The months leading up to Starfield and its launch were an event, whether you were a fan of Bethesda Game Studios titles or following the industry. Bethesda’s first new IP in over 20 years, a massive sci-fi space RPG with over 1000 planets, the latest directorial effort from the mind behind The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and Fallout 4 – all this and more pervaded the conversations around Starfield. It’s the first Bethesda Game Studios title to launch on day one for Game Pass, opening it up to a much larger audience than before.
However, being an Xbox Series X/S exclusive, it was also viewed as a big deal for Microsoft, who had struggled over the past few years to deliver high-profile exclusives despite its many blockbusters. Initial impressions from fans and critics were positive. Our review, like many others, praised the title for its exploration, shipbuilding, space combat, scale, atmosphere and improved visuals.
Sure, there were some shortcomings with the combat and extensive loading screens, but that sense of Bethesda wonder was seemingly intact. Even accounting for varying tastes, the title earned an 86 Metascore on PC among 78 critic reviews and an 83 Metascore on Xbox Series X/S based on 90 reviews – both respectable totals.
Cut to nearly three months later, and Starfield is discussed for entirely different reasons. It’s gone from a Very Positive rating on Steam to Mostly Positive and now Mixed. Out of 76,611 user reviews, 69 percent are positive and from the most recent reviews, only 51 percent. On Metacritic, Starfield’s user score is currently at 7.0 on Xbox Series X/S based on 11,100 ratings. The PC user score is even more worrying at 5.6 from 6,715 ratings.
Those who played Cyberpunk 2077 at launch will no doubt remember something similar – it started fairly positive before its user reviews slowly plummeted. Of course, just as with CD Projekt RED’s opus at the time, there was the belief that ratings were ultimately irrelevant. After all, if the player counts were strong, the game was doing something right for a large subsection of its audience. Right?
Starfield peaked at 330,723 concurrent players on Steam on August 31st – pretty good compared to previous Bethesda titles (Skyrim peaked at 287,411 when it first launched), especially when it’s also available on Game Pass. However, that’s when early access started. The concurrent player count has gradually declined ever since. It’s now at a 24-hour peak of 22,152 players, right below The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Special Edition’s 23,098 players.
Yes, the latter is technically seven years old. However, considering how many have shifted from the base Skyrim, released about 12 years ago, that Starfield is struggling to beat its predecessor is concerning. At least it’s doing better than Fallout 4, which had a 24-hour peak of 15,184 players, though its all-time peak of 472,962 players is above and beyond the space-faring RPG.
While concurrent player numbers on Xbox aren’t available, a quick peek at the Most Played Games on the console sees Starfield in 15th, just ahead of Halo Infinite. Remember that the latter’s reputation took a beating through the years for many reasons and has slowly been repaired thanks to numerous updates and new content.
Maybe it’s because there are newer games? That’s certainly a factor, and Starfield is a single-player title also competing against various free-to-play and live-service multiplayer games. However, Baldur’s Gate 3 launched a month before it on PC and is still the fifth most-played game on Steam, with a 24-hour peak of 125,585 players.
Cyberpunk 2077 may have seen a major new update and a paid expansion, Phantom Liberty, but that was in September. It’s sitting at 23rd in the most-played games chart on Steam, with a 24-hour peak of 36,246. Starfield is currently in 43rd place behind games like Elden Ring, Valheim, Stardew Valley and Terraria.
What’s going on? Are players going to Skyrim because they’re tired of Starfield? Are they looking at the former as a palette cleanser? Maybe just approaching other games to take a break? That’s one way to look at it, and you could argue that Skyrim and even Fallout 4 have more mods, which help broaden the experience and provide new features. However, looking back at the first year for the base version of Skyrim and Fallout 4, their drops in concurrent players are nowhere near as drastic as Starfield’s over the past three months.
Among several players, even the most die-hard who have hundreds of hours in the game, there’s a strong sentiment that Starfield doesn’t offer that same Bethesda magic of exploration. That feeling of picking a direction and traveling forth, discovering all kinds of wonders, whether it’s a side quest, a random event, a dungeon, or something unique, is simply missing. Starfield’s exploration is more segmented and alternates between hand-crafted content in the major cities, like New Atlantis and Neon, and randomly generated content on other planets.
Some find that the faction quests, story and companions don’t match up to previous Bethesda Game Studios efforts, never mind more contemporary games. Meanwhile, the randomly generated content begins to overstay its welcome once you see the same outpost and events on different planets, regardless of the circumstances.
It isn’t to discredit all of the cool things you can do, like building spaceships, engaging in massive fleet battles or just roaming around on the surface of a planet, gazing upon a nearby star. However, other things carry more substantial weight for a significant number of players, and Starfield isn’t delivering in those departments.
To clarify: This doesn’t mean Starfield is a failure. It crossed 11 million players as of October 25th and holds the record for the most number of Game Pass subscriptions in a single day. Nearly half of all hours played were on PC, so while its current position on the Steam charts looks dismal, its place in the Xbox charts looks somewhat better (even if it isn’t in the top ten). While Microsoft and Bethesda haven’t shared sales numbers, it was the seventh best-selling game of the year in the United States as of October 18th.
There’s a sizable team working on the game long-term, with director Todd Howard confirming 250 developers. They’ve done a good job thus far listening to feedback and implementing features that should have been present at launch, like Nvidia DLSS support, Brightness and Contrast settings, and much more.
Mod support is also coming next year and should heavily expand on the available experiences and gameplay features. The developer is also committed to DLC – one story expansion, Shattered Space, is already confirmed, and Howard promises “a lot” of post-launch DLC of “varying sizes.” No ETAs on any of it, unfortunately.
The problem lies in its future – even if Bethesda releases lots of DLC, it needs to do more to bolster the core and give current players a reason to keep coming back. It may sound like new content is the answer, but as seen with titles like Destiny 2 – a live service game with seasons, events – it’s not a recipe for success. If the initial DLC for Starfield isn’t incredible, then sales of future releases could be affected. Besides, all that long-term support and free updates requires resources.
Mods may seem like the answer, but again, Skyrim and Fallout 4 aren’t played to this day just because of that. It’s because they offer what fans of Bethesda titles want in environmental design, exploration, content (more curated over randomly generated) and pacing. There’s only so much Game Pass can do to alleviate those core issues, especially with so many other big games vying for intention over the coming months.
Starfield’s future very much depends on Bethesda’s plans for the same. It could have some earth-shattering features in mind for next year to bolster player numbers well into the future or some unforgettable stories in the works (again, Cyberpunk 2077 is a strong point of comparison). However, for one of the biggest games of 2023 and the most important for Microsoft and Bethesda in a long time, Starfield should be more than just an honorable mention to close out the year.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
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