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Starfield | Review Thread

What scores do you think StarfieId will get?

  • 40-45%

    Votes: 3 0.5%
  • 45-50%

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 50-55%

    Votes: 1 0.2%
  • 55-60%

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 60-65%

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 65-70%

    Votes: 2 0.3%
  • 70-75%

    Votes: 5 0.8%
  • 75-80%

    Votes: 15 2.3%
  • 80-85%

    Votes: 81 12.5%
  • 85-90%

    Votes: 241 37.3%
  • 90-95%

    Votes: 243 37.6%
  • 95-100%

    Votes: 55 8.5%

  • Total voters
    646
  • Poll closed .

Bernoulli

M2 slut
lol.....too late for that.
The review and steam thread after being created
Hungry Stock Market GIF by Naru Naru
 

mitchman

Gold Member
I'm in the same boat. Started around 5 days ago and I can't stop. Easily one of the most immersive games I played, it's super fun and feels modern unlike Skyrim or Fallout 4 in the years they released in. Haven't been this into a BGS game since Oblivion. Easily deserves another 3-5 points on Metacritic imo.
I felt the same for a long time, but after 3 days or so of game time, it's no longer as addictive as Skyrim was. It just feels like there is less reason to continue. I will but the hook isn't there for me anymore.
 

CloudShiner

Member
says the guy attacking Eurogamer for not loving the game as much as you? 🤨 too bad you aren’t brave enough to do this on your actual account instead of signing onto an alt
You sound very angry at my opinion, you need to calm down dear.

But you're right of course; I'm terrified of posting on a random forum under a different random name lest the big bad monsters come and get me.

Unfortunately for you, my comment won't get deleted here just for daring to say the wrong word. Unlike at Eurogamer

Carry on the good fight defending such sites though, that's the spirit sir! Thank you for your service!
 
I felt the same for a long time, but after 3 days or so of game time, it's no longer as addictive as Skyrim was. It just feels like there is less reason to continue. I will but the hook isn't there for me anymore.

I am about 25 hrs in, I feel longevity of game will depend on how much interest you have in activities like ship building and outpost building along side character development.

At some point quests will run out and start feeling samey, after that if you just want to spend time in the game world, then only you will continue.

Personally I think Bethesda did a good job with art style and music of the game, I am liking spending time with it.
 

graywolf323

Member
You sound very angry at my opinion, you need to calm down dear.

But you're right of course; I'm terrified of posting on a random forum under a different random name lest the big bad monsters come and get me.

Unfortunately for you, my comment won't get deleted here just for daring to say the wrong word. Unlike at Eurogamer

Carry on the good fight defending such sites though, that's the spirit sir! Thank you for your service!
you claimed I was being the opinion police when all I did was poke fun at you for being exactly that re: Eurogamer & you’re the one that’s gotten weirdly super upset which makes it all the more hilarious that you’re saying I’m the one needs to calm down

now you’re flat out putting words in my mouth, I never said your post should be deleted, I just think you don’t want it on your main account’s post history for whatever reason, and you’re clearly an alt 🙄 ~150 posts a bit shy of 3 years popping up to defend Starfield, whatever you say Paul Tassi

edit: I feel like Samuel L. Jackson with all these alts popping up again

samuel l jackson GIF
 
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Heisenberg007

Gold Journalism
Nobody is crying about the platforms tho. lmao
Yeah, it's just made-up fantasies that PlayStation fans are unfairly reviewing the game.

I guess, all those 26% negative reviews on Steam (who can play the game and did buy it) are also salty PlayStation fans. And the various outlets giving negative and below-80 reviews (who have also played and finished the game) are also salty PlayStation fans who can't play the game.
 

Topher

Identifies as young
Yeah, it's just made-up fantasies that PlayStation fans are unfairly reviewing the game.

I guess, all those 26% negative reviews on Steam (who can play the game and did buy it) are also salty PlayStation fans. And the various outlets giving negative and below-80 reviews (who have also played and finished the game) are also salty PlayStation fans who can't play the game.

