'I Can't Bring Myself to Play Anymore'; Growing Disillusionment With Starfield
Starfield - following in the footsteps of Skyrim - was to become a game for years and Bethesda's flagship work. However, a month after its release, quite a few players are feeling weariness with the space RPG.
It has been almost a month and a half since the release of Starfield. The game has certainly achieved commercial success - more than a month ago we reported that Bethesda's space RPG was bought and played by more than 10 million people (a large part of them, of course, in Game Pass, but the stats from Steam were also good).
Since then, this number has certainly increased even more, but there is also growing disappointment among some gamers who were disappointed with the content of Starfield. Todd Howard promised a game for years, while for some people Starfield turned out to be a September game at best - because October brought boredom.
"I can't bring myself to play"
These are the opening words of a post by Reddit user, who a few days ago complained to other fellow Starfield players:
"I thought I would be playing this game for years to come, like I did with Skyrim and every Fallout game from BGS. But I'm around 50 hours in and the game just doesn't click for me. There's something missing in Starfield, a kind of feeling that I did get with every other Bethesda game but that for the life of me I can't seem to find here. Everything feels so... disconnected, I guess? I don't know how to explain it any better than that.
And I just can't land on one more planet to do the same loop I've been doing for all these hours. I mean, does someone really find fun in running across absolutely empty terrain for 2km to get to a POI that we have already seen a dozen times? It even has the exact same loot and enemy locations! Even the same notes, corpses... Environmental storytelling is supposed to be Bethesda's thing, but this game's world building could have been made by Ubisoft and I wouldn't have noticed a difference," wrote user CarefulMode_.
The player's entry quickly gained popularity and is now one of the most upvoted posts on r/Starfield with more than 10,200 positive reactions and more than 4,000 comments., where quite a few people acknowledge the author of the post is onto something by adding comments from themselves:
"It kills me that you can't just land on a planet and explore anything. The landscapes are empty, there is no depth of structures that are inhabited by villains. Fallout emphasized exploration, so does Skyrim... and Starfield is like fast travel here, talk to person A, fast travel there, deliver information to person B. I wish I didn't use fast travel, but there's no reason not to," wrote xxAgentVenom.
The endless void in space
Many players recognized the following comment, belonging to player DeltaGamer7, as the accurate diagnosis for Starfield :
"They [the developers - ed. note] have fallen into the same trap that most space games fall into - namely, the world is simply too big to fill with meaningful content. Space is huge, and even inhabited systems have only individual cities.
They bit more than they could chew."
There were also quite a few ideas among the commenters to remedy the situation, such as densifying space with more interesting locations that would replace procedurally generated "fillers," or the ability to occupy outposts and turn them into your bases, like in Fallout 76.
Starfield is being patched regularly - smaller updates are coming out relatively often, but Bethesda should gather resources for a more serious content update to stem the tide of disappointed players.
Starfield on Steam
It's natural that in a single-player game players leave after a while, but as recently as two weeks ago the average numer of players on Steam was over 130k (via SteamDB). In the past week it has retained a significantly lower level of around 50-60 thousand.
The situation is also getting worse on Steam, in player reviews. Although overall the game has "mostly positive" reviews (72% of 68 thousand), if we consider only the most current reviews, Starfield gets a "mixed" reception with 65% of positive reviews out of 20,500. Let's also add that the game currently already ranks 6th among the most played titles in Game Pass on PC.
If Bethesda does not get a grip soon, forcasts for Starfield are looking bleak. This situation is likely to get worse - at least until the release of official modding tools.
