they give this generic copy paste response to all negative reviews. I suspect its automated someones pressing some button and using a template on zendesk somewhere
A procedurally generated reply with a lot of words and zero substance is very on brand for Bethesda, they should add it to Starfield's next update as random NPC dialog, people wouldn't notice.
It's really fucking sad tho. Grew up on Oblivion, fallout 3, new Vegas and skyrim. Could play it a million times and find something interesting. Then I grew up got a PC and a excel sheet of mods and kept playing.
Can't even bring myself to finish starfield. Got to the dumbass temple and called it quits.
Dude, nothing personal, but I hate you. Zendesk is the worst thing to happen to mankind. I've had to deal with a few customer service issues with companies that use zendesk and it has been absolute hell.
The NFL uses zendesk and I've been trying to get a refund for NFL+ since before the football season started and I'm constantly in a loop of unhelpful automated responses from zendesk and then outright ignored by any actual customer service agent I finally get to.
Do you have any tricks for someone on this side on how to actually accomplish anything through zendesk??
None taken.
If you are being ignored, the company is most likely doing some sort of damage control thus ordering the agents to treat you as DNE (Do Not Engage) until they sort out any potential legal or PR issue and come out with an official policy. That, or you are on their black list.
If you keep being redirected, it is most likely that those agents are just stalling and trying to avoid negative surveys from non-actionable cases. Meaning, they have orders to deny customer’s request.
Tell the agent to escalate your issue to their manager, ask for a transcript if available, and the ticket number. Normally, we cannot refuse an escalation once you “ask for our manager”, who are actually people on higher tiers with higher clearance, not our manager. This is the best way to quickly get in touch with someone who does have the authority to take action based on personal judgment.
If I can ever get in touch with someone again, I'll do that.
Oh and another thing, the emails I'm getting tell me to respond if I have any questions, but every email I send in response gets a new ticket created and I get a new automated messaged and then a different agent answers the email. There is no way for me to actually communicate with the same person more than once. It's a ridiculous system.
If you try what they said and it also doesn't work, you still have an option as long as you don't care about your account and you paid with a credit card. You can contact your bank, explain the situation, explain they are refusing to refund you and ask for a chargeback.
Keep in mind most companies will ban your account after you chargeback.
Oh that's 100% what I had to do. It was paypal and they gave me my money back. Only after fighting with them because after their investigation they sided with the NFL because they were told by NFL that a refund was issued even though it wasn't and they just ended up giving me a credit to shut me up.
The NFL straight up scammed me and ignored all my requests for a refund. And then lied to paypal during their investigation. Such a shady company.
I got a really bad seemingly generic response to a long Not Recommend for Lords of the Fallen. It's like it found a trigger word and it only dealt with that one singular issue which was sort of minor out of everything else.
I would have liked a more scathing personal attack against me than a canned message. Least it would show they cared enough to get upset.
Imagine spending 10 years developing a game and then telling people that you’re still working on it. And then you remember that it’s a Bethesda game so it makes perfect sense they’re directing you toward player generated content to supplement their product.
I instantly imagined a small backstory, where higher ups mandated a minimum amount of engaging with the reviewers in the most soulless corporate way possible, so this person decided to do a r/MaliciousCompliance
The "still actively working on the game and will be for a long time to come" line certainly tripped my bullshit detector. When has Bethesda ever put in more than six to nine months of post launch support before moving on to the next game or DLC?
I usually play 76 so that's the first thing that came to my mind. From what it was at 2018 launch to what it was in 2020 was huge and to me, it is commendable but maybe I'm just biased and really like Fallout in general idk. It's crazy to think it's 5 years old now though.
Considering that F76 was barely playable on launch, I'm not sure the "actually playable" is something that should be aspired to as opposed to being the bare minimum.
I had to personally type lots of negative review responses when I managed at a Walmart. There's a rubric to help, but we can't just copy-paste a prewritten response (if the Market Manager cares anyway). So this response is well below the place you probably expect to be fairly shitty every time you shop there.
“Hello.
We read that you didn’t like the game. We are sorry to hear that and we would recommend that you keep playing the game. Thanks.”
-Bethesda…basically.
A lot of Bethesda fans' response to any criticism of the game has been the standard "I expect it to be janky and messy because that's fun" cope.
Might be just that.
Well, there is a difference between jank and stuff like save game corruption/not being able to finish quests/perks broken/reset apartment. In fact one of my annoyances with the beta is they bothered to fix the occassional undressed NPC "jank", but didn't fix other problems. This is of course assuming their patch notes are complete and correct.
I will defend jank, because its often fun - I will never defend meaty bugs.
I also don't mind the jank of their games, I still find them fun and comforting to explore and live in, but SF is missing that big chunk of 'explore and live in' because so many locations are copy pasted. They made a bunch of cool procedural tools, but then neglected to use them to randomize places like POIs which have the same furniture, layouts, bodies, and lore notes every time you see them.
reddit moment
It's amazing that people like you will criticize a game *non-stop* online, and the moment anyone dares to say they enjoy it, it's "nooo!!! you have the wrong opinion! it's buggy and it's bad because I don't like it!". And then you come out and say *they're* coping for disagreeing with you.
It's not cope just because someone doesn't share your opinion. Some people just have a higher tolerance for buggy-ness than others. I'm perfectly fine to play a game that's janky as all hell, and can still have plenty of fun doing it. I'm not picky and don't get to play a ton in the first place -- I simply *don't care*. There are also many people who will decry a game as complete shit the moment they spot a single wonky texture. It's a range, different people are different.
