Bethesda, the developer behind Starfield, has started to respond to negative reviews of the game on Steam with reasons why players are misguided in their assessment. At the time of writing, I’ve counted over 100 negative reviews on Steam that have received a response from the developer.
Bizarrely, in some responses, Bethesda representatives have taken to telling players what they can do in the game. “You can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot! Starfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet.” Which was the response to xellas84 who left a detailed review and has 224 hours recorded in the game.
A lot of the responses seem to be toeing the line of saying the review is wrong while then plugging the game, which is a bold move under a negative review.
If you want to check out some of the other 100+ Besthesda responses, you can do so on the Steam review page. You’ll find that a lot of them are repetitive, which is understandable, given that a lot of negative reviews point to similar issues with the game, such as not being able to fly ships, empty planets, and mediocre quests.
Starfield currently sits at a “Mixed” Steam rating from both recent and overall reviews. Despite the Bethesda representatives assuring players that the game is being constantly improved, the effect of that is yet to show up in the reviews.
If the goal from Bethesda was to limit the damage that negative reviews cause, perhaps they should have looked up the Streisand effect first.
