I can’t say much on behalf of the game. I played a total of an hour or so, game was non-appealing and I could tell I wasn’t going to like the skill/weapon system. It was just meh on all sides. I can see why it hit mostly negative.
its seems like most of those negitive reviews have 60+ hours, some of the top negitive reviews are 250+ hours. the standard for boring seems a little funny to me.
Sunk cost. Some people got so hyped up for it, they felt like they had to like it. Turns out that’s not how it works and it’s just… Not a great game.
I mean, we see this kind of review all the time. It’s generally people that run out of things to do and start complaining that the game doesn’t have infinite content.
The art of countering a bad review:
Negative review at 2hrs (refunded)
-Hey, you barely even opened the game!
Negative review at 5hrs
-You can’t say that, you’re barely through the tutorial!
Negative review at 15hrs
-You just haven’t gotten to the good bits yet!
Negative review at 30hrs
-You rushed through it and missed all the good stuff!
Negative review at 60hrs
-Well if you played that long, it can’t have been bad!
Oh for sure, a lot of that too. But I’ve also noticed an overall essence of boredom and disappointment especially when compared to initial expectation, so it wouldn’t do to dismiss most criticism in this way. Bethesda really fed into the “big immersive universe 25 years in the making” thing and even, for example, emphasized the player’s ship in marketing, even though you hardly really fly the ship at all in-game. NPCs feel flat and buggy, most planets are largely empty, and most quests are just… Fetch quests.
I feel like, as with most Bethesda titles, mods are going to breathe new life into this one eventually.
Ikr. If I find a game not fun an hour in then I quit. The fuck these people have time for to play 60+ hours on a mid game
Sometimes you just stick with it to see how god awful it is, or just so you can beat it and wash your hands of it.
Having 100+ hours in it doesnt invalidate any criticism you have.
heres my rough story about how I did 100+ hours in it and why that doesnt make it good.
Yeah, I got bored at 360 hours. If course, I’d be bored with virtually everything after 360 hours, but some people must have higher expectations.
NG+ was a pretty big disappointment. There are a couple of dialogue choices which reference [Starborn] but for the most part you have to play questlines all over again as if you weren’t Starborn at all. Seriously, I’ve lived through this situation seven times already - why can’t I cut to the fucking chase that I know exists.
I liked it well enough. I didn’t even hate the loading screens all that much.
Flying and docking gets really old, really fast. I’d be willing to bet that most of the people who complain that they have a loading screen for docking probably forget that within a few hours into Elite Dangerous they probably just hit the auto-dock key because repeatedly doing it yourself gets boring as hell.
What disappointed me was that there is simply no reason to replay it post-starborn. Sure…some things “might” be a little different. But it’s fundamentally the same experience. So if you’ve completed most of the questlines before moving to the final mission (like I usually do), there is no reason to keep playing the game.
New Universes is just wasted potential. I wanted my post Starborn life to have the ability to jump between universes, like we were able to in that one mission in the research lab. That was great. And it’s a power that should definitely exist.
Imagine you jump into a universe where Sam Coe is somehow the leader of the Crimson Fleet, and in order to accomplish a mission in one universe, you need to steal/get something from the Crimson Fleet, and instead of fighting your way through, you are able to go to the Universe where Sam Coe is the leader and use what you know about him to gain his trust so that he gives it to you and you can take it back with you.
THAT is what I wanted post-starborn; the ability to fundamentally change HOW I complete missions I had already done. What I got was…hey, this person dies instead of this person. So frustrating
I do wish there was a bit of autopilot to how the ship works.
If I am on my ship on a planet, I would like to be able to pick a destination and have my ship just take me there.
It’s not the fast travel itself that is the problem, it’s just all the damn steps that are involved with it. You want to go to a space station, but you can’t just fast travel there. You have to travel to your ship, then you have to travel into orbit, then you have to the destination planet’s orbit, and then you can land.
And often, traveling to your destination’s landing site isn’t enough, with several key points being a good hike away on foot with no ground transport available to help speed things along. We can use ships to travel between star systems, but asking to put an ATV on board is just too much.
Even if they kept all of the travel steps, just keeping the ship instance loaded while it automatically travels to our final stop would be a huge QoL boon.
It certainly seems telling that everytime a news story about Starfield comes up, the picture with it is just a boring headshot of some normal looking person (or occasionally a pic of the ship builder). Bethesda’s other games at least had distinct looks, some sense of art and aesthetic that gave them identity, even Oblivion’s potato people.