I'm not on board with making this about "platforms". I think you are absolutely right that we should take these reviews scores at face value. The metacritic score is pretty much set in stone in the 83-84 on console, 87 on PC, and no issues with either. I said early on I had no problems with IGN's 7/10. However, I think the posts trying to push narratives that the score should be half the current score are just as contrived as those claiming this is about platforms. Reality is that 80+ is a great score even after the revelation that no, this game is not GOTG or even GOTY (overall). I am going to be very interested to see any changes in the Steam review score once Bethesda pushes out their update (finally). The thing about Steam reviews is that, unlike metacritic, they are very fluid. Steam rewards improvements over time. NMS is a prime example of that.
 
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Alexvot86

Neo Member
please show us on the doll where Eurogamer hurt you

excuse us for being suspicious when there’s been a massive alt issue on GAF lately and you check all the boxes

neo account despite being here nearly 3 years? check
<100 posts? check
pops up to talk about how amazing Starfield is and how you’ll ignore reviews in the future? check

where were you when it was reviewing well during the early access period? 🤔 in fact all your posts since release have been about how the game is amazing despite some reviews saying otherwise
Lol, I couldn't care less what Eurogamer or any publication do. I also didn't realise you were the alt account police, apologies. Guilty until proven innocent is your mo then. And who is 'us'?

You believe what you want but this is my only account on neogaf. I'm objective and praise games I enjoy whether it is pc, playstation, Nintendo or xbox and play games on all platforms.

Starfield being xbox exclusive has really messed up any real discussion regarding the game it seems, it's quite pathetic.
 

Heisenberg007

Gold Journalism
I'm not on board with making this about "platforms". I think you are absolutely right that we should take these reviews scores at face value. The metacritic score is pretty much set in stone in the 83-84 on console, 87 on PC, and no issues with either. I said early on I had no problems with IGN's 7/10.
Agreed.
However, I think the posts trying to push a narratives that the score should be half the current score is just as contrived as those claiming this is about platforms. Reality is that 80+ is a great score even after the revelation that no, this game is not GOTG or even GOTY (overall).
Even that is fine. We have talked about this earlier in detail, so I won't go there again, but ... the game has flaws. For some people, those flaws may not matter as much (like for you who believes the game is a 9/10). For others, those flaws might seriously affect their ability to enjoy the game (and they might settle on a 5/10).

Considering that individual reviews are inherently subjective, I think both scores are valid. A 10/10 would not be valid (because the game is not flawless). Same goes for a 0/10 (because it isn't like the game doesn't do even a single thing right).
 

CloudShiner

Member
you claimed I was being the opinion police when all I did was poke fun at you for being exactly that re: Eurogamer & you’re the one that’s gotten weirdly super upset which makes it all the more hilarious that you’re saying I’m the one needs to calm down

now you’re flat out putting words in my mouth, I never said your post should be deleted, I just think you don’t want it on your main account’s post history for whatever reason, and you’re clearly an alt 🙄 ~150 posts a bit shy of 3 years popping up to defend Starfield, whatever you say Paul Tassi

edit: I feel like Samuel L. Jackson with all these alts popping up again

samuel l jackson GIF
What a fool. Eurogamer is definitely the right place for you.

At least they have an ignore button here. Welcome to it, clown. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
 

Topher

Identifies as young
Agreed.

Even that is fine. We have talked about this earlier in detail, so I won't go there again, but ... the game has flaws. For some people, those flaws may not matter as much (like for you who believes the game is a 9/10). For others, those flaws might seriously affect their ability to enjoy the game (and they might settle on a 5/10).

Considering that individual reviews are inherently subjective, I think both scores are valid. A 10/10 would not be valid (because the game is not flawless). Same goes for a 0/10 (because it isn't like the game doesn't do even a single thing right).

For me, I'm always going to look at a score that is so far off the average side ways. Hard to take some of those scores seriously when they are putting Starfield in range of Gollum. Metacritic is 84/87 so I'm not behind this idea that 10/10 isn't valid but 5/10 is. No game is flawless and that's not what 10/10 is supposed to indicate.

Primarily I'm talking about this narrative that the metacritic should actually be lower....cuz reasons. It is the same nonsense I've seen in the past suggesting Sony gets a 10+ point boost in game reviews simply by being Sony. Just find those lines of thought absurd all around.
 
