Despite its strong launch, Starfield continues to lose its appeal among players. It is now one of the worst-rated games in Bethesda’s portfolio on Steam.
In the past 30 days, Starfield has received more than 7,000 new reviews from users on Steam, 37% of which have been positive. This corresponds to a “Mostly Negative” rating, something hardly anyone expected when the game successfully launched in September.
In their negative reviews, players call Starfield “boring and uninspiring” and “overstuffed with meaningless content.” Criticism is also directed at its outdated engine and the lack of proper exploration inherent in Bethesda titles. And many of those recent reviews come from people who have spent dozens (and even hundreds) of hours in the game.
“This game mainly lacks the very thing that made Bethesda games great in the first place: interesting and rewarding exploration. A quest or surprising situation around every corner,” one user wrote, adding that “Starfield feels like someone tried to copy this game design but added a few steps just to make it more tedious.”
Overall, Starfield currently has a “Mixed” rating on Steam, with 66% of the 86k user reviews being positive. For comparison, it launched with an 86% rating in September, but the share of negative reviews has been steadily growing since then.
Bethesda has also been responding to some negative reviews for a while now. But its attempt at damage control was heavily criticized by the community due to the tone used in those messages and the studio’s reluctance to directly acknowledge any issues.
For example, here is how one Bethesda developer responded to a player calling the game boring: “Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design — but that’s not boring. When astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored.”
Despite all the criticism, Starfield has become the “biggest Bethesda game launch of all time.” Last week, the studio announced that the game had reached 13 million players. Its success on Game Pass is also evident, but it is still unclear how well it performed in terms of units sold.