Image: Bethesda Game Studios
Bethesda is getting defensive over bad reviews for Starfield on Steam.
Bethesda Game Studios has started responding to negative reviews left by players on Starfield’s Steam page. A solid 69% of the game’s user reviews are positive, giving it the label of ‘Mixed’ reception on Steam - but that apparently isn’t enough for Bethesda’s customer support team, as it’s now replying to negative reviews with puzzling rebuttals.
This seems to be a bid to turn Steam players back onto the game after 66% of players on the platform hopped off the game just a month after launch.
Starfield’s bad review drama
As spotted by Twitter/X user JuiceHead this week, Bethesda’s customer support team has been responding to negative user reviews on Steam throughout November, with the latest reply being posted just yesterday on November 28. These responses largely drill into aspects users didn’t like about Starfield, in an attempt to change their minds on the matter by very politely telling them they’re wrong.
For example, one review specifically calls out the game’s overabundance of loading screens got this response from Bethesda:
Hi there, Thank you for taking the time to provide your review and we are sorry to hear that you were disappointed with encountering many loading screens while playing. While there may be loading screens in between fast travelling, just consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under 3 seconds. We believe that shortcoming will not hinder our players from getting lost in the world we created.
Remember: before criticising the game’s loading screens, consider the work Bethesda put into the rest of the game. That’ll do the trick. Another review called out Starfield’s ‘generic’ story and ‘boring’ gameplay, calling the latter a, “repeating, soulless chore.” Bethesda helpfully replied, “You can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot!" The support team then suggested that the player simply try another character build so they are, “faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter."
While most of these replies are worded as helpful pieces of advice, like asking players to just go back and play the game a different way, a few of them are borderline hilarious. In response to a review deriding Starfield’s ‘boring’ planetary exploration, the support team said:
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.
Here, the support team is directly quoting game director Todd Howard, who talked about the moon being empty but fun to explore for real-life astronauts despite that. There are a few other reasons the actual, real-life moon is a fun place to explore for astronauts who spend years studying the cosmos surrounding Earth, but these reasons were not listed by Bethesda. Instead, it followed up with a suggestion to, “explore and find worlds that do have the resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.”
Big companies like Bethesda don’t typically respond to Steam user reviews directly, so this is a strange turn of events. The comments left by Bethesda’s support team have only led to more discussion on Starfield’s faults online, so this may have backfired on the company in the end.