Starfield user score drops to "mostly positive" on steam
Starfield Steam reviews give the Bethesda RPG a ‘mostly positive’ rating, as the Fallout and Skyrim successor slips down the categories after its full launch.
I love Starfield. My mates love Starfield. It’s Fallout meets No Man’s Sky meets Mass Effect.
It’s just another kick ass Bethesda game in a long list of kick ass Bethesda games IMO.
its a solid B
75/100
It's good.
It's not earth shattering, its not game of the year.
It scratches that Skyrim RPG itch but in space.
It's less buggy and less crashy than people were expecting.
It's not without its flaws.
It's a solid B
Personally I'd give it like a C or maybe B- at the top. It's fine, but there are so many missing basic quality of life features that should be there.
My biggest gripes are all focused on outposts though. Outposts seemed to be one of the focuses from the marketing material, but they're a pain in the ass to actually use. There's somehow no list of the outposts you have, let alone a way to view what they're producing. Outposts need to be linked together, but there's no way to sort or auto-delete items, so it all eventually will get clogged up with lead, or whatever other resource doesn't get used often. You'll have to manually go through your containers to remove the clog and just dump it on the ground, where it'll remain for the rest of your playthrough. There's no snapping for anything except storage containers and the habitation modules. Everything else has to be placed by hand with manual rotations, so nothing is ever lined up. The alignment will also change after you place an object, so literally nothing will ever be aligned.
I have issues with many other parts of the game too, but outposts seem so incomplete, and somehow generally worse than what we had in FO4. Yet, outposts were prominent in their marketing. How?
It's another subpar Bethesda game in a long line of subpar Bethesda games. Lifeless bland NPCs, tons of glitches, bad gameplay issues, and the same "shallow ocean" criticisms we've been going over since Skyrim.
It's clear to me that Bethesda thinks Skyrim was peak Elder Scrolls, when I think Morrowind was peak Elder Scrolls. Unfortunately, it seems too much to ask for a decent story and interesting side content.
So I just don't buy Bethesda games anymore. I was disappointed in Skyrim, and Fallout 4 wasn't really my thing. It also doesn't help that I don't like the leveling mechanics of RPGs either and tend to prefer ARPGs like Ys and Zelda where leveling isn't a major part of the game loop. I know what Bethesda offers, and it's just not what I'm looking for these days. I play RPGs for story and immersion, not for graphics, character builds, and mods, and Bethesda seems to be more interested in the latter than the former.
But that's what I appreciate from Bethesda. They're pretty consistent at delivering a certain experience, it just so happens that it's not for me.
You want bland NPCs then you should play BG3.
Bruh, Bethesda arguably peaked like 20 years ago with Morrowind. Everything else since has been more or less downhill lol.
Their only great game since Morrowind wasn’t even made by them.
I will agree, Morrowind was an amazing game.
My guilty pleasure is to install Morrowind again and commit to replaying it, but to instead do another Skyrim playthrough because I just have more fun for some reason.
There's something about the newer Bethesda games. I'll go and install legacy games from other companies all the time for the sense of nostalgia, but despite having beaten almost all of them going back to Arena, if I want a Bethesda game I always end up playing Skyrim or FO4. And now (I presume) Starfield
So Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 were kickass Bethesda games?
Fallout 4 was a great game, but like Fallout 3, was a terrible Fallout game. Fallout 4 is what Fallout 3 should have been.
this is how I feel about it
Really has a Freelancer vipe to it as well.
Ou for fucks sake people, games dont have to be perfect tens Its okay to be a 8/10 or 7/10
The funny thing is that "Publisher Bethesda was not permitted to pay additional royalties for the RPG because it scored 84 on Metacritic, according to Fallout New Vegas developer Chris Avellone. It appears that Obsidian's publishing contract included a deal that meant the studio would be issued bonuses if the game hit a Metacritic of 85." scores matter to Bethesda a lot even enough to ruin relationships and screw developers.
I think Bethesda knows how to make one game in different settings, sadly that game was most popular in the early 10s.
I think this is an accurate way to put it. I happen to like that game but if it's not what you were expecting or you're tired of it you're not going to like the game.
I have to say the best change from FO4 is ditching the voiced protagonist. That was a big mistake at the time.
