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I must say it is not the best RPG out there, but I feel like it would have earned more. I personally have a lot of fun playing.
While it was not a Cyberpunk-grade overhype, I think it must still have been overhyped. Because if you see it as Skyrim with better graphics, it is pretty much what you’d expect.
Some of the common criticism seems to be intrinsic to the sci-fi genre. In Skyrim, you walk 100 meters and then you find some cave or camp or something that a game designer has placed there manually with some story or meaning behind it. And as a player, you notice that, because most locations in Skyrim feel somehow unique. Even though for example the dungeons have rooms that repeat a lot. Having a designer place them manually with some thought gives them something unique.
In interstellar sci-fi, a dense world like this is simply impossible. Planets are extremely large so filling them manually with content is simply not possible. And using procedural generation makes things feel meaningless. Players notice that fast. So instead, Starfield opted for having a few manually constructed locations that are placed randomly on planets, unfortunately with a lot of repetition. But that is a sound compromise, given the constraints of today’s game development technology. The dense worlds that we are used to from other genres simply don’t scale up to planetary scale, and as players, we have to get used to that.
Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Create a handful of small, dense “gamefied” worldspaces and people will complain that the world is not big and open enough and that it’s not realistic or immersive to have such small and dense “planets”. Create thousands or trillions (in case of Elite:Dangerous) of procedurally generated planets with realistical amounts of POI-s, and people will complain about boring, sparse worlds with little to do on and where it takes too much time to go anywhere. Try to hit a middle ground, and people will still complain.
Same thing with spaceflight. In Elite you can fly seamlessly everywhere in a system. Only real loading screens are jumps from one system to another. People complain regularly about long travel times (average being only a few minutes), how travel is not gameplay and how “boring” it is and that instantly warping from planet to planet would be so much better. And then people complain about warping mechanics in Starfield.
The developers can never win with the internet-dwelling “gamers” with these sorts of games. There will always be a very loud minority who complains that the game is not what they imagined would be their perfect game. Bear in mind that most people who like the game are busy playing the damn game and not leaving reviews.
As for overhype, oh, there was so much of it in space sim circles. People seriously believed that Starfield will be killing Elite and Star Citizen in one fell swoop. Of course, most of these people were already discontent with Elite and Star Citizen and when Starfield obviously didn’t fulfill their wishful thinking, they’re now even more discontent and loud.
Me personally? I’m waiting til I can get a new GPU so I can start tinkering with spaceship builds (really love the NASA-punk aesthetic, especially the interiors), guns and suits. And Starfield seems to have perfected jetpack combat, one aspect I really like about Elite, but which is kind of limited there (can’t swap jetpacks, and the combat suit has a crap jetpack even after upgrading it while the suit with the good one is not that suitable for combat). Can’t wait to make my Mobile Infantry build operating from a Firefly-class ship🙃
I feel like you’re straw manning the issues with the game. Sure some people are disappointed by the lack of depth in the setting. But there are PLENTY of other things to be not like: primarily in my book, the game should be called “Loading Screenfield” since you spend more time in loading screens than anywhere else.
There is a pretty big thread from a few days ago where people discuss the things that are underwhelming about the game. Overall, it’s not a bad game, but not great either. Considering the number of actually great games it’s competing with right now (looking at you BG3 and soon Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty), I think it looks even more meh in comparison.
I think the Steam rating seem pretty spot on.
Not going to argue whether there are too many load screens before I can upgrade my PC and play it. What I will say, though: Starfield is not exactly unique in having lots of load screens, and I think that limitations of Creation Engine play the main part. Travel in Elite is also a load screen after every minute or two if you need to travel to any star system more than a few jumps away. Same goes for X3, which consists of roughly 50x50 km sectors connected by warp gates (loading screens) and in early game you’ll need to always go through many sectors to reach anywhere.
Depends on whether one considers these (unarguably good, especially BG3) games as competition for Starfield. I think competitors to anything should be considered in the genre of that something–eg Infant Annihilator is not competing with Purple Disco Machine, they’re just so wildly different things. I’m a big space ship nerd and for me neither BG3 nor Cyberpunk is not even remotely competing for attention. The competition to Starfield could be Elite, Star Citizen, No Mans Sky, X4. Either Star Citizen or No Mans Sky are maybe the closest competitors thematically.
Elite is the main competitor for me, and has excellent space flight mechanics, plus is the only game in existence to have a 1:1 scale simulation of the Milky Way galaxy. Starfield has arcade-y space flight (more of a space shooter than space sim), but seems to have done the on-foot gameplay better than Elite–especially when it comes to on-foot exploration and the life on planets. Starfield also has ship interiors and the ability build ships from ground-up. All of of this fills the niches Elite lacks, so in a sense they’re more complementary than competitive.
Two things: First, that in NO way makes it better.
Second, I haven’t played X3 in a LONG time, but X4 has a similar structure of warping between systems. Thing is, there isn’t any load time when you warp. You’re not looking at a 5 second animation followed by a black loading screen for another 5 seconds just to travel from a planet to its moon. You also have to fly to those jump points, so you get to actually fly your ship. In Starfield, you just point at a blue dot and then load. Arrive in your system, get scanned, load some more. Etc.
Interesting. I don’t actually think of Starfield as a space flight game since that’s such a minor part of the game and you don’t actually fly much, you mostly load screen between areas. I think of Starfield as an RPG with some space flavor, which is why I compared it to two other RPG’s. You’re mostly quick traveling between locations and then talking/role playing. The space flight is a (sadly) minor part of the game.
In fact, I think Elite is a terrible comparison. But I get that the niche seems to be your jam so I get why you’d want to compare and contrast the two.
Sure, it is RPG first and foremost, space flight distant second. But it’s certainly not your typical swords-and-spells fantasy world RPG. Mass Effect would be the closest, but has even less space ship stuff. In fact, I don’t think there has recently been another thematically similar game.
Star Citizen and Elite are IMO thematically much closer to Starfield than BG3, especially when we consider the core game mechanics (turn based party RPG vs. realtime first-person gunplay). The former two and Starfield boil down to your character using a spaceship to travel between planets and space POI-s, dogfighting in space and gunfights on foot with exploration, salvaging/scavenging, trading, bounty hunting and other activities to fill your time with.
Turns out that people really like to complain.