I have never tried harder to enjoy a game more, but after 25 hours, I just wasn't having enough fun with it, so I bailed. I kept expecting it to get better.I'm happy for those who like it.

My opinion is they tried their standard formula on a setting which isnt really compatible with it, space not being a single map like in their previous games, think thats the major issue for me.

I've always been amazed how Bethesda can get so many things right while half assing so many other things. I wish we could combine the best things from Rockstar and Bethesda into one company.

As a Bethesda fanboy, really fan-old-man, I was so hyped. 2500 hours in both Skyrim and FO4, Probably just as many in Oblivion and FO3. I wanted to love it but just couldn't. It was OK, good, but that was it for me. I played almost 500 hours finishing most of the faction quest lines and the main story but that was it. I didn't nessisarily want some big new thing, just a vast improvement, or maybe it's better to say expanding on the systems they already had. What I found disappointing was that I felt that in many ways it was a step backwards for those sytems and they had years to fine tune them. For example, outposts. Whats the purpose in Starfield other than to farm XP and cash. If they would have expanded on FO4's settlement system. Even incorperated aspects of the sim-settlement mod. Settlemnts in space, recruit others to settle there, build shops, small quests involing your settlements, etc. A place to manage, trade, and defend, i.e. given them a real purpose. Also companians. While they were better than Skyrim and FO4, not by much. There was a companion mod in FO4, Heather, that after traveling with her, getting to know her backstory, I, as a 60 something year old man irl, was fighting back tears as she very emotionally told me how the institute had killed her sister. How she watched her die and felt so helpless. I am amazed, no blown away, that a part time modder, at home, doing her own voice acting, come create a NPC companion you can connect with and truly want to get to know, empathis with and a game studio with a three trillion dollar company behind them can't even remotly come close. Finally the procedural generation. I think I cleared out five exact same 'abandoned fuel depot' with the exact same bad guys that were in the exact same locations in the buildings on five different planets one weekend. That gets really old, really fast. Give me smaller but had crafted world any time. After Starfield, if I know in the future a game is procedurally generated I probably wont buy it. It's my biggest hestitation in trying Valhiem. Sorry it's so long, a lot to get off my chest. BTW, love your guys content.

The problem with Starfield is the things NPCs asks you to do would only make sense in a medieval setting. Those "talk to [person]" quests where you travel to another planet, talk to [person], then travel back to the 1st planet, would only make sense in a future where interstellar comms somehow don't exist, but interstellar travel does.

I got bored very quickly. But fair play to those that enjoy it. Life is about finding pleasure where you can. I looked elsewhere

The biggest disappointment is that we didn’t get The Elder Scrolls VI because they made this instead.

I put a couple hundred hours into this game and I have thoughts. When I judge what a game means to me, one of the most important moments for me is the very end, where I accomplish everything I set out to accomplish, go to my favorite spot, put on my favorite outfit (if applicable), and hit save for the very last time (for the time being, at least). It gives me that cathartic sense of a great story reaching its end and me letting it go. At that moment, I look back on the journey that I went through. I reflect on my first impressions during the tutorial and think about how long ago that felt, even though maybe it was only a couple of weeks before. I remember all of the special moments and challenges I overcame and, if the writing was good, the growth that the characters went through. Usually if I put more than a hundred hours into a game, this moment is very special. But with Starfield, it wasn't the same. First of all, without spoiling anything, the ending gives the player an unfair dilemma. It wants you to make a certain choice, but gives you every reason not to make that choice. It basically tells you that those hundreds of hours you put into it were not enough, and in order to nab this mysterious carrot that they are dangling, you need to give even more. In that way, it feels a bit like a never-ending live service game, because there is never a feeling of completion and satisfaction. There is only a feeling that the game wants you to keep going toward this vague future reward, and it expects you to trudge through endless recycled content to get there. I think that's a big reason why so many people have given negative reviews after spending so much time playing it. They endured the excruciating commerce system, the endless loading screens, the major plot beats delivered through boring dialogue instead of on-screen action, and the exhausting traversal systems, and all they asked was for the game to reward them with a fulfilling conclusion. But that reward never came, and at some point they had to just let go of this story and let it drift out into space.

