Bethesda Is Responding to Negative Reviews of Starfield on Steam

“When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored."
Yeah I think that might be because they were on the moon and not pressing WASD to walk around a fake moon
- If you landed in an in-game fake moon it would be a wonderfully interesting plot thread.
  
  I think I saw a documentary about that recently
- It also bugs me that Bethesda keeps saying that the game is about exploration and finding new planets, but so far every planet I've visited has some kind of building upon it. Its clear that people have been on this planet before, so why the hell should I explore this planet? At least give me some incentive or a better reward for finding a true empty planet.
  
  You're not wrong, but OTOH, it's pretty funny to see a planet having a building on it equated to the planet being explored, considering Earth was still being explored thousands of years after the first buildings.
- Or because they didn’t show up at the moon after a loading screen

Customer: I didn't like the taste of this cake.
Management response: Dear customer, thank you for taking the time to try our cake. This is a cake, which is sweet and tasty by definition. We made the cake so customers can enjoy the cake and taste the typical cake ingredients which taste sweet and tasty. The cake experience as we created should appeal to everyone because cake is tasty.
Customer: Wtf, it tastes like wet socks!
Management: Cake
- Customer: Hey there, customer outreach person; how does it feel to repeat yourself over and over again?
  Management response: As a large-language model, I am unable to experience feelings the way humans do. Moreover…
- You're enjoying the cake wrong, it's supposed to taste like shit
  
  Our survey of shit-enjoying-customers proves that more than 99% of them like our cake.
  
  Just wait until some suckers make you a better cake for free.
  
  I blame other cake makers for making good cakes and setting unrealistic expectations for cake making.
- The cake is a lie
  
  This was a triumph.
- It's the most* realist immersive cake you'll ever find.
  16x the detail.
  
  Now with optional toppings. Plate included in the deluxe cake edition available for limited time only!

I didn’t find any of the responses to be insightful, more a marketing reply to convince people who are off put by the negativity. This is coming from someone who’s played the game nearly 80 hours. Still disappointed by it, but I have a hoarding sim problem
- Bethesda games make hoarding painful though.
  
  Are you kidding? Slowly unloading your ship 200 pounds at a time and waiting for it to hopefully actually transfer to the pods is so fun. Not to mention they have absolutely no storage so you need a wall of them that you must then manually search to find anything. The best is when your cargo ship doesn't fit on the landing pad so you have to carry it all yourself. Or you could build a convoluted network of shipping docks and either manually fuel them or create another convoluted network of shipping docks just to ship helium 3 to all the other shipping docks. Fuck I love loading screens.
  Rage aside, the game itself was pretty fun for a run or two, but after that the shallowness really showed. Outposts suck ass though. I made shitty ones and figured I'd hit ng+ before actually caring about them, but I couldn't make myself care. Benches go outside, I don't give a shit.
  God I'm just remembering how bad it is now. If the terrain isn't perfectly level go fuck yourself, you can't expand your hab. I build a fucking boardwalk with multiple levels and shopfronts in FO4, I had nearly full map coverage for artillery, I could attract settlers to live there and defend it. Now I just drop an extractor and power and fuck off.
  
  I prefer the use oxygen to run mechanic over the now you can only walk mechanic. But yeah, it could be better. Let me hold all the guns Bethesda, encumbrance isn’t fun. I should just use the console and add that mod that reenables achievements

I wish these idiots would quit trying to tell the people playing the game that they are wrong for not liking it. Like, no man, listen to them, this is feedback. You can't take all of it without a pinch of salt but if you see a common theme, then you should address it.

Bethesda, simply put, doesn't know how to react to criticism. Instead of taking this feedback and improving their product they double-down and insist that you should like it because they said so. If it's boring it's boring man. They are simply as disconnected as possible. Remember the whole canvas bag fiasco? Then they said "ah, canvas costs too much, we aren't planning on doing anything with the nylon one"... deal with it in other words. Then they were puzzled why people disliked them to all hell.
- I can’t believe how ignorant you are of the worldwide canvas shortage of 2018. Canvas became a global strategic resource. Lack of canvas destabilized numerous nation states.
  The idea of frivolously wasting that precious canvas on a video game trinket is frankly offensive.
  -Bethesda, probably.
  
