At launch, Starfield was celebrated but it didn't take long before a hate campaign began against it and people started posting tons of negative reviews of the game. They complained about ridiculous things like the lack of vehicles (plenty of games don't have vehicles), and the lack of things to do (this is false, there is plenty to do).
The truth is that people had unrealistic standards. They wanted 1000 individually crafted planets and when they realised they were procedurally generated, people lost their shit without realising what an immense undertaking they were asking for. Starfield manages to provide a good variety of games and exploration always rewards you with amazing sights and plenty of opportunities to take photos. At the end of the day, Starfield provides more content than 99% of games out there. It is better than No Man's Sky @BILLYBIGBOLLOCKS. How you can you visit places like Neon and Akila and complain that the game is empty? There are so many settlements with an incomprehensible amount of content. There is also a host of lifeforms to discover and they all behave differently, making it exciting to explore the wild parts of planets.
People complain that many of the missions are fetch quests, but they fail to understand that much of the fun of the game comes from the journey. Traveling to different places, speaking to different characters and discovering new things is exciting, and fetch quests expose you to new content.
What I find strange is that people complain about the writing and the story. This is the best writing in a game recent. It's so fun talking to different characters because they all feel so different and they have varied motivations. I can't wait to meet new characters and it's exciting to pick what I'm going to say to them. I enjoy the persuasion situations where you have to pick the right thing to say to convince a character to do something. These are high stakes situations and I don't save scum so I deal with the consequences of my actions.
I will admit that the game is not perfect and there are some flaws. For example, there are a lot of loading screens. Secondly, 60fps mode isn't particularly stable. However, none of these shortcomings tarnish the game in a major way. Furthermore, Bethesda has listened to fans and updated the game to give players plenty of the features they have been asking for, making the game even better than it was at launch. That is a beautiful thing to do, and not many developers would do that. Thank you Todd Howard.
The hate campaign against Starfield was started by CHUDS who were mad that there weren't many conventionally attractive women in the game. You could see it on /v/, and it eventually spread to Reddit where chuds latched onto the narrative.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16c0z6n/why_are_all_the_girls_ugly/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16g935o/why_are_the_npcs_so_darn_ugly/
Of course, this discourse spread to Steam where a bunch of reviews started complaining about ugly NPCs. You can tell its chuds writing these because they use terms like "woke".
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1716740/discussions/0/4035850502436992213/
From here, it became easy to just call the whole game "woke" and the kinds of criticisms that came from this were ridiculous. People were mad that you could choose they/them pronouns!
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1716740/discussions/0/3824173464657206483/
So with all this needless hate gathering around Starfield, it became a hot topic in the culture wars which led to the torrent of bad reviews. That is why there is a negative perception of the game. However, for those of us who know what the game is trying to be and are playing it with a pure heart, we recognise that Bethesda has bestowed a masterpiece upon us. This is a beautiful game with so many twists and turns. It's innovative, unorthodox, yet so effortlessly fun.
I'm feeling quite sad right now because @ToeBeans ignored me cruelly and I don't know what I did to her to deserve this treatment. However, I'm about to play Starfield and it's going to make me feel much better. I might not have true friends online, but when I'm playing Starfield, Sarah Morgan and Sam Coe are my best buddies and they'll never desert me. Here are some of my favorite screenshots from the game. Looking at them helps me feel better.
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I don't think chuddery is what brought it down. BG3 was woke as heck but even the chuds played it. I think it was 2 things: 1) the misfortune if being released at the same time as BG3 which was a milestone in voice acting and motion capture and 2) it can feel like it takes a bit too long to get to the "fun" part in Starfield.
Starfield really is an underrated game though.
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Neither point you mentioned is why people love BG3 or became GOTY. The choices the player can make is why BG3 shits on Starfield, which has the illusion of choice.
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No, I think it was mostly the sterile writing.
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This is really it. Every RPG is essentially going to be a collection of fetch, kill and escort quests. A good RPG will use interesting mechanics, writing and environments to make you forget about that fact. Starfield failed this on every account.
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Right. Skyrim's writing and combat is also atrocious but the exploration makes up for it (at least for majority of people).
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True, that didn't help. Continues the tradition of Fallout (post 1&2) and Skyrim middling tier writing.
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