Starfield - Bethesda responding to negative Reviews

[HiddenX]

Eurogamer reports how Bethesda's customer support is responding to negative Starfield reviews:

Bethesda responding to negative Starfield reviews on Steam

A Sa-turn of events.

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."

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Thanks Couchpotato!



More information.

 

[Couchpotato]

Simply amazing how one post on X or the Steam forums goes viral so fast.

Also amazing how fast one post can ruin your or your jobs reputation.

 

[Zloth]

When I saw the headline, I thought maybe support was going into reviews that complained about the game not running (I presume there are some) and trying to help the reviewer through the issue.

 

[txa1265]

I think the word they're looking for is "gaslighting"

 

[JDR13]

I don't get the negative reviews. It's a good game. Not great, but good.

I took a quick look at some of the reviews on Steam, and a lot of the negative ones seem to be about the performance on their system rather than the game itself.

 

[Maylander]

I find it fascinating to watch how much the hype around a game affects the reviews and general perception. Based on the last few months, you'd think BG3 was an almost perfect game and Starfield a dumpster fire, which is obviously not the case. I wouldn't rate Starfield above BG3 or anything, but it's not like the gap is anywhere near as big as the overall internet vibe makes it seem.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

In the 20h I've played of Starfield my biggest issue was that while initially it impressed with the size of each random location you spawn into when you land, after you do enough jumping between systems and landing on different planets the world really started to feel really small, for some reason. I think it might be because of knowing that can't travel the world in one move and are relegated to individual secluded areas, that somehow don't have any real importance. It kind of gave me the feeling of just teleporting to isolated areas for no significant reason.

And I'm not sure that making the whole world explorable by ship would've fixed this, ala what Star Citizen seems to promise, and what No Man's Sky did. That would just introduce more tedium into the whole process, that would've probably been a nice feeling for the first or second time of doing it, and then you'd be back to just skip teleporting across the galaxy.

The only better option in my opinion would've been for the devs to limit themselves to 3-4 planets maybe, and put in a lot of work into those. But I'm not sure how you populate even one planet with enough hand-crafted content, for the more realistic size that Starfield's planets have. In which case they'd probably have to again limit what you could explore on that planet. Which kind of really narrows the scope of a space exploration game.

So they might've gone through this whole thought process and chosen what they've chosen, and having now gone through something similar, I think they didn't really have much of a choice in how they approached this, given the theme of the game. They would've needed to make a different kind of game to check off my particular issue.

 

[Irian]

Personally, I liked starfield and put a few hundered hours into it, but I can understand the criticism very well. The game is a nice sandbox with a lot of options, but certainly feels... flat. The characters, the missions, the story, the details, nothing goes really deep. The fact that no planet is really "empty", but people and buildings are basically everywhere - but they all look pretty much the same - does not help. While I would consider it marginally more stable than Skyrim at release, it still has far too many game breaking bugs.

So, all in all, if you are lucky and into this thing, you will enjoy it, but I do totally understand everyone who feels deeply disappointed. And the reaction of Bethesda is... not great. They - as usual - take their time with patches and have strange priorities. And they really do not communicate well with fans.

 

[danutz_plusplus]

Best thing about Starfield, for the little time I put into it, is the very much improved shooting mechanics. They were absolutely pretty solid for the type of game this is, and for how combat usually feels in Bethesda games.

 

[Ceonnyn]

In another game (Empyrion something) they call these locations POIs (points of interest). I would say they need to add like 30-40 new types of POIs and then things should at least be a bit more different.

 

[Redglyph]

Bethesda's answers seem to elude the criticisms and look like typical marketing logos.

One guy says the tasks are repetitive and boring, and their answer is that you can replay the game with a different character and have a completely different experience. It's obviously not what the user meant. Another user complains about the loading screens, and Bethesda's reply says how much data is spared because of procedural generation. Again, it's not helping; the user obviously compares that to other games who, without PG, manage to load the data asynchronously and avoid loading screens.

 

[Morrandir]

I find it fascinating to watch how much the hype around a game affects the reviews and general perception. Based on the last few months, you'd think BG3 was an almost perfect game and Starfield a dumpster fire, which is obviously not the case. I wouldn't rate Starfield above BG3 or anything, but it's not like the gap is anywhere near as big as the overall internet vibe makes it seem.

