Haven't played the game.

I'm curious as to how exactly the space exploration differs from Elite Dangerous.

Because in that nearly decade old game, space exploration does largely consist of fast travel warping to systems, scanning them and potentially any planets from your ship, scooping fuel from the stars, avoiding white dwarfs and neutron stars... And its absolutely enthralling.

Curious as to how they screwed up a proven formula.

The weird one to me is that they made it sound like a space survival game where the ship and its maintenance was going to be a primary game element, but other than the ship builder and random encounters outside a planets, it seems like it's hardly a thing.

I wanted to like it too. I did like my first playthrough after I learned to navigate its ridiculous menu diving, I thought it had some cool concepts and I liked the gameplay well enough for how I played it. Some aspects clearly had cool intentions then just forgot about, like unique NPC followers.

Then after over 100 hours or so I tried out NG+.

It shows all the flaws of the game at 10,000 nits, they are blinding. My first realization that things were bad was one of the first dialogue options that was different was pretty close to, "hey, i already know all of this lets move this along". And the response is, like, "wow, well okay then.".

My second realization it was going to get worse was that continued style of dialogue choice for each follower you can play with - which by the way if you don't like some of them then you're gameplay time is severely limited. I didn't really care about Sam or the religion guy, and the characters that were interesting were locked behind quests that I'd already done and decided whether I wanted them or not.

My third and final realization was that all the items and customizations I put into my ship are also worthless, since now I have to re-find each part and rebuild my ship. Could have done a save mechanic for shipbuilding...

I stopped not long after that. There is just no point to the game after the first playthrough because everything that was interesting about the game was the philosophy. But it's not that motivating as a game. Especially when you're going through copy-paste maps that are totally like that one other place. It's. All. The same.

Also from like a gameplay perspective, what the fuck? You're trying to tell me that *I have all of my knowledge of previous interactions, but none of my blueprint knowledge?" How does that track? It doesn't, and it's bullshit. There were so many ways the NG+ could have played out and they took the absolute laziest possible one.

P.S. the scrooge dream sequence ending of seeing the future of your outcomes was buggy and boring.

And yet it was still better than Rebel Moon...

Lol I'll give Bethesda credit for a lot of things, but innovation definitely isn't one of them.

RDR2 was nominated this year for at least one category

It came out years ago, hasn't been updated significantly, and the online component was abandoned. It's a fine game but why the fuck was it in on the ballot for anything? There were a few games this year like that. So weird.

I thought it was Steam players colluding to meme about it.. Because it's obviously not true

cause that would require effort, and planning, and design.

3 things that were clearly missing during the development of the actual game.

i'm sure they'll release 200 dollars of DLC to fix it all, so don't worry! /s

I am going to make a fallout 3 mod that brings the starfield experience, you can now only fast travel and it adds two loading screens between every location. It will also remove every NPC that isn't strictly quest related and make them immortal. It will also level the wasteland and replace it with a procedurally generated landscape with absolutely nothing to discover in it.

It certainly is telling, but not for the reasons you think, I suspect. The game has plenty of glorious eye candy, but why highlight that when only negative media gets engagement?

The mod tools haven’t been released yet.

One of the people who made Skyrim Together came outright saying that they gave up on making the same mod for Starfield because the game is just shit

I think some modders like the challenge or enjoy making a shitty game more fun for the community to actually play

Sunk cost. Some people got so hyped up for it, they felt like they had to like it. Turns out that's not how it works and it's just... Not a great game.

You play for a while because you feel like you should and really want to like it. Quest after quest you start to figure out that you don't actually enjoy what you're doing, and it takes a while to first figure out why, and then to break your addiction

I think it's a fair shake to play the entire game before giving it a review. A game this size, 100-250 hours seems like enough time to have done everything to confirm it is, indeed, boring as shit.

Because if it is bad, pretending it's great is doing everyone except Bethesda a disservice. Early on, the hype and fanboyism were relentless, they pumped it up as a "huge game" and their "most polished" or some such shit... and it just isn't really. They have had ages and a lot of capital to try to make it a good game, but a lot of people aren't convinced that it is. Let alone as good as the massive marketing pushes ahead of release would have you believe.

"Remember: they're still Bethesda", "remember the Skyrim hype?" etc was met with denial, eye-rolling and condescension, so the temptation to go "told you so" is pretty strong when proven right five minutes later.

Since then, their PR goons have been going around passive-aggressively sniping at reviews and explaining e.g. that ackchyually the dullness is intentional, and what do gamers know about games anyway (therefore it's actually good and it's the players that are wrong). I didn't think that was particularly classy, either.

Some people still like it for whatever reason, but there are also tons of valid reasons not to.

In short: the backlash against all of this is pretty predictable, and is being shared in a community where it's fairly on-topic.

Cool? Find a new hobby maybe, one where you don't post comments that add absolutely nothing to the conversation.