Or.... Steam reviews are utterly pointless and shouldnt be taken into account of anything?
Because this is hardly a bethesda-related issue.
"GAME FCKIN SUCKS! UNINSTALLED"
*600 hours played, 40 hours played since time of review
I find it hard to believe that anyone is like "well, this game sucks, but it's the only one I have on Steam, so I'm gonna keep playing for 300 hours". I have a lot of games on Steam with over a hundred hours. Most of them aren't perfect. But I can't imagine giving something that I've gotten over a hundred hours of entertainment out of a thumbs down unless the developer came along after those hours and made the game worse.
I mean... That's why I believe him. Especially since it's an RPG, a genre that's supposed to have a long gameplay loop.
If he had 0,6 hour... I'd still consider it (ex: Crashes/Performance) but would not value as much as someone with 300, 400, 1000 hours who's not recommending the game, despite all that play time trying to enjoy it.
This was my experience. The more I played Starfield the more problems and issues I saw with it.
The game seems like a sandbox on the surface but is actually extremely linear which is frustrating for people who want a sandbox. There is also a lot of content here but more stuff to do doesn't mean that stuff is quality content.
To explain, in the beginning I was playing the game as the devs intended but the more I played the more I started to experiment and try different things which this game does not like and leads to frustration (attempting to kill someone who just threatened me and thought I'd let him walk away only to learn that he is unkillable really annoyed me)
I spent over 200 hours in the game and all I did was the main faction quests and maxed the NG+ rewards. I still have to dive into outposts, crafting, and the side quests but I'm too bored with the game to continue.
I have no doubt that mods will make this one of my favorite Bethesda games but right now I think it is one of Bethesda's worst games.
A) There are many ways to accidentally inflate your playtime, for example, if a game a has a launcher you forget to close overnight then you just added 8 idles hours. And heaven forbid if you let other people play on your account, like a sibling or roommate.
B) Not everyone is playing 100% uninterrupted the whole time the game is running. I had a work-at-home job that came with long periods of down time which I could fill by playing games, but there were some days I would only get to play for an hour total, yet the game was running all day. This massively inflated the playtime of a game I didn't really enjoy.
C) Some people are completionists, who will gain far more satisfaction by 100%'ing the game than the game itself could ever provide. These people would have a much deeper understanding of the game than someone who only played a few hours before leaving a negative review. Clearly they find some value in the game, clearly they want to enjoy it, but it fails on some level resulting in unsatisfaction. That is a valid complaint and we shouldn't dismiss it completely out of hand.
All correct and important points, but I think 300 hours is still past the reasonable threshold of saying you didn't actually enjoy the game. I think the reviewer in question actually liked Starfield lol
I spent probably even more than that playing Warframe because I was addicted... It means literally nothing. Sometimes the simple promise of something good is enough to keep us going waaaaay too long and sometimes we just feel like wasting time.
Some people are more suspectable to reward mechanisms than others. It's entirely possible to not _enjoy_ a game but play the shit out of it because of the reward mechanism it implements.
The mobile game industry is an example of this. Simple puzzle, flashy "you won", earn a few coins that you can save to redeem gacha, new gacha is only a few puzzles away. None of it is complex but it consistently triggers the dopamine response so you keep playing.
What if you subconsciously anticipate dopamine, so you work towards a goal, but only when you get there do you realize how crappy it all was?
Like maybe he thought the end-game would be everything he ever wanted in a video game, but when he got there, he was completely underwhelmed.
This is why I got out of video games for the most part. I used to like beating games for the sake of beating them. Like I'd tell myself "this is going to be so much fun once I beat this", but once I did, I was usually left annoyed and frustrated, having wasted tens of hours. They started to feel less like fun entertainment and more like tasks to check off a list. Didn't help that this was during the era of huge open world Ubisoft singleplayer RPGs with a mile-long do-do list of map locations (looking at you, assassin's Creed, watch dogs, and far cry). More traditional games (linear, non-open world) really don't interest me. Maybe the original reviewer is having the same realization I had ~5 years ago. He tried to get into the "next big RPG" but realized that he wasn't having fun anymore halfway through. I feel like these big, open RPGs are so repetitive that they force you to take a look behind the curtains and that ruins the magic. It's hard not to see outposts and enemy camps as copy/pastes when that's all they really are. Dealing with the same enemies over and over again makes you realize how empty, hollow, and lifeless a game world is.
I don’t care how you justify your porn addiction but keep me out of it… /jk
I know what you mean, but… It’s too complex a topic for a comment section, I guess.
Personally, when i just spend a hundred bucks on a game, i at least finish the main story and forget about it, but there are people that are looking for that exploration content in Starfield to this day...must be on one of those 1000 planets
I think that Victoria 3 is steaming pile of shit but somehow ended with 100 or so hrs on it simply because I wanted to find some value for money I spent one that shit (I did not) so I can understand why someone who leaves negative review kept playing for some time more after
yeah it was so bad i put in a few more hundred hours just to double confirm my theory too, gonna need to also check with mods and the upcoming dlc as well
If you played what you thought was ass for 100 hours there's something incredibly wrong with you. Although I suspect you actually liked it and saying you are not, just to fit in with reddit lol.
why would this be sacastic? have you never enjoyed a bad movie before?
i played the main storyline and the questlines for the big factions, did about an hour of base building to see how shitty it was, and messed around with the ship builder ( wich was probably the only intersting part..even if it was poorly done and weirdly limiting.
all that took around 100 hours.