  They wasted all the canvas on influencer merchandise some months prior.
- they took the criticism of fallout 76 and continued working on it, still getting updates to this day when most other places would have left it to rot
  
  I'm not 100% sure but I think FO76 is maintained by BGS Austin. They seem to be far more interested in taking feedback and making the game better than the main Bethesda studio. FO76 may be fundamentally flawed but post-launch it's definitely getting more care than Skyrim, FO4 and Starfield combined.
  
  They also took class action lawsuits for that game as well, so that might be affecting that push to fix the game. But even if they fix it, doesn't negate the fact they said they don't plan on fixing canvas issue, or any problem they caused. Only when there was an outrage they reacted. Remember the horse armor for Skyrim or when they tried to sell mods that were included in previous game. I do.

Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design — but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored." The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed.
May as well boot up SpaceEngine then.
- It really evoked a feeling of smallness in me. Namely how small and devoid of content the universe feels.
  This is made worse because every inhabited planet I go to has some elaborate situation just waiting for me to solve it. For example: I land on the landing pad, walk 30 meters through a gate and am greeted by a hostage situation in a bank where the hostage negotiator is going to let me, some random, go do his job instead of him, trusting me with the lives of everyone involved without even blinking.
- Starfield, the epitome of scientifically correcty simulations. Why would I expcet my Starship Travel Simulator 2000 to be a fun-focused game after all, durr.
  
  scientifically correct
  Why doesn’t nasa just open up the starmap and simply fast travel to the moon or mars?

I have played most of the fully 3D Bethesda RPG games and I am accustomed to their game design, bugs, and janks.
But the only thing I hate about Starfield is just the way the game always talks about how amazing exploration of the unknown is (heck, your main character is even a part of the explorer group name Constellation) while trying everything it can to stop player to do just that (overly rely on teleportation, cannot travel seamlessly between planets, etc...)
It feels like you are playing an institute scientist in an fallout game, always stay in your high tech base and only travel using teleportation to the outside world
This is a major turn off for me and there is no way to fix it
- 100%. The best part of Bethesda open world games is exploring the open space between towns, quests, objectives, etc. Fast travel is an option, but rarely necessary. If you rely on it you will miss lots of cool stuff.
  Not so in Starfield, the space between objectives is literally empty space.
  
  That's a fair opinion to have, but my preference is actually exploring the towns. I love that Starfield removed many of the middle of nowhere winding dungeons that I got so bored of. (Dwemer/Nord ruins in Skyrim and office buildings/other skyscrapers in fallout 4.)
  
  I mean, that's why it's called "space", right? That's literally what it is.
- Yeah it's quite an accomplishment to make the vastness of space feel claustrophobic and small.
  Some of the response to the reviews is bizarre - one seems to try to claim that the planets are not boring because they're realistic and the real world is boring, and that the player is probably just overwhelmed by the awesomeness of it all.
  It almost feels like the game Devs have convinced themselves that they've been working on the greatest game ever made and when told "no you haven't" they're responding by saying "you just don't get our vision".
  It's an ok game. I'm actually less bothered by the loading screens and more by the old fashioned story telling. This game would have been amazing if released closer after Skyrim. But it's been 12 years and we've had Witcher 3, Cyberpunk and Baldurs Gate 3 that have changed expectations. All of them are better at evoking a sense of emotional engagement with the game, and actions having meaningful consequences in the plot. Subplots like the bloody baron in Witcher 3, or Judy in cyberpunk have stuck with me in a way characters and events in Skyrim and now Starfield just never have.
  Problem is I suspect Bethesda will focus on all the loading screen / sense of scale complaints and not register the more important (imo) issues with the stories, characters and gameplay. Less but better is the real lesson I think.
- Funny thing is, they don't care. As long as they have fans who will complain but still buy their product at full price... they simply don't care. This is evident with every product of theirs. Fallout76 had bugs originating from FO4 that were patched by community but were reintroduced in FO76.
- I'm actually fine with personally, but what I dislike is that Starfield is too grindy and slow.

If a significant amount of people "misunderstood" you, it's not their fault, but yours for not clearly communicating or not tailoring your communication for the target audience.
Same here: if people play the game "wrong", you didn't design it properly and/or marketed it completely wrong.
Sure, there will always be "dumb" (or too clever) individuals who you simply can't properly address and satisfy, but if the group is large enough to be loud, you failed your job.
- If a significant amount of people "misunderstood" you, it's not their fault, but yours for not clearly communicating or not tailoring your communication for the target audience.
  I find this ironic, because even the tutorials in the game only communicate half of the information you need. A lot of them just outright expect you to have played one of their games before. I could imagine if this was someone's first Bethesda RPG, they'd be confused as hell. Plus there are a few things unique to Starfield that are confusing even if you've played every one of their games before.