For me, a big problem was repetition. Once I come across something in a game that feels repeated and endless, something happens in my brain where I lose all interest in doing that task. One of the first custom landing points I went to on a planet had a science outpost or something, and a random quest to find someone lost in a cave. Then, another planet I landed on soon after, had a quest to find someone lost in a cave… and there was a Science outpost with the exact same layout as the first. That was basically the end of my planetary exploration.

the magic of bethesda games has always been setting off to complete a quest; 5 hours later you've run into a half dozen other quests, dungeons, pretty landscapes and you've completely forgotten what you had wanted to do in the first place. pretty hard to get the same feeling on a bunch of barren rocks with one thing to do on them.

"the best thing bethesda's done since oblivion" lmfao gaming journalism is such a joke.

I am a huge bethesda fan and a huge sci-fi fan, so despite having played through the game and only kind of enjoyed it I do still find myself really wanting to play the game. But then I log on and two things in particular bother me. First, the loading screens. I know it's been talked about, but I just can't with the loading screens. It just makes the whole universe feel so small and I end up feeling like 60% of my playtime is sitting there watching the screen do its thing. Second, there's literally just not enough to do. I've already done all the faction quests and the main quest and a bunch of side quests and now there's just radiant quests from the mission board. I've basically not touched 80% of the planets and I've done everything there is to do in the game. So now when I log on occasionally, I find myself teleporting from planet to planet looking for something interesting to do only to realize I've spent the last 10 minutes watching loading screens and I shut the game off.

I think what we're seeing, in real time, is developers finally learning that bigger is not always better. A limited scope map packed full of content will always be a better game and bring people back more than an infinite universe with nothing going on. Their OWN crowning achievement, Skyrim, is a perfect example of this.

I’d say…it’s exactly what I expected.

I feel like I kind of hit a plateau in my excitement at 15 or so hours. I never really felt myself getting more drawn in like I did with Skyrim. I feel like the world building needed to bake for a while longer.

The only reason you would be disappointed with Starfield is if you swallowed the hype.

Starfield. World as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.

One of the main issues with Starfield is the lack of interesting wandering. You can wander around the major settlements, and that is actually pretty good. But, other than that, there's not much more to find out there on the planets and in space.

About the modding. I saw some KZfaq video about it, something about the main problem now is the origin of the game world is not the player, the game will crash if the player travel too far away. Hence the loading screen. Each loading screen change the origin of the game world. But if people want to mod it, the best option is to fix the origin of the world to the player character. However, since the origin of the game world is where the game build on, it is not an easy fix. Some had said it is easier to make a whole new game than to change the origin of the game world.

I watched a video on KZfaq and after completing the game numerous times, the next time you play NG+ there is a chance for encounters to be different. However, it is a small change and if you don’t notice anything different at the start of your NG+ that means you have to complete the game again and once again, there is a very small chance that the next time you play the interactions and things will be different…that’s crazy. Almost forcing the gamer to play through multiple times just to get rewarded with unique interactions.

I remember playing The Outer Worlds and being enthralled. Arguably Starfield was bigger, newer (not that newer is better), and a little more content rich, but it was just not as fun. I think like Jake said, it was just ok.

I hit a game breaking bug during Sam's companion mission. I just checked after 3 months, and that bug has still never been fixed, let alone addressed by bethesda. Locking companions to you during their buggy missions while simultaneously requiring no companions with you to progress the main story was a really bad decision.

I was very excited about this game when it was announced. As a self-admitted Skyrim and Fallout addict, I was determined to play this game... fully. In fact, as I only own a PS5 in the current generation of consoles, I was even planning on buying an Xbox Series system JUST to play Starfield. That has changed a bit since its release and subsequent reviews. I still think it looks cool, and I want to play it, but I may wait to see if it makes its way to Sony. That could be a VERY long wait (if ever), but I'm not sure buying an entirely new system for a single game makes sense, especially since I concentrate on PS as my main gaming experience. We'll see.

Man, honestly I really love this game when it comes down to it. I'm sad to say that it was ultimately the lack of optimization that stopped me from finishing this game. I, along with many others, just don't have the means to own a top of the line beefy PC, and it really sucks that this game is kind of locked behind this sort of thing. The loading screens suck, but man I would've been able to look past that and pretty much everything else people complain about if I could just play this game smoothly. I know I'll come back to it and love every minute of it once I can spare a couple grand for a new rig. For now, cyberpunk holds my heart. Thanks, Gameranx, for yet another dope and honest video.