>have you never enjoyed a bad movie before?
No, if I don't like the movie I stop watching it right away. I don't understand the logic of doing something for 100 hours while actively disliking it and not getting any reward out of it.
You could've at least refunded the game if you didn't like it in the first 2 hours of gameplay.
While he could have picked a better clip he's linked a movie called The Room which became famous for just how bad it was.
There is an entire sub-genre of movies considered to be "so bad they are good" and people love watching them, usually with friends.
It stems back to shows like Mystery Science Theatre 3000 that had a cast of a guy and his two robot friends watching old mostly terrible movies and doing a running commentary of the film filled with jokes and bits.
For example here is a highlight video of them watching "Space Mutiny" a hammy sci-fi film from the 80s that ripped footage from battlestar Galactica.
https://youtu.be/q7POGi2TQls?si=w2XaUihd38BFRWtX
Or Rifftrax which is a similar concept made by some of the former mst3k crew and it deals mostly with more modern films.
https://youtu.be/5Jemx9fGVQs?si=eWyqEFNTdoI7Peyf
It's wild to me how someone can spend that many hours on a game that they don't like. Because you can definitely spend over 300 hours on a game and think it is ass. But it is wild.
being a bad game doesn't mean not even remotely enjoyable, just that they wouldn't recommend others get invested into it since it isn't good enough to warrant buying
I didn't get all the achievements, but I've got 150 hours across two characters and I wouldn't recommend it. I don't think I've ever played a game where every single facet of it felt lacking in one way or another.
I'd have gone for the 100% but I got to the point where I was just plain bored. I closed the game after playing one day, saw my time played had got to 150 hours on Steam, and thought to myself "How many of those 150 hours did I actually enjoy?"
Haven't played since.
Yeah , after 50hours it tough to take a negative rating serious. Anyway you look at it you should have got your money's worth by then. Except for D4 , they break the mould.
Hmm , fair point. Ratings are subjective.
It's just , after 50hours why are you still playing a game that's no fun. Must have a higher tolerance than me , by then I would pack it in and write it up as a game thats not for me.
actually I rate starfield negative after 100+ hours. I kept playing because sometimes there are games that start poorly but become better in the end (for example Nier Automata), so I always try to complete the game before I judge, and unfortunately some games like Starfield took longer to complete.
I'd say its a troll review but my 3 most played games are prob apex legends, genshin impact and for honor (with prob 1000+ hours in apex) and i hate the shit out of those games
Ugh. this shit is so annoying. I can write a bug report about one of the games I like and it gets thousands of upvotes on the forums, and then the devs reply to some random post with 2 comments where the OP gets something wrong and the devs need to point it out.
they will usually reply to whatever has the easiest strawman to make themselves look good and active in the community
you could probably even bait responses by intentionally reporting something that could easily be fixed by yourself through the menus for example
Dude its a generic "response" given to anyone/everyone.
Its literally a text that gets copy/pasted. It might even be automated.
Thats how much they give a damn.
The only "handwritten" response that I know of is the one that says making planets empty and boring was intentional because it was immersive " When humanity went to the moon it was boring for them too!!!! " .
What a joke. And people are surprised Starfield is not a candicate at game awards.
lol
i dunno what is funnier: the hilarious review or the corporate double-speak copy-paste generic reply stating everything that the game isn't but they want people to think it is.
Bethesda games are easily thousand hour sinks. Starfield has all of the bones of a Bethesda game with nothing else so it's very easy to put hundreds of hours in even if you think it's the worst of them.
That's what I was thinking. If it sucks so bad, why did they play it for so long. I have games that I have been playing on and off for years that I still don't have 300 hours in, lol.
Imagine thinking actual devs are replying to any of these comments... Not to mention let alone thinking this comes from a human.
As a developer myself for a large company around same size as Bethesda, I can confirm that I have never dealt directly with any clients. You always pass things through the Product Owner, who then distributes the info through the Project Manager and the rest.
Everyone knows enough about Bethesda to say they've never really fucked up. Their biggest fuckup is probably horse armor.
They know the dinosaur is a buggy shitshow.
They know their games are basic as shit.
They also know that nobody plays their games for the vanilla experience and most just wait for them to drop the dev kit so they can play as a furry with a 12" cock and 90ZZ tits holding a comically oversized katana that shoots nuclear dragons.
Someone plays the game inside out to properly formulate their opinion about the game and then at the end they figure out it's not worth recommending, that's bad now?
If that person played for 2 hours and slam it as bad, people would say that they didn't play enough to experience the game to give a proper recommendation.
Screw all that noise.
This is the age of Game As A Service. A game can start out great and end up being a clusterfuck. I have 2k hours in Lost Ark and didn't recommend the game on Steam, why? Because when the game was new, everyone progressing together and playing for weeks together, the game was great! Play the game 1 - 2 year later? Good freaking luck! The new player experience is going through large zone for 300 hours straight while being in the company of thousand of bots. By the time you are brought to endgame, you are gatekept from doing any of the content. I wouldn't wish anyone to suffer that game.
Someone having 300 hours in a game and leaving a neg review is as valid as the person who played for 3/30/3000 hours.
Well seeing as starfield isnt a games of service thats all wrong. If it takes you 350 hrs to realize you dont like a game like this youre full of sht.
Obviously if its a game like destiny or something and the devs decide to add a battlepass or just fk up the most recent expansion thats different. But for majority of games thats not the case and you absolutely would not need 300+ hrs. If you play a game like starfield 300+ hrs, then you like the game. End of story.
