The metanarrative all around Star field just took a very strange turn. Steam reviews for the sprawling sci-fi role-playing game recently turned “mixed” on Valve’s showcase, and now Bethesda employees are arguing with players in the comments about why the game isn’t as boring and soulless as some have claimed.
Developers’ responses to some of the Star fieldThe most negative Steam reviews were recently spotted by X (formerly Twitter) user JuiceHead and shared online. These aren’t just fact checks or short comments either, but multi-paragraph rebuttals that read like a potential Bethesda customer service representative working on a script. “The story is so generic that the gameplay becomes boring,” read one recent review published on November 27 a user who has accumulated 75 hours of game time. “I wish there was a reason to even worry about exploring planets and building outposts. it’s all fun until you do it once, then it’s all repetitive, soulless work.’
Here’s Bethesda’s response, which reads like the peak corporate parody found in old Bethesda RPGs:
greetings
Thank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!
You can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot!
Star field is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary based on your character’s skills and decisions, greatly altering the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that contradict or are the opposite of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a completely different game. Put points into different skills of the character you created earlier, and now you will have to make completely different decisions and difficulties.
There are so many layers Star fieldthat you’ll find things you didn’t even know were possible after hundreds of hours of playing.
Even after completing the main story, your adventure will not end! You can go to New Game+ to continue exploring Starfield and all that it has to offer!
Never stop exploring!
Bethesda Customer Support
Other responses are much more strident: Bethesda vehemently rejects criticism of Starfield’s galaxy of 1,000 planets as “boring.” “We’re sorry you don’t like landing on different planets and find many of them empty,” read another support response. “Some of the Star fieldPlanets are supposed to be empty by design, but it’s not boring.” The representative then quoted director Todd Howard gave the interview in which he mentioned that the moon was empty, but the astronauts were not bored when they landed on it.
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Another Bethesda customer support response dismissed a review criticizing the game’s many loading screens for how they interrupt space travel and exploration. “While there may be loading screens between fast moves, just consider the amount of data for extensive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in less than 3 seconds,” the post reads. “We believe that the lack will not prevent our players from getting lost in the world we have created.”
Steam reviews can make or break a game’s long-term success on the platform, especially if they fall into the dreaded “mixed” category with less than 70 percent positive reviews, after which the rating moves from blue to the yellow “danger zone.” Star field recently surpassed that threshold in the peak of new sales ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. But it’s rare to see a studio actually abandon subjective judgments and basically tell users that they’re playing the game wrong.
While it’s far from a bad game, it’s clearly a long-awaited space RPG from the creators Fallout 3 and Skyrim didn’t impress everyone as some fans might have hoped. My cityown extensive overview describes both the good and the bad of an expansive open world game and the lack of a Game of the Year nomination Geoff Keighley’s Game Awardsafter which there were disputes about reducing the number of simultaneous players on Steam, further complicated the narrative behind the big Xbox 2023 console exclusive as something other than a smashing success.
One surefire way to eliminate negative reviews on Steam is to keep releasing big updates. For now Star field recently got DLSS support on PC and the ability to eat food directly from the environment (which serves no purpose but is fun), the game still has tons of other tweaks and additions to it, and travelers like Cyberpunk 2077 proved that it is possible. Although, based on the current responses to Stream’s negative reviews, it sounds like Bethesda thinks so Star field mostly fine as is.