By Claire Lewis on September 27, 2023 at 3:28PM PDT
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/starfield-is-bethesdas-lowest-rated-game-on-steam/1100-6518009/
Starfield–Bethesda’s first new IP in a quarter of a century–has, for the most part, enjoyed a very successful launch. The game hasn’t even been out for a month, but in that timeframe, it has managed to beat Skyrim’s concurrent player count on Steam (with over 1 million concurrent players taking the game for a spin on launch day) and amass over 10 million players. That’s no small feat, and at first glance, it may seem like everyone playing the game is having the time of their life. But Steam reviews tell a slightly different story, with Starfield scoring lower with Steam players than any previous Bethesda game–including Fallout 76, which faced an incredibly rocky launch.
Bethesda hasn’t revealed how many copies of the game have been purchased rather than accessed via Game Pass, making it difficult to compare Starfield’s launch to that of previous Bethesda titles. Still, Steam’s metrics offer a pretty clear picture of the game’s reception, especially since, unlike players making use of Game Pass, anyone playing Starfield on Steam had to shell out the cold, hard cash to buy it, and probably purchased Starfield with the hopes of truly enjoying it. Unfortunately, after taking a peek at the Steam reviews, it seems Starfield has fallen well below the mark for a significant number of players.
Here’s how Starfield’s Steam reviews compare to previous Bethesda titles:
- 2009’s Fallout 3 reviews are 79.07% positive.
- 2011’s wildly popular Skyrim is right behind New Vegas, with 93.88% of user reviews rating it positively.
- 2015’s Fallout 4 earned a respectable 81.90% positive rating among players.
- 2020’s Fallout 76 previously held the record for Bethesda’s lowest-rated game, with 71.76% of Steam user reviews giving it a thumbs-up.
- 2023’s highly anticipated Starfield is currently rated a fraction of a percentage lower than Fallout 76, with only 71.40% of player reviews speaking positively of the game.
Bethesda has garnered a bit of a reputation for releasing games with loads of bugs in them, and while Starfield certainly has a few, it’s arguably the least-buggy title launched by Bethesda in recent memory, and the studio seems to be committed to patching these issues out as quickly as possible. So what gives?
There are a number of potential reasons behind the game’s low score. Some players and internet personalities have been extremely vocal about their distaste for Bethesda’s choice to let players select their own pronouns, which may have affected the game’s rating to some extent. But rather than complaining that they’re being bogged down with bugs, many players are complaining about awkwardly-stiff NPC facial animations, an extremely limited number of romanceable companions, and far too much procedurally generated content that sees immersion broken when players stumble across the same named NPC’s corpse in the same exact spot inside the same exact cave on three different planets. Other complaints include the lack of any sort of codex or compendium to keep track of lore and learn more about the history of the game’s factions, the absence of any ground-side mode of transport (like a rover or alien mount) to make planet exploration less onerous, and, perhaps worst of all, downright painful interstellar dogfights.
While Bethesda’s latest release has certainly fallen short in the eyes of some players, there’s no guarantee that this will remain the case. The studio has a habit of releasing large-scale games that later receive large-scale updates, often including new DLC, new in-game activities, and access to mods for console players. Bethesda clearly has big plans for Starfield, and its Steam user score may improve in the future as more content is added. For now, however, the game is trailing behind Cyberpunk 2077’s concurrent player count on Steam, and 25% of players exploring the galaxy on Xbox have failed to even achieve liftoff. Ultimately, Starfield’s fate will be decided by the actions of its developer, but for the moment, a good amount of Steam players seem to agree that the studio’s choice to lean on procedural generation has resulted in a game that feels like it’s a mile wide, but an inch deep.
Starfield has its issues for sure. But anyone rating it worse than FO76 is absolutely delusional. Or atleast if we’re comparing launch vs. launch. Not launch vs. 5 years of active update post launch.
Edit: i mean my point literally. I have played both and this is my opinion about both games. This isn’t meant to be a debate about rating systems nor the games lol.
Except Steam scores a binary - like it or don’t - and the overall score is just what percentage is positive vs negative. You can’t rate one or other, just whether you liked each game.
But Gamespot have gone too soon with their reporting, picking a time when the scores are still in flux. Fallout 76 is 72% positive, while Starfield is 75%. And Fallout 76 certainly wasn;t 72% positive at launch. It’s not a fair comparison and is a nonsense story.