What a wierd take, given that people STILL play Skyrim, Morrowind, and Fallout games in droves to this day. And that there are a ton of YouTubers that have made careers exclusively off of Beth lore and build videos and such.
Also given the post is about the game shifting to "mostly positive" on Steam. Which means the vast majority of reviews on steam are actually positive. And a lot of the negative reviews have to do with performance and technical issues, not the gameplay itself.
Also the fact that other "open world story-based shooters with rpg and crafting mechanics" are actually really popular - you know like Cyberpunk, or Mass Effect, or RDR2, or arguably, Jedi Survivor.
If you don't like Beth games, that's fine. They're not for everyone. But it doesn't mean your opinion is universal.
Is the score of Starfield really the only gaming topic Lemmy has to offer since like 4 days?
Some of it is organic hype and some of it is Corporate Funded social media teams / personnel who do their best to control the online narrative. Happens every time a Triple A game launches, no matter how many times that Company has betrayed it's audience and succumbed to greedy scummy practices. People even still talk about Activision Blizzard titles as if it won't just be another cashgrab.
Personally, I'm always super skeptical about these sort of games having a positive reception. I think the fast decline in user scores since launch is a perfect example of how unreliable the hype is.
There's a giant push to really hate on Starfield, all over the internet
Yeah, and I don't get why. We quite literally got exactly what we expected with Starfield, and nobody said we would get anything different. For those of us who enjoy it, we got precisely what we were promised. For those who don't enjoy it, nobody tried to pretend they were getting something different.
If I have one complaint, they did not manage to brand it as effectively as they branded Fallout (the blonde cartoon, music, etc). But then, they never managed to brand tES that way and we're all still alive.
My 2c. Isn't it a breath of fresh air that we got a complete game without $100s in day1 DLC required to make it playable?
I don't understand the people who spend a hundred hours on a game to then give it a bad rating, calling it boring. Why don't they just quit much earlier and play Chrono Trigger or something?
Plays game for 2 hours, rates poorly
"How can they review it without completing it"
Plays game for 60 hours, rates poorly
"Why are they rating it poorly if they spent so many hours on it?"
It's such a bizarre, but real issue. I've always been boggled by the idea that you can't offer your opinion on some games without first giving them a full work week. "I know you just sat there for the length of 5 movies and didn't like it, but it doesn't really get good until you sit through another 10."
If you give it 2 hours, a game should have made it worth your time.
With some games after 20+ hours the honeymoon phase is over. But I want to finish it so that all this time doesn't feel wasted. And there's hope that the game will get better. I mean everybody else loves it so it must be a great game right?
However, often it just feels like work and it makes the flaws of the game even more obvious. And I just end up despising it.
This is the best answer, players are invested after a certain point, but the realization that they don't like the game comes later in the process. The more you play the game you don't like the more you're frustrated with it and the more likely you are to give it a poor rating, especially when the things that are your biggest complaints feel like obvious bug fixes that should have already happened, but continue to exist.
The world would be a better place if more people just played Chrono Trigger when they got upset at a game.
Honestly moba fans alone would make it the best selling game of all time
If a narrative-heavy game takes 60 hours and then fucks it up on the third act, it deserves the hate. Games having a bad payoff 200% warrants bad reviews.
Oh sorry, this isn't a Danganronpa thread.
You can put a ton of hours into a game and not like it. This isn’t a new concept.
Ask any LoL or Destiny 2 player.
But in all seriousness, sometimes a game is just too massive to form an opinion on in any reasonable amount of time.
Yes, this was exactly how I felt when playing Fire Emblem Engage. God. I hated how the hub world basically sucked an equal amount of time for each map I cleared. Sure, the mini-games are optional,But so is brushing your teeth.
I may be getting older but it feels like a lot of games are just padding their runtime with gameplay that doesn't mesh well at all.
Honestly, the games that take the most time I often have more negative opinions about. The Assassin's Creed games, for example, purposefully waste your time. They shove a bunch of junk in and try to make you interact with it when I could be doing something enjoying with my time. Enjoyment per hour should be the measure of a good game, not hours alone. If the game takes me 300h to complete and I only enjoyed 10h of that, it's a bad game.
Yes exactly!
Games are meant to entertain. If they aren't fun or force you to do unfun things, then why waste your time on them?
