Starfield is here, and after dozens of hours floating in space our reviewer Chris Livingston liked it—but didn’t love it. “Starfield is Bethesda’s biggest RPG ever, and it shares even more DNA with Skyrim and Fallout 4 than I expected—but it ultimately falls far short of the greatness of both of those games,” he wrote in his 75% Starfield review.
As one of the most anticipated games of the year, there are unsurprisingly already tons of Starfield reviews online from other publications that have been playing the game for the last week. Although there are some notable exceptions: Bethesda didn’t provide early review code to UK-based publications Eurogamer, The Guardian, and our sister magazine Edge until shortly before or just after today’s embargo. That means there are still more reviews to come—but with 97 reviews already collected on OpenCritic, there’s already a wide spread of reactions, from “this could be one of the most ambitious games ever made” to “a mile wide, but an inch deep.”
Here’s what the critics are saying.
Honestly, a lot of the complaints are about what I would expect from a Bethesda title. The biggest surprise so far has been all the comments about how polished it is and the lack of bugs. Hopefully, that holds once more people get their hands on it and start really digging into it. It would be nice if Bethesda learned something from their last few releases. Then again it is a Bethesda game, so who knows.
People are saying this about BG3 too, so I wouldn’t put much weight into that. The bar is apparently low these days to be considered bug free.
“They released it almost bug free!” is the new “AAA devs announced there will be no micro transactions!” Gamers as a group are basically abused spouses.