I trust the scores that come after release over the ones that came before, because post release scores aren’t concerned with biting the hand that feeds re: getting future review copies for titles down the line. It’s telling that a lot of the earlier ones are higher but just say “great game, Bethesda’s knocked it out of the park again” with a sentence or two, and later, lower ones are a lot meatier with specific criticisms.

I think it’s worth noting that there are a lot of irrelevant low reviews from the review bombers too, as well as zeroes from the people who are upset that you can choose your pronouns. I’ve played the game. I don’t like the game - I think it’s bad on its own merits, or lack thereof. Where I think FO4 was a ‘meh’ because of the less impactful character building and stripped-down dialogue system, doubling down on the clutter looter aspects, I call Starfield bad because the same clutter looting and character building with a new coat of paint is now gated behind repetitive tasks and mostly barren procgen maps. There’s more layers of obligatory fast travel between the parts of the game that are enjoyable, and that’s in service of the parts of the game that aren’t. The game is objectively worse than FO4 for those reasons, and in the case of the leveling system, it didn’t even need to be.

And you know, while I’m airing my grievances here, I also think it’s fair to have higher standards in the eight years between the two games - Bethesda doesn’t get to hide behind their own old engine the same way Obsidian gets a pass for the issues FNV runs into - it’s their engine. They should know from the get-go whether the game they want to make can be supported with a system built over a decade ago, and if it’s not, they should be prepared to go back to square one. They had plenty of time; I don’t believe for a second they couldn’t have made this game right, but they were hell-bent on getting one more game out of the Creation engine, and by god did they, for better or (much, much) worse. So when people say “It’s Bethesda, what did you expect?” I will answer, from the top of this hill where I’m already carving my fucking epitaph, “Something more and better than what we got last decade.” And people give shit for that expectation? I’m supposed to be impressed that they plugged the random number generator that puts cartons of cigarettes in trashcans into a random planet generator? That in the eight years between FO4 and this samey, shallow, mediocre mess, two more than the development time between Daggerfall and Morrowind, that arguably set the standard for this kind of game with its masterfully crafted world, with huge setpiece cities full of bespoke characters and encounters, they’ve managed to stretch the disappointment of randomized containers full of vendor trash and blocky bases full of raiders over thousands of empty maps? Give me a break. Game bad. Emperor Todd has no clothes and I’m fucking calling it out.