Bethesda Game Studios released Starfield on September 6, 2023. It was the studio’s first new IP in 25 years. According to the game’s director Todd Howard, it was the dream project he’s been meaning to make since his earliest days as a game developer. And now that Bethesda finally had the technology to realize this vision, they brought us Starfield as the ultimate sci-fi open-world RPG.
The game was highly anticipated by just about everyone. Long-time Bethesda fans, sci-fi fans, open-world RPG enthusiasts, space nerds, and the general gaming audience were all expecting Starfield to become 2024’s Game of the Year.
But then Baldur’s Gate 3 happened. Released roughly a month ahead of Starfield, Larian’s D&D-based RPG skyrocketed in popularity due to the enduring popularity of Divinity: Original Sin II, a successful Early Access phase, and some viral bear-focused marketing. A combination of high production values, the console audience’s newfound preference for turn-based combat, and the rising popularity of Dungeons & Dragons all captured the public consciousness and kickstarted many a conversation about what a truly next-gen RPG should look like.
This is how a GotY is made.
And then, after heroically saving the Sword Coast from a Mind Flayer invasion, we finally got our hands on Starfield. A game that could best be described as Skyrim-in-space. To the point where your character eventually becomes known as the Starborn (Dragonborn) who can unlock a variety of Powers (Shouts) you can use by hitting the Z key on your keyboard. When combined with the game’s performance completely unjustified by its middling at best visuals, abundant procedural generation that sucks a lot of fun out of exploration, an extremely simplistic character-building system, and numerous side systems like ship construction and outposts that feel completely disconnected from the greater game, this resulted in a lukewarm reception, to put it mildly.
While it’s in no way indicative of the total sales, just comparing the publicly available concurrent player numbers on Steam, Baldur’s Gate 3 ended up with a total of 875,343 players, while Starfield never got past 330,723. And that’s not even mentioning all the awards Larian managed to snag later on.
Despite this particular stumble, Bethesda remains committed to Starfield. According to Todd Howard himself, the studio isn’t ready to count the game out. Instead, they fully intend to keep supporting it with updates and expansions for the foreseeable future in the hopes that it eventually becomes the title it was always meant to be, one to stand tall among Bethesda’s other juggernaut hits.
So now, one year after the game’s initial launch, we’re taking a look at Starfield in its current state.
Here are the things we’ll be examining a bit closer:
Public and critical reception
Post-launch support
State of the modding scene
Ongoing Public and Critical Reception of Starfield
It can be difficult to accurately gauge how good a game is close to its release. The combination of hype, expectations, and various launch day woes can result in either an inflated score or a game being unjustly maligned. But now that the dust has settled, we can check in with some review aggregators for a clearer picture.
Based on a total of 186 critic reviews, Starfield’s OpenCritic score sits at a respectable 85 Top Critic Average, with 84% of critics recommending the game.
Metacritic, on the other hand splits the reviews between PC and Xbox. Based on 80 PC reviews, Metacritic holds Starfield at 85 again, while its Xbox score, based on 90 reviews, dips slightly under that to a still reasonable 83. This paints a picture of a solid, if not outstanding game. Metacritic’s average user score, however, puts Starfield at a somewhat more middling 6.8/10, which indicates a more passion-driven reaction to a product that wasn’t exactly what people were expecting, or one that wasn’t quite as good as advertised.
The trend continues on Steam, a user-facing platform with a very robust player review system. As of this writing, Steam lists a total of 102,685 user reviews for Starfield, with 59% of them being positive, which puts it well into the Mixed territory. Looking at just the recent reviews, there are 967 of them, 55% of which are positive.
For comparison, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition is rated Very Positive at 94% positive reviews from a total of 166,575 reviews, 2,297 of which are recent. Meanwhile, Fallout 4 is also rated Very Positive with a total of 248,442 reviews (83% positive) and 2,697 recent reviews (85% positive).
The above numbers show that Starfield is not being received as well as Bethesda’s previous open-world offerings. And while the total number of reviews can be attributed to those games being considerably older, the number of recent reviews is a more alarming stat which suggests that fewer people are picking up Starfield despite its relatively recent release date.
Ignoring the total player counts due to all the different editions released over the years and just looking at 24-hour peaks of concurrent players on SteamDB, we have Starfield at 9,953 players, Skyrim at 27,038, and Fallout 4 at 23,418. While these are just Steam’s numbers that ignore consoles and other PC stores, we still can see that Starfield in its current state is far from the enduring hit Bethesda wants it to be. And if we compare it to a more contemporary RPG like Baldur’s Gate 3 with its 83,897 24-hour peak, the situation starts to look even more dire.
From Larian’s 2024 PAX West retrospective. They know who they owe their success to.
Still, not all is lost for Starfield just yet. A combination of robust post-launch support and a lively modding scene can easily turn this spaceship around. Which brings us to our next section.
Post-Launch Support of Starfield
Following Starfield’s release in September 2023, the game’s been getting a steady stream of patches. Some small and just contain a couple of quick fixes and persistent attempts to improve the game’s performance, while others are much bigger, like the one from May 2024. That one introduced a number of new features and welcome improvements, like a series of new gameplay options, the ability to customize the interior of your ships, improved surface maps, and more.
