| konnichiwa said: Sales are one thing (and sales will hurt thanks to gamepass for starfield on consoles) but critically I could see it go both ways. Divinity beat Fallout 4 metacritic wise. |
I mean Baldur's Gate could review better and possibly take the Best RPG 2023 win from Starfield no matter when it releases this year, regardless of whether it release a week later or months later. There is already going to be stiff competition for the best RPG category no matter what way you look at it, as we also have FF16 and Diablo 4 releasing this year.
- Diablo 4 so far seems like a better game in every possible way than Diablo 3, and Diablo 3 got an 88 meta. It has deeper RPG systems including a proper skill tree, more gear stats, and better character customization. It has a bigger focus on the story telling and dialogue compared to Diablo 3. It has better graphics and better art design (they wanted to go back to a darker more Diablo 2 like art design as many thought Diablo 3 looked too cartoony). It has a much larger, more open, and reactive world, complete with weather systems and day/night cycle. 2 fan favorite classes missing from 3 are returning in 4, Druid and Sorcerer/Sorceress. No auction house breaking the gear progression like there was in Diablo 3 at launch. It has a larger campaign, estimated by Blizzard to take 45-50 hours to beat, compared to 25-30 for Diablo 3. The camera now zooms in on conversations complete with character animations during dialogue, instead of the dialogue taking place with text boxes from the typical isometric viewpoint. Balancing PvP was a major focus rather than an afterthought like it was in Diablo 3 at release. I won't be surprised at all if Diablo 4 is a 90+ meta game.
- Final Fantasy 16 has so far seen alot of praise from critics who are happy about the more DMC-like gameplay and the high degree of difficulty customization. FF16 will likely be a high 80's, maybe even 90+ game.
- Baldur's Gate 3 has so far seen very good user scores on Steam early access, 87% positive reviews with an average score of 9/10, and Larian's last game, Divinity Original Sin 2, got a 93 meta on it's lead platform, so it stands to reason that Baldur's Gate 3 will likely get at least a low 90's average from critics on release.
While the competition for best RPG this year is stiff, we definitely should not rule out a possible win for Starfield. Not only has Bethesda proven to be capable of 90+ reviews on 3 of their last 4 singleplayer RPG's, but the main thing that held them back in the past was a lack of polish. However, that shouldn't be the case with Starfield, the game left pre-production and entered actual development back in late 2015, and the full team moved to Starfield after Fallout 76 released in 2018. That means that as a September 2023 release, it will have had almost 5 years of development with the full dev team, plus an additional 3 years before that with the smaller team. Compare that to Fallout 4, their lowest reviewed singleplayer RPG of the last 4, which had 2.5 years of development with a partial dev team and only 1.5 years with the full dev team, that is a substantial difference, plus the dev team is larger now too, as a result of opening the Bethesda satellite studios since Fallout 4 released, so the overall increase in man-hours compared to Fallout 4 is huge. On top of that, we heard from a former Bethesda dev last August that the game was nearly content complete at that point, which means that pretty much September 2022-September 2023 will be nothing but bug fixes and optimization, a full year dedicated to bug fixes and optimization.
The 2nd biggest thing that held them back on Fallout 4 was the dated Creation engine, so they rebuilt large portions of the engine for Starfield and TES 6, so much is rebuilt that they are calling it Creation Engine 2. A greater focus was put into improving the shooter mechanics and gun handling compared to Fallout 4 as well.
Starfield has a strong chance of 90+ average from critics imo, maybe it could even go as high as Skyrim did.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 09 March 2023
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