentioned sandbox that was because I was trying to determine if he’s a ‘guided path’ versus ‘sandbox’ type of player, and maybe that’s what might be driving his boredom factor throughout the life of NMS, versus the before and after nature comparison.
As far as your comment goes (see below), none of that talks towards the boredom of the NMS game, just a similarity to other survival games, as well as mentioning another sandbox game that you thought was better.
There’s no voiceover work to be spoken of. You’re constantly just reading dialog and menus. The loop isn’t that different from almost any other open world survival crafting game, except it has spaceships you can fly from planet to space - just like in Space Engineers an arguably better space sandbox game that’s actually a sandbox.
I bought it about 2 years after launch, played through the main story, and then kinda got bored with it because it’s just the same thing over and over again. I came back after the first major update, played it for a few weeks and then got bored again because it was mostly a “fixing things to how we wanted them to be”. I played after the next major update as well and while it did bring some new life back into the game, it’s still essentially just “build a base to put these few things in and collect resources so you can build more stuff” or “do these pointless side quests so that you can buy/build more stuff”.
Thanks for the clarification. I am curious about one thing though?
Are you a ‘sandbox’ type of player, or a ‘guided path’ type of player (if you had to choose one)?
I’m wondering if you’re the latter type of player, and if it has driven your outlook on the game, throughout all the years it’s existed, with all the additional content added to it throughout those years?
The problem is that the game fell flat even on a lot of basic expectations, especially exploration.
When you first arrive on a new star, you’re automagically orbiting the “most important planet”, if it has one. Without doing anything other than arriving, you already know all the inorganic resources of every planet and moon around that star (you don’t know where, but you already know it’s there without a scan). Not only that, you know which planets have abandoned mines or settlements and where. While flying in orbit, if “nothing happens” in the first 10 seconds, nothing will happen, period. POI in space all have to be fast traveled to.
It manages to be worse than NMS where the parallel is obvious, like in scanning fauna/flora, where you activate the scanner, point and click and call it day. But do it 8 times just to say it’s different.
Shipbuilding is fun, but the fucked that up by locking many parts behind two different skills, Piloting and Starship Design. It really feels like something they did because they couldn’t figure a way to balance the economy around ship prices. They could’ve made it so that you get access to better parts by completing faction missions, that’d give actual reason for the players to do them other than sheer curiosity, but nope, spend precious skill points to get better ship parts!
This game is a pile of bad design decisions on top of more bad design decisions and whether the company is AAA or not is irrelevant. Bad implementation, aka errors and bugs, is a matter of coding. Bad design is a matter of direction, or lack thereof.
i agree that the exploration outside of the main areas is very sparce, but i think its important to cosider thats is what was promised, and the lore backs it up. i liked the hand-crafted areas a lot but outside of those areas tends to feel like NMS with a couple generic things to do every some often. but i still enjoyed building my bases and running in a circle around them destorying all abandon factories with rando baddies i could find.
i agree the fact that they are a AAA studio is irrelevant, but most people do judge things differently when considering this. its too often i see people praising indie games that i eventually try and hate. but i dont freak out and call it terrible, i stop playing. and i see well made AAA games that i greatly enjoy get review bombed for defending there design decisions which were based of what the designers consider fun.
but i dont agree that they made a “pile” of bad decisions. Again i think they were trying to make a fun game and most of the designer probably enjoyed playing it before releasing. but the majority of people who thought bethesda was making “their” dream space shooter didn’t like it so know bethesda is evil for some reason. i liked this game, i will play the dlc, and likely replay it.
I agree that the skill-locked purchase of physical equipment is garbage but I found myself sticking on the question of if you got the ‘de-facto’ best ship part for each category because you had the relevant skill.
Like some quest is occuring and, in dialogue, you have a choice locked by being the most-skilled pilot and choosing it leads to one set of the best ship parts. How does that flow? Does that read as the same thing, or is it more enjoyable now as a reward for character build?
you have a choice locked by being the most-skilled pilot and choosing it leads to one set of the best ship parts. How does that flow?