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Humdinger

Member
The Eurogamer reviewer was overly verbose, but he articulated the main reason I'm passing on Starfield -- the lack of that old Bethesda magic, when it comes to open-world exploration. Other things are there (e.g., interesting questlines), but the open-world exploration isn't. I mean, the title of the article sums it up: "A game about exploration, without exploration."

A few quotes that stood out to me...

[Referring to the opening sequence, which is missing the usual Bethesda confinement/reveal dynamic.] This is Starfield at its worst, one of the handful of uncharacteristic stumbles Bethesda makes delivering its usual sense of wonder, and one example of many small, strange decisions the mega-studio has made that obstruct its own uncanny ability to conjure real videogame magic.

I always found those opening sequences very memorable. They set the tone. You were confined to a dungeon, on a ship, in a vault, or as a prisoner bound for execution, and then, suddenly, you were free, and the world was spread before you. It stirred a sense of wonder. It made you eager to explore the wide-open world. I remember reading about how Buddhists arranged their gardens for the same effect -- tight confinement in a space, then expansion into a wide-open view of a beautiful landscape. In Starfield, though,

you burst forth from your grey-brown mining shaft to... a concrete landing pad. Your first view of the wider world is the grey-brown non-place of the planet Argos, the sci-fi equivalent of a car park by an industrial estate off the M4.

That's just the opening sequence, though. It would be easy enough to forgive, if the rest of the exploration delivered. But it just doesn't.


The great Bethesda RPGs are about exploration and discovery. [....] It's Bethesda's most fertile ground, where it plants memories that, for one reason or another, just seem to stick. The long hike through snowy peaks between Dawnstar and Winterhold, where the wind lifts just in time with the mournful choirs of the score; the time a giant smacks a bandit and breaks the physics a little, sending him a mile or two up into the air. The temptation, from a symbol just at the edge of your compass, poking out of peripheral vision, of a Daedric shrine along a winding commute - or the opposite, the looming, intimidating dread of what you know will be a massive dungeon. [....]

Starfield doesn't have it. It doesn't have surprises along the road, memories of journeys and distractions, a sense of artfully-engineered, perfectly positioned distraction and discovery, like each shrine was hand-placed by Video Game God, because it is both entirely disconnected and, frequently when you do roam about on a planet surface, procedurally generated. In Starfield the planets aren't entire regions, they're fixed cities with random land around them. You can't be lured off the road, or simply on the road to drink in the world, because there is quite literally no road to be lured away from. There's no route from one planet or system to the next. In Starfield, instead, you fast travel everywhere.

It's a topic that's led to much discussion of loading screen waits and broken immersion, the sense of disappointment mostly forming around not being able to seamlessly land a spaceship and take off like you'd hoped. And that's a fair point, but also a failure to really capture what's lost when you cut out manual exploration entirely. Instead of roaming discovery, Starfield's world is navigated by hypertext [...] The result - aside from losing all those sacred in-between moments - is a kind of total disorientation and detachment, a radical alienation and a saddening kind of ennui.

This is what sinks Starfield, at least for me.
 

ChoosableOne

ChoosableAll
To be clear. You haven't played that much. You're not impressed. But it deserves at least 4 out of 5?
I don't think 15 hours of gameplay is too short. Many games last less than 4 hours, and I'm not one of those people on Steam who play a game for 200 hours and then say "I don't recommend it." It's rare for my opinion about a game I've enjoyed for 15 hours to dramatically change after those 15 hours, as I usually continue to enjoy the game until the end. Also, when you say 4 stars, that's equivalent to 80 points, and when there are 2500 games on Metacritic that have scored above 80 points, do you think this game doesn't deserve to score above 80? 3 stars equate to 60 points, which would be equivalent to a disaster like Redfall. So, I don't think 80 points is too much. I also didn't like it enough to give it 90 or 100 points; that's about it.
 

Topher

Identifies as young
Don't worry I'm sure it will be GAFs GOTY just like Halo Infinite was.

Pretty sure Halo Infinite winning GOTY was due to the ability of folks to create multiple accounts giving them multiple votes. Since we integrated the voting functionality into the forum software, that's quite a bit harder to do.
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Their mock reviews process is broken though and they know it. Phil came out and said that they had Redfall scoring at least 10 points higher in their mock reviews process.