I've been far more lenient with Starfield than most people. I've been a Bethesda fan since Morrowind, so the gameplay loop of exploration, discovery and loot is right up my alley. The best thing about Bethesda games for me has always been the things you could do outside of the story. Just taking a stroll in any random direction through the environment that they created and finding an amazing bit of environmental storytelling or an unmarked dungeon with some incredible theme to it. Of the supposedly over a thousand planets to explore in Starfield a large percentage of them are gas giants you can't even land on, multiple moons that you couldn't tell the difference between, and rehashed locations to visit on every planet, duplicated down to even the items inside lockers. After the 40 or 50 hour mark there just doesn't seem to be anything left to see or new to explore. I would have taken four highly detailed explorable planets over a thousand cookie cutter boring uninteresting planets. I hope this isn't indicative of what we will see in Elder Scrolls 6.

I felt like the city and towns didn’t feel lived in. The npcs didn’t all have a home they went to and I could follow around and learn about them like Skyrim or oblivion. I think it missed that Bethesda charm.

I had fun with it. I think I checked out of the story when they revealed who the Starborn were under the mask because I cared so little about them. But the exploring and quests etc were fun. I still play more from time to time but I want to cross the Unity a few more times before settling down and really focusing on resources and building a base

My takeaway was that I stopped paying attention to online commenters and unsubbed from a lot of places and now just enjoy what i like

Going from Baldur's Gate 3 to Starfield was extremely difficult.

To me, this game felt like driving down a long highway, like you're somewhat concentrating on driving, but otherwise you're not engaged at all. My brain just went into autopilot and my memories of this game are just kind of a hazy blur.

I think the core issue is deeper and more depressing: Bethesda simply doesn't know anymore how to replicate Skyrim's quality level of exploration and adventure. Their last indisputable success was over 10 years ago, but Fallout 4 clearly had some questionable decisions. So if anything, I am more concerted about the present and the future of BGS itself, rather than Starfield's future.

Disappointment. Didn't hold my attention like Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 4. I was married to those. This felt boring, found myself on my phone in between the barrage of loading screens having to bounce the cosmos.

The reason 40hours is the average playtime is because it takes 39 hours to get anywhere.

For a "space simulator" in 2023 the amount of loadings and not be able to fly off the planet were a deal breaker for me. If the quests/npcs were at least good... but it's all a mess

Maybe I need to try to put more time into the game, but I totally disagree that it feels like a Bethesda game. If it felt like “just another Bethesda game,” that would be such an upgrade to this game.

It's a decent game but they really missed out. They concentrated too much on vastness and much less on content. I'd rather have 100 planets with a lot to do than 1000 planets with cookie cutter settlements. Even the loot is mirrored in different locations...

I started playing Bethesda games with Oblivion and have played all of them since. I was so excited for Starfield as I felt it was going to be a refreshing story that would give the unique feeling of excitement and nostalgia that only amazing games can give you (nostalgia - feeling like a kid on Christmas with a new toy. The feeling we don’t get as adults very often). For some reason the exploration, planets and travel felt like the biggest betrayal… What’s there to explore? What’s there to enjoy outside of the streamlined experience / story (if you enjoy that)? The lackluster exploration experience is what made my rose tinted classes come off and made me realize that this game is truly a “copy-paste” of the “Bethesda formula”. I won’t say the game broke my heart, I think my expectations and hopes did. “Their most disappointing” I think that’s accurate in that there were expectations. Their worst? Maybe, who knows. I was hoping and I guess expecting this game to reignite my love for gaming and for a good story. It was just one of those experiences that as an adult can add to the “it is what it is”. As someone who has been losing interest and that true enjoyment with gaming over the last couple of years, this one hurt more than a usual disappointment.

I had high but reasonable expectations for the game, and I have to say; while I liked it, I never felt wanting more when I turned it off at night. No "One more mission/side quest and I'll go to sleep". It was "alright". I never ended up finishing it but I did enjoy my 40ish hours in the game.

This was a 15 minute video of saying "it has mixed opinions"

Going on three months now waiting on game breaking bugs to be fixed. The resref bug and the corrupt save bug, where if you play the game too long without initiating ng+, your save gets unrepairably trashed.

