Enjoying a Game only to Grow to Critique It

I'm not happy with the title of this thread but as I ramble on maybe someone can suggest a better one.

This will largely be a discussion of my time with Starfield this month but I'd also love to dove-tail into a broader topic I often wonder about - for a lack of a concise way of looking at it - and that is spending a large amount of time with a game that you were enjoying only to walk away from the whole experience realizing that you wouldn't recommend it after all.

Upfront, I quite like Starfield. There are parts of it I really enjoyed, enjoyed enough to invest more time in it then any game I've probably played in the last 7 years; yet as I feel myself winding down until the next DLC comes out I think I'm overall quite disappointed in the game. I wonder if the rising crescendo of that enjoyment was based on what I thought was coming together only for it to never really manifest in a meaningful way. I wouldn't go so far as to say I feel like I wasted my time with Starfield, and I'm eager to return to it after some DLCs hopefully fill out its gameplay loops but in the context of a larger discussion I wonder what makes me feel like I do.

I don't think its simply a case of "Too much of a good thing" - I have played incalculable amounts of Super Mario World and Mass Effect 1. No matter how many hours I sink into those games I don't think I could ever reach a point where I'll "sour" on that experience. I can think of games like that where I have played and replayed to death and come away with a lot of really passionate thoughts and ideas.

There are also games that are short that I never touch again that I would still sing praises of. So I don't think brevity or a lack of brevity is necessarily inherent to whatever it is I'm trying to articulate.

There are games I grow fatigued of well before the finish line yet still look back on my time with them fondly. I don't think value is involved.

And finally on the other side of the fence there are a few games where I am initially enthralled by the experience only to look back on it with fatigue or disappointment. I don't want to turn the thread into a subjective battle of tastes but to articulate my own point I'd say a game like Destiny, Halo Infinite or even a new Assassin's Creed (I hadn't played one in a while) were times where I spend my initial hours really excited and passionate about the game only to retroactively view that time differently.

Maybe sometimes how something ends is just as important as how it begins.

As far as Starfield goes its an interesting beast! At a glance it seems like some of Bethesda's best work, I find the gunplay in that game to actually be enjoyable, something not even fallout 4 could claim for me. It obviously looks great with some really cool art design, I absolutely LOVE the space ship building and after some pretty substantial headaches with the UI for it I've loved bringing cool spaceship designs from my nerdy mind to fruition as a HUGE sci-fi nerd my whole life.

BUT Starfield is also just really disappointing to me. I feel like it could be better and I'm disappointed that a lot of these systems that they've been iterating on for years seem to have kind of gone nowhere or taken a step backwards. It seems like a lot of the content is just generated by a computer rather then thoughtfully placed by a person. Some of that is still there don't get me wrong, I've encountered some really cool derelict ships and the odd feature on a planet but mostly its just recycled content... yet unlike a radiant quest in Skyrim or Fallout which was obvious and easily ignored I feel like the entire exploration of Starfield IS a radiant quest.

I knew I was done in Morrowind, Oblivion or Skyrim and Fallout when I finished the map. I knew I had completed the man made content and I could say farewell.

In Starfield I cant always tell when I'm going to find something thoughtfully placed by a creative mind with a story to tell or simply waste an evening bumping into recycled content placed before me by a computer and that's a bummer.

In my opinion I think the smaller, concise worlds of their previous work was stronger then what they've spent their time building. Maybe games are just too big to make how I like them these days. Too much energy gets spent on things I value less.

Oh well! Thanks for reading!

Are there any games that made you feel similarly?

I can think of a fair number of games that I enjoyed at first but came to loathe over time. Destiny (the first one) is the one that stands out to me the most. I think the "winning" formula is a game with a good core loop and just enough good content sprinkled in the later areas that you don't want to abandon it because you can see parts of what made it fun and hope that it comes back around to being good again (which some games do) and then it never does.

Another game I felt something like this about (though in the end I still like it overall) was The Last of Us Part II. A lot of people hated various plot or character aspects of it but for me all of that was (mostly) fine, it was the pacing that did it. I was invested in the characters and story but it would. not. end. Some games just don't know when to wrap things up.

For something like Starfield it sounds like the "nuggets of gold buried in a field of dirt" effect where you keep going hoping to hit another motherlode of good content but there's just too much to dig through and it doesn't feel worth it in the end.

A lot of games like this have a "boil the frog" effect where there's no one big point that turns you off and stops you playing but instead slowly you find yourself not enjoying yourself but still playing out of a kind of momentum. There's nothing worse than realizing you played a game for 30 hours past the point where you weren't getting anything out of it. It's such a huge waste of time but with big games it's all too easy to find it happening.

@bigsocrates: Totally, I agree!

That core gameplay loop is key. Pretty hard to pin down I would imagine, especially in the endless sea of audience's subjective opinion.

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

The most recent release, Starfield. Mainly, because it DOESN'T live up to the hype that was promised for years. It's just another Bethesda style game with outer space paint. However, its not a bad game, just as many of those other games in the past weren't bad. But because its another one of those, I haven't been playing it as much as I would like to. Turns out, I'm still kind of burned out on Skyrim even though its been years since I played it, and it took me playing Starfield to realize it. I will still finish it, I'm at the point now where I have no choice but to do the many sidequest just to build my character to finish the main story. But I won't be playing it consistently as I did Fallout 3 or New Vegas in the past. At least the release was one of their less buggy ones. That is something Bethesda can be proud of... I guess.

So yeah... I agree.