How do you mitigate for that in the short term without overhauling your mock review process (which takes time)? Only give review codes to those who you know lean more favourably towards your platform.

I think he said their mock review was more than 10 points off. So it could have been 15 points off. And that's is wild.
 

Topher

Identifies as young
Their mock reviews process is broken though and they know it. Phil came out and said that they had Redfall scoring at least 10 points higher in their mock reviews process.

How do you mitigate for that in the short term without overhauling your mock review process (which takes time)? Only give review codes to those who you know lean more favourably towards your platform.

When they said Redfall was reviewed internally 10 points higher than critics, the critic score was in the 70s. Ultimately landed in the 60s. So yeah, their internal process is obviously giving them really bad information. Selectively handing out review codes certainly doesn't help. Not sure what they were thinking. Did they expect Eurogamer and others to sit quietly by while other sites get codes? Definitely comes across as trying to manipulate the process. I think back to when Spencer was dismissing the importance of their games getting a 11/10 and then here we are, yet again, actions not matching words.
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
When they said Redfall was reviewed internally 10 points higher than critics, the critic score was in the 70s. Ultimately landed in the 60s. So yeah, their internal process is obviously giving them really bad information. Selectively handing out review codes certainly doesn't help. Not sure what they were thinking. Did they expect Eurogamer and others to sit quietly by while other sites get codes? Definitely comes across as trying to manipulate the process. I think back to when Spencer was dismissing the importance of their games getting a 11/10 and then here we are, yet again, actions not matching words.
Their internal is probably made up of the shills like Colt and company that were pushing it like it was some amazing game.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Their mock reviews process is broken though and they know it. Phil came out and said that they had Redfall scoring at least 10 points higher in their mock reviews process.

How do you mitigate for that in the short term without overhauling your mock review process (which takes time)? Only give review codes to those who you know lean more favourably towards your platform.
Step 1: Remove SenjutsuSage from the mock review team.
Step 2: Remove the mock review team, and assign better producers who track the progress and quality of the game THROUGH OUT development instead of at the very end when its too late to change anything.

Starfield should have been an amazing game. The tech is there. The heart is there. The effort is there. Its polished, but ultimately its the design flaws that should've been apparent to any producer a year or two into development, let alone 8 years later. I want to love this game, but the design choices made here years ago by Todd's design leads are constantly keeping from being immersed in this world.

The only thing I would blame Microsoft for is allowing Bethesda to go unsupervised for the last 3 years. If Phil really plays video games like he says he does, this disjointed feeling wouldve stuck out to him within hours of playtime. 3 years is plenty of time to pivot and make it feel less menu driven and disjointed.
 
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IDKFA

I am Become Bilbo Baggins
I kinda agree with the EG review. The game doesn't feel as open as I expected. Still a great game, but personally for me it's not the best BGS game. Roll on ESVI!
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
high quality GIF


The engine is a big obstacle to most of the immersion breaking complaints due to having to design around the tiling with load screens and the like.
Yeah, I guess part of the tech is there. They did a great job upgrading the visuals, but not being to stream in interiors and fly around planets is a huge reason why the game doesnt always connect.
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
I think the point @Mattyp is making is that there isn't enough time in the review cycle to cover the entirety of the game. To your point, I don't think they have to. I'd say there is probably enough in the main game loop to come to a decision as to the reviewers opinion on the game. I do think, however, that there is a hell of a lot left on the table there that the reviewer simply doesn't have enough time to get to. But in fairness to @Mattyp he acknowledges that even if they did that doesn't mean the score would change. In fact, he suggests it is possible the score might even go lower. But he is right that there is enormous pressure on reviewers to get the review done by the embargo date.

But this has been a point of debate for years. How much time does a reviewer need to spend in a game, especially one this size? From his standpoint, he put 70 hours in and didn't think that was enough for him to review. He said that before any other review scores came out so it isn't like this was only in reaction to scores from other outlets.


I'm kinda disappointed in him that he feels after 70 hours he can't score the game. That's just weird to me. Is it that he really doesn't want to give it the score he truly feels it deserves?
 
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