The problem is that (Steam) reviews or ratings are givendepending on expectations (hype) and thus aren't really comparable between games.

 

[Maximous]

Starfield dialog feels like a 1990's game without any branching, the first option moves the story linearly, the other options feel like "team-C" wrote script for a humor element; the story is very flat feeling almost pushed. There are no new interesting elements in Starfield to make me replay it, a very underwhelming game.

 

[SSIGuy]

Well, I've given up on the game after playing about 15 hours. I found the combat to be somewhere between 'meh' and boring (it felt worse to me than FO), the UX is awful, but the thing that killed it for me was the constant need to go places to do things. That shouldn't be a con in a game; it should be a cool part of the game, going to new places to explore new areas, discover new things, etc. But the constant fast-travel and loading screens just continued to break any sense of immersion I felt I was starting to develop in the game.

69% percent on Steam feels about right to me... it's not a bad game, but it is also not very good imo. There are simply better games out there waiting to be played and so I'm playing those instead. I might revisit it in a couple years, but for now it's on the shelf. Heck, I even thought about replaying Mass Effect 1 to 3 instead to scratch my scifi RPG itch.

Lastly, it probably didn't help that I tried playing this right after finishing BG3. Someone earlier in the thread made the point the BG3 and Starfield aren't that far apart in terms of how good they are, but for me, they are very far apart on many levels; story, voice acting, writing, combat, exploration and sense of discovery. I found BG3 to be far superior in all areas, and Starfield was a very shallow experience in comparison for me.

 

[bizorker]

I wouldn't rate Starfield above BG3 or anything, but it's not like the gap is anywhere near as big as the overall internet vibe makes it seem.

Respectfully disagree. In my gaming circles, the overwhelming opinion is that the gap is very significant. In other words, everyone is really, really loving BG3, and everything thinks Starfield is just an OK game. One product is meaningfully superior. Doesn't mean Starfield is a dumpster fire, per your point, it's just not great, and it's lack of greatness is exasperated by launching at the same time as BG3.

The problem is that (Steam) reviews or ratings are givendepending on expectations (hype) and thus aren't really comparable between games.

This is a factor I'm sure, but I haven't read any steam reviews on Starfield, and have only read about it here on this site and talked about it with friends, and the general vibe is definitely "OK but not anything special".

 

[JDR13]

Respectfully disagree. In my gaming circles, the overwhelming opinion is that the gap is very significant. In other words, everyone is really, really loving BG3, and everything thinks Starfield is just an OK game. One product is meaningfully superior. Doesn't mean Starfield is a dumpster fire, per your point, it's just not great, and it's lack of greatness is exasperated by launching at the same time as BG3.

That only tells me your gaming circles prefer that type of game. I don't know how people can compare the two directly when they're completely different types of RPGs. One is a first-person, single character sci-fi RPG while the other is isometric, party-based, turn-based high fantasy. It's literally apples and oranges.

 

[bizorker]

I'd say apples and orange in video game land would be more like comparing BG3 to Super Mario Brothers 5 or something. These are both RPG games from studios where we've all purchased and played pretty much every game they've ever made. My prediction: BG3 will win RPG of the year on this site and in every publication by a wide margin. And I'd bet most voters will have played both games.

 

[JDR13]

I'd say apples and orange in video game land would be more like comparing BG3 to Super Mario Brothers 5 or something. These are both RPG games from studios where we've all purchased and played pretty much every game they've ever made.

I think it's pretty obvious what I meant. I'm talking about within the genre. Let's not suddenly pretend that RPGs can't be vastly different or that fans of the genre don't have preferences to certain features and styles.

My prediction: BG3 will win RPG of the year on this site and in every publication by a wide margin. And I'd bet most voters will have played both games.

Cool, but that doesn't really have anything to do with what I said.

 

[rjshae]

There's no situation so bad that it can't be made worse through social media. I know from past experience that I've thoroughly enjoyed games that many others have panned, so it's best to take these things with a big grain of salt.

 

[Morrandir]

The question is if and how Bethesda will adapt their strategy as a reaction to the mediocre critics. Will they stick to their old formula or will they try another approach (with TES6)?