I gave up on it after an hour. Oh woooooooow being foreshadowed I'm gonna fight this giant thing that just ruined the whole thing, super suspenseful anyway byyyyye. Frankly I just can't get into it - the environments, graphics, gunplay, enemies etc. are terribly dull. I need something to be different than in Skyrim almost 12 years ago.
There's a real unfortunate tendency these days of people solidifying their love/hatred of something as part of their identity and then never move from that position. We've seen it with Star Wars, Trek, etc, both came back weak and improved but some people won't budge from the opinion formed in those initial releases. Same here, some people have decided they hate BiowareBethesda/MS and therefore this game must be bad.
Problem is, it falls into the category of something not being great but not being terrible, and no one anywhere seems able to discuss anything with any middle ground opinions anymore.
"I played this 100+ hour game for 1 hour and I already knew it was shit" is about the same level of irrelevance as "you have to play at least 40 hours to understand that the game is great". Opposite ends of the spectrum, both extreme views.
In reality, you're right. A game should hook you from the start, and most truly great games do. I've got something like 30 hours into Starfield. It's obviously not a truly great game. It is also not however a shit game that has no merit or value playing. It does take a while to sort of get into, and that's a major flaw. But for me it did pick up and I started enjoying it.
Some of my favorite open world games bodged their openers. In particular Horizon Zero Dawn and The Witcher 3 come to mind. So far Starfield does not appear to be as good as either of those. There are too many aspects of the game that feel half baked, especially in comparison to truly great games.
But it does somehow have its hooks in me despite its flaws. And I do think if anyone wants to really give the game a fair shake and have discussions about it in good faith, they have to invest a little more time to at least be able to experience enough of the game to get a real picture of it. I don't know what that number of hours is. I don't think it's 40 by any means but it's definitely more than 1.
It's that or "git gud" or something every time someone has an issue with something. "You don't like chess? Well, you're not even an FM, so you clearly just don't get it." Bro is acting like I've never played a (...the...) Bethesda Game before, because the idea of someone not thinking Starfield is GOAT is just unthinkable.
Kinda funny when it turns into whining about how everybody else is a big ol' complainer, though.
A game shouldnt take multiple hours for you to decide if you’re going to like it. Hell a tutorial shouldnt take an hour to complete. Someone getting home from work isint going to enjoy starting up a new game thats not fun for the first several hours which would take up most of their evening or several evenings
It has Utopian Sci Fi like Star Trek in the UC, it has Western Sci Fi like Cowboy Bebop in Freestar Rangers, it has Cyberpunk Sci Fi like Blade Runner in Neon, it has Corpo Sci Fi in Rujin Industries, it has military sci fi like Starship Troopers in the Vanguard, ...
It has even so many more scifi types like NASA punk.
So the only way you can claim it has no style is if you didn't play the game.
I agree, but you've described very small areas in the game you purely run through maybe doing small 5 minute side quests in. Outside of that there's basically 1 interior style that you're looking at for every ship, space station, mars, the moon, and every other settlement.
It's like if Fallout 4 had Diamond city, the institute, the railroad, and every other outdoor location looked like the Glowing Sea: flat, rocky, one building type.
I was never a fan of the Bethesda jank and look, but skyrim was at least interesting. It was pretty funny to just see what npc's are up to and just doing random things. I don't think it's as great as people make it out to be. But starfield has nothing going on.