Good job, guys, I'm sure that'll fix it.
Fuck. I mean I even liked Starfield but this level of mishandling the public perception is absolutely unreal.
- Honestly, this behavior of responding to player feedback and arguing about how "it's just because you didn't play the game right!" is kinda unhinged.
  It also, to me, really takes Bethesda's mask off and reveals what their culture must be as a company. Based on these responses, they seem so convinced that they shit gold that they've stopped entertaining feedback or trying to innovate much in their games much at all. Kinda confirms some of the criticism I've seen of them since Fallout 4 and 76 came out.
  
  It seems to me like someone in the PR department decided they needed to "try something new," and then didn't actually run the idea by anyone who could say this is a stupid plan. Someone on the community management team got a promotion and thought it was time to make a bold move, and they were absolutely wrong.
  
  Part of me believes this was triggered by them only getting one nomination in The Game Awards.

No Man's Sky has had no loading screens during gameplay, and space to planet transitions on full planets, since what... 2016?
The Creation Engine is just too damn old.
Edit @Dark Arc: You're right. Creation Engine is just too damn shitty, I guess. I called it "old" because the gameplay feels so antiquated.
- "Engines" are not static things. What we call "Unreal Engine" goes back to the 90s.
  These comments always bug me as a programmer because it's like someone calling a 2023 Camero old because it doesn't have the acceleration of a 2023 Mustang... The "age" almost certainly isn't the problem, it's where the effort has or hasn't been put in to the engine and more importantly the game itself (e.g., carrying on the metaphor, the Camero might be slower getting up to speed because all the R&D for the last 3 years was on a smooth ride).
  
  Yeah to be honest what strikes me the most about companies like Bethesda is just how little they've improved over the decades. There's nothing stopping them from making major improvements like removing loading screens, adding vehicles finally (I wonder if the ships are really a hat like the train in fallout 3), fixing the buggy ass collisions and physics, or any number of dumb shits they just keep leaving in game after game. It really speaks to the institutional inertia and spaghetti mess their code must be.
  
  Creation Engine is static. Others, you are right, change.
  
  That's true, but the comments are valid when talking about Bethesda games
- No man sky also barely has a story and has zero voice acting. It's apples and oranges, just because they're both fruit doesn't mean they can be compared
  
  Except you just compared them in saying they are both fruit. In fact, saying they are both fruit is finding a commonality between them when comparing. There are many metrics on which Apples and Oranges can be compared. They are different colors, have a different internal structures, and different juice content. These are negatively correlated comparisons. More positive correlations would be that they are both roughly spherical, provide vitamin C, and grow on trees.
  I have always hated that expression. You can compare anything since comparison is just the act of identifying similarities and differences (positive and negative correlations). One can make meaningful comparisons between and apple and a suspension bridge if the situation calls for it.
- They are completely different games though. Watchdogs 2 had less loading screens than Hitman 3, but that doesn't really mean much to say.
  
  They are compared because they both are advertised as filling the same niche, of space exploration with emphasis on exploration.

Landing on the boring planets wasn't my problem with the boring game.
The ground combat was terrible. The space flight was terrible. The space combat was terrible. And it was wedged into every activity for no reason other than lazy design to pad things.
And then there was the UI...
You can't "feel small" when the game makes you a fiddly murder hobo in the tutorial.

I love that steam reviews can make companies take notice and is harder to shove away compared to other types of reviews with how it's always there on the store page.
- Hot take: Alan Wake 2 would have a lot of explaining to do if EPIC had a review system. My disappointment with that game was immeasurable and my weekend was ruined.
  
  Hmm, I haven't played it. I avoid everything epic store stuff (even though I would have gotten it for free, since I'm childhood friends with one of the devs). So I'm curious, what's the problem? I've heard like three people say that it's their game of the year already, so I'm curious what's the issue for you?
  
  I'd love to hear why, personally. Wasn't a huge fan of Alan Wake 1, so the huge outcry for the sequel has been a bit odd for me, and would like to hear the other side of the coin.
- It was a heart warming situation when I saw Blizzard's game get mixed reviews. They didn't release games anywhere else until now and getting a reality check was a much needed thing for them.