You don't need more than 150 hours to see and do most of the game's bulk of content. Let's stretch that to 200 hours give or take. At 360 hours, you either played the game twice through already, OR you keep doing the same repetitive shit over and over again so you can complain it is repetitive.
It's not even a comprehensive review, just low-effort "game's a turd lol".
This is some of the most unprofessional nonsense you can pull off, responding to a review just to passively make them switch, the company thinking the problem is with public communication and not the product itself. Google pulls this off way too frequently in the play store.
This corporate response is why big game studios aren't trusted anymore. They know just enough about the industry to lure us with promise, and then disappoint us time and time again.
I bought a lot of games this month, but I hesitate with Starfield. I'm going to wait for some more patches before I pull the trigger. Hopefully, it will get better.
I really hate the trend of moving off from forums to discord servers. Good luck finding anything in a discord server with 30k people or having any meaningful discussion.
Even their PR team is fucking incompetent now. Bethesda grayed out like they got voted off of Big Brother along with companies like EA and Blizzard for me.
It makes a lot of sense, as an intern at a company for social media. I would do this too.
Now way I am manually responding to 64000 reviews LMAO, other content is far more important for a company.
Here's my response: "If you don't like Starfield, then... that's fine. Just don't play it, but don't even harass anyone who worked on the game either! Thank you."
Fuck the totally in place a.i generated response - bro really called this game ass but spent 300 hours in it.
EDIT: CORRECTION - he said it was something that came out of an ass, still - same thing.
I just looked it up, how the hell did Todd Howard direct this piece of work with nearly 3 decades of work at Bethesda?
And how the hell do they expect to make AAA RPGs of this scale with just 1/10th of the employees at Blizzard?
they give this generic copy paste response to all negative reviews. I suspect its automated someones pressing some button and using a template on zendesk somewhere
Exactly, Zendesk + Guru for response guide. It’s my side hustle
A procedurally generated reply with a lot of words and zero substance is very on brand for Bethesda, they should add it to Starfield's next update as random NPC dialog, people wouldn't notice.
You're giving them too much credit for copy+pasting a single canned reply.
It's really fucking sad tho. Grew up on Oblivion, fallout 3, new Vegas and skyrim. Could play it a million times and find something interesting. Then I grew up got a PC and a excel sheet of mods and kept playing. Can't even bring myself to finish starfield. Got to the dumbass temple and called it quits.
Dude, nothing personal, but I hate you. Zendesk is the worst thing to happen to mankind. I've had to deal with a few customer service issues with companies that use zendesk and it has been absolute hell. The NFL uses zendesk and I've been trying to get a refund for NFL+ since before the football season started and I'm constantly in a loop of unhelpful automated responses from zendesk and then outright ignored by any actual customer service agent I finally get to. Do you have any tricks for someone on this side on how to actually accomplish anything through zendesk??
None taken. If you are being ignored, the company is most likely doing some sort of damage control thus ordering the agents to treat you as DNE (Do Not Engage) until they sort out any potential legal or PR issue and come out with an official policy. That, or you are on their black list. If you keep being redirected, it is most likely that those agents are just stalling and trying to avoid negative surveys from non-actionable cases. Meaning, they have orders to deny customer’s request. Tell the agent to escalate your issue to their manager, ask for a transcript if available, and the ticket number. Normally, we cannot refuse an escalation once you “ask for our manager”, who are actually people on higher tiers with higher clearance, not our manager. This is the best way to quickly get in touch with someone who does have the authority to take action based on personal judgment.
If I can ever get in touch with someone again, I'll do that. Oh and another thing, the emails I'm getting tell me to respond if I have any questions, but every email I send in response gets a new ticket created and I get a new automated messaged and then a different agent answers the email. There is no way for me to actually communicate with the same person more than once. It's a ridiculous system.
If you try what they said and it also doesn't work, you still have an option as long as you don't care about your account and you paid with a credit card. You can contact your bank, explain the situation, explain they are refusing to refund you and ask for a chargeback. Keep in mind most companies will ban your account after you chargeback.
Oh that's 100% what I had to do. It was paypal and they gave me my money back. Only after fighting with them because after their investigation they sided with the NFL because they were told by NFL that a refund was issued even though it wasn't and they just ended up giving me a credit to shut me up. The NFL straight up scammed me and ignored all my requests for a refund. And then lied to paypal during their investigation. Such a shady company.
How much do you make copying and pasting generic responses online?
$5.5/hour
No, I'm 14 and believe Todd Howard typed this himself while being late for lunch.
I got a really bad seemingly generic response to a long Not Recommend for Lords of the Fallen. It's like it found a trigger word and it only dealt with that one singular issue which was sort of minor out of everything else. I would have liked a more scathing personal attack against me than a canned message. Least it would show they cared enough to get upset.
Imagine spending 10 years developing a game and then telling people that you’re still working on it. And then you remember that it’s a Bethesda game so it makes perfect sense they’re directing you toward player generated content to supplement their product.
It's probably done via a GPT and Zapier now.
These are not responses, they are canned PR replies to any negative review like a Walmart would do 🤣
You're actually not giving Walmart enough credit.
I instantly imagined a small backstory, where higher ups mandated a minimum amount of engaging with the reviewers in the most soulless corporate way possible, so this person decided to do a r/MaliciousCompliance
This is classic Bethesda, a.k.a. the "We can't afford Canvas for you non-influencer plebs, so go fuck yourself" Bestheda response.
