Starfield Expansion Receives More Negative Reviews Than Concord at Launch

If you head on over to its Metacritic page, you'll find mostly negative reviews—a bad sign for a game that was supposedly on its way to recovery.

While Starfield fell short of everyone's expectations and was nowhere near the Game of the Year contender many thought it would become, it did at least get an 83 Metacritic score. In comparison, the expansion is faring much worse with a 54 Metacritic score.

On Steam, things don't get much better at all, with the expansion receiving over 1,000 negative reviews, putting it in the "Mostly Negative" category.

Instead of being one huge step for Bethesda and Microsoft, Shattered Space is a debilitating two planet-sized steps backwards for one of gaming's most storied video game developers.

Starfield isn't the first AAA game that generated years worth of hype and didn't live up to it. It certainly wouldn't be the last. But many had hoped that it would do a Cyberpunk 2077, which could very well have bankrupted CD Projekt RED if not for a late surge that was the result of a combination of the surprising success of the animation adaptation, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, on Netflix and over a years worth of effort optimizing the game.

However, Cyberpunk 2077 was never a bad game. Sure, it was unoptimized and bugged. It was also lacking in features. The core gameplay was exceptional when it worked and the story, including the endings, delivered. You can't say the same for Starfield, whose large, expansive, and procedurally produced universe feels empty and uninspired.

You can only say that a game holds so much potential for so long until you start to accept it will never realize it.

Granted, it's only been a year and Bethesda seems intent in supporting Starfield for at least a couple of years until most of the development team moves on to work on The Elder Scrolls VI and, eventually, Fallout 5. But, someone working at Bethesda has to tell the higher-ups that whatever they've done has failed so far. Because if they don't change course, bringing Starfield to PlayStation, which may happen within the next 12 months, will open yet another can of worms and put Xbox in even worse light.

For what it's worth, Starfield should at least run best on PlayStation 5 Pro, just like another upcoming Xbox exclusive, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.