I notice people are now starting to have this feeling about Street Fighter VI as well, but those people still love the game a lot. And is still considered way better than SF5.

Probably the closest would be RDR2. I adore the first one and I was having a grand time with 2 for a decent while. Then all the tedium of it leaning into a more sim like experience started to grate on me. I started to get annoyed that all these things just got in the way of adding more interesting stuff. Why do I care about taking a bath? But that's the game, and I still spent 115 hours with it.

Interesting you bring up Starfield. I played about 5 hours through Xcloud and found it exceedingly dull. The story bits and wandering the cool space city of New Atlantis were the highlight. I'm a huge Fallout 4 apologist that spent like 300 hours scavenging the wastelands so I figured this game was right up my alley. Yet I can't shake the feeling that I would end up largely where you are if I did keep playing it. Becoming moderately less dull would not be enough for me to say that I would truly enjoy my experience. I had expected this to be the game I spent most of the remainder of my GPU sub with, minus Lies of P, and now its pushed me back into Sea of Stars which I am enjoying very much. Also Cyberpunk, once I get over the gripes in my earlier post about 2.0, has shot right to the forefront.

I think it boils down to whether or not the good outweighs the bad enough for me to look past it at this point. As we are getting older I would rather just be mildly disappointed that something didn't click than spend hours trying to enjoy it. Critical thought is important, but so is our time.

Edit: The inverse is something worth mentioning as well. Lies of P, for example, is something I was extremely critical of in the early goings and have since become more fond of as I progress. Though I was certainly more on board with it than Starfield. So I guess its about how much of something you enjoy at the start informing how you intend to feel later on and the balance of what you like and don't like about a game.

@spacemanspiff00: Yep! Definitely worth noting the inverse. In a way those might be my favorite games, always nice to be surprised. I think Subnautica was this for me. When it originally started I sort of went "Oh mannnn another one of these... lets slowly gather materials in an endless grind" only for it to become arguably my favorite game of all time once I got out of the shallows and started seeing the other things it had going on.

I'm also a huge Fallout 4 fan. Playing it on Survival really enhanced its systems for me and rebuilding the wasteland, literally from both a thematic stance but also in creating safe places to break up the sheer danger of the wasteland was really cool.

In hindsight I dont know what I was expecting with Starfield but I guess I wanted the Outposts to matter more and looting junk and turning it into XP and usable resources isnt how they work in Starfield... they're just sort of there cosmetically as a thing to decorate. You can literally buy all the ingredients you need in New Atlantis for pennies whenever you want by sleeping for 24hrs at a time. It doesnt make sense.

I think I've gone into this a few times on this site before, but it's Persona 5 for me. A game I could not be more excited for, and quite enjoyed up front, with a top-notch style and some of the best combat and dungeon design in the entire SMT series. Only to turn on it by the end, after a hundred hours of the game's seeming disinterest in a telling any story that's not about magicking away a nebulously evil adult making life hard for a kid, ripping off characters from past games, and Atlus's inability to get away from the same problematic themes and tropes, a lesson that should have been learned multiple times over by now.

@junkerman: Ahh Subnautica. That game is the only one of those I've ever gotten into and finished. I even used a trophy guide just so I wouldn't miss anything. Admittedly, I liked it more in the earlier goings before the whole resource grind ramps up. In the late game I used the console to make my life easier because I didn't feel like doing anymore scavenging. I don't personally feel like I cheated myself since I'd seen pretty much seen everything besides the end game by then. Shame I couldn't get into Subnautica 2.

@brian_ While I realized the Persona games aren't for me for a variety of reasons, I did enjoy the P4 anime a lot so I watched the P5 one as well. Couldn't help but think that it just told the same story with slight differences over and over about, as you said, "magicking away a nebulous evil adult making life hard for a kid." I'm sure it was better with cool dungeons to go a long with it but ya I think the anime really exposed the story in an unfortunate way.

hmm, interesting food for thought.

if i'm being honest, i think my delta isn't broad as some- what i mean by that is, i can't really think of games where i was head-over-heels, lovesick swooning that i now consider fundamentally negatively. i don't have a lot of video game regrets (can't really think of 1).

more often for me it's something that i enjoy the novelty of that then fades and i'm stuck completing something i've kinda sorta lost interest in. games that would probably fit into this category are Paper Mario: The Origami King, Luigi's Mansion 3, Yakuza 0, and Death Stranding. i think with those 4 in particular i was looking to experiencing new things- and while i got a degree of that, i found they didn't resonate strongly as i'd hoped and had friction that worked against my interests.

if we're in the mood for slightly flip takes- i think were i to revisit the Mass Effect franchise or fire up Elden Ring again, i think their stock might have depreciated in my head (though to be fair i wasn't over-the-moon for ER). in ME's case i think i've played games that have raised the bar for party-based character games and dialogue, and in ER's case i recently played the PS5 Demon's Souls remake and had a significantly better time.

I toyed with adding Persona 5 to my list of soured game experiences as well but kind of waffled. The style and design of that game is so my jam... but in the end I wish it went deeper with the evil adult storylines then it did and overall it just felt like a re-hash of Persona 4 with more style but less soul.

Persona 5 is a masterpiece and a better game than Persona 4 overall, imo. However, the dungeons can drag a bit. The funny thing is, I was starting to get tired of them, then the casino dungeon happened with the style and that cool "temptation" song that I turned around on it. And I fully support a game that has teens exposing the corruption of adults. Nothing wrong with that at all.