Is It Just Impossible to Have an Honest Conversation About Starfield?

Slight tangent.

Maximum score (4 stars, 5 stars, 10/10, 100%, whatever they're calling it) not meaning the game is perfect is not at all a problem to me. There are games I absolutely love and would recommend to just about anyone and even then I don't think they're "perfect".

The thing that bothers me most is how average scores specifically for games are basically never used, and below average scores are just a handful of the most broken things ever.

It's so absurd that on metacritic for games, "average" goes from 50 to 74%. In movies it goes from 40 to 64. I don't know for everyone else, but I don't consider 7 out of 10 an "average" mark. And a game so broken it almost doesn't run at all doesn't deserve 5/10 (really, I've seen some).

Anyway, review scores are silly. Read the guys' opinions, see why they like it and why they don't. Someone's absolute favorite masterpiece is someone else's most unplayable shit.

@Ashtear Exactly. The 100% rating is often misunderstood. It does not mean perfect game, plus every publication has their own standards. Therefore one 100% is not comparable to another 100%. And like in your example conversions from 4/4 to 100% (because it can only be 0%, 25%, 75% or 100%), is done so an overall Metacritic score can be calculated.

For the longest time I think Metacritic is a bad for the gaming industry, if they lean too much towards (in example bonuses for developers, if they reach a certain rating).

To me, a perfect score doesn't (or shouldn't) mean a game is literally perfect. It means "I recommend this game without reservation. Everyone with the slightest interest in the genre should play it."

Granted, even by that standard a lot of these perfect scores are pretty questionable

Then read the text of the review where that should be explained. Stop putting so much stock in scores. Most sites would do away with them if Meta/Open Critic hadn't screwed up the system so they have to rely on clickthroughs. Eurogamer actually did for almost a decade but recently had to bring them back.

They like your contributions. You're part of the conversation. I think it's reasonable to want to filter what post you see versus what conversations you see. Lemmy will evolve

Feel free to block me, too. If you don’t like what I post, you won’t need to see it.

I think the ones that bother me more are the ones that are rage bait for a thing that the OP hasn't even experienced themselves. Maybe everyone else enjoys X and you find an article that summarizes your feeling on it, so you post that article and say how you share that position. That's all well and good. But posting an article that's angry about FFXVI's depiction of slavery, even though OP has no first-hand experience with the game to say if the article is full of shit or not; that bugs me. I don't know how many of the topics the OP has first-hand experience with, but I know they have none with FFXVI, and all of these articles are just designed to get people angry about something. Plenty of games have slavery in them without having to make their story about slavery being bad; we know slavery is bad. If OP has a problem with it after playing the game and that article sums up their thoughts, then it's okay to post that article. If OP is sincerely as pissed off about every one of these things that the articles they post are pissed off about, then maybe I should block them, because they'd have to be a miserable person. We also don't need 3 slightly updated posts about Baldur's Gate 3's split-screen not working on the Series S.

I mean if you look at the post history, OP has posted a LOT of things, but also posted two mary sue articles with kind of inflammatory takes on BG3, and Starfield. So I would not say they specifically have been posting rage bait.

They are just a super poster, they post just tons of gaming articles that strike their fancy, which is cool it keeps this community fresh, but it's not always good, just is what it is, I won't complain really because it's not like I'm much of a poster.

You've personally posted gaming "journalism" articles about starfield on !gaming at least once a day for nearly every day of the past 10 days. So excuse me but I'm a bit fucking fed up with "scrolling by" dozens of times in an attempt to find actual substantial discussions. Every time something is posted about the problem can literally be solved by not fucking buying it if you don't want to.

I apologize for sounding a bit vitriolic about this, but I hate when a valid complaint about this is responded to by just saying "don't look at it lulz." How about a solution to that problem would be you posting things that actually start interesting conversations instead?

And yeah sure it's the next big game so of course it'll have media coverage about it. But I don't really think much of anything I've read about this game has been really substantive in the gaming journalism space. I don't remember reading something and actually wanting to care.

In my original comment I wasn't insulting you personally, mind you. A lot of people have been posting about this game.

Youre right and I'm sorry

“God damn I’m so tired of hearing about the Super Bowl, it’s been a freaking week can y’all just get over it?”

