While it’s not unusual for a gaming company to respond to criticisms of one of its releases, Bethesda looks to be going a bit further than most when it comes to pushing back against negative Starfield reviews. In recent days, some Bethesda employees have begun posting replies to negative Starfield reviews on Steam, often going to great lengths to push back against critiques of the company’s sprawling sci-fi title.
Bethesda employees have been spotted responding to negative Starfield reviews on Steam in an attempt to counter criticism of the game. Making the already strange situation all the more unusual is that it isn’t members of Starfield’s development team taking to the internet to address critiques of the game, but rather employees from Bethesda’s Customer Support department. A post on X by user JuiceHead shared screenshots of a few of the often long-winded replies some players found posted under their negative Starfield reviews, illustrating the unusual lengths Bethesda has gone to defend the troubled title.
The replies highlighted in the post attempt to push back against some of the most common complaints about the game. In one hilariously outlandish response to a player who complained about the prevalence of barren planets in Starfield, a Bethesda employee stated, “When astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored.” Another response attempted to deflect a player’s frustration with the ubiquity of loading screens and fast travel sequences in the game, encouraging them to use the loading time to admire the amount of data needed to run Starfield’s massive universe.
Starfield may have left a bad taste in some players’ mouths following its release, but the response of Bethesda’s Customer Support team to these critiques feels oddly out of place. Given the years of effort that went into its release, it’s understandable for Bethesda to want to defend Starfield, but telling unhappy players that their complaints about the game are objectively wrong doesn’t paint the company in a particularly good light.
However, seeing as the Bethesda Customer Support team previously made headlines for requiring Fallout 76 players to write an essay in order to have their bans overturned, maybe this unorthodox response to Starfield’s critics isn’t so surprising.
