this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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There are nine reviews on metacritic from various outlets that score the game 100/100. I would love for every single one of those reviewers to look me in the eye and with a straight face, repeat the claim that Starfield is perfect and there is absolutely nothing in the game that could possibly be improved on. If you want to know who's not conversing honestly, that'd be a good kicking-off point.
I have serious questions for anyone who gives a game, any game, a completely perfect score, especially one that is known to have some technical issues.
To me, a perfect score doesn't (or shouldn't) mean a game is literally perfect. It means "I recommend this game without reservation. Everyone with the slightest interest in the genre should play it."
Granted, even by that standard a lot of these perfect scores are pretty questionable
And that's why comparing different people's ratings is so difficult. 10/10 can mean "absolutely perfect and impossible to ever improve upon", it can mean "the best possible execution right now", it can mean "the best expected result with no major flaws", it can mean "I had a good time and would recommend this to anyone", and so on. All of these definitions are valid.
Aggregate scores paper over those differences. That automatically makes them less accurate.
Also, the problem with "perfect" as your standard is that it doesn't exist. Everything is inherently tradeoffs. There are games with better gunplay than Starfield. There are games with better story telling. The games that do that are a lot smaller and more contained. As good as BG3 is at writing and presentation, even that's not perfect, and what they did do was only realistic because it's a CRPG and the story is the overwhelming majority of the development work. There are games that are bigger in terms of absolute size of the universe you can discover and land on, but they don't have the same depth of character development and combat options, the same quality or amount of hand crafted story content, etc.
You're always going to be able to point to games that do some specific element better than a given game, and the more ambitious a game is in providing a huge scope, the more things you'll be able to point to and say "X did this better" (because there are more elements to nitpick). Not every game is for everyone, but looking for failings is a bad way to explore or evaluate a game. It dramatically limits what you see.