Bethesda responding to negative Starfield reviews on Steam

Bethesda’s customer support team has been responding to negative Starfield reviews on Steam.

Starfield had a strong start, becoming the “biggest Bethesda game launch” of all time. Those numbers rose over the first few days of release, with Starfield’s concurrent player count previously beating Skyrim’s concurrent player record on Steam.

But despite these initial player numbers, Starfield currently sits with a ‘Mixed’ review status on Steam. At the time of writing, 69 percent of the game’s 80,365 reviews on the platform are positive. The rest are, obviously, less generous.

Perhaps in a bid to turn these negative Starfield takes into a positive for the game, members of Bethesda’s customer support team have started responding to certain reviewers on Steam.

As spotted by social media account JuiceHead, the team has taken the slightly unusual step of explaining to the people leaving these negative reviews that the game is good, actually. It has then asked them to consider the amount of effort that went on behind the scenes to make a game of such scale.

In response to one user that called Starfield’s story “generic” and the gameplay “boring”, one member of Bethesda’s customer support staff replied with a post highlighting everything players can experience in the game.

“You can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot!” it wrote. “Starfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough.”

It then suggested the reviewer gives the game another chance, but this time tries different characters with different backgrounds.

“You will feel like you are playing a totally different game,” it said. “Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter.”

Meanwhile, when another user lamented the amount of loading screens, the support team replied imploring the reviewer to “consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under three seconds”.

In response to a reviewer that appears to have suggested they found Starfield’s planets empty, the Bethesda team said this was “by design” and “not boring”.

“The intention of Starfield’s exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have the resources you need or hidden outposts to look through,” it wrote.

In Eurogamer’s Starfield review, our Chris gave the game three stars.

“Starfield pairs near-impossible breadth with a classic Bethesda aptitude for systemic physics, magnetic sidequests, and weird vignettes, ” he wrote.

“But in sacrificing direct exploration for the sake of sheer scale, there’s nothing to bind it together.”