I recognize all of that as true to some extent, but still I have 230 hours in Starfield, and I haven’t even finished all the quests.
Does that truly constitute a failed game?
As far as I’m concerned their biggest mistake was not having something to travel around in the planets on the start. Walking around to the interesting locations was annoying.
Then there’s a bunch of pointless systems like the colony system, and the whole space magic thing, but the rest is still a bog standard Bethesda game with 10000 different handcrafted unique locations for me to explore following a bunch of sort of interesting questlines.
Just because you enjoy it doesn't mean the game doesn't have problems, or it didn't have a negative affect on BGS's image. The reviews vary location to location, but on Steam it's at 55%. That's unfathomably bad for a Bethesda open-world RPG title.
A lot of people bought Starfield because it was a Bethesda game. A lot of those people will re-consider the next time such a game comes out.
Even years later, people are willing to put up with all of Skyrim's jank, bugs, performance problems, terrible animations and visuals, bad story and the rest because the core gameplay loop of exploration is so strong. It carries the entire game.
Starfield is missing that core that holds it together.
> Just because you enjoy it doesn't mean the game doesn't have problems, or it didn't have a negative affect on BGS's image
All of their games have a negative effect on BGS’s image. There’s no company that has more people complaining about their games. It’s going to take a whole lot more than a single terrible game to get people to stop buying them.
I’ve played fewer hours but gone through the whole story and about eight trips through the unity.
I don’t think it’s a failed game so much as one that’s not lived up to what it could be. The story is occasionally great but not always so. Most of the procedurally generated planets are entirely pointless and dull. You can see where they abandoned and downscaled ideas because there are still rough edges - the ‘fuel’ system that never was, for instance.
Overall I enjoyed the game, but it definitely falls into the same “banality of the infinite” trap that No Man’s Sky does
Does that truly constitute a failed game?
As far as I’m concerned their biggest mistake was not having something to travel around in the planets on the start. Walking around to the interesting locations was annoying.
Then there’s a bunch of pointless systems like the colony system, and the whole space magic thing, but the rest is still a bog standard Bethesda game with 10000 different handcrafted unique locations for me to explore following a bunch of sort of interesting questlines.