You got my idea wrong
you get access to better parts by completing faction missions,
I meant that, as a reward for finishing a quest, or series of quests, the ship parts become available. It’s not “choose to get a ship part during the quest”, it’s “complete quest, vendors now sell new stuff”.
For instance, completing mission 4 of the UC Vanguard opens up B class parts because “congratulations, we’re promoting you” or, given how that questline flows, “We’re promoting you because things are getting dangerous and you need access to the extra stuff”. Completing the final mission unlocks C class parts. But those are only at the Deimos Staryards, since they’re the sole contractor for UC. It wouldn’t make sense to complete their questline and also get access to FC’s B and C class ship parts, for that you’d have to complete their Freestar Ranger questline. That’s the idea.
Still a 7? Just curious, what made it fun for you? What were the expectations? Legit curious, as finding a good comment about the game that doesnt sound salty af is far in between.
I found skyrim fun for 60ish hours and than got extremely bored. Never touched it again. Starfield looked like that but barren as hell, which is not what it is sold as. Those are my personal reasons for not touching it though!
well, i thought of it as fallout 4 in space before playing. it has a couple core gameplay changes i liked and a couple i didn’t. it is the slowest paced bethesda game for sure, which is why i think most people call it boring. if you didnt replay skyrim i doubt you would replay this game. i give it a 7/10 for people of my taste and i would consider myself the intended audience. i have played bethesda games since oblivion and average about 200 hours per bethesda game, usually 3 playthroughs seperated by about a year or 2. for reference here are my top bethesda games:
- Fallout: New Vegas - 9/10(obsidian for a major win)
- Fallout 3 - 9/10
- Oblivion - 9/10
- Skyrim - 8/10
- Fallout 4 - 8/10
- Starfield - 7/10
- Fallout 76 - 3/10 - i wish i could enjoy this game
these scores reflect how much i enjoyed each game. but if New Vegas had no technical issues it would be 10/10 for me.
Can I mod new Vegas to make it look or perform better on an Xbox? The graphics really break my immersion.
Ye, that makes perfect sense, thanks! From your other scoring, i can see the game isnt that bad, but just average. Even compared to the others, which are rated a lot higher. From this i can also assume id enjoy the game for like 30sh hours, because this isnt 100% my jam. For me that wouldnt be worth the full price, but i can understand for somebody that would put 200h in np it would be worth it :)
Not op but I too give it 6 or 7. I liked the story. I liked shooting things. I liked the dialogue. I liked the base building. Liked the graphics, it was super quick for me on my 4900 xt. But everything was liked. Not loved. It was mediocre in everything. The POI were fun, but there are like 10 that get recycled. I like the planets but they’re also recycled. I like the cities but they’re all the size of a tiny town. It’s fun but it was sold as something grand which undersold it’s promises. First colony outside of earth, biggest civilization, has like a population of 100 if that. They should have sold the entire story as worlds on the rim. Not the hub of humanity.
I knew what to expect, and I was still disappointed. I was expecting the constant loading, and the jank, and the shit AI, etc. I was also expecting the world building to be decent, and the quests to be interesting with tons of distractions that keep you coming back. That’s what makes it a disappointment; the actually good things about a Bethesda RPG are totally absent in Starfield. It’s just the mechanics and formula; none of the flair or personality.
People expected a game about exploration. Because it’s a Bethesda game, and because it’s a space bethesda game, and somehow Bethesda managed to make a game that doesn’t really have exploration in it despite having loads of planets.
Why did they not just make a single solar system full of curated content, why did it have to be set in the vast universe forcing them to use random generation, that is full of nothing? They sent themselves up to fail on this one.
after starfield i finally played Outer Wilds (not a typo) and goodness, i have so much more memories with that game than starfield, despite the fact i finished it in half the time i beat starfield
if you’re craving incredibly crafted space exploration play Outer Wilds, don’t look up anything about it though, it’s one of those that will make you wish for amnesia so you can experience it again for the first time
The expansion is very good too if you haven’t played it yet. Luckily my memory isn’t the best so when I managed to replay the game after finally picking up the DLC I got to rediscover many parts of the game.
Throwback to the hard cope when this game released, the fanboy dismissal of any criticism was insane.
Because people can’t have different opinions?