There may in fact be a few games where empty spaces and a sense of vastness actually contribute to the atmosphere and make for an enjoyable game. But NOT in a game that’s divided by fucking loading screens with not a single “vista” to look out at.
- No Man's Sky. Too large for human comprehension. And sometimes it's way too empty. Just like real space. Especially in VR.

Everyone seems to be missing the point so I'll let Todd Howard remind you all, "We're going to be doing a lot of add-on content for Starfield."
$5 horse armor folks. That's Bethesda. Stop paying them to make garbage, or at least stop complaining about it.

Cool, so I'll wait to pick this game up until it's $10 on a steam sale in 5 years, and play the community's modded version.
- I'm not sure the game is popular enough to get quite the modding support of the community like previous Bethesda games.
  
  I disagree purely on the point that what Starfield is, more than anything else, an amazing platform to make a mod on. Not a great game per se, but the setting and overall theme leave a lot of room for Bethesda to cash in on the work of others as is tradition.

Looks like Bethesda discovered ChatGPT.
Some of those replies are as bland, hunky-dory and sanitized as can be, with a dash of "you're playing it wrong".
- Corporate speak incentivizes bland language. Standing up for as little as possible brings as few enemies as possible, after all. Unfortunately, an empty, bland proposal can only result in empty, bland art.

Luckily only tried it once on gamepass. For sure has some interesting parts to it (I did like the ship designer) but it hit me on the second location I explored - this is pretty much a Skyrim reskin. The are randomised dungeons everywhere for no goddamn reason whatsoever, my goddamn spaceship can only fit like 5 suits.... alright. Been there, done that, I'm out.
Looking for a re-release in 5 yrs with all the add-ons and mods, maybe I will get it then.
- Pirated it but it wasnt worth the disk space. Tried it for a couple hours but it was so boring. I have done a quest for a bank where I was supposed to collect money. It went like this: Fast travel to the ship. Fast travel to the planet the person is on Talk with them. Fast travel back to ship Fast travel to bank planet Fast travel to bank. Talk to bank guy to get money. Next bank quest. Rinse and repeat
  
  Badabing badaboom now that's a $90 value
- I just wonder how someone can encounter randomly generated content when all these handcrafted locations exists where all the story and quests happen.
  I played like 30 hours before I even came across random generated content.
  And those things definitely felt like end-game stuff.
- Why get it then and support this bs? We got this trash because people kept buying Skyrim and circlejerking it

oh good, this reminds me I haven't bothered to leave a negative review yet. let me correct that.

Starfield frustrates me, because in many ways its a major step in the right direction. It has much better roleplaying mechanics than Skyrim or Fallout 4, but at the same time the lore is half-baked and the skill system is fairly weak. It has great potential, but a lot of it feels toned down and less "real" because of it. Space exploration has a lot of potential as well, but setting every objective so far apart on planets ruins exploration by filling it with monotonous procgen.
That's why I'm fairly confident that once properly patched, and mods/DLCs are in full swing, it will probably be remembered very fondly despite the release state. It'll pull a Cyberpunk.
- I think everything you said here is spot on except the idea Starfield will improve pike Cyberpunk at this point because Bethesda's attitude really doesn't indicate that they seem to admit anything needs fixing.
  With that said I doubt many people expected Cyberpunk to do as well later on so you are probably right and I hope you are for the game and genre. I really like the aesthetic of Starfield and want it to succeed.
  I'm just so tired of getting such half baked stuff at release.
  One annoying thing about the "make your own stories" concept is that content us going to be recycled. My followers don't say anything new or have new things to do etc because it's all baked in but also on this supposedly open RPG landscape.
  
  I would agree with you if Bethesda games haven't always been saved by modders, rather than Beth themselves. If we had to depend on Beth to fix their own game, Skyrim would've been abandoned long, long, long ago, same with Fallout 4.
- The problem is that starfield is modern warfare III of Bethesda but people trying to see it as next skyrim, Bethesda ai generated almost all this game and looped it in roguelite shape, the only things evolved is mechanics as you've said yourself, and again as you've said yourself, this game will be saved by modders
  
  Procedural generation is not AI, don't spew nonsense.
  
