where is hellbender. hover 95. ski free?
Like I just don't understand what people expected. It's Fallout/Skyrim in space. It has a ton of the exact same mechanics, the exact same weak points, the exact same strong points. I'm sure I'll enjoy it, I'm just not chomping at the bit to have it right now and so will pick up the Game of the Year edition with all DLCs included for like $20 in a year or two.
If you like Bethesda games, you'll probably like Starfield. If you don't, you won't. I personally enjoy them, they're excellent "brain off" entertainment for me and at the same time I understand why some people don't like that, and that's also completely fine but I just don't get why people are flipping their lids in either direction. By all accounts (bearing in mind I haven't played it) it is exactly, 100% to the letter what I expected it to be.
Specifically, the other franchises let you literally just wander around through a hand-crafted world stumbling into who knows what. There are very few games that can deliver that because the hand-crafted thing is sooo labor intensive and expensive.
But Starfield failed to deliver on that. There are countless quests and destinations and rich dialog trees, but if I just push forward on my control stick, I will immediately leave "hand-crafted" behind in favor of "procedurally generated" and then I will hit a wall in at most 30-40 minutes. That's so tremendously different than what I was able to do in the other games that I just didn't have a reason to play anymore.
Bethesda wasn't obliged to deliver on the bits I personally loved about the other games, but I (and some others) were legitimately bummed when they didn't.
So...you haven't even played it and you're incredulously wondering why people don't like it? I don't have a big stake in what others think about the game but that seems worth reconsidering.
I think if you like Fallout 4 you MAY like Starfield. I guess just speaking as someone that ignored all the marketing for this game and came in with an open mind, I wasn't expecting anything. I love a lot of Bethesda games, though I wasn't crazy on Fallout 4 since it stripped some RPG stuff. It was serviceable still. I didn't really care when people said "oh you can't land on planets" and things like that. It seemed like a lot of the complaints people about Starfield were unimportant to me.
So imagine how disappointed I was when it had a bunch of additional things I didn't like on top of that.
- Terrible NPCs. Not likable or hatable, just bland. All the companions talk the exact same.
- Boring missions and story (yes even the "cyberpunk" city was bad).
- Easily the worst skill tree I have ever seen in a Bethesda RPG. I have never been less excited to level up. It's just minor stat boosts or shit that should've been basekit for the player. Fallout 4 had a great skill tree that made me feel different on each playthrough.
- While we're talking RPGs, this is not an RPG. There's basically no decisions to be made in any of the missions and no sense of having a character.
- Pretty boring setting. I know it's Nasa punk, but I vastly prefer the Fallout setting.
- Maybe one of the laziest ways procedural generation has ever been used in modern gaming. I hope it's the nail in the coffin for this kind of development.
- To cap it off, the discourse around the game has been annoying because it's either people calling the game woke or people saying only idiots that like No Man's Sky are disappointed by this game. It's a lot of polarized hateful nonsense.