Starfield - Personal Review

[Torillian]

Azzanation said:

pokoko said:

I've seen a lot of people try to invalidate Starfield criticism by blaming the console wars but that does not work for me.  Many of those who are disappointed with the game are PC gamers and long-time fans of Bethesda.

It is also NOT Skyrim/Fallout 4 in space, which is a big reason why those Bethesda fans are unhappy with it.  

Personally, I feel like it threw away the best parts of Fallout 4 and several aspects of that game that I hoped it would build upon.  In fact, despite being a much newer game, I would say that it went backwards from Fallout 4 in multiple areas, which I find to be absolutely baffling.

Most prominently, exploration is but a shell of what it was in previous titles and quickly becomes boring once you've been to the same copy/pasted location 5+ times.  This is a massive downgrade from the thrill of crawling through downtown Boston.  The game also makes you waste far more time running from one point of interest to the next over empty terrain.

Actually, I've never played a game that respected my time less.  It felt like most of my play-time was spent either running or dealing with inventory.  At least console commands and batch files helped on PC.

Speaking of downgrades, building outposts is nowhere near as fun or rewarding as it was in Fallout 4.  They took one of my favorite things and made it clunky and annoying.

On the other hand, they did a great job with ship building, which is easily one of Starfield's best aspects.

I was also very disappointed in the writing for many of the quests, which forced players into nonsensical directions with limited options.  The Freestar quest, in particular, had many people very unhappy.  

I could have written several pages of criticism and analysis last year but now it's been months since I've touched it.

Thats an interesting take you have, and you are entitled to your opinion. The game was also hated for it being an exclusive, everyone decided to get the magnifying glass out for this release due to it. 

I can agree with some of your points but the exploration point, I don't. I infact liked what they tried to achieve with the exploring. Space is meant to feel empty, and it added to the immersion. I enjoyed going to a planet that was barren or a moon. The game has a ton of variety of different sceneries and creatures. Sure, a few structures were reused but the assets that weren't reused were done extremely well.  

I will also agree on the clunky menu screen and inventory management, something they can fix down the road so it's no concern, it didn't ruin my time with the game, I've played worse games with bad inventory management. It is my biggest gripe with the game was the amount of times I needed to pause for fast travel, scanning planets, selecting abilities and Inventory selection. I am grateful it was designed on the new SSDs as last gen fast travel would have been a nightmare.

The Story isn't for everyone, it was what I expected which wasn't bad nor amazing. I can understand people won't like it.

I definitely agree the ship builder kept me hooked in the game. I loved upgrading my ship, changing it and it never got old seeing it take off or land.

Is the bolded something that just happened on forums or do you believe this affected official reviews? As someone else mentioned the metacritic score of starfield seems in line with other Bethesda games recently. Do you think it deserves higher than low 80s and that its exclusive status lowed its reviews?