It seems like Steam gamers found Bethesda’s latest SciFi RPG title rather successful, despite the somewhat mixed critic reviews prior to the game’s release.
Starfield went into early access for Premium Edition users on September 1st, while the official release date of the game is today, September 6th. Steam is well known for letting users review newly released games only 12 hours after their release date in order to avoid review bombing. Thus, Steam users started to post their opinions about Starfield earlier today, which are mostly “very positive” as of writing this article, with 13,000 user reviews to date.
Despite the recent Starfield pronouns controversy, and the game having received mixed to mediocre critic reviews, Steam users still found the science fiction title to be one of their best single-player RPG experiences to date, with reviews stats currently at “Very Positive” and 86% review score.
This comes as a surprise, as user reviews are usually hypercritical of controversial game launches and tend to exaggerate the flaws in a newly released title, especially if it has performance issues or gameplay bugs. In the case of Starfield, not many bugs were reported by players, quite an unusual event when talking about Bethesda games… But what can we say, the RPG company learned from its past mistakes and repaired Starfield to have little to no bugs at all, a much-appreciated effort from the Steam community as it seems.
Starfield critiques from gamers and critics
There are some issues Steam users and game critics alike point out for the newly launched Starfield. Features that make the game “dull” “boring” or “uninteresting” are at the forefront of the ‘accuzations’. These are some of the few elements criticized by the gaming community:
- Lack of a minimap and overall map (although the game has a map system, it’s too minimalist, rendering it unusable).
- Lack of a seamless transition between flying in outer space and landing your ship on a planet, a feature that’s been masterfully executed by the game No Man’s Sky, a title Starfield drawn from a lot gameplay-wise (mining, planetary travel, spaceship customization, procedurally generated environments, and more).
- Simplistic quests with “too much talking”. RPG games are known for having rich storylines, translated through NPC dialogue. But gamers tend to think Starfield crossed the line a bit by having too much dialogue for short or forgettable quests.