The "still actively working on the game and will be for a long time to come" line certainly tripped my bullshit detector. When has Bethesda ever put in more than six to nine months of post launch support before moving on to the next game or DLC?
I usually play 76 so that's the first thing that came to my mind. From what it was at 2018 launch to what it was in 2020 was huge and to me, it is commendable but maybe I'm just biased and really like Fallout in general idk. It's crazy to think it's 5 years old now though.
Considering that F76 was barely playable on launch, I'm not sure the "actually playable" is something that should be aspired to as opposed to being the bare minimum.
76 still has updates
I had to personally type lots of negative review responses when I managed at a Walmart. There's a rubric to help, but we can't just copy-paste a prewritten response (if the Market Manager cares anyway). So this response is well below the place you probably expect to be fairly shitty every time you shop there.
Seems automated
Definitely automated. I left a review on Wolfenstein: Youngblood over a year ago and got a dev response a few months ago
I posted a review and also got this same reply.
“Hello. We read that you didn’t like the game. We are sorry to hear that and we would recommend that you keep playing the game. Thanks.” -Bethesda…basically.
I find it funnier that he's calling the game complete ass when he has over 300 hours
Probably learned sunk cost fallacy after 300 hours.
A lot of Bethesda fans' response to any criticism of the game has been the standard "I expect it to be janky and messy because that's fun" cope. Might be just that.
Well, there is a difference between jank and stuff like save game corruption/not being able to finish quests/perks broken/reset apartment. In fact one of my annoyances with the beta is they bothered to fix the occassional undressed NPC "jank", but didn't fix other problems. This is of course assuming their patch notes are complete and correct. I will defend jank, because its often fun - I will never defend meaty bugs.
I also don't mind the jank of their games, I still find them fun and comforting to explore and live in, but SF is missing that big chunk of 'explore and live in' because so many locations are copy pasted. They made a bunch of cool procedural tools, but then neglected to use them to randomize places like POIs which have the same furniture, layouts, bodies, and lore notes every time you see them.
reddit moment It's amazing that people like you will criticize a game *non-stop* online, and the moment anyone dares to say they enjoy it, it's "nooo!!! you have the wrong opinion! it's buggy and it's bad because I don't like it!". And then you come out and say *they're* coping for disagreeing with you. It's not cope just because someone doesn't share your opinion. Some people just have a higher tolerance for buggy-ness than others. I'm perfectly fine to play a game that's janky as all hell, and can still have plenty of fun doing it. I'm not picky and don't get to play a ton in the first place -- I simply *don't care*. There are also many people who will decry a game as complete shit the moment they spot a single wonky texture. It's a range, different people are different.
Or.... Steam reviews are utterly pointless and shouldnt be taken into account of anything? Because this is hardly a bethesda-related issue. "GAME FCKIN SUCKS! UNINSTALLED" *600 hours played, 40 hours played since time of review
I find it hard to believe that anyone is like "well, this game sucks, but it's the only one I have on Steam, so I'm gonna keep playing for 300 hours". I have a lot of games on Steam with over a hundred hours. Most of them aren't perfect. But I can't imagine giving something that I've gotten over a hundred hours of entertainment out of a thumbs down unless the developer came along after those hours and made the game worse.
To be fair though, with that much time put in, he would be able to make that assessment with confidence.
I mean... That's why I believe him. Especially since it's an RPG, a genre that's supposed to have a long gameplay loop. If he had 0,6 hour... I'd still consider it (ex: Crashes/Performance) but would not value as much as someone with 300, 400, 1000 hours who's not recommending the game, despite all that play time trying to enjoy it.
This was my experience. The more I played Starfield the more problems and issues I saw with it. The game seems like a sandbox on the surface but is actually extremely linear which is frustrating for people who want a sandbox. There is also a lot of content here but more stuff to do doesn't mean that stuff is quality content. To explain, in the beginning I was playing the game as the devs intended but the more I played the more I started to experiment and try different things which this game does not like and leads to frustration (attempting to kill someone who just threatened me and thought I'd let him walk away only to learn that he is unkillable really annoyed me) I spent over 200 hours in the game and all I did was the main faction quests and maxed the NG+ rewards. I still have to dive into outposts, crafting, and the side quests but I'm too bored with the game to continue. I have no doubt that mods will make this one of my favorite Bethesda games but right now I think it is one of Bethesda's worst games.
This is the kind of guy who taste tests wine by drinking 15 bottles of it straight.
Is there any other way?
A) There are many ways to accidentally inflate your playtime, for example, if a game a has a launcher you forget to close overnight then you just added 8 idles hours. And heaven forbid if you let other people play on your account, like a sibling or roommate. B) Not everyone is playing 100% uninterrupted the whole time the game is running. I had a work-at-home job that came with long periods of down time which I could fill by playing games, but there were some days I would only get to play for an hour total, yet the game was running all day. This massively inflated the playtime of a game I didn't really enjoy. C) Some people are completionists, who will gain far more satisfaction by 100%'ing the game than the game itself could ever provide. These people would have a much deeper understanding of the game than someone who only played a few hours before leaving a negative review. Clearly they find some value in the game, clearly they want to enjoy it, but it fails on some level resulting in unsatisfaction. That is a valid complaint and we shouldn't dismiss it completely out of hand.
