Starfield one month later: did it live up to the hype and are people still playing it?

Starfield has had a lukewarm reception. (Picture: Bethesda)

Starfield has been out for over a month now, and sifting through reviews, ratings, and charts reveals a mixed reception for the game.

Ever since Bethesda announced Starfield in 2018, hype has swelled around the new sci-fi role-playing game, from the makers of Fallout and Skyrim. As their first new intellectual property in 25 years and the biggest first party release so far for Xbox Series X/S, it was primed to be one of the biggest releases of the year.

And yet a little over a month since its release, Starfield is Bethesda’s lowest rated game on Steam and player numbers are dropping fast, as fans and critics fail to agree on exactly how well the game has turned out.

Although nobody seems to hate the game, its Metacritic score is in the mid-80s and what once predicted to be a game of the year contender is now seeming more like a flash in the pan.

Those critical about Starfield often complain about frequent loading screens, overuse of fast travel, little actual space exploration, and disappointing storytelling and characters.

‘The company learnt nothing from previous games, they created a big empty world and relies on the modding community to fill it in, which worked well for a previous game that is still played today,’ said player Atlas on Steam.

‘It has some good concepts like shipbuilding and the graphics look good. But underneath the game is shallow and very repetitive.’

Another player named Risk added the following:

‘I definitely see how some people could enjoy this game but I can’t recommend it. I should be traveling in space more, gravity jumping more, landing and taking off more. Entire galaxies are bypassed via loading screens and much of the gameplay feels at least a decade old.’

The numbers tell a more alarming story, as Starfield is currently Bethesda’s lowest rated game on Steam, with only 70.73% of user reviews being positive, and its Xbox Metacritic score dropped to 83 following Edge’s 6/10 score.

Of course, the reason that review was so late is because Bethesda refused to send out early copies to certain British outlets, including Edge, Eurogamer, The Guardian, and ourselves.

This was an apparent attempt to ensure the Metacritic score was as high as possible at launch but it created an early controversy, and sense of bad feeling, that the game has never escaped from – especially after a number of high profile US sites gave the game unexpectedly low scores.

Player numbers are dropping for Starfield. (Picture: Steam)

Perhaps the biggest problem for Microsoft and Bethesda, though, is that fewer and fewer people are actually playing the game.

Starfield peaked on the first Saturday after launch with 330,000 players, but on the most recent Saturday, October 7, only 100,000 people were playing the game.

It also quickly sunk out of the top 10 played games on Steam and is now at 21, below MMO New World and the seven year old Civilization 6.

Starfield has fared particularly poorly compared to Baldur’s Gate 3, which came out only a few weeks earlier on PC and was not expected to be such a mainstream success – but it is still at number six in the Steam charts.

There’s no way to tell how the game has performed on Xbox but from the data that is available on Steam, it seems to have been only a minor hit.

Starfield – things have not gone as smoothly as expected (Picture: Microsoft)

But there are positives too, with many people praising the game and its value for money (HowLongToBeat says the game takes 149 hours to see everything). The scientific accuracy, the chance to visit over 1,000 planets, the music, and ship building have all been received positively.

‘Starfield is a good game. It certainly ate a solid chunk of my time without me even realising how long I’ve spent in its world. The music is outstanding, and the ship building was tons of fun,’ said Steam user Poopfeels.

‘It’s a Bethesda game through and through. Beautiful environments, fantastic immersion and storytelling. Fulfilling the fantasy of living in another universe Starfield has become a game I’d love to play again and again,’ added [AO] Henry.

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The game may also have a second life through modding, which is only now getting into gear and which has proven a key appeal for other Bethesda games.

And if nothing else the game has certainly created a lot of discussion, which Microsoft will see as a positive, with over 100,000 reviews on Steam.

None of those people are going to agree exactly on the game’s merits but while Starfield is not the game many hoped it would be it’s not a complete disaster either.

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Starfield has been out for a month now, and sifting through reviews, ratings, and charts reveal a mixed reception of the game.