With the latest news that modders will essentially be able to create their own stories, Starfield likely has a long road ahead before it’s fully realized. The base game and people’s reactions to it will be lost to time by that point.
Bethesda already gets nerfed feedback for bugs, where a considerable amount of understanding is provided whereas other devs aren’t so lucky. I don’t believe it matters what state the game releases in. We’ve seen enough footage to be sure it’ll at least be decent, but if Cyberpunk is the worst case scenario then Starfield is at least poised to exceed that.
If that's the bar being set for this game, then it has already failed. You guys have got to keep in mind, Starfield is supposed to represent a turning point in Microsoft's 1P output, outside of their traditional staple. It's also, by incident, meant to be a redemption for the absolute disaster that was RedFall months earlier.
"Just" getting beyond Cyberpunk is not good enough. It shouldn't be good enough. When are people going to start demanding Microsoft put out some genuinely industry-leading, standard-setting 1P AAA epics? They want the allure of competing with Sony on power but want to skirt doing so where it actually matters: in 1P software that pushes the limits of the hardware's technical capabilities. That's half-assing it IMHO.
We already know games journalists are going to over-score this game just to give a narrative power, similar to what they did with Halo Infinite. The hope should be that unlike that game, Starfield is legitimately representative of its score or close to it. With how biased and corrupted games outlets are these days (particularly in the West), though, that's hard to believe will happen.
Am I saying Starfield needs to be Game of the Generation? Of course not. But it needs to be doing at least
something beyond other open-world games on the market, especially considering the size of the company funding it and what resources they have available to them. Unfortunately for the game, each new leaked footage we see keeps revealing a game that's, at best, on-par with most of the other standard open-world games already on the market, and not even in all aspects. At worst, some of the footage is already showing it to be under-par in some aspects compared to those other games.
My opinion: going off what's been shown it looks like a solid 85 MC game. And I hate MetaCritic, but it's the quickest way to convey where I feel it lands quality-wise. Depending on how present the less-than-flattering aspects of the game take up play time, I think a realistic high-end is a 90, but anything over that will feel like reviewers just gaming the system to prop it up for a narrative neither it nor Microsoft deserve to have.