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Starfield is now mostly negative in recent reviews
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this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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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 broken, 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.
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.
Yeah, it's hard to throw all the blame on people when there's so many engineered tactics to tempt people to buy stuff, but there's got to be a point where you realise you don't really need that special skin for pre-ordering, you won't even use it and you won't even be playing the game in a year. I'd like to see more regulations on it all, just to protect the people who struggle to protect themselves from predatory business tactics.
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?
Steam reviews months later aren't really newsworthy imo. Nor are they interesting.
The fact that everyone is commenting on it suggests otherwise
it confirms my theory that people are hateful and want an outlet to, as bad as I hate this term, "circlejerk" to
Fair, but here's the thing:
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.
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.
I cannot agree with a lot of this, that it's a justified never ending series of hate waves. I especially cannot agree these are Bethesda fans. Every comment thread typically contains a shitload of vitriol toward them specifically, calling it out by name.
I was a huge fan of Skyrim and fallout 3/4. I bought Starfield, hated the map, found the game kind of interesting but not obsession level compelling, and just haven't played it much. It couldn't be less interesting to me to obsessively hate it. There isn't a way it could be bad enough to talk about over and over. It's old news. I may pick it up later when I'm bored and get into it, or I may not. Life moves on. I think people need to see it as what it is, a video game, and as such there are much more important things in life. Play the ones you like and be done with it.
Having said all this the hate waves don't seem to be stopping so I'm simply going to add Starfield to my content filter. Just simply don't give a shit.
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.
It's because the people leaving negative reviews now are the opposite of haters.
We're the people who still gave a damn, who were willing to put the effort to play the game, who found at least part of it entertaining enough to keep playing despite all the frustrations, who dared hope that the next quest or world or NPC would bring back the feeling of playing the old Bethesda games.
We're the people who the game finally managed to break despite how much we tried to enjoy it. Who gave up in frustration after the last crash made us lose all the time we'd spent customizing our ship (my case), who lost the will to play after realising we knew what we'd find behind that corner or locked door because we'd already encountered them half a dozen times in exact copies of the same building in half as many planets, who after weeks of trying to find the same sense of wonder we'd found in previous Bethesda games finally gave up after the umpteenth unfulfilling quest bland generic NPC, or cookie cutter location.
And we're the people who, even after all that, still had enough respect for a company that had once made games we'd loved not to post a negative review... until, instead of acknowledging the game's faults and trying to fix them, Bethesda started attacking reviewers for their opinions and defending their poor design choices.
So you played the game despite not liking it? I don't see how anyone else is to blame for that
So you literally kept your opinion quiet due to loyalty to a capitalist company...? That's not how they will get better.
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?!
I think it's more like "why are they bothering?" Like, usually for these kinds of single-player games, the reviews improve over time because once the nature of the game is well known, new prospective buyers are more likely to be correct about whether they'll like it or not, so new reviews are mostly from people who self-selected for being likely to enjoy the game.
So either people are getting worse at knowing if they'll like Starfield before they buy it, or they're buying it despite knowing they probably won't like it so they can leave a negative review, or people who bought it at release are going back and reviewing it months later.
There was a narrative it got review bombed I think. So people can get into it thinking it's not that but it ends up being exactly what they feared.
If there is a game that has mixed reviews, I sometimes still go for it if I feel really interesred. It could just be "hit or miss" thing and I could still love it while some hate it.
This can be people doing the same thing and majority finding out it's not working for them. Also, there is a sale on Steam, so likely many people got it for themselves, or for Christmas
I suspect that it is a third, more obvious reason.
Shut up, Todd.
Your game might have been a 6/10 ten or fifteen years ago, but today it's just outdated in every single aspect.
Not only that, but its characters and quests feel generic and uninspired even when compared to older Bethesda games, and the little background stories that made them great (I still remember that guy falling from the sky just out of Seyda Neen all these years later) are not only entirely absent, but their absence is highlighted by the sheer generic blandness and emptiness of the planets and the cookie cutter repetition of the locations you find randomly scattered on them (often without any consideration for the planet's nature or environment; I've lost count of the amount of times I've facepalmed after finding an outdoors lounging area with sandwiches and whatnot in planets with no breathable atmosphere; and the time Gopher found life in a cookie cutter cave in Earth's moon without the game acknowledging anything about it just made me feel all kinds of vicarious embarrassment for your game).
And to top that off there's the bugs (I posted my negative review out of frustration after the last time the game crashed before I could save after spending way too long modifying my ship with that extremely poorly designed ship editor interface — though even that isn't as bad as outposts; I entirely gave up on those after the first attempt), and Bethesda's apparent absolute lack of interest in fixing them...
Which gets me to the main reason people are shitting on your game, your company, and you personally now, Todd: the sheer Elon Musk levels of lunacy you and your company have displayed in response to the first wave of negative reviews by telling the reviewers their opinions were wrong, and the fact that said lunacy apparently takes precedence over fixing the damn bugs.
This is no longer about a mediocre poorly written and lazily designed game running like shit on a decades old engine that should've been ditched after Morrowind, this is about Bethesda jumping the shark and losing any respect its customers might have once had for a company that used to produce great games. We gave you another chance after the horse armour debacle. We stood by you when your games became formulaic generic fantasy with Oblivion and Skyrim, because the stories were still good. We gave you many chances, because we remembered the good old times and we naively hoped they could come back. And then you showed your true colours (admittedly for the nth time, but hope is hard to break) and outright told us our genuine concerns were, against all evidence (in the year of games like Baldur's Gate 3!) wrong.
Fuck you, Todd. You ruined it. And it's quite possible Bethesda will never recover.
I didn't read the whole diatribe, but it seems like you think I'm one of the creators of the game? Lol wow
It's a joke, since that guy has commented in the same vein as you just did
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.
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.
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.
"People are entitled taint-lickers because they don't like something that I like"
You sound like a lot of fun to be around.
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.