I got the same with collectibles in games. Chasing collectibles is boring to me, and you will never see me going for one that isn't directly on my path. It is meaningless fluff.
To be fair, the game is so massive, any review (positive or negative) done on less than 60 hours probably won't do the game justice. It's entirely possible to hold hope for redeeming qualities only to be a bit disappointed in the end.
IDK, I think 10 hours is plenty for any game, and 2 hours is enough for most. By two hours, you've likely discovered the core gameplay loop and seen how it handles progression, and by 10 hours you've seen whether that core gameplay loop changes throughout the game.
I don't like negative reviews for games when they've spent double the time HLTB gives for a playthrough. I don't expect to play much more than "main + extras" on any game, so any review that's expecting content beyond that just isn't useful for me.
Customers aren't professional reviewers. Paying customers are entitled to have their opinion at any time. Tiny Tina's Wonderland immediately put me off with that lame overworld. I think I clocked around 3 hours and then uninstalled it. Never ever would I spend dozens of hours in a game where a significant portion massively annoys me.
Well they kept getting told this game is a slow burn, so they kept at it, waiting for the fun.
(Just cracking a joke here folks, based off the reports it takes a dozen hours for it to get good)
I have about 30 hours in it now. I wouldn't say it gets any better over that time, if you didn't like it at the beginning you won't like it after 30 hours.
If a narrative-heavy game takes 60 hours and then fucks it up on the third act, it deserves the hate. Games having a bad payoff 200% warrants bad reviews.
Oh sorry, this isn't a Danganronpa thread.
Eh, guess I'll drop my review.
The game seems good and mostly well made, with the best hand-crafted environments I've ever seen from Bethesda.
But when it comes to the core gameplay loop, I feel like I've played this game already and I got bored very, very quickly.
It truly plays like Fallout 4 but with more menus and loading screens in order to fast travel somewhere. There is space combat, but it doesn't feel compelling to me. Click on bad ship until kaboom.
You want to fast travel? Drop some things, you can't fast travel while encumbered. Please undock first, we have some quest events tied to undocking and we don't want you to miss those. Please fast travel to the planet before landing at a location, we have some quest events tied to the space around planets and we don't want you to miss those.
Again though, the game is generally well made and I can see a lot of people truly enjoying it and the many gameplay systems you can dive into like settlement, ship, crew building, and side questing.
The slower-paced looter shooter gameplay loop just really isn't for me right now. I'd rather play Fallout or Borderlands.
Note that I haven't commented on the story. I don't feel like I've experienced enough of it to really give a good opinion on it. I've played 4 hours.
It isn't really a slower paced looter shooter, hell I barely loot anything and talk my way out of most situations.
It is more of a story based RPG, where you carve your own story out of the game. You decide what kind of character you want to play, and which quests you follow and which you ditch, anything is permitted.
If the only thing you do is go inside a random dungeon, shoot anything that moves, loot anything that isn't nailed down and then go sell it, you won't have a great time.
If you want to enjoy the game more, I'd suggest to choose a trope for your character: diplomatic Federation Captain, cunning Bounty Hunter, vicious Space Pirate, hardened Space Trucker, curious Scientific Explorer, ...
Then find a quest line that synergies with your trope and follow it all the way through. Making decisions based upon how your character would react, not just what option will give you the most loot or is the easiest to accomplish.
Starfield has all the scifi tropes imaginable, kind of like what Skyrim had with Fantasy.
Currently I am enjoying my interpretation of the backstory of Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek. Being as helpful as I can, making philosophical statements and trying to find a diplomatic solution to anything. I change the UC to be the Federation and the Vanguard to be Starfleet. And recreated the USS Enterprise to the best of my abilities.
I had a blast for the whole ~26 hours I played.
Aww man it’s actually a bummer to hear so many people are disliking the game. This has been the first game in a while where I’ve gotten hooked. I love the RPG elements in the game and the story has been brilliant. I’ve enjoyed games recently like Ragnarok and Control but this is the first one where I’m excited to just get back and sucked into the world. The last Bethesda game I played was actually Fallout 3 over a decade ago. It makes sense as Mass Effect is my favorite franchise and this feels like an evolution of that. My perfect game would probably be Starfield with ME: Andromeda combat.