I uninstalled Starfield to make some space and realized I’ll probably never install it again, just because it’s too hard to stay engaged with for extended periods. Hope we get some crazy mods/dlc/fixes to turn it around

If a game doesn't grip me within 10 hours of playing I'm pretty much over it. Starfield didn't make the cut for me. I have too much going on to waste time on bad games when there are better ones out there.

He keeps saying "some people just love bethesda games..." yeah, so do I, but I hate this one.

The best part of Starfield finally releasing is knowing that Bethesda now has no choice but start on TES 6

"I liked It, I didn't love It" Is exactly what I feel about Starfield.

I was definitely disappointed, mostly because of the exploration. I don’t really care about the quests because Bethesda is mediocre on quest most of the time but the exploration has always been top tier with environmental lore and Starfield doesn’t really have any of that

I would have appreciated if the game took a significantly smaller scope (say 25%) and focused on flushing more personality into that world. I explored the 4-5 major settlements very early on in the game. I was excited at the notion of discovering more of these settlements spread through the rest of the planet systems. I was disappointed that outside of a very few outlier settlements like Red Mile or Paradisio, 99% of the planet exploration involves the exact same bases/encampments/caves randomly populated on them.

The updated Cyberpunk made me realize I don’t need Bethesda anymore… I re bought Fallout 4, and barely made it a half hour. This kinda game just doesn’t work for me anymore

Bethesda itself has become Bethesda’s biggest disappointment

I expected fallout in space, that's what I got. I love the game, its not phenomenal, but it's very enjoyable. I may not play it that much anymore after getting all the achievements, but am very much looking forward to dlc in the future.

It’s not Skyrim in space, not even close.

It’s the same thing over and over. As soon as you engage in a conversation and that camera goes into Bethesda mode you already feel like you’re playing a game you’ve played over and over and over. Most games that are succeeding have mystery shrouded around them and this has none. Rockstar improve their formula every time to such a degree that they can get away with it.

It is an okay game. It didn't replicate those feelings I got from playing Oblivion, Skyrim, or Fallout 3 for the first time and that's unfortunate, but maybe it's because I've seen this game one too many times. It has also been extremely difficult going from Cyberpunk (I started after the new patches) to this game. Cyberpunk just feels like it has so much more life to its story, NPC, environments, and I feel so much more satisfaction from a fight encounter in CP than I do in Starfield. I'm very interested in the main story, the possible endings, the relationship sidequests, and just the world of Night City in general. I'm about to finally beat Phantom Liberty and then I'll give Starfield more time, maybe with more hours played and actually getting to New Game+ I'll enjoy it a little more.

I ain’t play the game but not being able to fly you’re ship on planet seems like the biggest missed opportunity of a lifetime. I honestly wish more space games did it. Jedi survivor would’ve been amazing with that or even a bike like shown in outlaws.

Those ps3 graphics are amazing

Hey Jake and everyone. Here I am, one of those weirdos who doesn't usually bother with any online discussions. Forums having died is a big one for me as to why. Discord is too messy, so's Reddit, and yet here I am to talk about Starfield. Likely the one and only time. Surprised that my number is so high too, apparently I have put in 375 hours into Starfield at this point. I am less than 10 levels away from getting my last achievement. Is it a little boring? Yes and I still enjoy playing. I wouldn't go so far as to say I love it, but 375 hours is a lot of time in one game. Love, love, loved Fallout, so I suppose I love Bethesda style games, but I was hoping for more. Different engine would have been nice, less load screens would have been preferable, and changes to space combat too. Even still, there's a ton of game, with story I really enjoy and the new game+ is the shit. Anywho, back to never speaking online and playing many other games, it isn't just Starfield for me. I'm just too old to bother with online discourse.

I’m also at “I like it but don’t love it”. That being said, a really good DLC with a few optimizations (read less loading screen) and it could get to “I love this game”

For me its the way Bethesda treated their own fans after it was released and then effectively calling many people poor because they csnt optimise. Not taking accountability is such a loser move.

I'm surprised you guys haven't made a video addressing the massive success of Baldur's gate 3.

Bethesda die hard here. Starfield was my most anticipated for 2023. I played it for one week, completed tons of side quests and did the main quest. it sucks so bad.

Space games tend to receive an overwhelming hype train where people think its going to be some kind of generation-skipping experience.

I've said this elsewhere. I enjoyed the game, I found it weirdly relaxing. It was far from perfect, don't get me wrong, but it seemed about on par with the majority of Bethesda games to me.