  Oh I'm anti-Bethesda and Bethesda practices, I'm just sure it will eventually be a great game once the community steps in and fixes it. It isn't an excuse for Bethesda, but rather admiration for the modding community, and an example of why FOSS and a rejection of the profit motive is so good.
- When players are tired of paying to be game testers then things will change. Until then, go mine some ore or whatever, I haven't played it.
  -Bethesda, maybe

I played 50 hours of Starfield. I had fun.
But two things are true. It's a step back from no man's sky and it's not worth playing more than 50 dollars for.
- A step back in what sense? Technically? Yeah probably. Starfield is the first Bethesda game to have working ladders(one slight sort of exception in Fallout 4) lol. But in terms of story, and world building, I think it's fair to say Starfield is much ahead in that.
  
  That'd be more meaningful if Bethesda had ever managed to create a story with any worth. Sometimes the bones of a decent story are there, but the execution is usually amateur hour.

Starfield was super fun until it wasn't. I have no desire to ever go back to it. Skyrim on the other hand....
- For me it was super boring until I left Constellation, fun for 10 or so hours after that, super boring for a few more, and now I haven't played it in over 2 months.
  
  I actually just peaced out of constellation right away because I felt like the reason I was there was bullshit. I had 30 hours of fun doing side quests, came back to constellation because I heard there were powers I was missing. Acquiring them was tedious and they weren’t even that useful. I grinded out the main story and quit once I got the credit roll. Zero desire to go through it again
- Skyrim on the other hand....
  Do you think to an extent it's just familiarity? It is relaxing for you to go back to something you're so familiar with, you aren't surprised by it.
  
  You got downvoted, but yes, and mods. Starfield will be looked at a lot more favorably when everyone is playing a modded version of the game.

... I liked it
- its fun, I liked the main story although it does have its slow spots, the vanguard terrormorph quest was pretty cool, but after a while like all games it gets kind of tiring, this game still feels like it needs some work, hopefully it will get even more post release content than fallout 4, there is a lot of space they can add stuff

Hey surprise surprise a soulless corporation does soulless corporation things.
- This doesn't read soulless corporation to me. This reads Todd Howard's bruised ego. He's one of the directors of the whole studio after all, and could very well be behind this decision.

Amusing that the article gets the response of the first review wrong.
The negative review doesn't only mention that the empty planets are boring, but that the populated ones are the same locations over and over again.

I miss Games like Starbound. So much to see and do. Unbelievable good atmospheric Music under a Sky full of Stars while building you first Base. This was one, if not the, first game to give me a feeling of smallness in comparison to the Universe.
- I also loved starbound. My problem was the late game became very gamey, with the linear planet tier progression to get better materials. Once I got past the progression and beat the final boss there was nothing fun left to do, even with all the base building stuff they put in.
  
  There's nothing wrong with a game ending at the final boss tbh
  
  I really enjoyed these "Space-Dungeons" where you could Upgrade your Weapons at the End or get a Terraforming Device for an Emerald-Forrest Biome or something like that.

Me: I'm bored
Bethesda: No you're not.
Me: Oh

The failure is absolutely deserved

amid Starfield's ‘mixed’ user review rating of 69%.
Nice.

Slow news day, eh IGN?

I remember reading that quote before the game launched. Weird.

You can reply to reviews on Steam????
- Yeah? There's a comment section and developers comments get highlighted on the store page. As far as I know it's been like this for many years.
- Yeah that's how developers respond to negative reviews or problems that their players have.

A bigger open world just means less interesting things to do. This is how I've seen Starfield described.

Bethesda games are always boring trash. The real game won't even appear for another year or two at least (after the modders have finished fixing all the bugs, the horrible writing, the design flaws).
- Bethesda games are always boring trash.
  Compared to the average game? I don't agree. Compared to entirely exceptional games like Fallout: NV, yeah. But you don't have many options if you enjoy open world fps RPGs, and Bethesda games are sometimes the only passable option. I mean, I'd take Starfield over Elden Ring any day, because of personal preference, not because it's a better game- but my own preference means I also couldn't say it's a worse game.
  
  But you don’t have many options if you enjoy open world fps RPGs, and Bethesda games are sometimes the only passable option.
  This is only true if it's literally true that it has to be "first person". There are, in my opinion, way too many 3rd person semi-RPGs with a vast, open world that are very similar to Bethesda games. It has gotten to the point with me where there are only so many games like this I'll even play, because they're huge time drains and they come across as basically the same game with a different skin or setting.

Hah, that first quoted review is like playing Elite Dangerous. Really love that game. However, Starfield doesn’t have VR, so I’m not interested in going down that path. VR in Elite (except for ground ops) is amazing, and a spaceflight/sim absolutely should have a VR option IMO.

I didn't know Johnathan Blow worked for Bethesda.