I think it’d be even lower if it wasn’t a binary choice. You’d have to feel more than 50% negatively to rate it badly but without that, people who like it only say… 60% positively would drop the score lower than it is.
Starfield, unfortunately, has turned out to be the most bland game they’ve released. It feels like they tried to do Obsidian’s Outer Worlds without campy symbolism Fallout is known for. The systems are there but nothing feels fleshed out. They have perks but they’re static number increases locked behind a level up and a challenge. They have piracy but it’s a percentage chance and a roll of the dice.
Everything exists for the sole purpose to be overhauled by modders and while that’s what they do best, it’s kind of sickening to see them embrace it. They used to at least put paint on the canvas but now we’re getting rough sketches and are being told to wait for better artists to color it in.
I also felt like The Outer Worlds was pretty bland, tbh.
The camp seemed cheap and forced.
Starfield is similarly half fleshed out, I agree.
The Outer Worlds was indeed also bland but it had a little more style to it. The “Spacer’s Choice” and associated mascots was an obvious nod to vault-boy and the same kind of vibe. Starfield just… has none of it. Like a different publisher took the engine for a spin without knowing what made previous titles so engaging.
Not including 76, starfield unfortunately feels the most shallow. Yes the gunplay is fun like 4 but looting isn’t as fun without the junk dismantling. The dialog and roleplay is decent but the perks are the worst I think I’ve seen. They’re all “increase x by 10% but also do this challenge before you can use a skill point”
I won’t ramble but they made a lot of very very strange choices as if they didn’t learn from the criticisms of past titles.
Personally I think it’s better than Fallout4
I don’t care for the fact that starfield took a more family friendly theme despite being M rated
Look how hardcore Fallout 3 was and you’ll see how watered down starfield is
How is there seriously not a trace of dismemberment…. Why don’t enemies turn into ash and disintegrate with my laser powered gun??
Why does my partner talk dirty after sleeping but nothing of intimacy is shown even of “T” rated value?
Did you wanna watch em fuck?
Yes?
I mean….maybe? dontkinkshameme
I honestly don’t understand where the M rating comes from. A few blood smears on the scenery? Is it the packs of cigarettes lying around?
To me the game is just not… captivating. The scale doesn’t work for me. The spaces are not interconnected. I get no feeling for the places… that way I can’t really wander and find interesting stuff. Additional the writing is very… random? Way too many fetch quests. BG3 is way more enjoyable too me. Starfield has lots of stuff, but I don’t care about said stuff. I think they messed up the scale. Skyrim had this nice approach how they handled the size of the cities. The cities were about showing the feeling of the city, not the actual size. That way the cities are idealised Spaces that are extremely memorable too me. Here they tried to scale them more realistically but don’t have much content to fill them with… So much emptiness!
Overblown and knee jerk.
I’m enjoying the absolute fuck out of this game - hundreds of hours already and no regrets. This game is a lot deeper than anyone gives it credit for, it’s fantastic, and I’m looking forward to more of it.
No Man’s Sky bores the hell out of me and yet I’m having so much fun exploring planets and raiding pirate bases and being surprised by handbuilt content in what I thought would be a procedurally generated dungeon. Not to mention the surprisingly deep side and faction quests. Oh and so many hours playing with the shipbuilder.
I’m sorry you’re not having fun guys. But maybe you should focus on things that are fun for you?
Same. Just explored a planet where I found some chatter on the terminals about organisms living in a cave system and then got to explore the cave system and see them after discovering the airlock - style door in the complex that opened up to it.
Finding that the procedural generated buildings are pretty boring, but the surrounding proc-gen landscape is actually pretty cool. Lots of variation in landscapes per planet depending on latitude I land at, etc, and the variation extends to changes in animal coloration, which is a cool bit of attention to detail.
Put together a fairly heavily modded no man’s sky just to compare and couldn’t get into it. Seems pretty cool but just not engaging.
That being said, I’m finding Starfield to be brutally bland in some ways, but I’m still enjoying it. Running with 65-ish mods so far, so some of the stupider stuff that vanilla version does is mitigated, really ally looking forward to when the esp mods start coming out.
I love this game, so much to do
Hopefully that’s not sarcasm. I genuinely do love the faction missions in Starfield. I’ve just grinded out the Ryujin tree and about to start Freestar.
