No matter what field of entertainment you’re in, there is always the possibility of bad reviews and thoughts about what you make. The key thing is how you respond to those negative reviews. Some people take them personally and lash out at those who made them. Others ignore them because they “don’t mean anything” so long as you enjoyed the thing you made. Some people simply don’t read reviews so that they don’t have thoughts from either side clouding their minds. But in the case of Bethesda, they’re taking the negative reviews of Starfield rather hard, as some of their customer support team are trying to explain away the things that gamers don’t like.
If you haven’t heard by now, Starfield has been getting a lot colder reception from gamers the longer it’s been out. The “wonder and sheen” of its launch has long since worn off, and Steam is the perfect place to see that. The game is hovering between a six and seven out of ten, with thousands of reviews pointing out that the game is “mid” at best.
Well, someone in Bethesda didn’t like that, as members of the Customer Support division have started responding to the Steam reviews and trying to “calm down” the negative thoughts by explaining what’s going on. To our knowledge, developers don’t do this regularly, and yet they’ve been making these responses up to yesterday:
So, what have they been trying to shoot down in terms of the negative remarks? Well, gamers weren’t happy about the loading screens that kept popping up during gameplay, to which the support crew stated that there was a “lot going on behind the scenes,” and thus, a loading screen was required. Another thing the gamer reviews stated was how planets were literally empty at times, and the support crew fired back by stating that this was meant to be “realistic” as plenty of planets in the universe have nothing to do with them.
We can let the loading screen issue pass because of the size of the game’s universe, but the other complaint isn’t so easy to dismiss. After all, gamers didn’t want a “realistic spacefaring game”; they wanted one where every world in this universe would provide something special to do, and that’s not what happens, and if it’s a crapshoot to see what planet will give you meaningful content, then gamers won’t want to do exploration. That was another complaint in the reviews; there wasn’t enough content spread out meaningfully, and thus, some people focused on the main story and key side quests.
All in all, it’s very suspicious that Bethesda would be doing these kinds of responses.
