Starfield is definitely one of Bethesda’s more controversial titles. Sure, it’s currently boasting numbers bigger than Skyrim, but opinions on the game’s quality are all over the place. There’s no place where this is more evident than the game’s Steam page, which is currently sat at a Mostly Positive rating after almost 90,000 user reviews. However, almost 25,000 of those are negative, meaning Starfield is now Bethesda’s lowest-rated game on the platform, dropping slightly below previous record holder Fallout 76.
According to Steam DB figures, Starfield is currently sat at a fairly respectable rating of 71.38 percent, but Fallout 76 has a surprisingly high rating of 71.76 percent, despite the game’s miriad of issues at launch. Of course, Fallout 76 isn’t the same game now as it was back when it first released, as Bethesda has done a great job fixing and polishing things up to get it in a respectable state, but Starfield being rated lower than it still isn’t a great look.
There are several reasons as to why Starfield now has this record, some of which are completely out of control of Bethesda’s control. For starters, the game managed to whip up the bigots into a frenzy for including pronouns in its character creator, which will have undoubtedly contributed to a bit of review bombing as basement dwellers with nothing better to do than to try and win an invented argument against themselves.
Secondly, this is the first Bethesda-developed title to be exclusive to Xbox and PC since The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, and exclusives are just naturally more susceptible to further review bombings due to all of the ridiculous “console wars” nonsense. Mix all that together with the legitimate criticisms and mixed feelings from those that may not be too keen on this new style of Bethesda RPG, and you can begin to understand why Starfield is rated so low.
It’s a bit of a shame, but it’s highly unlikely that Bethesda or Xbox actually cares. Starfield has just had Bethesda’s best launch ever, amassing millions of players in a very short amount of time. Whether it be through Game Pass or actual sales, hundreds of thousands of people are playing Starfield right now, and that will probably matter a lot more than a 0.4 percent difference in Steam ratings.
In other Starfield news, fans of the game recently discovered an incredibly convoluted way to steal the clothes off of NPC characters. All it requires you to do is max out your social skill tree for the Manipulation skill and commit a double murder. Hey, I never said it was easy.