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Bethesda Continues to Defend Starfield by Replying to Steam Reviews

"You can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot!"

Image Credit: Bethesda, Starfield

Earlier this month, Bethesda made headlines when they responded to a Steam review criticizing Starfield's game world for being boring, empty, and lacking meaningful points of interest. In their reply, the developer claimed that Starfield's procedurally generated planets were intentionally designed to be empty and compared them to the experiences of the first astronauts on the Moon, prompting more negative feedback from the community.

Image Credit: Bethesda, Starfield

It appears, however, that Bethesda's defense strategy has not changed since then, with even more responses from the studio's developers coming to light in recent days. One review that Bethesda chose to respond to comes from Steam user UptownMermaid, who, in their write-up, emphasized one particular issue that many other players criticized as well – loading screens.

In response, a verified Steam user, "Bethesda_FalcoYamaoka", whom you might remember as the author of the previously mentioned "When the astronauts went to the Moon, there was nothing there" reply, said that although there might be an abundance of loading screens during fast travel, they are completely justifiable due to the substantial data needed for the procedurally generated and expansive gameplay.

"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," reads the reply. "While there may be loading screens in between fast traveling, 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."

Image Credit: Bethesda, Starfield

Another response was shared earlier this week by a developer known as "Bethesda_Kraken", who defended Starfield's gameplay loop and exploration. These aspects, criticized for being tedious, repetitive, and soulless, were addressed by recommending players not to roleplay as their character of choice but rather to create different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are opposite to their previous characters. Additionally, Kraken shared a short rhyme describing Starfield as a game where "You can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot!"

"You can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot!" Kraken 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. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. 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."

As you may have already guessed, the community wasn't particularly fond of the replies, with many finding Bethesda's attempts to mitigate the damage by sharing the same corporate-like responses over and over again to be futile.

The majority's opinion regarding Bethesda and their latest game is now perfectly reflected in Starfield's status on Steam, which recently shifted to Mixed, signifying that its rating has fallen below 70%. The community's sentiments toward Starfield were also evident in The Game Awards 2023's Game of the Year nominees list, where the game Bethesda devoted eight years to developing did not even make the cut.

Image Credit: Bethesda, Starfield

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Comments 3

  • Anonymous user

    You want to play a boring space game, go play No Man's Sky. People just need to relax cuz this game is fantastic when you actually start playing it. The interactions you have on Neon or even the UC storyline, a fantastically made in this awesome. Negative comments will come no matter what and Bethesda really should just leave it alone but then defending themselves is not wrong either. Most of these haters are pretty stupid in my book when you consider the fact that most games have a much longer loading time. They are probably just PlayStation fanboys that are bitter because they didn't get it on their console.

    1

    Anonymous user

    ·7 months ago·
  • Anonymous user

    This game is fun and mildly entertaining with some of the mechanics, namely ship building, but it's definitely not indicative of an 8 year build time, nor does it live up to any of the promises Bethesda made about it other than it's in space and there are procedurally generated planets 🤷

    0

    Anonymous user

    ·7 months ago·
  • Anonymous user

    Dear anon, the reason people hate the loading screens is because NMS, Star Citizen, Space Engineers and other space exploration games let you experience the journey, and let you experience space travel, while Starfield is just like, "nope, you get to skip Space, this is just a Skyrim Mod and we couldn't afford to make a fully featured space game after 8 years"

    0

    Anonymous user

    ·7 months ago·

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