I know I’ll be a victim of the usual “isn’t it ironic said critic put so many hours in then called the game lame because his time investment clearly indicates a level of deep enjoyment”
But I’ll proceed anyways. I mean, that is correct. I did enjoy saaaaay my first few hours with it then I started to feel it. Let me back up and explain. So I’m not an Xbox fanboy or a PlayStation fanboy or Nintendo or bethesda or anything. I’m anti tribalism. I like great games. That’s about it. I would say perhaps as I’ve gotten older my taste and standards have become quite high. I can be picky I’ll admit. What I’ll also admit is that I am a HUUUUGE skyrim fan. Huge. It claimed my entire 7th grade year when it came out. I got it on my pc in late high school and boom. Addicted again. Covid hit in 2020 while I was in college and you guessed it, during quarantine I was back in. Hundreds of hours. Hundreds. Minimum.
Something about it, the score, the exploration, even the Hogwarts legacy/nancy drew esque story telling delivery did not bother me and no I can’t quite articulate why. Fast forward to starfield and it’s my most hyped game almost ever. Behind Arkham Knight. Just ask my gf. I’ve been talking about it non stop since the gameplay reveal in 2021. I paid like $40 extra and I am NOT very liquid right now just to play the damn thing 5 days early.
I hop in and I’m like hm okay kinda slow but it’s just gettin goin. I learn the mechanics and enjoy the combat a lot and I make a point to travel to every star system and discover every bespoke event and unique quest. I submit an entire evening/night to this and it was awesome. Mainly on abandoned space stations. Classic bethesda “environmental non verbal storytelling”. Loved it. Buuuut I ran out. Pretty quickly.. Aaaaand honestly there were not that many for 1000 planets and 120 systems. Maybe like 8-10? Skyrim and fallout 4 felt like they had a lot more.
So what’s next. I guess I’ll hop in the quests. And this is where the game started to free fall to me. It hit terminal velocity. Guys. This shit is not engaging or well made simple as that. Holy fuck. Let me explain, the quests themselves, the writers showed up to work. The *stories* found in them, are quite good, but the bethesda formula, (which by the way feels particularly flat and stale here in a way oblivion/skyrim and fallout 4/fallout 3 were not) let’s it down. The *storyTELLING* is nigh-impossible to enjoy. Look let me illustrate my point, take some stories I consider great, what if last of us 1 was like this;
*walk up to tess* a PS2 model stares at you like a theme park animatronic “hey Joel, what should we do about Ellie?”
You select a dialogue option and no sound comes out because you’re a silent protagonist
“Okay. Hmmm… that could work… let’s try that out Joel” as she makes some minor robotic hand gestures.
You get into a fight with Ellie. She’s standing frozen in the middle of the room with a vague frown; “you better have a good explanation for why you tried to leave me Joel!” A persuade option appears and you succeed silently of course, she goes “hmmm… that makes sense. I’ll go back with you and Tommy now” and then slowly walks out of the room like she’s walking to her kitchen from the living room.
You see what I mean? Any story would suck if it was told this way. Who could enjoy this? Arkham. Mass effect. GTA. Red dead. Spider-Man. God of war. You put all of these through this format and voila, they suck.
And since this is getting super long I’ll wrap up with they obvious elephant in the room. The exploration. They fucked up majorly. As in, sacrificed the best part of their games. Like if rocksteady shipped a game with bad combat (they’re about to actually) or if naughty dog shipped a game with low production values.
No longer can you go from the tundra to the swampy marsh/forest to the city seamlessly and discover handcrafted shit on the way. Nope. Now you land on the North Pole by selecting it in the menu, walk around, there’s nothing besides maybe copy paste garbage. Nobody to meet. You open the menu again, select the forest of the planet. Load in there. Exit the ship, loading screen. And oh darn. Same story. The loading screens almost hit self parody. You’d swear they’re fucking with you almost. It’s atrocious. This game is talking to automatons in rooms and loading screens. And the combat becomes completely trivialized even on the hardest difficult to where it’s a fuckin joke. I walk around with the eternity gate hip firing everyone and they drop in literally 1 hit. Maybe 3 tops. On the hardest difficulty.
I’m not even some tik tok brain motherfucker but I found myself eventually skipping all the dialogue. There’s no great writing or acting to be found in any of it so why bother.
TLDR: combat is too easy, exploration too fragmented, story telling too amateur. It feels outdated and flat after a certain point early on. 84 on metacritic is fair.
. He didn’t say he killed the pilot and took over the ship.