Following that in June, the game received a huge update that coincided with the release of the official Creation Kit. It also conveniently introduced some sample Creations, which are essentially Bethesda-sanctioned mods, and the Trackers Alliance system utilizing them. By joining the Trackers Alliance, you’ll now get access to curated community-created missions you’ll be able to purchase on an individual basis. Beyond that, the June update also introduced a new Bounty Scanner System that allows you to scan the game’s NPCs to check if any of them have a bounty on their head to then bring them in. And on top of that, the update improved the game’s melee weapons and ammo crafting.
Last but not least, the June update revealed Shattered Space – the game’s first premium expansion. According to Todd Howard, the expansion is similar in scope to Fallout 4’s Far Harbor DLC and is closer in its deliberate design to earlier Bethesda games as opposed to Starfield with its fondness for procedural generation.
The expansion itself will revolve around the mysterious House Va’ruun, a faction that felt somewhat unfinished in the base game, but even so was among the most interesting and unique parts of the game’s setting. When it launches, Shattered Space will let you uncover at least some of the secrets surrounding the followers of the Great Serpent as you explore a new location packed with content and face some new enemies and challenges.
Just a couple of weeks ago, we learned that we’ll be able to do all that on September 30 when Shattered Space goes live. If you own the Premium Edition or the Constellation Edition of the game, you’ll get Shattered Space for free. Otherwise, it will cost you $29.99 or your regional equivalent.
Together with the release date announcement, Starfield got another big free update that introduced REV-8 to the game. REV-8 is the game’s first drivable land vehicle that should make navigating the game’s sparsely populated planets that much more exciting. Here it is in action:
This upcoming expansion as well as the vehicle seem like great additions to Starfield, taking the game in the right direction. Releasing them about a year after the game’s initial launch, however, is quite a bold move. We’ll just have to wait and see if the expansion will be able to bring back old players and attract a significant number of new ones, and how Bethesda will decide to proceed from there. Will we be getting more similar expansions? Will the base game’s systems get overhauled in any major way? Will the game’s UI get some love it needs so much?
The answers to those questions are out of our hands at this point. What isn’t is all the content the community can add to the game in the meantime.
Current State of Starfield’s Modding Scene
A lot of people consider mods to be an integral part of playing Bethesda’s games. And understandably when a new game like Starfield got announced, people expected it to have robust mod support. Since the game’s release, people have been doing what they could to mod it while waiting for the official release of the Creation Kit which happened roughly 9 months after Starfield’s launch.
That alone is nothing too out of the ordinary and comparable to Skyrim and Fallout 4. The Creation Kit for Skyrim launched roughly 3 months after the game’s release, while the one for Fallout 4 took about 5 months to arrive. Since Starfiled is using Creation Engine 2, and is the first game to do so, it makes sense for its Creation Kit to take slightly longer to materialize.
However, even before the Kit was released there were rumblings that this new and updated engine is not quite as mod-friendly as advertised. While people have been making mods for Starfield from before the game’s official launch, most of them tend to be fairly simple and small in their scope. This interview Eurogamer did with the people behind the unofficial Starfield Community Patch sheds some light on the issue. Apparently, it can be quite tricky to work with the new engine even for those intimately familiar with its previous iterations. There was even a suggestion “that modding capabilities were not a consideration in the development of the game engine up to now.”
Even despite that, as of this moment, Starfield’s Nexus Mods section contains over 8,000 mods. And with the recent release of the Creation Kit, we can expect some more ambitious projects to join their ranks. Because currently, the absolute majority of the mods on tap there include minor UI tweaks, limited rebalancing, and simple texture replacements.
Neutral LUTs, one of the most popular Starfield mods on the Nexus as of this writing. Not exactly a total overhaul.
The lack of public interest, real or simply perceived, in the game is also a factor. This recent VG247 article takes a look at Project Tamriel – an ambitious mod that intended to recreate Skyrim as a Starfield planet. That project was, sadly, canceled, and its developers interviewed in the article above blame the cancellation on a lack of excitement by the broader community.
Another worrying trend is Bethesda’s occasional attempts to see how far they can push mod monetization. Its latest iteration, Starfield’s Trackers Alliance was met with some considerable backlash and prompted Bethesda to reevaluate the pricing model for this particular feature.
The Vulture. The first Trackers Alliance mission will set you back 700 Creation Credits or $10 for 1000 Credits, as you can only purchase Credits in increments of 500.
And while Todd Howard remains adamant that his studio will continue supporting both paid and free mods, it’s hard to shake off the perceived conflict of interest between the two. For a profit-driven company having immensely popular mods completely unmonetized while there exists the infrastructure to monetize them means pretty much leaving money on the table.
In that context, it’s hard not to see Bethesda’s occasional updates and new edition releases as an attempt to at least curb the modding scene for their games. Like, for example, the recent Next-Gen update for Fallout 4 that upon release broke the functionality of F4SE, a mod a great number of other mods require to run properly.
Is Starfield’s apparent mod unfriendliness and its experiments with the Trackers Alliance another sign that Bethesda really wants to eventually bring all mods under its umbrella? We can’t know that for sure. What we do know is that right now we’re still far away from Thomas the Tank Engine spaceships and robust theme-park planets each acting as a recreation of Bethesda’s earlier titles.
What do you think? After the points covered in this article, do you feel like giving Starfield another shot? What do you feel the future will hold for Starfield? Will it bounce back and get a comeback story similar to Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky? Or will it be consigned to history as a dud, never to be mentioned again?
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Val Hull
Resident role-playing RPG game expert. Knows where trolls and paladins come from. You must fight for your right to gather your party before venturing forth.
