I must say it is not the best RPG out there, but I feel like it would have earned more. I personally have a lot of fun playing.
While it was not a Cyberpunk-grade overhype, I think it must still have been overhyped. Because if you see it as Skyrim with better graphics, it is pretty much what you’d expect.
Some of the common criticism seems to be intrinsic to the sci-fi genre. In Skyrim, you walk 100 meters and then you find some cave or camp or something that a game designer has placed there manually with some story or meaning behind it. And as a player, you notice that, because most locations in Skyrim feel somehow unique. Even though for example the dungeons have rooms that repeat a lot. Having a designer place them manually with some thought gives them something unique.
In interstellar sci-fi, a dense world like this is simply impossible. Planets are extremely large so filling them manually with content is simply not possible. And using procedural generation makes things feel meaningless. Players notice that fast. So instead, Starfield opted for having a few manually constructed locations that are placed randomly on planets, unfortunately with a lot of repetition. But that is a sound compromise, given the constraints of today’s game development technology. The dense worlds that we are used to from other genres simply don’t scale up to planetary scale, and as players, we have to get used to that.
I never did play the PTD, I have heard it was very rough though.
First time a really playing Dark Souls was when the remaster came to PC, then binged 2 and 3 and played through all endings on ER when it came out and put 300 hours in, waiting on the DLC eagerly.
I also did mod elden ring quite a bit, including dlss+fg from the much hated PureDark, and the excellent seamless coop mod along with a 32:9 support mod.
Ultimately my point is people are nitpicking Starfield lmao
PTD was with the dlc man, the original DS was almost unplayable on release, some random internet person released a mod called DSFix like 30 minutes after it released on pc that unlocked the fps to 60 and improved performance in some places. Multiplayer was also pretty fucking bad, so bad that yet another mod released that exposed how the networking p2p graph worked internally where you could bypass the normal network to connect directly to your friends to be able to see their signals.
My point is that the reason why people weren’t so critical of ER is because compared to other FROM games, it was quite the improvement. People expected much, much worse.
Maybe since it’s been so long since Bethesda released Skyrim, people just don’t remember the pure vanilla experience which is why they are being harsher with Starfield. That, and that Bethesda has way more funding for their games.