In a year without games like like Baldur's Gate 3 and Phantom Liberty, Starfield would be considered a great game. I still consider it a good game. I gave it an 8/10 I think. Just like Skyrim though, it's gonna take the modding community to really bring out the best in the game. Same as Fallout 3 and 4 and pretty much any Bethesda game that's not Dishonored.
That being said, Bethesda needed to shed that Creation engine a decade ago. The formula has stayed well beyond it's welcome. Congrats on the dub, but I hope they don't take this as "we're doin' it right". I'm sure they've seen all the criticism. They just need to sift through what's constructive and what's blatant fanboy logic, and improve things for Elder Scrolls VI. Jesus Christ creation engine for Elder Scrolls VI would be...depressing.
7/10 to 9/10 is perfectly valid scores imo after spending nearly 200 hours playing it. 10/10 is too high. 6/10 is too low. Metacritic on PC at 86, rounded to 9/10 on a 1-10 scale, spot on.
The low points for me:
1. The tame character design. Pirate design can be cool but no eye candy in a whole universe doesn’t get my approval. And when mods arrive almost every day to add some sort of mild sex appeal the devs should know they f’ed up.
2. Parts of the quest script is just plain boring and the execution on some quests are terribly rushed. The old colony ship was so cool in theory but the execution was like some intern job that didn’t even reach the art team.
3. The main quest becomes a boring collectaton. Oblivion without levels inside the Gates. Just a bad idea. Script was alright but I was bored at the temples at the second one.
4. Not enough reasons to be inside the ship. You spend hours to get it all right with the build editor, plan out the layout carefully, then you can skip it all and fast travel literally from inside a cave on one planet and back to your outpost on another planet without even looking at the ship. Why??
5. No land vehicles. Not a fan of crawling in a snail pace with the over-encumbered backpack full of resources. They absolutely 100% need to add transportation of some sort. Hello Games did it. Bethesda can do it too.
6. There is no real global economy worth mentioning if you just want to trade goods.
The high points for me:
1. The on foot combat, tbh I love it, weapons are cool and it just feels great, lots of weapon variety, love the jetpack too.
2. Ship building. In short: It’s fantastic.
3. Outpost building. Not nearly as advanced as in NMS but still fun and I like to do some environmental story-telling and add some clutter, cargo links is a cool idea too.
4. The visuals. When it looks great it looks marvelous. I have hundreds of screenshots.
5. The world just keeps on going without triggering main quests and it’s one of my favorite things in games in general when a game simply leave me alone.
6. Factions. I really enjoy some quests there and the consequences. Still haven’t played them all.
In the end it went from 7 up to 9 for me over 40 hours or so, then back to around 8 after finishing it and starting NG+. Then cemented at 9/10 after starting over and having spent over 100 hours just building outposts and ships and doing side stuff without getting pushed to do main quests. Hopefully they’ll keep iterating on it like they originally said they would.
Side note: People are rushing these award events for no logic reason, the year ends the last december last time I checked. How about giving people some time to actually play the games??