To me Starfield was a beautiful lie. Much like it's ingame food items gloriously cursed. It promised travel by spaceship. What we got was travel by cut scene. And the more and more you dissected it the more and more you realized where ever you went in game there was always some random human outpost just sitting 30 feet away from your target and you cant help but wonder. What was going through those npc's heads. Aside from that featureless glazed look that all the npc's seem to have. "Yeah! There's a big glowing structure just outside our front door lets go explore it and claim a first!" "Or we could wait for some random explorer to stop by and claim the glory for themselves. On top of that there's a random criminal element roaming the galaxy which they mostly claim as UC Space with the exception of House Va'run and the UC appears to be on the backend with the Crimson Fleet. And don't even get me started on the main story line trying to rip itself from Skyrims cold Sort of kind of dead corpse cause keeps getting revamped every year with a new console platform. Truth be told it all felt like Fallout 3 or 76 all over again with the same mechanics same game engine only mildly updated to make DLSS useless from the start.And loading screens every where you went. It got me to thinking. How to classify the United Colonies as a ruling party. And the only conclusion that I could come to was it was a failed state., Much like Bethesda and Todd Howards reputation.

For me, this is the best thing since RDR2. It took getting to a few temples, maxing a few skills, getting to "A High Price to Pay" and getting past 200K space caps to have fun but im having a great time man.

The bugs and lack of remedies are what killed it for me. I could not build outposts after level 80 or so (and I had saved that feature for last to try, other than a few resource outposts I made early...) I NG+-ed 3 times hoping that would fix it. Starting over seems not worth it.

At the beginning of the year I was really excited for Starfield and didn't know BG3 existed. What a difference a year can make

I think the ai generated responses from Bethesda should’ve been highlighted more because it shows they have no interest in improving the game and that they were just hoping modders would do it again like they did for Skyrim.

I’ve been waiting to jump on this game because I wanted to give Bethesda a chance to bake it longer. It might be time to give it some attention. CP2077 was amazing (after the Phantom Liberty update) and although I don’t want this becoming a habit for big studios, at least with digital release the bigger studios have the money to fix the major issues.

For me I really enjoyed the story. But I didn’t feel motivated to really explore like in the other series. It felt empty with nothing to do but scan stuff. So once it felt that way to me I quit going outta my way and just focused on the main story. Haven’t played since. Hoping they do a NMS like thing and improve it. And of course the creation kit to release so the god modders can do their thing. Can’t wait to see what they come up with.

76 is actually a good game now worth trying it :)

I bought into the good reviews and general popular attitude towards it and I dropped $35 to get it early on gamepass. It was a ginormous disappointment to me. I started out thinking it was pretty good but at this point I would just call it bad, I don't think it even deserves a "mediocre"

In my opinion,nothing was a disappointment like Fallout76. This game was different

I wasn't interested in Starfield until I randomly wanted to play a space game about the time it launched. Then it had me playing every night until 2-4 am and going to work exhausted because I just couldn't stop playing it. My current thought is that Bethesda took an extra year to release a game that wasn't just broken and would provide a framework for more to come. I put the game down after 230 hours because I didn't want to get burned out. This is a game I want to enjoy for a very long time.

I feel like the expectations around the game were a bit too much. Bethesda, while a successful and influential studio, haven't really changed their formula for a very VERY long time. Same gameplay, same loop, same story-telling style, etc. Which isn't a bad thing necessarily. Don't fix something that isn't broken yk. But at the same time eventually people are going to see flaws in that formula and I feel like that might be a factor to why things turned out the way they did.

I found it very enjoyable, and I loved piloting my huge ship around in space. The only bad thing was the bug that halted my progress in the main Constellation story. Unfortunately, I can't finish it after over 100 hours. I hope they fix that soon.

These well informed opinion pieces make for great videos!

I would say yes, I thought I would be playing this game all the time but after I beat the main story I never went back. It’s too limiting, too many loading screens, hope we get some meaningful updates soon enough.

I think it comes down to how you are feeling on the day of playing any game. I played Morrowind and Shin Megami Tensei, basically Persona, and absolutely loved them, but later version I just got board because they were lacking that spark from earlier games. Plus, getting older, I just don't have the paicents playing long drawn out games

It’s my favorite space game to date. I’ve played NMS and elite for hundreds of hours. Only real issue is they made fast travel too easy which bypasses the game and the immersion. It’s a great game to me. I love it.