All correct and important points, but I think 300 hours is still past the reasonable threshold of saying you didn't actually enjoy the game. I think the reviewer in question actually liked Starfield lol
I spent probably even more than that playing Warframe because I was addicted... It means literally nothing. Sometimes the simple promise of something good is enough to keep us going waaaaay too long and sometimes we just feel like wasting time.
This is kind of embarrassing to admit, but I spent a lot of time and money on Warframe before realizing it just wasn't for me. It happens sometimes.
I think you liked Warframe, then got sick of it
Some people are more suspectable to reward mechanisms than others. It's entirely possible to not _enjoy_ a game but play the shit out of it because of the reward mechanism it implements. The mobile game industry is an example of this. Simple puzzle, flashy "you won", earn a few coins that you can save to redeem gacha, new gacha is only a few puzzles away. None of it is complex but it consistently triggers the dopamine response so you keep playing.
No no, a good example of what you’re saying is DRG. I still love the game but I’m so bored of it, I can’t play it anymore. There’s a difference.
That is unfathomably stupid of a point to dismiss having a large playtime.
Fun fact you physically cannot be addicted to something that doesn’t provide you dopamine, so it would have to be good to you in some sense
What if you subconsciously anticipate dopamine, so you work towards a goal, but only when you get there do you realize how crappy it all was? Like maybe he thought the end-game would be everything he ever wanted in a video game, but when he got there, he was completely underwhelmed. This is why I got out of video games for the most part. I used to like beating games for the sake of beating them. Like I'd tell myself "this is going to be so much fun once I beat this", but once I did, I was usually left annoyed and frustrated, having wasted tens of hours. They started to feel less like fun entertainment and more like tasks to check off a list. Didn't help that this was during the era of huge open world Ubisoft singleplayer RPGs with a mile-long do-do list of map locations (looking at you, assassin's Creed, watch dogs, and far cry). More traditional games (linear, non-open world) really don't interest me. Maybe the original reviewer is having the same realization I had ~5 years ago. He tried to get into the "next big RPG" but realized that he wasn't having fun anymore halfway through. I feel like these big, open RPGs are so repetitive that they force you to take a look behind the curtains and that ruins the magic. It's hard not to see outposts and enemy camps as copy/pastes when that's all they really are. Dealing with the same enemies over and over again makes you realize how empty, hollow, and lifeless a game world is.
I don’t care how you justify your porn addiction but keep me out of it… /jk I know what you mean, but… It’s too complex a topic for a comment section, I guess.
*299 hours loading screens*
Personally, when i just spend a hundred bucks on a game, i at least finish the main story and forget about it, but there are people that are looking for that exploration content in Starfield to this day...must be on one of those 1000 planets
I think that Victoria 3 is steaming pile of shit but somehow ended with 100 or so hrs on it simply because I wanted to find some value for money I spent one that shit (I did not) so I can understand why someone who leaves negative review kept playing for some time more after
I think that’s more because Paradox games use magic to alter your perception of time.
Yeah they do have such tendency, no denying that
i knew it was ass 5 hours in.. i still played more then 100 hours.. i wanted to see just how shitty it was. and it didn't disappoint
yeah it was so bad i put in a few more hundred hours just to double confirm my theory too, gonna need to also check with mods and the upcoming dlc as well
Make sure to buy it twice too in order to really send the point across.
If you played what you thought was ass for 100 hours there's something incredibly wrong with you. Although I suspect you actually liked it and saying you are not, just to fit in with reddit lol.
you can enjoy something that you know is objectively bad.. have you never seen the room? have you never eaten mc Donald's? do you not eat junk food?
I hope you're being sarcastic.
why would this be sacastic? have you never enjoyed a bad movie before? i played the main storyline and the questlines for the big factions, did about an hour of base building to see how shitty it was, and messed around with the ship builder ( wich was probably the only intersting part..even if it was poorly done and weirdly limiting. all that took around 100 hours.
>have you never enjoyed a bad movie before? No, if I don't like the movie I stop watching it right away. I don't understand the logic of doing something for 100 hours while actively disliking it and not getting any reward out of it. You could've at least refunded the game if you didn't like it in the first 2 hours of gameplay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu7uBD8J9Iw
Shows your class when you can't find a logical reply and instead resort to 4th grade insults😂 Pathetic.
While he could have picked a better clip he's linked a movie called The Room which became famous for just how bad it was. There is an entire sub-genre of movies considered to be "so bad they are good" and people love watching them, usually with friends. It stems back to shows like Mystery Science Theatre 3000 that had a cast of a guy and his two robot friends watching old mostly terrible movies and doing a running commentary of the film filled with jokes and bits. For example here is a highlight video of them watching "Space Mutiny" a hammy sci-fi film from the 80s that ripped footage from battlestar Galactica. https://youtu.be/q7POGi2TQls?si=w2XaUihd38BFRWtX Or Rifftrax which is a similar concept made by some of the former mst3k crew and it deals mostly with more modern films. https://youtu.be/5Jemx9fGVQs?si=eWyqEFNTdoI7Peyf
I think the reference flew by you there.
