Holidays and Starfield

For as long as this blog exists, I have been taking a "European style" 3-week holiday every year in July. This year, because we moved into our new house this summer, we pushed that 3-week holiday back into September. And as usual, I will bring my iPad and my Switch, but no PC. So, not much PC gaming for me in September. And I just realized that given the current situation, that suits me just fine. I bought several games this year at release, and that is something I don't want to make a habit of. While I haven't been disappointed by any of those games I bought on release, the state of triple-A gaming market is such, that getting disappointed by a game bought on release day is certainly a danger.

In particular I am talking about Starfield. Just like Baldur's Gate 3, Steam tagged Starfield with the "RPG" tag. But with what little research I did about this game, I can already say that Starfield will be a very, very different game than Baldur's Gate 3. So different, that it is questionable whether these two games are actually in the same genre. And, unfortunately for Starfield, on all the points where you can point out major differences (procedurally generated vs. handcrafted, science fiction vs. fantasy, turn-based vs. real-time combat) my personal preferences lie on the side of Baldur's Gate 3. Which, at least for me, makes Starfield a bit "the RPG I would have bought in 2023 if I hadn't already gotten Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur's Gate 3".

Now don't get me wrong, I might still end up buying Starfield. But with a release date right at the start of my 3-week absence from PC gaming, I wouldn't have bought it on release even if I had wanted to. And, in the absence of an early access version, and an embargo for streamers until a week before release, I still have some major questions about the quality and interest of gameplay for me of Starfield. Given that their previous release was Fallout 76, Bethesda certainly made more effort to release Starfield as a more polished product, but right now nobody knows how well they succeeded with that.

And increasingly review sites block either all or all negative user reviews for 36+ hours after release, so that it is very hard to get an accurate reading of the quality of a game early on from reviews. I'm not saying that "review bombing" isn't an issue, but the measure also prevents the word getting out on buggy releases. I have a rather interesting Chrome extension called Metacritic score/time graph, and it adds a graph to the critics review page of a game that shows the data points of review scores over time. There is frequently a decline in review scores over the first month, suggesting that the release day reviews were either just shallowly surfing the hype, or just plain bought. After a month, many games also show an increasing difference between average critic review scores and user review scores. Overwatch 2, released last October, had release day reviews as high as 90 or even 95, and is now down to a critic review average of 79 on Metacritic, with a user review average of 14, and only 9% of over 140,000 user reviews on Steam being positive.

Thus I will probably watch some streamed gameplay content of Starfield on my tablet during my holidays, and have a look at the evolution of critic and user scores on Metacritic, and on Steam, at the end of September, when I will be back. By then it should be a lot clearer whether this is actually a good game, which would be worth me leaving my turn-based fantasy comfort zone for; or whether it is another entry on this year's long list of hyped games on which the tenor of the reviews changed quickly into the negative after release. If I buy Starfield, I doubt I will buy it because of the "RPG" label; I still have some hope that it is a reasonably good shooter / exploration / base and ship building game. I would be very, very surprised if turns out to be a good role-playing game with a strong story.