I still think the game is fine. I still think it did some very interesting things. I got over 100 hours of playtime from it. I played on gamepass too. So I definitely got my monies worth.
Does it have problems? Sure. Quite a few, but it’s still enjoyable enough of you don’t expect the too much. It also had tons of potential of they actually release the creation kit.
I don’t think it’s the worst game ever. It’s not even their worst game.
It’s the worst Bethesda RPG game I’ve ever played. What did you think was worse? I suppose the MMOs?
Brink, Rogue Warrior and Fallout 74 come to mind.
Bethesda doesn’t only make RPGs
The game is a solid 7 and still holds immense potential. The lack of updates combined with a lot of quest & progression breaking bugs and dismissal of such criticism is a 0 and why I wrote a negative review.
Solid 7 out of what? If you say out of 100, then yes I agree drinking diarrhea water out of a toilet bowl is more fun to do than playing that shit. If you say out of 10 then you are claiming it’s well above average (5) which means you have been drinking diarrhea water.
Considering how you verbalize yourself I think we both know who’s drinking diarrhea, and likely undiluted.
And if you lack so much nuance you might as well go back to Reddit btw.
A solid 7? I’d give it a 4-5. I very stupidly preordered and I very much regret it. The one and only time I ever did so as well. The game shows a shocking lack of care. It definitely has some systems which ought to be interesting but they’re rendered pointless by the game and the main plot is utterly appalling.
I think Fallout 4 was a solid 7. Starfield seems to have been aiming for F4 in space but it falls short in just about every arena. I remember the settlement feature being really cool but unfortunately not very well integrated into the game, and a little half baked. I was so hype to see Starfield would be bringing it back, but instead it was entirely pointless and a total waste of time, as well as being far more restrictive.
The main quest in F4 was at least relatable and interesting enough with some very nice side quests. Starfield has the most boring narrative of every game I’ve ever played, the mind brainless go-hum fetch quest side quests, and no interesting characters in sight. It was literally the 7/10 Fallout 4 but somehow worse.
Fallout 4 but somehow worse.
Fallout 4 was very mid compared to FO3 and Skyrim.
You should have seen the fucking starfield subreddit before release lmao. One guy on there was genuinely convinced this was “something special” and would revolutionize the gaming industry.
The basis for that claim? The way Todd fucking Howard was acting, and the marketing material for the game.
I personally really enjoyed the trip. Far from perfect, and more a 2010 game in its core, but quite entertaining. However, I would have been disappointed if I had to pay 80€ for it (especially because this game lacks polish). I had no hesitation thanks to the gamepass, and I have no regret playing 100h to it :).
I think the backlash is a bit excessive. It feels like people expected this game to be exceptional, having huge expectations that were never met. It’s Bethesda, how can we expect a master piece from them on day one? Besides, it’s not like a success like Skyrim can be reproduced that easily. It’s not bad to have expectations, but if the game is different than what you had in mind, it’s not the game’s fault imo (and it happens too frequently those years, as if all major releases are bad games that should never be played).
These are just a few random quotes I found with a minute of Googling but there are many more out there. I think people were expecting exceptional and had huge expectations because Bethesda and Microsoft were very much pushing the hype train a lot. They set up the game as one thing and what was delivered was a pale shadow of it. I agree you can’t expect for the success of Skyrim, but it was 100% presented to the world like it would be. There are many parts of the game that fall short of what Skyrim did 13 years ago and what other Bethesda RPGs were doing decades ago in terms of quest design and dialogue.
“We’ve always wanted to play the game we’re making and no-one else has quite pulled it off in what we’re doing. And we feel that once we started putting some pieces in place and playing parts of it, there’s something really… I don’t want to say too much but… pretty incredible there.”
“It’s very big, yeah. People are still playing Skyrim and we have learned from that. We spent more time building [Starfield] to be played for a long time, if you so chose that you just wanted to keep playing it. It’s got some more hooks in it for that, that we added later to a game like Skyrim… while still making sure that somebody who just wants to play it, and go through the main quests and “win”, or feel they’ve accomplished something large is doable.”
