Starfield Is a 7/10, According to Steam User Reviews

Starfield -- the new Xbox and PC RPG from Bethesda Game Studios -- is one of the most popular games in the world right now and will likely be one of the biggest releases of the year come December. How well it will do during awards season though remains to be seen. Right now, on Metacritic it boasts scores of 85 and 87, which are solid returns, but also suggest it could come up short in the Game of the Year discussions. Meanwhile, its Steam User Review score makes it odds look even worse. 

At the moment of writing this, the game has 38,758 user reviews on Steam. Only 77 percent of these reviews recommend game. This means the game only boasts a "Mostly Positive" rating. This is notably lower than Bethesda Game Studios' Fallout 4 and Skyrim, which have 83 percent and 94 percent approval ratings, respectively. It's almost even lower than the contentious Fallout 76, which has a 75 percent approval rating. 

"The more I play Starfield the smaller it feels. Infinitely smaller than any of Bethesda's previous titles, which is ironic considering the scale of the universe they are attempting to create," reads a Steam review with the most votes of approval. "For the first time after less than 100 hours I feel like a Bethesda game has nothing new to show me. No reward for wandering off into the far corners of the map, no prospects of anything new beyond what I've experienced beyond level 30. It's a world without a soul and no interesting history within it."

So, the most recommended review of the game on Steam is negative, but surely the second most recommended review isn't, right? Nope, it is. Two of the ten most recommended reviews for the game on Steam are negative. When you zoom out, the positive far outweighs the negative, but when you zoom in to the two most recommended reviews on Steam rights now, they are both negative. 

"This game is so hit or miss I'm not sure what to think of it. Part of the time I enjoy it and in other parts I find myself bored and uninterested," reads this second review. "The graphics are okay, but the gameplay feels old and I find myself skipping through conversations. The exploration portion of the game is lacking. It's a space game where I don't seem to travel in space. I use the map menu to jump light-years away in a single loading screen. I don't take off and land, I just appear and disappear."

Much like the game's Metacritic score, the game's Steam User Review score has been slowly going down since the game's release. Of course, it's hard to look too much into the game's Steam User Review score because the game has reignited the console wars and at any given time they are troll reviews bringing down its score, however, the two reviews above have dumped 95 and 56 hours into the game, respectively. In other words, it's unlikely console wars are the motivations behind each.

At the end of the day, what matters most is how many copies the game sells and how many players it attracts to Xbox Game Pass. Critical and consumer acclaim is a bonus. So far, the game is off to a good start in this regard, but it remains unclear if Xbox and Bethesda have seen a return on investment yet. 

H/T, PCGamesN.