There is no game the internet loves to debate more than Starfield, the latest being how many hours can you put into a game before deciding that it’s bad, resulting from a recent surge in negative Steam reviews for the game. This is controversy #243 for Starfield in the past year or so, and there seems to be no end in sight.
My own thoughts on the game aside (if you’re a reader, you know I liked it), two things are pretty clear at this point in the wider conversation:
1. Starfield did not perform critically as well as Bethesda and Microsoft hoped, with scores in the low 80s, under almost all other mainline Bethesda games, and just a single Game Award nomination, which it lost, from a company that used to be a GOTY frontrunner with each new release.
2. Starfield has, at best, received a mixed reaction from the public, as meh-to-low Steam scores indicate, but overall the narrative seems to have ended up being “this is far from Bethesda’s best, and it encapsulates how dated their design philosophies are.” Though often using much harsher language.
One thing Starfield did have is a whole lot of players, and many who stuck around for months, which is pretty good for a single player game with no updates and no real mod support. But it does remind of a similar situation, one that no doubt Bethesda does not want to invoke: Cyberpunk 2077.
As you may or may not recall, Cyberpunk 2077 launched as…a financial success. It sold 13 million copies in its December launch month alone. Bethesda could have dusted off their hands, had a few million more sales trickle in over time, taken that to the bank and moved on.
But of course the problem was the game itself, launching technically sub-par or outright broken on many platforms, and missing key features. So, despite a huge rush of initial sales, CDPR knew they had to put in the work to repair both the game’s reputation and their own. And after three years, with Phantom Liberty and the game’s 2.0 update, they genuinely turned it into one of the best single-player RPGs of all time. I’d consider it one of the biggest gaming comeback stories of all time, up there with Final Fantasy XIV and No Man’s Sky.
Starfield is in a similar situation. Bethesda and Microsoft can talk all they want about playercounts and billions of planets explored, but the narrative is pretty clear that this was an overall disappointment, and Bethesda’s second big miss in a row after the launch of Fallout 76 that again, took years to fix up into “hey you might want to try it, it’s actually pretty good now” status.
The problems here are a bit different, and I would argue, harder to solve. Bethesda’s problems are not largely technical like Cyberpunk’s were. Sure, there are some bugs, but they are far from the main issue. Cyberpunk, at baseline, had a great story, great characters and a great setting. The common view is that Starfield lacks in many of those departments, and those are not so easily fixed.
You can’t really just…change Bethesda’s dated character models and fixed view conversations that feel so ancient now. I doubt you can just start cutting out the need for the game’s many, many loading screens between zones. You likely cannot patch in the ability to fly directly into a planet’s atmosphere like No Man’s Sky.
Some things, sure, you can definitely upgrade. An expansion means room for a compelling new story and characters, potentially. You can add more POIs that are interesting and less copy-pasted across a host of planets. New star systems, new, more rich planets, new alien life, etc. The potential for expansion is there, but I’d say there is less you can change about the base game itself as it stands.
If you think I’m wrong about this, well, Bethesda seems to agree with me. They have already promised that the game will start getting updates every six weeks, compared to the close to zero it has had since launch. They’ve given a line list of items they’re working on in 2024, albeit I’m not sure more ship parts and perhaps land vehicles are going to cut it. Fixing games like Cyberpunk or No Man’s Sky were deep, lengthy processes, and with Elder Scrolls 6 already being worked on in earnest, I wonder what resources Bethesda has for what this “repair” process needs. But after two underwhelming launches, it feels like a necessity for many players not to lose faith.
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