Starfield's recent reviews have gone to "mostly negative"

What happened? I haven't played the game, but it was my understanding that it had a rocky launch but many still enjoyed it.

It’s a little boring, it seemed unfinished at launch, the performance wasn’t great, and the developers have since claimed that it’s the players who have it all wrong. There’s an interesting story in there somewhere but the game is flawed. When the developers are slow to acknowledge the issues and make updates, I think it causes a lot of players to be apathetic about the game.
In contrast, CD Projekt and Hello Games knew their games were bad at launch and kicked things into gear almost immediately. No bullshit excuses and they kept pushing updates until the games were good. Both are pretty much a case study on how to recover from a bad launch.
- It took them literally years to make Cyberpunk anywhere near to properly finished and it still doesn’t have a lot of features they promised pre launch. Similarly with No Mans Sky.
  Starfield came out 3.5 months ago. It wasn’t great at launch but it was fucken light years better than Cyberpunk. Bethesda have released a coupe of small-ish bugfix updates and have announced plans to release new content from February. So far they’re no worse than the two examples you listed.
Many enjoyed it because they thought the product was unfinished and they’d receive their moneys worth at a later point in time.
As per usual, the big corps said “haha u thought” and left it as is. Which to me is just another 10 year old game with the same old mechanics I got bored of 5 years ago.
You can only replay Skyrim so many times…
- I see. It seems to have a lot of parallels to No Man's Sky, which had a pretty disastrous launch due to it missing a bunch of promised features, only in that instance the developers actually made good on their word and now it's an incredible game.
  I liked the idea of Starfield when I heard about it because it seemed like a similar idea but with a more realistic art style. Was kinda disappointed seeing it fall on its face the way it did.
  But hey, at least they didn't preorder Minecraft Legends amirite
  cries
- My dozens of thousands of hours on Skyrim beg to differ
I dropped about 20 hours into it (got a free copy from AMD). I got bored and have very little reason to return to it.
The story is decent but the unimmersive hoops you have to jump through for it are very strange in 2023.
Fwiw the story and faction quests are pretty good, but that's it. New game plus is boring, planets are empty, outposts are frustrating and borderline pointless. Once the shiny newness wears off, you realize it's not much of a game.

Not surprising considering how bad it is. I could excuse the boring/ nonsensical story (Skyrim and especially FO4) if the other parts of the game, like exploration or the environment were fun. But that's not even there. The game is just a soulless, boring, flat pile of crap.

The game has an M rating (because of very dangerous drugs, BGS' words, certainly not mine), yet the dialogue comes off as after school special.

Just play the crimson fleet quest line to understand what I mean if the opening Act didn't convince you.

SF is a great premise with horrible execution, and unless BGS is willing to go back and re-record their dialogue for tone, I think "mostly negative" is a fair critique.

That's a shame, I don't think it's fantastic, but it's okay, I felt the mixed tag was pretty fair.

Fitting, the game is also "mostly negative".

That doesn't make it trash, but it's mostly a regression from previous games. Shame that Bethesda seems to be have absolutely zero desire to improve anything about their formula at all.

And as expected, Obsidian's already-subpar Outer Worlds vs now Starfield really just proved who made all the good open-world RPGs that released under Bethesda's name.