Ehh I don't know. We recently had both bg3 and elden ring. Both had near universal praise and no pay to win or micro transaction nonsense.

There are so many actually good games out there, you need to branch out more if your bar for an A is that low

I dunno, I think it's a game somewhat damned by faint praise. I hear "It's good, not great" a lot and I get it. If you like Skyrim you will like Starfield. But I'd say the big achievement is to scale up a game like Skyrim into such a big playspace.

It's certainly good quality in terms of the look and what they've technically achieved. But the actual gameplay isn't that far away from what they did in Skyrim and Fallout. I get it - if it ain't broke, don't fix it - but to be honest it feels a little dated. And No Man's Sky does alot of the non-RPG elements better.

It's been a strong year for games; and look at Baldur's Gate 3 - that game actually pushed forward narrative game play.

Starfield is huge and interesting, but ultimately a bit samey. I think the "ocean wide, inch deep" is too far and unfair but the basic concept kinda applies in a crude way. Baldur's Gate 3 is smaller in scope but so much richer and varied. Time was Bethesda was the undisputed king of RPGs, but I think CDProject Red supassed them with the story telling in Witcher 3 (and then fell back with Cyberpunk 2077) and now Larian have supassed both with Baldur's Gate 3.

It's a good game, but it's impact is dimmed a bit by what else has come. It'll make a ton of money and probably be around for years, but it doesn't feel the same huge leap forward as when Skyrim came out. But hey, hard act to follow to be fair.

Well made games get praised for being well made games and get the accolades and attention they deserve, at least on the AAA level.

If a AAA game isn't receiving that, then it's probably not a well made game.

C is a passing grade. B is pretty decent. A implies you excelled.

I would say B is more than fair. It’s surprisingly not garbage for a bethesda title. It’s not the second coming of christ.

A good artist doesn't do their art to please everyone, and knows that is a fool's errand.

Stop projecting the failures of management on to the creatives.

I guess that depends on how narrowly you define "genre." It's a pretty good sandbox RPG, and it'll get even better with community mods. If that's what you're looking for, it's great and way better than pretty much anything else.

But if you broaden it a bit, it has a mediocre story, mediocre combat, and mediocre exploration. So compared to other RPGs, it's really not special.

So I'd give it a B grade. It gets Cs in many areas, but the sandbox is good enough to pull it up to a B. To get to A, it needs to excel at something, like exploration (e.g. do more with the ship in space) or economy (e.g. invest in trade routes and impact the cost of goods by flooding the market). But it doesn't really excel at anything, it's basically the same formula they've had in the past with a different setting.

It's still a good game, it just doesn't stand out in any particular way. For everything it does, another game does it better, and it really needs to be the best at something to get an A from me.