Stop complaining. Play it if you want, don't if you don't want to. People just like to be popular and liked. Everyone bandwagoned on Baldurs Gate being good but I can't think of a type of game I hate more than that. Now everyone is bandwagoning on this because A- they don't have an Xbox or a PC, or B- they want to be cool and alternative.
I mean come on, last week everyone was saying "omg Baldurs Gate has no microtransactions! Roleplaying! GOTY!" And now with Xbox/Bethesda making a game just like that, you guys instantly roast it for being......a Bethesda game.
I cannot stand turn based combat and generally avoid RPG's these days and even I think this is a ridiculous take.
I don't own BG3 but I've played at a friend's place and that game is about a thousand levels deeper than Starfield. If you like RPG's and mucking around with dice whilst you play computer games, BG3 is a god damn masterpiece.
I hate those types of games and I've still managed to sink 50 hours in bg3 and I'm not even done with the first act yet. It's the new standard for AAA gaming.
The larger studios need to take notice. All of the positive press and heartfelt words about this game have been heard the world over.
You CAN deliver a complete product with no microtransactions and have people absolutely frothing over it and make a big pile of cash.
It's REALLY not my cup of tea, but I can't pretend for one second that the game isn't the absolute tits. It's fucking amazing, really. I just can't do turn based. At that point I may as well get a DND group together.
Oh, it's turn-based?? I thought I would buy it but turn-based completely ruin the immersion for me. I never understood how you're supposed to suspend your disbelief when everybody politely waits for the opponent to strike.
Worse than turn based my dude/ dudette. It's roll for attack with in-built twin die. Ruined it for me too but I'm not going to stand in the way of the target audience enjoying a truly great game.
Well if you want to get nitpicky there's no "roleplaying" in a Bethesda games because there are no bad outcomes. Minor spoilers about BG3.
For instance in BG3 I went into a camp swords blazing and murdered everything in sight. Turns out I killed a recruitable companion along the way that I never would've found out if I hadn't read about it online. Technically speaking that's an undesirable outcome because I'm going to miss out on some content but at that moment I didn't give a fuck and similarly the game just went along with it. At no point did the game even hint that maybe I shouldn't kill that character, if anything the game told me the objective is to kill that character. Had it been a Bethesda game I 100% would've been prevented from just murdering that companion and the game had given me a chance to recruit them.
Similarly I reloaded one hard fight 4 times to save a character who was relatively important to the story. That bitch just kept on running into AOE effects and getting herself killed. BG3 didn't give a fuck if that character lived or died because the story would've continued without her. We all know how Bethesda handles characters that are important to the story, they literally cannot die.
And finally I'm currently at a point where the game gave me 2 choices, either I send one of my companions into eternal servitude or another character important to the story dies. Maybe there's a third option that lets me save both but I might've missed it. If this was a Bethesda game there wouldn't even be such a situation because it doesn't matter what you choose, either option has a bad outcome.
And those are just examples from my current playthrough. From what I've seen others play you might not even get to those decisions, which means some decisions will lock out other decisions down the line and that's once again something Bethesda does less and less with each game
Baldurs gate 3 gets praise because it's a great game, Starfield gets shit because underneath it's just Skyrim in space. Are we supposed to give praise for a game that follows a decade old design philosophy? If Doom 93 came out today should we lose our collective minds? No, because the industry has moved forward. Our expectations should be higher than Skyrim. There are good things about Starfield. The moment to moment combat seems excellent and Bethesda clearly has improved the visuals compared to FO4 and FO76. But the rest of the game seems it could've just as well been released back in 2011.
And before you think I'm some hyped up tweeb who is now disappointed that Starfield didn't live up to the hype, I haven't been hyped about a Bethesda game since Fallout 3. I'm well aware how easily Bethesda springs up hype and how the final product doesn't really match the hype they promote. I had pretty basic expectations of what Starfield might be and I feel like Starfield was pretty much in the ballpark to the expectations I had: good shooting, lots and lots of loading screens and menus and very little of actual "space". That's to say I didn't have high expectations in the first place.
That would explain why out of all of Skyrim i only remember the fact that you could kill the girl that invites you to dark brotherhood amd subsequently destroy it.
All that gameplay you described? Is ancient. The industry has moved on as you say. You clicked through menus and virtually rolled dice to do that. That's so old, it predates video games themselves.
At least Starfield is more modern than turn based gameplay.
I think the microtransactions praise was more are, non predatory marketing / extracting every last cent praise. Didn't Stanfield have a premium cost to pay a week earlier or something? Is that not a similar concept, albeit nowhere near as shit as microtransactions.
Are we not all tired of being wrung out for our cash? What's so wrong with just charging what you need so that you can make a game.