Starfield | Review & Discussion Thread
- Thread starter Gamernyc78
- Start date
Yeah. The neat thing is I can do the opposite, I can break down any piece of entertainment media and point out its deficiencies.
Nah, it's pretty safe to say Starfield will have nowhere near the effect Halo did for its time. There may be a diamond in the rough, but there are many types of diamonds, and Starfield would be among the lower end of them going by overall sentiment.
It's not a situation like with, say, System Shock back in '94 which was clearly ahead of its time and the majority of gamers weren't cultured enough to appreciate FPS games that weren't DOOM; open-world RPGs are a known quantity these days and most gamers on PC and console have had 10+ years to experience with multiple types of open-world & RPG games over that time. They're mostly well-cultured in that respect.
If Starfield were doing anything genuinely ahead-of-its-time or original, at least some notable people across all the levels of the hobby would have noticed by now, and others would be following in their wake. That just isn't happening. I mention all of this because Halo did a lot of this for FPS games on console back in 2001, which is what really helped OG Xbox establish an identity for itself. Halo 2 cemented that.
I just don't see enough that's particularly amazing about Starfield for it alone to have helped massively propel console sales or subscription growth. Again, not the same as saying the game isn't good: it seems like the vast majority at least feel it's a good game. But few are saying it's a "great" game, even fewer would say it's a killer app. Starfield's a solid effort for Microsoft to hopefully get back in the swing of consistent upper AA and AAA 1P releases that aren't just racing, RTS and flight sims, but that means what comes after Starfield will have to be even better.
So how this really pans out, we'll have to wait and see how Avowed and Hellblade 2 end up being accepted. Not necessarily in terms of player counts or sales; unless Hellblade 2 is a supremely massive jump in scale & scope over the first game I don't see it pulling in that much of an audience compared to something like Starfield. But in terms of overall quality and quality respective of peers in their genre/style, those games have to perform stronger than Starfield is doing. They can't just be 'Starfield equivalents' in that sense, otherwise the optics and narrative for Microsoft WRT 1P output just degrades.
I had this happen to me last night in the last area. I wasn't sure if it was a bug because, with what was going on, I wasn't sure it was on purpose.holy shit bro just become the thing.
But I realized it was definitely a bug. I've been grabbing video snippets when weird things happen.I'm constantly recording things.
I think we all know that saying that Starfield is somehow "open world" is a lie. I mean, with so many loading screens all over the place, it can't seriously be considered in this category.
I think that Hellblade 2 has the potential to play in the same ballpark as Sony's 1P games. The last game in the series had some misses, and lacked combat, however it was very well done for what it was and it looked great given the budget it had.
Well, Hellblade on PS3 had a ton of action, etc. (far from my favorite game)... So I think the studio has serious potential going for it.
Same for future Doom titles, there is serious potential there... But will MS let it flourish?
I wonder if developing for the Series S will also have an impact on these upcoming titles. It would be good if there wasn't, but developers can only do so much.
This is a fun watch. The 2 defining duke xbox shills blaming everyone else because the starfield reviews didn't go their way. Skip to starfield review section.
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See this is the big issue with Starfield. People say it's amazing because it's so different to other games, and that is why it'll be remembered, but the specific reason they're saying this is because of the space exploration elements. How can it be remembered, and be integral for gaming moving forward, if NMS and other space sims do this aspect better? Why wouldn't we look at them as indicative of the new development, instead of Starfield? This is where the crux of the game is: Because as well as being a space game - it's a narrative RPG. So the scope of the game isn't "boring" like NMS or Star Citizen, it's a real game! But if the real game is what is so good about it, how will it be remembered for having these "immersive" exploration mechanics? It's a motte and bailey argument where the game gets shifted amongst its constituent elements to defeat criticism, but the game isn't holistic or better than the sum of its parts. If you want space exploration, there are better games, if you want a narrative, there are better games, if you want an RPG, there are better games, so at the end the claim appears to be "Starfield will be remembered because it does many things at once!" to which I would reply "so?" Starfield does two things okay, so it's groundbreaking? Not really the case. Maybe Sony should add an RTS section or shmups to factions and claim to be groundbreaking for doing two things at once (to be fair though, Nier includes action combat game with many shmups elements, but it's integration is seamless and you don't fell as if you're getting an inferior product to each gameplay element compared to a focused game of the same type). All it takes is one game to come out, say NMS 2, that manages to do each element better, or to combine them in a better way, for Starfield to appear weak. I think that is what it's legacy will be. Slowly people will respect it's a game that had a lot of scope and tried to emulate exploration, but was ultimately shallow. Much the same way BG3 highlighted how weak RPGs have become, hopefully someone comes along and demonstrates how weak Starfield really is.
Some are deluding themselves in believing this will be bigger than zelda and hogwarts legacy.
Matty Plays is a known Bethesda Game Studios fanboy. Also, I find it funny that he built his channel around playthroughs. To my knowledge Matty never made videos bout Xbox until he was hired by Last Stand Media to cohost their Xbox podcast. Kinda sus. Didn't watch the video just read the comments and Matty did say in the video that Starfield is more The Outer Worlds than No Man Sky. If he said that then he literally answered the question of why the 7-8 scores?
If he wasn’t into Xbox until Colon Mediocrity hired him for a podcast, he’s as valuable to that one as Chris Raygun is to Sacred Symbols, as an Xbox fanboy who knows nothing about 99% of games and cares even less.Matty Plays is a known Bethesda Game Studios fanboy. Also, I find it funny that he built his channel around playthroughs. To my knowledge Matty never made videos bout Xbox until he was hired by Last Stand Media to cohost their Xbox podcast. Kinda sus. Didn't watch the video just read the comments and Matty did say in the video that Starfield is more The Outer Worlds than No Man Sky. If he said that then he literally answered the question of why the 7-8 scores?
Colon is a master of hiring idiots for the wrong job, it appears!
I think that unless some studio staff comes out and say it we can't know what the limitations that were set ahead then had to be tempered down because of the Series S we can't really tell.
I mean, many many games don't require much to implement all their features (but not visual or frame rate parity) at least they don't require much given what consoles do these days. Many "indie" or "AA" games with limited scope and art budget often have to have simpler assets anyway, many AAA games don't require much more in therms of GPU processing either, it just depends how low you intend to go. Everything simpler than a game like TLoU 2 could be downscaled to last gen even, so for many the PS4 still does the trick (the xbone never did).
Then there is the outlier that wanted local split screen and it seems that does not work for some engines.
Mr. Sensitivity, Gene Park is on their Nintendo podcast so I guess Colin is a master of hiring idiots. Lol.
If Larian had to use the S as a baseline, it's possible BG3 would not have split screen in the first place. You're right that we can't know the limitations without people speaking up, but we have heard that the S can limit the scope and features of games. That has been said by developers. Whether it's true or not, and will impact XBox games in the future, remains to be seen.
3/5
metro.co.uk
Starfield review - the final verdict: outdated, unambitious and disjointed
GameCentral completes its review of Bethesda’s new sci-fi epic and explores why Starfield fails to live up to its full potential.
metro.co.uk