The side missions are also quite nice too. None of the faction nor side missions overstay their welcome too much, they feel like a good balance between chore and activity. Plus the rewards make it more than worth it.
I’ve only just gotten to the temples in the story so I’m quite far ahead for the main questline, which makes it all the more enjoyable. Plus to top it all off I’ve max affinity’d Sarah.
It’s Bethesda’s best game by technical standards. They’ve come a long way using the Gamebryo engine for longer than most of their players have been alive. But as far as gameplay and content, they’ve been fairly stationary.
What’s actually gone up are players’ expectations.
I think there are a lot of people that were determined not to like Starfield to begin with. It seems like a lot of people just speedrun it looking for faults to talk about and never stopping to appreciate the game world or game play. And Starfield is such a huge game there are a lot of angles to attack it from. Not released on PS5, too much like previous Bethesda games, no seamless space flight. Those things are true to some extent, but I think Starfield is a massive achievement and I look forward to future content and mods. Right now I’m 100 hours in and not even through one faction storyline. I’m savoring it.
I think there are a lot of people that were determined not to like Starfield to begin with.
So you are honestly telling me that there are swathes of people that have such a hate boner from the beginning, that they would buy Starfield and give it a bad rating on Steam?
Some certainly, complaining about games is itself a game for some. Or maybe they got the game for free with a video card or something. I find I tend to appreciate things less when I haven’t paid for them.
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I knew exactly what Starfield was going to be like months before it came out. Because I bet it was “Fallout with a space theme.” And I was right. Except they cut out VATS, which was the only thing holding FO3-4 shooting together. The only highlight is the shipbuilder.
I think there are a lot of people that were determined not to like Starfield to begin with.
I am determined to not like games that are boring and bad.
If you seriously believe that. Then I know what a fact this game is mid as fuck.
Alright hear me out: If an unknown team who’s not sitting on Microsoft’s giant PR budget have had developed this game, no one would give a flying f*ck about it.
There are dozens of ambitious, great indie games at Starfield’s current caliber out there on Steam and Itch.io already, and they only can barely find an audience. PR changes everything.
I’m a space game junkie and if there are other games like Starfield out there I’d like to know about them. Closest one I can think of is Spacebourne 2, which is very ambitious and has more freedom in some ways, but is nowhere near as huge and detailed.
I’m also a space game junkie and I feel Starfield feels… off in that regard.
The aesthetics are spot on, the vistas gorgeous and the ships have a practicality to the designs I enjoy. The little details down to the food being styled after modern astronaut food is clever and the diversity of planets keeps things interesting.
But it doesn’t really feel like a space game. It feels like a fantasy game with a sci-fi filter over it. I understand there can be a lot of overlap between the genres and I also struggle to articulate exactly what doesn’t hit the mark for sci-fi vs fantasy, but there’s something missing.
I think Starfield has a lot more human character than, say, Elite: Dangerous, but Elite hit the sci-fi feel better and, despite it being much older, creates more of that awe-inspiring space exploration feeling.
The biggest pain point there is the real lack of meaningful space interaction. Your ship, while being entirely personalizable, is largely useless. My play thrus saw a fight every 7-10 jumps, at best. Theres a lot of emulation of E:D and SC in power management but because of the flight dynamics, that entire sidebar is largely binary. Either you engage and win or you jump out. The flight dynamics are rough enough that theres no room in the conversation for being a skilled pilot. Then the interior loses a significant amount of meaning in auto-gen’d doors. you shouldnt be forced to put blank squares in just to get a layout that is traversable.
the veneer of a space game is there but it really lacks the extra thought into how a cornerstone mechanic should work and that causes the largest part of the downfall in my eyes.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. The ship is often a character, and an important one at that, in sci-fi. I think of EVE Online, Star Trek, Elite: Dangerous, etc.
The ship didn’t feel like a very big deal in Starfield. I really enjoy personalizing mine, but it doesn’t feel like it has a big impact on the gameplay.
It was always going to be Skyrim in space, and I think some people are fine/great with that.
No Man’s Skyrim.
Nice!
I am, 60+hrs in and I’m thoroughly enjoying it
Yeah, I don’t think that’s inherently an issue, but there’s some dichotomy in the marketing about that. Maybe that’s a projection, though, I’ll admit it.