“And it has large scale goals and storytelling, but that minute-to-minute feels rewarding for you. And if you just want to pass the time and go watch the sunset and pick flowers it’s rewarding in that way too. The quiet moments feel really really good.”
Yes, it seems to be it. I personally do not like this way of thinking. Marketing is always going to put up some lies in order to sell the product. It feels strange to me to judge a game from what the marketing said about it, instead of what the game truly is. Of course, it would be very disappointing if you can only rely on what the marketing said when deciding to buy or not buy the game. But with all the options available nowadays (reviews, streams, test it for 10€ thanks to the gamepass instead of paying 80€ directly), it seems strange to me to spend so much money, without informing yourself enough, and be this angry afterwards.
As I said, it’s not like the game is perfect, but it’s far to be as bad as those « user reviews » depicts.
It’s the same people who were sending death threats to CDPR over Cyberpunk. They had built up up an internal hype saying that [insert game] was going to replace their life, and they would have no reason to ever leave their computer again. When that obviously didn’t happen (and it had the some bugs on launch, although not universally game-crashing levels of bugs like Skyrim on launch, which people seem to forget) they decided that they needed to stomp the game into the ground and nobody was allowed to enjoy it ever. Unfortunately the internet is all bandwagon these days and the petulant children have managed to get a cloud of negativity to hang around the game. Talk to some adults about the game and you’ll find that it’s solid enough, with a decent amount of gameplay. Is it worth $100? No, buy it on sale for like 30 or 40, but these people saying you are garbage for not believing that the Bethesda team needs to be lynched over this really need yo take their spoiled heads out of their collective ass.
I have major regret for buying this game. Games like this should have a 20 hour refund window instead of 2. It took me 2 hours to realize it wasn’t possible to get the game to not run like garbage.
Steams 2 hour window is not a hard line. I’ve refunded games after spending hours trouble shooting
The two weeks thing I think is the hard limit, but 2 hours most definitely isn’t.
I’ve heard that, but once I tried to refund a game at 3 hours and got nothing but an automated response (denial) everytime I requested a refund.
In this specific case it was actually a game I played 2 hours of during a free weekend approximately 4 years before buying it, played one hour after buying it to see if it had gotten better, decided it hadn’t and refunded it. But Steam counts free weekend playtime towards the refund window…
If there’s any actual way to ensure a human reviews it, that’d be neat. 100% it was automatically denied by some code just checking my playtime and seeing it was past two hours.
I emailed Gabe directly when I had an edge case like that. He forwarded it and it got resolved.
I know when you’re fighting with Google support as an app store developer, including images in correspondence can get a human to look at it as they can’t properly scan that for automation purposes.
Maybe a url in a claim would be the same for steam? Not sure if you can include images.
I once got a refund after 5 hours. I opened the game, left it running at the main menu, then went to make lunch and completely forgot about it. Wasted probably about 3.5 hours in the menu. When I asked for a refund, I didn’t even explain that I’d left it open in the main menu; I just pointed out why I didn’t like it and why I wanted a refund. The game in question was Mount and Blade, store country was Germany, and I submitted the refund request on the same day I bought it.
Even 2 weeks isn’t the hard limit, at least in Australia.
I finished Doom Eternal at launch and put about 20-30 hours into it, but got it refunded when Bethesda added Denuvo to it 3 weeks post launch
Ngl I’m honestly happy with the trade off of being able to refund games when publishers try to pull shit vs being able to buy a Steam Deck
Well if the companies refuse to give you a demo to try, maybe you should pirate it to try and then purchase it.
Another option is becoming a patient gamer and just waiting for the game to get better (if it does) a year or two down the line and then buy it at a discount.
In the last few years there aren’t many games I didnt regret buying early.
I’d rather buy it than spend hours and hours downloading and failing to unpack it for unknown reasons.
But I’m not going to spend more than like 10 minutes trying to make it work. If it takes longer than that, it’s just a shit game that doesn’t deserve my money. Too many other perfectly good games to spend my time playing to fuck around with all of that.
I usually do pirate and then buy (if worthy) but surely a major Bethesda release would be worth 80 bucks, right?
Right?
Wrong. They proved that they could no longer be trusted after the release of Fallout 76.
