We have all witnessed Starfield rise from just 1 million players during early access to hitting 10 million players three weeks after the successful launch on September 6.
Through the following weeks, we’ve also seen how Starfield’s concurrent player statistics on Steam and its review scores plummet gradually and consistently.
Now, reviews on Starfield are calculated to have a Mixed score. According to PC Gamer, Starfield’s Steam reviews are 69% positive. Recent reviews are also 48% positive. What could have gone wrong?
Looking over at both the positive and negative reviews for Starfield on Steam, there seems to be a consensus that Bethesda has lost the magic touch that made their previous games popular in the first place.
A major source of critics' dissatisfaction is the game's scale. For many players, having over 1000 procedurally generated planets spread out among 120 star systems contributes to a feeling of monotony during planetary exploration.
Making it worse, it appears, are two pieces of news - Bethesda’s admission that planets were described as empty and barren and a claim by a former Bethesda dev that the number of systems and planets should’ve been fewer than it is now.
Despite the falling scores and scathing reviews, it has only been two months since Starfield’s launch. There is plenty of room for improvement. For example, Bethesda has released a major patch, Update 1.8.86, that brought the much-awaited DLSS support for the game.
There’s also the upcoming DLC, Shattered Space, of which details are still sparse. Hopefully, this DLC will help us realize what Todd Howard had said before - that Starfield is a game meant to be played for years.
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