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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 .
It's 87 now but with only 44 reviews. It will only go down from here and will end at like 84-85. Yeah, hardly a disaster but for a game hyped up as the saviour for Xbox for the past 3 years it's a huge disappointment.

They put pressure on themselves with constant excuses, repeating quotes, barren AAA release windows and inconsistent quality.

One game isn’t a saviour . For that it would take better people steering the ship but I’m in a minority of the Xbox fan base it seems when it comes to Spencer and company.

I still think they could compete far better overall with PlayStation and Nintendo if they had better personnel.
 
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SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Y6BvK7B.jpg


87, the same as Halo Infinite.

I wasn't expecting any more, to be honest. I even voted for 85-89 yesterday and commented in this very thread that it'll be between 86-88. But I know people were expecting more (90-95 or even 95+) from Starfield, and it didn't live up to its potential.

The sad part is that it could have been a special game because we don't get games like these -- open-universe space RPGs.
Its 88 on PC.

And Halo Infinite was overrated. Its known. Even here on gaf. From the reviews its obvious that this is a much better game. Far more ambitious and sprawling.

You are acting like it has a 70 on metacritic.
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
This is just what it's going to turn out to be. An average game and not bad. Just not the GOTY some were really pushing for.

This happened with Skyrim for me and I have over 100 hours on PC. It's a 7/10 for me.
 

Danknugz

Member
i was hoping this was a game where you could travel to random other planets and land and visit the primal cultures and have them interpret you as a god while you bring them culture and technology and shit like that
 

jroc74

Phone reception is more important to me than human rights
"You see that mountain? You can't go there"
Hey, I didnt want to go there but....lol
you mean the video from the IGN performance tester with timestamps? big FUD indeed

Indeed, lol. I know some dont like NXGamer but he's really, really good.

Frustrated World Cup GIF


If this ends up not doing well, what exclusive worth a damn does MS still have?
Its gonna have to be some game that surprises everyone. Not one with a lot of hype surrounding it. I saw a few in MS's E3 that has a chance to be that game.

That said, I think the game will do well. It launching on Game Pass will skew console launch number tho.
 

Romulus

Member
I think even 1 full sized planet to explore with more detail and the possibility to explore outposts on other worlds would have been far better.
Its 88 on PC.

And Halo Infinite was overrated. Its known. Even here on gaf. From the reviews its obvious that this is a much better game. Far more ambitious and sprawling.

You are acting like it has a 70 on metacritic.


Sprawling random generated worlds. Nothing wrong with that but the bulk of the exploration is a worthless gimmick. It's just a check in the box that works on the uninformed.
They definitely should have had more hand crafted regions.
 

Pallas

Member
Y6BvK7B.jpg


87, the same as Halo Infinite.

I wasn't expecting any more, to be honest. I even voted for 85-89 yesterday and commented in this very thread that it'll be between 86-88. But I know people were expecting more (90-95 or even 95+) from Starfield, and it didn't live up to its potential.

The sad part is that it could have been a special game because we don't get games like these -- open-universe space RPGs.
So because it’s not scoring 95+ it’s not special? Lol Some of you rely too much on these scores, this could very well still be a special kind of game with a crazy amount of exploring.
 

twilo99

Gold Member
This is really disappointing tbh. I’d have thought you’d at least be able to fly around to planets within the system you’re currently in.

Kinda strange with a space game where you can barely explore space.

huge thumbs down for that .. I guess we gotta wait for star citizen after all
 

Topher

Gold Member
This is really disappointing tbh. I’d have thought you’d at least be able to fly around to planets within the system you’re currently in.

Kinda strange with a space game where you can barely explore space.

Exactly. I get you can't fly down to a planet, but you can't even fly around them or get close to them? You are just hovering in space? That doesn't make any sense.
 

Lokaum D+

Member
Watch this review for a very in-depth and accurate representation/state of the game.


wait, the game dosent even have flight inside the planet ??? what ? damn that's bad on my book, isnt this a space game ? didnt us already have a ship ? why i cant flight the damn thing inside the planet in order to explore ?
 
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Dzab

Member
When millions of people have access to a game there is no "they".

Games that get destroyed in steam reviews always deserve it, there have been no exceptions.

If you only want to see opinions from people who have played a certain amount of time etc then you can filter reviews accordingly.

It's a review system where there's nowhere to hide. If there are significant problems in any way then it will be made to be known.
I mean the overall 'score' that you see under the game. It's still a collective rating people see at first glance of a game.

There have definitely been exceptions lol, Street Fighter 6 got destroyed at launch simply because the game launched a few hours late and people were confused at the server times, I don't exactly think that's fair or representative of the game itself. The reviews did balance out eventually though. Games get bad reviews for simply having Denuvo. Sure Denuvo sucks and no one likes it, but bombing a game because of that when it isn't relevant to the game itself. Unless of course it messes with the performance.

The filter system is good though, being able to filter out the nonsense reviews helps.
 

Heisenberg007

Gold Journalism
wait, the game dosent even have flight inside the planet ??? what ? damn that's bad on my book
No, that was actually confirmed by Bethesda a long time ago.

No flights inside the planet's atmosphere / over the terrain. There is not even a vehicle that you can drive on the planet. And I think the reason for that is that Bethesda wanted to limit how fast you can move on the planet because if you moved too fast, you'd have run into those invisible walls in 3-5 minutes (which usually takes ~9 minutes if you're running).
 