No. I got exactly what I wanted from it. Fun ship building, improved gunplay, fantastic characters and companions, tons of replability, a focus on a main story (that I consider top notch), and room for plenty of expansion going forward. This game feels extremely similar to Daggerfall. It set the ground work for what’s to come. In time, it’ll be remembered as a classic. Maybe a little too big for it’s own good, with too much procedural generation, but that’s my only complaint. Wheneve a sequel does drop, (probably 30 years from now, given the pace Bethesda is on) I think it’s going to be a masterpiece.

I played it for a good 70 hours, which for any other game would be plenty. But I have little desire to go back to it. Skyrim and Fallout 4 are games I've poured hundreds and hundreds of hours into over the course of several years because I always loved going back to them. Starfield doesn't feel the same; the lack of a hand-crafted interconnected world really hurts it for me. It certainly wasn't a bad game...just not one with the same kind of staying power.

Yes, I was very disappointed with the outcome of the game and I’m a big fan of BGS.I finally decided to try out the game and I just felt like I was forcing myself to play it which is not a good sign. I’ve also tried multiple times to go back to it and I just lost interest. The loading screens, 30 fps, and bugs was some of the major reasons why I stop playing the game.

The best way I’ve ever heard Skyrim described was “wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle” I feel like starfield is that concept, taken to its logical conclusion. Add onto that the fact that it was released in one of gamings most ridiculously stacked years in recent memory and a lot of the discourse around it makes sense

It's such a strange game, I enjoy the faction story lines and the main story is pretty good after the initial...lazy? Writing of "heres a thing, here are some bad guys, oh look, here is a ship for you" . The combat is good enough to be quite fun. The main downside for me is the exploration, the Skyrim and Fallout games have always been so much fun to explore round, find fun little side quests and random events, weird stuff going on etc. Starfield feels too big and too empty, you land on a planet and try to explore to find very little of interest. Also, I don't know about anyone else, but Fallout 4 brain kicked in and I collected all sorts of random junk thinking "ahhh, crafting items" to find there's no scrap system and it's just...stuff...which seems like a backwards step to me. It's a decent game, but it is full of disappointing issues that really hurt it.

For me as someone who is a big fan of starfield, they really focussed in marketing about it being a space exploration game. But it never really feels like you're exploring space. Yeah you can dogfight in 0G and make a spaceship. But all of the "exploration" is in a sub menu. You don't just happen upon planets of moons. You have to deliberately go to planets you click on. That mixed with the severe amount of loading screens (I know, dead horse) but honestly imagine if ES6 comes out and you have to go through a loading screen for every little shack you come across. You also gotta take into consideration games like no mans sky and star citizen had to make entire game engines from scratch specifically for what they wanted. Bethesda decided to just patch the one they're currently using so it might literally be impossible to do some things.

I’m a casual gamer nowadays, but grown up with Bethesda games, amongst other classic Triple A titles, like AC, Batman Arkham, FIFA, and COD, but only ever come back to Bethesda after all these years. I’m probably in a minority where I genuinely enjoyed Starfield and like the sandbox style blended with the RPG aspects of your archetypical Bethesda game. Think Minecraft, meets Skyrim, but in space! For me, the casual gamer, that works and is more than enough for me .

Starfield at least recaptured a bunch of people on the ropes of RPG back into the genre regardsless of how empty it truly is. Their biggest disappointment IMO is that in nearly fifty years their lore into Fallout barely goes outside of North America. Their apololypse has world war, nukes, an experimental genetic virus, all the while set in a butterfly effect past, yet the whole IP is treated like an afterthought.

I played it up to half way point. Never replaying it. Not at least without some major overhauls... most likely fixed by modders than Bethesda. Because Bethesda can't seem to ever fix most of their issues ever since Morrowind. I was always okay dealing with some jank, because the core of it was fun. Skyrim probably being the peak everywhere I turned, there was something to look at and I could do it without dealing too much with the annoying aspects like loading. Unfortunately Starfield put those limitations right in the forefront and unfortunately did not benefit of the "I want to explore everywhere I look" part of it. What probably hurt Bethesda the most was the gaslighting tone deaf responses to valid criticism. "Not having fun? That's because you're playing it wrong! Astronauts went to the moon and you can't say they were bored".

