Really? 35 hours of great content?

Exactly what parts of Starfield struck you as great?

I'll agree that around the 30 hours mark of my playthrough I was thinking the game felt big and expensive and was excited to spend more time in that universe.

But it wasn't long after that even the faction quests ended up just so repetitive in scope and even level design that I was over it.

The number of loading screens just to go from point A to B for a fetch quest is probably the worst of any open world game...ever.

It's like they finally had SSD tech so they just decided to throw any concern over loading out the window in game design.

The story is mediocre, the voice acting is meh, the gameplay loops are extremely repetitive.

The thing you like is the one thing I also enjoyed of ship combat with boarding enemy ships. That was done well, outside of the fact you can't physically go outside your ship.

And "you can play 35 hours without hating it" as the barometer of whether a game is satisfactory sells yourself and your time short. You as a consumer deserve more, and making excuses for outdated and poor game design doesn't do yourself any favors. Legitimate complaints about games getting their fair amount of attention leads to better games, as happened with games like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk. The only way Bethesda's game devs are going to get the appropriate resources from management to focus on making a game that doesn't waste your time with repetition on the next one is if there're enough complaints about the repetition in this one that management is concerned about repeating bad press which might impact sales.

You do yourself and the devs disservice minimizing or dismissing complaints and only do the execs a favor.

That's great if you don't feel that way. I'm guessing that as you put more hours in the title you'll feel different, but hope that's not the case and your enthusiasm remains. But for many players that were quite excited for the game, it ended up being rather disappointing.

He's getting downvoted because despite everything you said, the valid complaints about Diablo 4 are not similar to complaints about Starfield.

It's not the "Diablo 4 microtransactions for skins is OK" (which I disagree with) that got him downvoted, it's "both games disrespect the player's time".

Why can’t we have both and the people who want to play each type of game enjoy what they like.

We can. But they're different. I have a problem with microtransaction-driven games, even if it's skins. I won't fault you if you like D4, but D4 is the first (second if you count the mobile shit) Diablo game that I haven't put 100 hours into, or even played. The complaint about microtransactions is valid and objective however, and there have been criticisms on cosmetic-microtransactions for almost a decade now. It's not a feature by any stretch of the imagination, and nobody who plays the game seriously prefers "$25 armor set" to "customizable armor set"

Nobody "has to enjoy" Starfield. But the topic of the hour is whether Starfield was overhyped or (imo) whether Starfield is a valid target for the kind of criticism that came up when BG3 came out and other game studies complained it was too well-polished.

There are objective complaints and subjective ones. I don't care about the subjective ones. You don't want base-builders, so be it. You don't want procedural quests, whatever. Sometimes I play games with a playtime of 30 minutes because I don't want a long game. But Starfield was not misleadingly advertised or a bug-riddled mess. We got Skyrim in Space, and that's what we were promised.

That's a breath of fresh air. I'd appreciate that even if I didn't want to play Skyrim in Space. If someone comes out with a game and says "It's just like Witcher 3", I'll thank them and never touch it. I won't fault the game for being like another popular game I happen to hate.

I only brought up D4 here because people are saying Starfield is "just like D4"