I would be shocked if FF16 beats Starfield personally. I have not been all that impressed by what I have seen of FF16 so far. The combat is very DMC while I would have preferred FF7 Remake like combat. The character designs feel more western than JP, especially in terms of clothing, and the architecture as well feels very western to me, not what I want out of a JRPG. No proper party members, only limited time only single companions, and you can't play as them. The graphics are largely lackluster for a current gen exclusive (was recently revealed that it was planned to be cross-gen but PS4 support was dropped partway through development so cross-gen explains the lackluster graphics). I see some good in FF16, the summon stuff seems good, and I like that they implemented Nier Automata like player assists. But overall, it doesn't look much better than FF15 to me, and FF15 got like an 83 average, so I'm thinking maybe 85-86 for FF16.
As for Starfield, here is what we know: 1) 3 of the last 5 Bethesda singleplayer RPG's won GOTY, while all 5 were nominated for GOTY. Of those, 3 of the 5 reviewed 90+, the other 2, Morrowind and Fallout 4, both got an 88 average. 2) Bethesda has put 4x as many man hours into Starfield than any of their previous games, it has been in development twice as long as their previous longest in development game, and the core dev team is roughly double the size of Fallout 4's dev team. 3) Bethesda's Creation Engine 2 is supposedly largely rebuilt from the ground up, and therefore shouldn't be nearly as wonky as Bethesda's previous games which used Gamebryo and Creation Engine 1. 4) Starfield was reportedly content complete last fall, roughly a year ahead of it's September 2023 release, that is a year to optimize the game and fix bugs, far longer than Bethesda has ever spent polishing their previous games, and they also have Xbox Quality Assurance resources at their disposal. 5) Starfield is releasing on one less platform than their past games did, due to dropping PS5 support, that means one less platform to optimize the game for and 1 less platform to squash platform specific bugs on.
I am confident that Starfield will review 90+, more confident of it than many of my other meta predictions so far this year (and my predictions this year have been largely good except for a few outliers, I am doing particularly well in the multiplat Opencritic prediction league, nailing my 89 prediction for Diablo 4 just today).