I think Starfield aesthetic is somewhere between the desolation of Elite Dangerous and the cartoonish abundance of No Man’s Sky. Elite Dangerous is probably a lot more realistic but Starfield has more to do and interesting places and storylines. I really wish we had the flight and travel model from Elite. I am impressed at the celestial mechanics of Starfield though.
More so the flight model imo. Not being able to use lateral thrusters without switching modes is really bad and just confusing for me. I don’t even know why they did that, even on consoles / gamepads you should have the spare second thumbstick for that.
Better space travel would be nice but honestly it’s something I didn’t really expect from the game anyway so it isn’t as big of a deal.
Yeah, that all sounds fairly right to me!
What do you find impressive about the celestial mechanics in Starfield? That’s not something I picked up on in my play, and I’d enjoy learning a new lens to appreciate it through.
For games most similar to this? Outer Worlds. For games about space exploration, has actual good space flight: Outer Wilds (yeah they have similar names). For games about space exploration, resource gathering and space flight: No Man’s Sky. For games about planet exploration, resource gathering, and building: Astroneer.
Also Elite Dangerous for space flight and combat. But I haven’t played it.
Star Citizen, even with all its flaws, is a better space sim than Elite
How so? I’ve looked at it a few times, but it seems really expensive and unfinished at this point. I like Elite: Dangerous, but I think I’ve mostly exhausted its “amusement park” of activities and I’d be curious to try something new.
Space flight controls are more fluid, and you can walk around your ship, get out and board other ships/walk around planets. Just generally more immersive than ED.
Also, you can buy almost every ship in game. CIG sells ships instead of DLC, and they persist between wipes. You can just buy a starter ship for $35 and upgrade with in game money after you make some cash. There are a few ships that are unavailable to buy in game, CIG usually holds ships back for a while after they release them to buy with real money.
@TheAlbatross I’m not sure what more this game could possibly offer. You have a very specific idea of what a space game should be like - you should build it.
Naw, that kinda work ain’t for me. I’m here to be entertained, not make entertainment. My skillset is very different from that required to make a game, but that doesn’t inherently disqualify my opinions on how much I enjoy one piece of entertainment or not. Plus, it’s all subjective.
I like Starfield well enough, I’m still playing it, but it doesn’t quite scratch the itch other sci-fi games do.
For me this is one of those games where I’ll probably pick it up a year or two from now when it has all the addons and it’s like $20 and I imagine I’ll probably have an okay time with it then.
If a no-name created Starfield, it would be panned and forgotten in a day. The AI is beyond trash, it trivializes combat. Story is beyond lame. Writing is boring and the facial animations are below-par. Combat is bare-bones, both on ground and in space. Exploration is copy-pasted. The loading screens are pathetically bad.
For a game about having your own space ship and exploring the galaxy, you really don’t get to do much of that. It’s just a bunch of set pieces with a skybox that says you’re either on a planet or in space. Tons of indie games have done space better and Starfield should be compared to that regardless of who made it.
i disagree, if a no name created starfield itd be heralded as the best hidden gem in years maybe decades
Dang it actually seems pretty good. Haven’t had the chance to play it so I haven’t bought it yet
I’ve put about 80hrs into it so far and I really enjoy it.
Same. I’m loving this shit. It has problems like every game, but they seem pretty insignificant to me with how much I’m enjoying myself.
I think BG3 coming out so close to Starfield really harmed the perception of the story, characters and writing. They’re really lackluster in comparison.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still playing Starfield, but I don’t find it terribly compelling. Oddly enough, I think I enjoy the ship building the most but now that I’ve almost run out of ship parts to unlock, I’m not very motivated to open it again. The gameplay itself is sorta bland and the story is fulla holes and oddities. The quests don’t seem to have a lot of choices and the dialogue often feels like my decisions are irrelevant.
The game is also still pretty buggy. Critical NPCs missing and needing console codes to appear and all that. That part is frustrating, but I understand modern game development relies on users to be defacto QA because of time and budget constraints (stingy publishers).
I might try getting more into the outpost building, but I’m not sure I see a real point to it. And the system for it is quite clunky and frustrating to use. Maybe DLC will help out, but I honestly woulda skipped this one were it not for the Gamepass drop.