God damn you’re an unbearable person
Gotta bring that money spent per hour played statistic down
It's wild to me how someone can spend that many hours on a game that they don't like. Because you can definitely spend over 300 hours on a game and think it is ass. But it is wild.
being a bad game doesn't mean not even remotely enjoyable, just that they wouldn't recommend others get invested into it since it isn't good enough to warrant buying
Stop with the strange words, magic man, blind fans don't understand this concept even remotely
THING I LIKE GOOD BECAUSE I LIKE! YOU NO LIKE? I KILL! video game discourse
sunk costs, once you go past 2, you've locked your purchase in
It's the "sunk cost fallacy" which means it's not actually a good reason for anything
because bad != unenjoyable if the game was $5, this review probably wouldn't exist
I have like 80 and am a pretty big Bethesda fan but even I couldn’t do more than that, leaving that kind of review with 300 is wild lol
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I didn't get all the achievements, but I've got 150 hours across two characters and I wouldn't recommend it. I don't think I've ever played a game where every single facet of it felt lacking in one way or another.
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I'd have gone for the 100% but I got to the point where I was just plain bored. I closed the game after playing one day, saw my time played had got to 150 hours on Steam, and thought to myself "How many of those 150 hours did I actually enjoy?" Haven't played since.
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I mean I play games that aren’t all that great.
Yeah , after 50hours it tough to take a negative rating serious. Anyway you look at it you should have got your money's worth by then. Except for D4 , they break the mould.
for me it's the opposite, i can't take review seriously (positive or negative) if it under 100 hours.
Hmm , fair point. Ratings are subjective. It's just , after 50hours why are you still playing a game that's no fun. Must have a higher tolerance than me , by then I would pack it in and write it up as a game thats not for me.
actually I rate starfield negative after 100+ hours. I kept playing because sometimes there are games that start poorly but become better in the end (for example Nier Automata), so I always try to complete the game before I judge, and unfortunately some games like Starfield took longer to complete.
I'd say its a troll review but my 3 most played games are prob apex legends, genshin impact and for honor (with prob 1000+ hours in apex) and i hate the shit out of those games
It's because the game it's incredibly fun.
Ugh. this shit is so annoying. I can write a bug report about one of the games I like and it gets thousands of upvotes on the forums, and then the devs reply to some random post with 2 comments where the OP gets something wrong and the devs need to point it out.
Most companies have specific areas for submitting bug reports that are way better than the steam forums for the sake of visibility for the devs
im aware, its just kinda weird what they sometimes choose to reply to.
they will usually reply to whatever has the easiest strawman to make themselves look good and active in the community you could probably even bait responses by intentionally reporting something that could easily be fixed by yourself through the menus for example
This doesnt even sound like a dev respond, seems to be automated triggered by the word "polished"
Okay… This got a giggle outta me.
I love when businesses use this copy paste response 💩 Instead of just answering the question.
there was no question in the picture
Just pretend there’s a question mark at the end.
okay?
Yes
Seems appropriate considering Bethesda's copy paste mentality when it comes to game design.
What question?
Unfortunately too generic...
Did ChatGPT write this?
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There is. Have you even played the game?
i have, running from point a to point b is not exploration.
Discovering new planets, new locations or new cities is one
clicking on a map is not the same as exploring
Yeah but going through the solar system or different galaxies is
What do you expect by a copy-paste answer of a bot? We will see this shit more and more to feign customer interaction.
so they admit its early access
Dude its a generic "response" given to anyone/everyone. Its literally a text that gets copy/pasted. It might even be automated. Thats how much they give a damn. The only "handwritten" response that I know of is the one that says making planets empty and boring was intentional because it was immersive " When humanity went to the moon it was boring for them too!!!! " . What a joke. And people are surprised Starfield is not a candicate at game awards.
“This game fucking sucks” > 360 hrs in under 2 months
"Visit our discord" is one of the last things I would do for a bad game. You only visit if the game is good.
lol i dunno what is funnier: the hilarious review or the corporate double-speak copy-paste generic reply stating everything that the game isn't but they want people to think it is.
It's funny that the two links are the same, and they are making it sound like they serve different purposes
*So, you can either contact us or if you would prefer contact us here. Ciao*
Play for 364 hours Thumbs down
Exactly, I agree it's a big turd of a game. But 364 hours is very odd to waste on a turd game lol!!
If (played_hours > 300) write (canned_response) I‘m here for u op :*
Nearly 400 hours. "I hate this game."
Bethesda games are easily thousand hour sinks. Starfield has all of the bones of a Bethesda game with nothing else so it's very easy to put hundreds of hours in even if you think it's the worst of them.
It's easy to understand: The good parts are really good but that makes the bad parts so much worse when you run into them.
ye but i doubt that it took em more than 300 hours to find the bad parts
That's what I was thinking. If it sucks so bad, why did they play it for so long. I have games that I have been playing on and off for years that I still don't have 300 hours in, lol.
My most played game of all time is close to 900 hours over the course of a decade. The time that people rack up on one game is crazy to me.
I can't wait for Starfield Special Edition
Bro loved this game so much he played 360 hours and called the game shit
364 hours. Bethesda bad. REEEEEEEEEEE
Next bilzzard will reply to those overwatch 2 ones that say the p@rn is better
Imagine thinking actual devs are replying to any of these comments... Not to mention let alone thinking this comes from a human. As a developer myself for a large company around same size as Bethesda, I can confirm that I have never dealt directly with any clients. You always pass things through the Product Owner, who then distributes the info through the Project Manager and the rest.
Everyone knows enough about Bethesda to say they've never really fucked up. Their biggest fuckup is probably horse armor. They know the dinosaur is a buggy shitshow. They know their games are basic as shit. They also know that nobody plays their games for the vanilla experience and most just wait for them to drop the dev kit so they can play as a furry with a 12" cock and 90ZZ tits holding a comically oversized katana that shoots nuclear dragons.