Bogroll

Likes moldy games
The space exploration aspect is really a downer for me right now. But yeah, I'll need to judge for myself. Hoping it isn't as bad as some are making it out to be.
Even if they had a Everspace 2 style traveling between planets in the local solar system would be a massive improvement to the immersion for me.
 

zeldaring

Banned
It will probably score similarly to spider man 1.. aren't they pretty much the same game?
It seems to have more variety and much better story. if they can make some much better side missions it could differently see the 90s. SIde missions were garbage in the first.
 
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Hugare

Member
I read a couple early impressions and the writing was on the wall that this was no GOTY contender lol.

I think as someone mentioned, as Bethesda/MS were petty and tried to control the media by denying review outlets codes for the game, those reviews will from denied sites will come back to bite them in the ass as they will drop the MC lower. If it is 87 now it will likely drop to 85 at least.
Edge will tear a new asshole in it, for sure

Doubt that Eurogamer will give it a 2/5. 3/5 is a safe bet (which would drop the MC score anyway)

It will probably end up at 85, yes
 

NEbeast

Member
Luke Stephens summary:

- Best game BGS has ever made in some ways but inferior to past games in others.

- It's not No Man's Sky, it's more of a bigger Outer worlds.

- Not about exploring space freely, its about fast travelling to locations and talking to NPCs.

- Gunplay significantly improved.

- Ship customization is great, favorite part of the game for him.

- Base building is only really available after 50 to 60 hours due to insane resource requirements that require A LOT of mining on planets. Very late game system and VERY grindy.

- Voice acting and writing is very well done on conversational level.

- The game is very big but he thinks Bethesda were too ambitious and bit off more than they could chew.

- Much of the scope is an illusion, the more you engage with it the more this illusion fades.

- Late hours of the game are full of bugs and broken quests.

- MSQ can be beaten in 18 hours if you skip side content, over 50% of the MSQs are fetch quests for NPC characters. MSQ pretty lacklustre.

- Side content quests are superior to MSQ but have numerous bugs, one major faction quest line got so broken in his first save that it cannot be completed at all.

- Many broken and bugged quests, first 20-30 hours are VERY polished, the further into the game you get the more bugs you see and the more severe they become.

- NPCs float into the sky during conversations and sometimes clip outside into diferent zones (lmao) this breaks the quest as the characters can clip out of ships and disappear into space. This broke a big quest as an NPC floated out of the space station to never be seen again, he reloaded a previous save 1 hour back and the NPC floated out of the station again when he got to that point. He never came back. Only solution was to make a new save.

- Ship physics are prone to breaking, as are character and object animations.

-AI is broken at times, cites an issue where security guards NPC stop pursuing you after you cross a treshold in the city.
- Many funny "classic" BGS glitches.

- You can see "null objects" visible on the screen. These should not be visible to the players

- Guards randomly drop dead when you approach them sometimes

- Shadow glitches

- Game sometimes thinks you're in combat and won't allow you to fast travel despite not being in combat.




- No DLSS support
- Good performance and framerate in his high end rig.
- Constant loading screens, like A LOT, "if you're wondering wether there's a loading screen for a particular action, the answer is most likely yes"
- Feels like a game built on technology of the past, in the same vein of Fallout 3 and New vegas.
- Game design feels dated in a lot of ways.

- Exploration is very limited, you get to a visible wall that tells you you've reached the end of the area and get prompted to fast travel away.
- The planets are not fully explorable, just small generated maps based on your landing location and points of interests. It's an illusion of scale and freedom.

- These generated tiles are not continuous, if you see a big mountain in the distance that you want to explore but is out of reach, if you try to land as close as possible in the direction of that mountain it won't matter because there will be a whole new terrain generated and the mountain will have disappeared.
- These are not planets to explore, just individual microbiomes, compares it to a tiny minecraft map being generated once you land.


- Procedural generation engine is broken, in the first 20 hours of the game he saw multiple recycled locations, up to 8 times per location. Some of these recycled locations are also recycled for the MSQ. Many points of interest are straight up copy pasted onto different planets without any variation (same enemies, same enemy placement, same structures, same environments and objects in the same placements) This caused him to think he was going insane while playing until he was able to pinpoint the issue.

- Many planets are gas giants you can't land on, sometimes they will have barren moons you can land on, these are apparently counted as planets.


Conclusion:

- Starfield is a really fun game and there is a lot to grind and have a good time, people will be playing for years and still be discovering new things
- The encounters you can get randomly in planets are fantastic, NPCs will remember previous encounters and initiate random dynamic encounters.
- There is lots to do with all the systems in place and there's something for most people in here.
- Solid game, very fun, not a masterpiece.
- Loved the combat.
- As a gamepass title, playing this game is a no brainer.
- Perhaps not the masterpiece Bethesda and Microsoft were hoping for but still good.

"Starfield is a solid game that was shooting for the stars but never left the orbit".


YT Link:


This is the biggest criticism you can give the game.
 

MirageMew2

Member
Consuming every bit of review content I can today and everything I’ve read about space traversal is underwhelming.

I think in future space games like this need to ditch the idea of having tons of planets to explore and instead focus on a handful of super large detailed planets. Until technology gets better to where a dev team can make hundreds of planets interesting and packed with content without being bland and boring.

Everyone is trying to outdo each other with bigger games and more places to explore and sometimes it comes at the expensive of these areas actually being interesting.

Not entirely related but I actually really appreciated Jedi Survivor and the scope of Koboh in this regard relative to its predecessor.
 
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Koenigssee

Member
Knowing Bethesda, the only surprise is that the score is still way higher than what i expected.

Still would play tf outta it tho.
 

Thirty7ven

Banned
Was listening to the Defining Duke and Matty who is a big time Bethesda fanboy says that for the first twenty hours he was playing this like previous BGS games and not loving it.

All the talk about crazy space exploration and after all this game is all about he main quests.
 
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