Edit: Below is a rant about a nit picking bug bear of mine. It doesn’t really color my perception of the game as a whole, but is sorta part of the confusion about the writing.
It’s totally unbelievable that 3 entirely new religions cropped up in 300 years. I’ll give the caveat that I completely understand why a game developer would not want to include existing religions in their game, but you’re telling me that in 4-5 lifetimes, ALL EXTANT RELIGIONS HAVE BEEN FORGOTTEN AND TOTALLY REPLACED WITH NEW ONES?
That’s utterly ridiculous. The major religions on Earth have persisted literally thousands of years and you’re telling me that they would be abandoned during humanity’s greatest cataclysm in history? That’s bupkis. Tradition and ritual are key parts of culture and hard forgotten. Even without name, the ritual of nigh forgotten religions still remain in cultures on Earth to this day. From little things like the superstition of knocking on wood to cornerstones of speech such as “goodbye”, the impact of religion on culture is undeniable. Beyond that is the decision to make the guy who is apparently the last Jew in the universe (Abe Levitz) a mild stereotype of the nervous Jew. It’s not so terribly egregious that I’m calling it foul, but it’s just a bizarre and unnecessary decision.
One of the religions is just atheism with a pr team, I count that one as not new.
man i dunno. I really like this game. I probably play 2-4 hrs a week, and each visit feels super fresh. For a company known for it’s bugs, Starfield is amazingly bug free (for me). I think. I had one crash on console? And that is after a bunch of quick resumes.
I am digging exploration, a BUNCH. the biomes have great attention to detail, and I really like NASA punk.
There is a lot going on, and instead of focusing on what is not there, which is natural, and fair, I find myself enjoying what is there. I do wish that ship and outpost habs had some kind of effect vs cosmetic (it seems like hacking is in the game w/all these computer cores…but where???), but my wishlist is WAY LESS than Skyrim. It would be nice if there was some way to have “location NG”, where after the first visit, the next visit in a different planet / system triggers the next variant, etc.
I’ve got well above the recommended specs but the game runs too badly for me to play, sadly. Every voice file is delayed by a few seconds (which is an eternity in lip-sync time) and the game stutters & freezes constantly, in both interior & exterior cells. I haven’t played since the latest update to see if anything improved, but I’ve easily got over 1000 hours in everything from Oblivion to Fallout 4 and had every intention of sinking the same kind of time into Starfield.
Are you running on HDD? That can cause voice file delay.
I am on gtx1080 the game run fine for me except for the low frame rate.
There is a nexus mod claimed to solve this issue for HDD https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/2245 maybe this can help
I was having the same audio delay issues with speech, take-off/landing sounds, etc when I was playing the game installed on an HDD storage array. I moved the install to the SSD system drive and that’s all gone away. Crashes have gone down too, I was crashing 2-3 times in an evening of playing but for the past several days or more I might see one crash in a 4+ hour session. Still more crashing than it should but it’s not absolutely terrible
It’s not perfect, but that helped a lot. The audio’s still a bit dodgy, but the freezing has stopped and I can actually play now. Thank you very much.
the game run fine for me except for the low frame rate.
I can’t tell if this is a joke
I don’t know if it’s as much a case of underdelivering as it is overpromising
I think the only thing they really overpromised on was how cool and interesting the story was, and how it concerns the “greatest questions of mankind.”
Everything else they’ve stated about the game, including its technical stability, has been pretty true to all the hype they were building and showing off prior to release.
Somehow it’s just missing that je ne sais quoi their other games have. I can’t explain it. It’s exactly the same as everything else they’ve done, and yet it’s equally not.
People are acting like this game is terrible but forget they said the exact same shit about Skyrim, NMS, FO4, and Cyberpunk 2077. After a few updates and some mods no one’s going to be shitting on this game 2-3 years from now.
All of those games are considered great today but you couldn’t visit social media without seeing people complain about any and everything after they launched. I have a couple hundred hours in and I love this game. I haven’t even finished the main story on my first play through.
I bought FO76 at launch and played it for 70-80 hours before dropping it for good. Never could get back into it but I digress. I have 0 interest for Starfield.
This is all to say, the reviews seem pretty validating and it tracks with my personal experience.
I also wouldn’t hold out any hope for great DLC. We’re decades away from Point Lookout at this point. You might get a Far Harbor, but I think it’s probably gonna be Vault 88.