Aww man it’s actually a bummer to hear so many people are disliking the game.
... Mostly Positive.
I totally agree. I'm having a blast with this game. Imo, the best thing Beth has ever made (yeah, suck it Morrowind stans)
I think the problem is that this game has a bit of a slow burn. It took a bit for it to open up and make sense for me, more than most Beth games. I think over time the hate cycle will die down and people will get it on a steam sale and finally sink their teeth into it and after a couple of years it's going to be as beloved as Skyrim is today.
I think a big part of the problem is just hype cycles. People had expectations that were through the roof. They didn't tell you they had seamless transitions to space, and they didn't tell you they had BG3 caliber branching conversation trees (which we're a long way from being able to realistically do outside of a CRPG). But people seemingly expected that.
I watched the direct and we got basically what I expected (though the gunplay feels better than I expected. I definitely felt like VATS was needed in FO4.) It's Bethesda's game design philosophy of a massive world with a bunch of different play styles and a bunch of different quest lines (and smaller single quests) and locations that don't have to be done in any order. You can easily get sidetracked and go down rabbit holes. They iterated on most of their core features and adapted them to the new setting in a really well done way.
I also love the way the skill system brought back the "get better by doing" philosophy of Skyrim with challenges to unlock higher levels, and the story telling is sci fi in more than just skin.
Out of curiosity, have you played BG3 ? It seems that most people who don't like the game are coming to starfield right from BG3 and those who do have not played it. BG3 is now just the bar that AAA story telling is held to and anyone who has experienced it is having a hard time with the story of other games.
I'm playing Baldurs Gate 3 with friends and Starfield singleplayer. And I am enjoying both.
They aren't the same game, even though they both rely on story and some aspects of the game are the same (like coming up with your own character and wanting to see how the story affects them)
I think I’m just getting old. Games like Starfield are boring the hell out of me. I played it for about 1.5hrs then uninstalled it.
I did the same thing with fallout 4, I think it's just todd that's boring.
It's been in the top 10 (and often in top 5) concurrent players on steam since release so I think you just don't like it, but many others still do.
Because they've been making the same game just with different settings for 20+ years and it been overused. You may have fun with the game if you didn't play the last few Bethesda games or you still enjoy that type but it is stale for most who have played fallout 3, nv, 4 and the elder scrolls games for most of their lives. There's just nothing new.
I think it's that other games have done cooler stuff, while Bethesda keeps making the same game with a different skin.
You must have such a refined taste to not waste more than 90 minutes on starfield. May I recommend Elden Ring or Baldur's Gate 3 for a discerning individual such as yourself.
If you can already know the game is boring after 1.5 hours, the game is indeed not for you.
I thought it was yet an other boring scifi shooter, but gave it a try after seeing someone else playing it. Then I saw how much of a Star Trek TNG vibes it had.
If this game had dropped in 2016, I’d be ecstatic. But… I played Elden Ring & it felt a bit like a modded Skyrim, that was better than Skyrim. Now, Bethesda games feel stale.
Does this mean they get no bonuses and obsidian gets a turn again?
Is it just me, or do the planets look like they have no lighting at all? (Playing on Xbox Series X)
They look completely lit to me, there's just very little shade in most cases. PC RTX 2070. Stuck in the 30fps club with you though.
There seems to be a bug with the main star/sun not showing up in some amd cards. I don't recall if Xbox has this glitch, but it does use an amd card as well so seems possible. Hopefully Bethesda or amd or whoever is responsible for the bug can fix it soon.
That's a bug.
Best walkingsim/exploration rpg I've played this decade by a longshot.
Haven't played the game yet, but I see everywhere that exploration sucks because all the planets are empty and look the same?
There are plenty of moons/planets with life and interesting things to see, but yes there are a lot of "barren" moons and whatnot. The game tells you what to expect when you click on a given object. It will tell you if there are flora and fauna, what the temperature is, what minerals to expect, that kind of thing. From what I can tell there is almost always some sort of structures/bases on the planets as well.
Nope, not true in the slightest. There's actually a lot of variety in biomes, flora, fauna, characteristics - and a lot of them even have multiple biomes with different life per biome.
