I just don’t understand what people were expecting. I expected Skyrim in Space and got that. Expecting a true space sim on top of that? That’s an entirely different ask. I’ve got E:D and NMS if I want to spend hours hopping from one system to the next and deal with space physics. But if I want a story, Starfield is delivering for me.
I think a lot of people that are extremely critical of it weren't going to buy it anyway and just want to enjoy banding together to shit on it in camaraderie because it's popular to hate it.
There's also this sort of awkward dynamic that Bethesda has created with its player base where the extensive amount and kinds of mods their games end up with means people view every small facet of the game that they don't love as something that they want to change and modify, where a different game that's bolted down and doesn't have guaranteed mod support would just never have those little bits talked about at all, and the players would just talk about what they like instead.
If you look at comments about Starfield even from players that enjoy it, you notice that most of the time nobody says anything about what they think it's doing right, aside from a "and it's still a good Bethesda RPG", while also having a small list of things they don't like or want to change. Just knowing that changing these things is possible makes people fixate on wanting them gone or different.
But it absolutely does need at least one mod. That inventory mod linked a few days ago, for example. That mod is a godsend.
I’d also like to see some sort of automated bulk-selling for outposts… or at least, bulk vendors and the ability to link to landing platforms/warehousing in cities (or some cities.)
And one that lets you create presets for ship power settings.
I think a lot of people that are extremely critical of it weren't going to buy it anyway and just want to enjoy banding together to shit on it in camaraderie because it's popular to hate it.
I actually feel like there's WAY too much emptiness in Starfield and for its scale, there are very few different types of places to visit.
Bethesda needed to scale down quite a bit to make more meaningful places to visit because as it stands, there's very little to find through organic exploration.
It is so space skyrim and i'm at 70 hours in. It's almost like space Daggerfall with all the procedural encounters. I've even warmed up to planetary exploration somewhat.
I have no idea where people get these unreal expectations from. The game is overall good. With one big 'but'. The engine is very outdated. If it looks this bad on release, just think about how it will look compared to other games 1 year from now.
It is just awful for a game released in 2023. The character model quality is the same as Fallout 4.