Open world space role-playing game by Bethesda certainly did not have a warm Christmas season. Up to now (December 27), Starfield has received enough negative reviews above Steam to push the user rating status down to “Mostly Negative”. It’s a worrying downfall for a game that was once hyped in the most flowery of terms by one of the world’s most famous developers.
Announced in 2018, Starfield has always received high expectations from the community leading up to its official release in September 2023. As Bethesda’s first original IP in decades, it has attracted die-hard fans of the studio are eager to jump into an “epic space opera with over 1,000 explorable planets,” or something like that, according to the trailers for Todd Howard.
However, in the months following the game’s launch, Starfield faced a lot of criticism from fans and the media: its shallow storytelling, its vast but lifeless universe, and its fragmented by countless loading-screens, an adventure with nothing much to do but wander between barren planets, not to mention countless bugs ranging from small to large… beautiful graphics are not enough to save Bethesda’s “super product” that has been cherished for more than a decade.
Too many loading screens make the Starfield player experience fragmented and annoying
User frustration with Starfield seems to be increasing over time. On Steam user reviews, the game dropped to “Mixed” status around November of this year. A month later, on Christmas when all families gathered together warmly, Starfield received a cold blow, when its rating on Steam dropped to “Mostly Negative”, meaning “Mostly Negative”. almost negative.
People on the r/Starfield subreddit noticed a drop in reviews right around Christmas, when the game received a whopping 245 negative reviews on Steam. Many people in this community also compare Starfield to Cyberpunk and Baldur’s Gate 3. But even in the community of fans of Bethesda’s work, Starfield’s victory is not high.
Creating and customizing your own spacecraft is a rare feature of Starfield that everyone appreciates
One of the top Steam reviews for the game currently reads “Just buy Cyberpunk.” Other fans directly compared the game to other Bethesda games: “Don’t play after Skyrim or Fallout 4 or Fallout New Vegas or Fallout 3 (…) You will be very (disappointed).” Another review describes the game as “excessive nonsense. An open world RPG contains so much meaningless content that it becomes disjointed and the good stuff falls away.”
Faced with negative reviews and a series of players leaving, it’s unclear how Bethesda and Microsoft will respond, as they have always emphasized that the game is created to be played over a long period of time. Starfield is expected to receive new features and updates in 2024, including “new ways of traveling”. Bethesda says its goal is to deliver such updates at a rate of every six weeks, starting in February.
Will these updates magically revive the game like No Man’s Sky? Cyberpunk 2077? Let’s wait and see.