What i expect people are complaining about is one of two things:
To the first point, I agree planet scanning gets pretty boring if that's all you do for 5 hours straight. But there's a TON of content in this game. Switch it up. Once you're done with a mission, go explore the planet you ended up on and scan the things. Or don't. Who cares. Planet scanning isn't necessary at all. I think a lot of people see that planet scanning gives you a ton of credits and xp, go grind that one thing, and then complain that it's boring.
On the second point, yes every planet will have a bunch of locations that are like "Cave" or "Covered Crater" or "Abandoned Facility" and such. A lot of them are small resource troves, but the facilities actually feel pretty handbuilt - if you check them out. But I think a lot of people see "Abandoned [whatever]" and think "oh autogenerated content, meh" without checking it out. I certainly have been guilty of that. But every time I actually decide to go in, I'm surprised at how much fun I actually have in those environments, how much environmental storytelling is actually there, and how well built the levels are. I feel like they hand built a bunch of these or components of them and an engine puts it all together.
The reality is that every Beth game ever has used procedural generation. And they've been getting better at it with each game. Skyrim felt less empty that Oblivion. Starfield feels less empty, overall anyway, than Skyrim. The handbuilt hub planets are way busier than any location in Skyrim. The procedural worlds feel more empty than skyrim for sure, but it makes plenty of sense, theres still plenty to do, and the amount of planets makes it feel less empty. And overall, there's a LOT more handbuilt and story content than skyrim - by several factors imo.
I'll also point out that the procedural content is just flavor. You don't need to engage in it but it's there if you want it. This game has a TON of handbuilt content - more than any other Beth game. The faction quests feel like a full game in their own right. The side quests are plentiful and quite deep. Complaining about procedural content in this game feels like complaining about the number of leaves on a tree.
There's both too much and too little stuff on planets. The random outposts it spawns are kind of boring but it's annoying when I want to put down an outpost and the game has randomly put someone else on the best spot. But when I want to get to them, there's a long walk for pretty much nothing.
You can complain a lot about Starfield, but it has some of the most aggressive fast travelling options available to date. If you are walking a lot, it means you don't understand the mechanics.
You can literally look at a waypoint and teleport to it.
I went from inside a dungeon, and teleported all the way to the commercial district on a different planet in a different system to sell everything in like 10 seconds.
Steam has long since proven itself it be a useless metric to get any valuable statistics from.
It's reviews have always been filled with memes, but especially now that reviews can be monetized.
Even poorly done negative reviews rake it a lot of Steam Points.
How can reviews be monetized also the overall score is what really matters and is far more trustworthy than any games reviewer. Oh you mean points, I still fail to see how that matters when a game has 10k+ reviews and some tiny portion of them are memes. There is literally nothing better in terms of reviews.
Steam reviews are generally 90% memes or circle jerking.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint had mostly negative. The reviews all complain about either no achievements or the fact that the game was locked to their Ubisoft launcher first. Not real criticism of the game, especially considering most of what people complained about on release was fixed by the time it got put onto Steam.
It's now 7 months later and it's finally gone up to mixed with mostly positive reviews recently, despite no changes to the game.
Compare Breakpoint to Wildlands, it's not as good previous game, all of the recent reviews are still circle jerking but posting positively.
As soon as Steam embraced the memes and shit reviews by adding a Funny button its reviews went to shit.
They should have made an arena shooter instead
Play Walking Simulator or actually go outside instead
Modern gamers are self-destructive. Nothing is good enough, and because every AAA release gets torn down and review bombed in one way or another, most and eventually all games from developers with the resources to make something of scale will become pay to win, microtransaction based garbage.
Because if they can't please their audience and lose all passion for the craft because of it, they'll just say fuck it go straight for the credit cards of those that do show up.
I've played about 70 hours so far. If you like the genre but starfield doesn't wow you, I don't think you're able to be pleased. Is it perfect? No. Is it at absolute minimum an A grade? Absolutely.
Ehh I don't know. We recently had both bg3 and elden ring. Both had near universal praise and no pay to win or micro transaction nonsense.
Hi-Fi Rush, Remnant 2 as well in the AA area. It's been a pretty good year tbh
I agree that we should appreciate well made games. But those are already beloved all around and praised at every turn, I don’t know how the people could be more supportive.
