Also while I agree Starfield wasn't all the way there and I think its issues run much deeper, I do find it funny when people so often shame it in order to praise Cyberpunk, when they're near equivalents in reputation and half the Starfield haters were blindly hating on Cyberpunk a few years earlier. There's definitely parallels in how people grasp at every miniscule reason to drag Starfield's reputation. Bracing for it to get called a masterpiece in 2026 when and update alters a few minor things and some newer game has to bear the cross.

I played the base game on a One X at launch and PL on a Series X. It's well known that the base console versions were more barren but there was a mountain of misinformation once the bandwagon kicked off. Eg people using console commands on PC to force ultra-low LOD models and then claim it was the PS4 version. Anecdotally there were plenty of people in off-shoot fan groups enjoying it on the old consoles and IRL friends who loved it on PS4 while being none the wiser that they were meant to be hating it.

Half the complaints with hundreds of upvotes were nothing to do with glitches though and were routinely insane, like not being able to sit at a street vendor and eat noodles, or not being able to purchase any building in the city, or not being able to have sex with every NPC, or cherry-picking examples of niche details in older open world games and acting like it was egregious for CP77 not to have every last one. People had built up their expectations into some kind of 1:1 life simulator that would integrate the total sum of all game features before it.

The most loud and annoying claim was a total insistence that it would never be salvageable because the writing and quest design were fundamentally bad and that content would always be the bulk of the game. Lo and behold they change a couple parameters and all of a sudden it's a masterpiece despite, as those haters correctly guessed, 99% of the content being identical to launch. I'd played it over about 3 weeks, staying offline to avoid spoilers, concluded it was easily the best thing I'd played that whole gen then went back online to find a total gamer jihad emphatic refusal so see any element of the game as being above the worst it could possibly be. Well, with the exception of Judy and Panam's designs. Gamers being sheep is nothing new but this was a particularly hysteric, black and white instance.