Starfield Is Seeing Consistently Lower Scores and Player Count

todd howard

todd howard

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, weā€™ve also seen how Starfieldā€™s concurrent player statistics on Steam and its review scores plummet gradually and consistently.

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Credit: SteamDB

Now, reviews on Starfield are calculated to have a Mixed score. According to PC Gamer, Starfieldā€™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.

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Credit: Bethesda

Making it worse, it appears, are two pieces of news - Bethesdaā€™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 shouldā€™ve been fewer than it is now.

Despite the falling scores and scathing reviews, it has only been two months since Starfieldā€™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.

Thereā€™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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