Think BG3, think Elden Ring. Even CP77, after a very rough release, is in a pretty good state now and about to receive a dlc + update that delivers many things originally promised; allowing the developer to recuperate a lot of the lost good will with the customers.
The point is, people still love good games. Just that starfield is pretty mediocre. Not a bad game by any means, but it feels like a lot of compromises, loading screens and reused assets.
One of the major disappointments imo is that space isn't interesting. You only really go there for the odd ship battle to progress the plot or whatever, but you can't really fly between planets, so you miss out on the cool side stories you get with Elder Scrolls games by walking between cities. I was hoping for Firefly the Bethesda game, but it's just Skyrim stretched across planets that you fast travel between.
I want to find ships in distress, pirate outposts among asteroid fields, scuttled ships I can scavenge, etc. In other words, space should be a mechanic, not just a setting.
I think the planets are fine, but I'd rather have fewer, more densely populated planets. I don't think space-colonizing people would only make 3-4 settlements per planet, there would be dozens if not hundreds of settlements before moving to the next planet. I'd rather buy a DLC to get access to more systems then current setup where everything is spread out. In fact, just give me Sol with Earth, Mars, and maybe one of a Jupiter's moons being inhabited with the rest working like the planets in Starfield.
But no, it's just Skyrim set it space, with fast travel between cities. That's fine, just not particularly special. I may play it at some point, but it's not what I'm looking for right now.
I dunno, I think it's a game somewhat damned by faint praise. I hear "It's good, not great" a lot and I get it. If you like Skyrim you will like Starfield. But I'd say the big achievement is to scale up a game like Skyrim into such a big playspace.
It's certainly good quality in terms of the look and what they've technically achieved. But the actual gameplay isn't that far away from what they did in Skyrim and Fallout. I get it - if it ain't broke, don't fix it - but to be honest it feels a little dated. And No Man's Sky does alot of the non-RPG elements better.
It's been a strong year for games; and look at Baldur's Gate 3 - that game actually pushed forward narrative game play.
Starfield is huge and interesting, but ultimately a bit samey. I think the "ocean wide, inch deep" is too far and unfair but the basic concept kinda applies in a crude way. Baldur's Gate 3 is smaller in scope but so much richer and varied. Time was Bethesda was the undisputed king of RPGs, but I think CDProject Red supassed them with the story telling in Witcher 3 (and then fell back with Cyberpunk 2077) and now Larian have supassed both with Baldur's Gate 3.
It's a good game, but it's impact is dimmed a bit by what else has come. It'll make a ton of money and probably be around for years, but it doesn't feel the same huge leap forward as when Skyrim came out. But hey, hard act to follow to be fair.
Well made games get praised for being well made games and get the accolades and attention they deserve, at least on the AAA level.
If a AAA game isn't receiving that, then it's probably not a well made game.
There are so many actually good games out there, you need to branch out more if your bar for an A is that low
C is a passing grade. B is pretty decent. A implies you excelled.
I would say B is more than fair. It’s surprisingly not garbage for a bethesda title. It’s not the second coming of christ.
There's a lot of gamers out there who believe they are Bethesda fans, and this is one of the first times they've actually had to reconcile the game's quality vs the developer they think consistently puts out good games. The amount of comments displaying obvious buyers remorse masquerading as defense of the game is hilarious.
You sound like you need to play more games. Gamers generally have every right to hate AAA games these days, as they are, categorically, not A grade games.
I guess that depends on how narrowly you define "genre." It's a pretty good sandbox RPG, and it'll get even better with community mods. If that's what you're looking for, it's great and way better than pretty much anything else.
But if you broaden it a bit, it has a mediocre story, mediocre combat, and mediocre exploration. So compared to other RPGs, it's really not special.
So I'd give it a B grade. It gets Cs in many areas, but the sandbox is good enough to pull it up to a B. To get to A, it needs to excel at something, like exploration (e.g. do more with the ship in space) or economy (e.g. invest in trade routes and impact the cost of goods by flooding the market). But it doesn't really excel at anything, it's basically the same formula they've had in the past with a different setting.
It's still a good game, it just doesn't stand out in any particular way. For everything it does, another game does it better, and it really needs to be the best at something to get an A from me.
A good artist doesn't do their art to please everyone, and knows that is a fool's errand.
Stop projecting the failures of management on to the creatives.