Since it was first unveiled to the world last year, Bethesda has had a difficult time keeping players attached to Starfield. As a Bethesda game, no one was very surprised that there were as many bugs as there were. However, this was something that was highly anticipated after Microsoft acquired the developer, putting the team under intense pressure to make it good. Even though it was available on Game Pass on launch, Starfield still didn’t avoid getting absolutely review-bombed on various sites. The game is now sitting at Mixed Reviews on Valve’s platform, which has not improved since Shattered Space’s release and the introduction of buggies.
Unfortunately, things still aren’t looking good for Bethesda. It just released the first Starfield DLC, which has received negative reviews on Steam. Bethesda introduced new gameplay features in the DLC to make traversing across planets easier and more fun. However, despite this new and fun addition, it didn’t add anything that players were actually looking for in new content, including new features. In an interview with the Game File newsletter, Phil Spencer talked about how he and Todd Howard discussed the new expansion.
“Todd and I were talking about Shattered Space. Starfield is a game I put a ton of hours into and really love, but they’ve had this thing where they’ve added features throughout the year and then they had an expansion. I think some of the feedback on the expansion is: ‘We wanted more features.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, should we have waited to put buggies out?”
Right now, Shattered Space has mostly negative reviews on Steam, many of them directed at its poor writing and stale ending. The addition of buggies just made it clear that Bethesda has no idea what players want. The Steam page doesn’t acknowledge these issues in the news section, but there are updates concerning quest fixes and performance improvements. The update posted on November 5, 2024, Update 1.14.74, even reintroduced the uncapped framerate option on Xbox Series X.
Starfield is available to play on Xbox and PC.
