Starfield
We are, of course, an industry that lives and dies by Metacritic, for better or worse. It’s not just fanboy fuel, it’s something that can mean big bonuses and further investment, or on the other side, studio closure, depending on how a game is received.
This year we’ve seen two all-timers, Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3, where Baldur’s is now the highest scored PC release…ever on Metacritic. There was much speculation about where Bethesda’s Starfield would land (far too much speculation), and now two weeks after early launch, the score is startling to settle. And it’s…slid a bit.
When the review embargo first dropped, Starfield was sitting at something like an 88 on Xbox and an 89 on PC. Not 90+ the way I think Bethesda may have been hoping, and yet still extremely good.
But this is a year of extremely good games, in a generation of extremely good games. And over time, Starfield’s score has dipped, specifically on Xbox. It retains an 87 on PC, but Starfield is now an 84 on Xbox Series X as more reviews have come in.
There have been some heated debates about Starfield review scores, some of which contributed to this slide. There’s IGN’s 7/10 which is all anyone could talk about when embargo dropped. And more recently there was The Jimquisition’s 4/10, which I believe may have sank the score by an entire point by itself the day it dropped.
Starfield
An 84 is still “good,” but an 85 used to be the cutoff mark of whether a game had garnered enough “prestige” according to the bosses. And 90+ games are generally what end up as top GOTY contenders. In the case of Starfield, an 84 means that it is now Xbox’s 47th highest reviewed game of the generation, not really anywhere close to the top. And not even as high as many of Xbox’s other exclusives. There are different standards for games with different expectations riding on them, fair or not.
You can probably guess the highest games in the overall Series X list, and most of them are third party. Elden Ring, Persona 5 Royal, Hades. And in terms of Xbox exclusives, we have Forza Horizon 5 at a 92, Microsoft Flight Simulator at a 90, Psychonauts 2 at an 87, Hi-Fi Rush at an 87 and even Halo Infinite at an 87.
Then, you can compare it to similar Bethesda games in the past on Xbox:
- Oblivion – 94
- Skyrim – 96
- Fallout 3 – 93
- New Vegas – 84
- Fallout 4 – 88
- Fallout 76 – 49
Other than the Fallout 76 aberration, this is tied for the lowest with something that is not actually a mainline Bethesda game, New Vegas, and I think most believe that score undervalues what would go on to be a better game in hindsight.
I’m not trying to roast Starfield here. I gave it a 9.5 and I stick by that after 150 hours of play. But overall this does not seem to have landed at least critically exactly where Bethesda and Microsoft probably hoped, though they’d never say that publicly and they have been celebrating all the 9.5 and 10s the game did get. It really is quite divisive, a huge split between some people genuinely saying it’s one of their favorite games ever, and other failing to muster anything more than a “meh.” We will see how history treats it.
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