Developers reacting to feedback is always welcome, but players have been taken aback by Bethesda’s response to Starfield’s criticism. Its latest responses to negative reviews on Steam have been met with confusion from fans.
On Nov. 27, JuiceHead on Twitter pointed out how “Absolutely bizarre” these responses were. Bethesda Customer Support is almost always there to explain why the game is good and that what the devs did was right. For example, a review mentioned how exploration is boring to which Bethesda replied with: “Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design – but that’s not boring. When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored.” So yeah, it’s boring because you don’t know how to enjoy it. The fact Bethesda has been writing them for weeks despite the media attention and community sentiment says a lot about where it stands regarding customer support.
As many players pointed out, the statement about astronauts not being bored on the moon is especially baffling. Of course, astronauts weren’t bored on the moon. But as one comment read, the moon landing was a “real situation which was a huge accomplishment when it did happen” while in the game “it’s just a passing moment and quite literally easy to do.” The two are not the same and comparing them just doesn’t make sense.
What’s even worse is that chunks of those replies are copied and pasted from one to another, including the astronaut example from above. Then there’s almost always a paragraph about how fun the game is. My favorite is a 10-line paragraph starting with “Starfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet,” saying how you should create new characters and level different skills to have more fun in Starfield. All those bits are mashed together and create messy replies that seemingly don’t care for actual issues written in the review.
According to players on Reddit, Bethesda does the same on Xbox too, and many players agreed that at this point they’d rather “[Bethesda] just shut up and put out updates cuz this recent Bethesda attitude comes off as condescending and snide.”