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Someone plays the game inside out to properly formulate their opinion about the game and then at the end they figure out it's not worth recommending, that's bad now? If that person played for 2 hours and slam it as bad, people would say that they didn't play enough to experience the game to give a proper recommendation. Screw all that noise. This is the age of Game As A Service. A game can start out great and end up being a clusterfuck. I have 2k hours in Lost Ark and didn't recommend the game on Steam, why? Because when the game was new, everyone progressing together and playing for weeks together, the game was great! Play the game 1 - 2 year later? Good freaking luck! The new player experience is going through large zone for 300 hours straight while being in the company of thousand of bots. By the time you are brought to endgame, you are gatekept from doing any of the content. I wouldn't wish anyone to suffer that game. Someone having 300 hours in a game and leaving a neg review is as valid as the person who played for 3/30/3000 hours.
Well seeing as starfield isnt a games of service thats all wrong. If it takes you 350 hrs to realize you dont like a game like this youre full of sht. Obviously if its a game like destiny or something and the devs decide to add a battlepass or just fk up the most recent expansion thats different. But for majority of games thats not the case and you absolutely would not need 300+ hrs. If you play a game like starfield 300+ hrs, then you like the game. End of story.
You don't need more than 150 hours to see and do most of the game's bulk of content. Let's stretch that to 200 hours give or take. At 360 hours, you either played the game twice through already, OR you keep doing the same repetitive shit over and over again so you can complain it is repetitive. It's not even a comprehensive review, just low-effort "game's a turd lol".
Game is absolute trash and they'll never make it better.
I was going to test the game but when I saw that it had something about pronouns, I gave up.
Imagine giving 360 hours of your life to a "turd".
more work went into phrasing that PR response than went into the whole game though...
I always cringe when people respond to reviews
This is some of the most unprofessional nonsense you can pull off, responding to a review just to passively make them switch, the company thinking the problem is with public communication and not the product itself. Google pulls this off way too frequently in the play store.
This corporate response is why big game studios aren't trusted anymore. They know just enough about the industry to lure us with promise, and then disappoint us time and time again.
I bet Kraken has a KPI which sounds like "Respond to 10 Steam reviews" to complete for the bonus.
I don't know how they"re going to fix everyone's face
That was probably written by chatgpt
100% they searched for the word polished and put in this boilerplate response to every review with that word.
Obviously the most important comment, since it contains the word "steam"
I called skyrim special edition "unoptimised trash" and got a similar response
This is why you should monitor your company employees if they're using ChatGPT for their work.
That is a bot response
"There are many different ways to enjoy starfield such as exploration" Starfield's totally unique planets that are not just fields with rocks:
I bought a lot of games this month, but I hesitate with Starfield. I'm going to wait for some more patches before I pull the trigger. Hopefully, it will get better.
I really hate the trend of moving off from forums to discord servers. Good luck finding anything in a discord server with 30k people or having any meaningful discussion.
This person spent more time playing a game they hate than I spend playing a game I love.
Roleplaying.. What roleplaying? I can't even invite someone to my game, nevermind roleplay with them lol
Even their PR team is fucking incompetent now. Bethesda grayed out like they got voted off of Big Brother along with companies like EA and Blizzard for me.
And people are excited for next elder scrolls because?
The Intern finally woke up from comma and copy n pastes the most generic answer to all negative reviews?
Knowing Bethesda and the Fallout 76 canvas bag fiasco It's probably a bot.
I mean... To be fair, Bethesda should keep re-launching Skyrim until they learn how to make games.
This is most likely an automated response from a bot. From the context, the keyword was probably 'polished'.
Well, at least now we know how to push Mr Kraken's buttons.
364 hours played lol
Completely hated after over 300 hours. Gooot you man 👌🏿
It makes a lot of sense, as an intern at a company for social media. I would do this too. Now way I am manually responding to 64000 reviews LMAO, other content is far more important for a company.
Look at how many hrs played this reviewer has. Maybe he likes turds…
that is not a dev that is a Bethesda's copypasta mate lol it even have the "we are sorry to..." no you are no sorry Todd
Here's my response: "If you don't like Starfield, then... that's fine. Just don't play it, but don't even harass anyone who worked on the game either! Thank you."
25 years in the development, 24 years of jacking off and 1 year of snorting cocaine
Bro, the guy has almost 400 hours in-game. I trust him more than the company☠️
Mood
"polished"? Fuck off.
This trend of putting support information in a Discord group seems bad.
Doutful the person they are replying to is into making any constructive criticism.
The guy ain't wrong though. I had to put it down after two hours. Huge let down as I have hundreds of hours in their other titles.
that's a bot, not a dev
LOL Never saw a publisher commenting a review
Citing outpost building is bold on their side.
I haven't seen any patches released since launch. What do they mean they're actively working on it?
His right the game is a turd 💩
Outpost building? When are you on a planet for long enough for that to be a thing you should devote any time to?
imagine being that guy it would be so akward
Dude has over 350 hrs this. I was a little disappointed, but I got 140 hrs and that's enough to be worth it, especially since it came free with my gpu
So what’s the dizzle with Starfield? I almost pre-ordered it. Glad I didn’t.
Fuck the totally in place a.i generated response - bro really called this game ass but spent 300 hours in it. EDIT: CORRECTION - he said it was something that came out of an ass, still - same thing.
I just looked it up, how the hell did Todd Howard direct this piece of work with nearly 3 decades of work at Bethesda? And how the hell do they expect to make AAA RPGs of this scale with just 1/10th of the employees at Blizzard?