For all that développement time, for how shallow the game is, absolutely.

I beg you, don't ask such a question. Todd Howard will take it as a challenge and ask you to hold his beer. 😭

I knew I was going to be disappointed with the game when I heard that it would have over 1000 procedurally generated planets, and they were using an updated Creation Engine. I played several hours and was so bored that I stopped and haven't managed to talk myself into returning.

I enjoy it and spent a lot of hours playing it. Im just waiting for some mission fixes, more content and less copy paste locations before I go back in. I was not disappointed in any sense of the word. Well, Im not sure the end of the main story lived up to what it promised but it was asking a lot, imho

By game studio you already know that they just failed and that's their end. You need to give oppurtunity to other game studios. This is how it works. After multiple titles failing, there's really no hope that Bethesda will do the same or better than they did before. Graphic is one thing and gameplay is second thing... two different things that must be good at this time.

How do you officially finish the game?

Starfield looks like a fancy version of no man’s sky.

I loved it whilst I was playing it, but now I've taken a break from it I find I don't really miss it or feel an urge to go back to it. I put in like 300 hours, gonna wait until the Shattered Space DLC comes out before I pick it back up again.

I put 195 hours into Starfield before deciding i was done with it until some patches & DLC rolls through. It was fun, addictive, but also bland and had many instances of "one step forward, two steps back" game design. The space travel, if you can call it that, is far too fragmented for me to immerse myself in the game like I did with Fallout or TES. And even if space travel was close to seamless (or just seamed, but very cleverly disguised behind transitions that don't break immersion), they focused on quantity over quality when it comes to planets & activities. There is a ridiculous increase in randomly generated, generic encounters. It's not just the radiant quests that would push you to interact with the world and create your own stories, like the endless quests in Skyrim. It's other types of encounters, recycled facilities and caves that just vastly outnumber the amount of unique content in the game. The unique content itself just isn't that interesting either. There's one or two faction storylines that are cool. But even those are wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle. The Crimson Fleet especially. They're all written like saturday morning cartoon villains. The game's entire universe is very sterilized and lacks any grit, charm or identity. It doesn't help that i put Baldur's Gate 3 on hold to dump a couple hundred hours into this game. So the sheer quality and creativity of the writing was in INSANELY stark contrast. Starfield is *fine* as your brainless, mainstream action RPG with no real role playing or consequence. But I wanted it to be more. Especially after Bethesda's been repeatedly shown up by more complex RPG games made by studios like CDPR, Obsidian and Larian. I liked the game. I'd have to be pretty insane to have played almost 200 hours of a game I hated. I just didn't think it was anything truly special, nor do I think I'll remember over 90% of what I did in it a year from now. And that's a shame. Because Bethesda, while not always delivering the most complex or interesting writing & roleplaying elements, at least used to be able to provide memorable, immersive worlds for you to inhabit. Starfield simply doesn't have that, and I hope Beth's post-launch support can at least improve it all by a little bit.

As someone who put 250+ hours after the launch in the game, I feel empty. Half if that time was spent on doing the NG+ loop till max power levels(had to finish at NG11+ cuz of bugs in one of the runs in which the temple didnt generate and I noticed way too later). I thought once I became OP, I will engage with things which I did in the last run I played, I did every quest there was to do. The gameplay is fun but at the same time very empty. I feel like they wanted us to have the empty feeling after you max out because that would probably what it would feel like to be a God. It's a good philosophical dilemma but sucks in game because there is nothing to engage in outside of main quests. You truly can't be evil, you are punished heavily for it in real annoying ways. You truly can't be good because you left your own universe and are a impostor in this one taking the place of a dead person. Why build ships when there is no challenge for it? A semi decent ship coasts you across all enemies. Why make outposts unless you want to be filthy rich without any means to spend it. What good is money for a God who can obliterate anyone in a blink of an eye? In the end I left feeling empty when I last put down the game. It's not a bad game but it definitely is empty and makes you as well.

Anyone else feel like Microsoft/Xbox is cursed? They can’t put out one exclusive without it being a flop. No matter how many acquisitions they get, we still haven’t seen a new AAA game knock it out of the park.

It's definitely their biggest disappointment, A lot of people made excuses that 76 wasn't made by the main team but Starfield was and their is no excuse this time