Literally yes.

Here's a thought, not everything requires a response.

Fuck dem owls

No doubt. Enjoy your video games the way you want to enjoy them. I picked up RDR2 again recently, got to the point where you're supposed to break Micah out of prison, and I'm just like, fuck that guy. I'm going hunting and playing dress-up.

Yes, but Fallout 3 came out in 2008. You'd think there would be some advancements in that time.

that's an intellectually dishonest way of quoting the person that you quote

I had no expectations going in (wasn't planning to play it) and came out having fun. I don't know what expectations you or anyone else had, but maybe those expectations are what ruined the game. I don't think anyone's claiming the game is perfect (anyone who is probably is trolling), but it's pretty dismissive of its strengths for people to say it's unplayable (unless you legit can't run it, which is fair). If all you focus on is what the game doesn't do well, then you might as well only ever play perfect masterpieces because all other games will be a disappointment. If the price is a concern, it will probably go on sale eventually anyway, assuming you don't find alternatives before then.

I do think there are a lot of flaws with the game, but those flaws have already been elaborated in great depth by others. Despite those flaws, game is still fun and has a lot of room for mods to come in and make it better.

If you only compare games to what you want them to be then you can claim any game sucks. The gunpay in Madden games, for example, is awful.

I will! Won't be buying the dlc but it'll be a good time to actually finish a playthrough

Yeah. I started one a few weeks ago but I paused it when I heard that 2.0 is coming out. I'm gonna pick up the expansion and just play a new run all the way through, maybe watch Edgerunners again too.

There felt like a lot of people who really wanted CP to be GTAV and were extremely upset that it wasn't.

There was also a lot of angst from people who saw the words "open world" and expected it to mean some Second Life-esque escapist experience, rather than the actual meaning of open world, as in there is a big environment where you are free to roam around and do stuff in.

Misled expectations from the marketing hype absolutely played a key role in all of that furor, but at least for me, I tune out most of it since I like making my own opinions on things.

There's a TON more that could be said but those are the three standout points from my perspective.

In those Reddit threads almost everyone seemed like they had second hand information or it was just a meme that was constantly repeated.

Literally every conversation about Stadia

Oh no, my lighting is more realistic.

You can indeed use the mods with the game pass version.

weird, i never liked the look of SkyUI, thought it looked trash compared to base game

an ancient game engine that’s probably barely hanging together

I think Bethesda is a company full of people at the terminus of their careers - they don't know how to make any other kind of game than "Bethesda RPG," they don't know how to use any other game engine, and they are unable to learn either of those skills. Many other game studios have learned to evolve and shift their resources and assets - Naughty Dog doesn't still use the Jak and Daxter engine, From Software went from making mecha games like Armored Core to defining an entire genre with Dark Souls. It seems like Bethesda doesn't have the capacity to change like other companies.

That second paragraph has nothing to do with the quality of the game Bethesda Studio made though, not that Bethesda Softworks/Zenimax don't deserve criticism for the HR issue, but it's not fair to put that on Todd and his team.

Imho its because the procedural underpinnings are so close to the surface. How are you supposed to stay immersed when you know roughly how many POI's there will be and that you will see the exact same POI on multiple planets, right down to object placement? They will all be within running distance of the ship etc etc.

Its not the first game to do it, NMS is pretty immersion breaking in this respect, but at least its somewhat masked by being able to cruise around the surface, use vehicles etc. But I think proc gen for POI's is a trap for devs. If they do go down that path there needs to be a deep well of content to stitch together so that things feel unique.

I suspect the use of AI in game design (not necessarily in runtime) will go a long way to improving this sort of thing. Its one reason I think the Creation Engine is a dead man walking so to speak and a really bad call for ESVI. I doubt they will be able to shoehorn in AI to the dev pipeline effectively.

A lot of the game world in Oblivion and pretty much all of it in Daggerfall were procedurally generated by Bethesda yet I personally consider them to be the best games that Bethesda has ever produced!

Kind of, I don't mind the surface being procedurally generated but the landmarks themselves are empty.

Finding a dungeon in Skyrim means a unique layout, rewards and maybe a quest. In Starfield landmarks can't be unique because they need to populated too many planets but they are also empty, there is never anything worth grabbing or finding inside.