LogIn"Nobody, and I mean nobody, at Bethesda is patting themselves on the back while ignoring our players."
Bethesda
Starfield's latest expansion, Shattered Space, has disappointed most players. The $30 DLC not only lacks meaningful content and interesting quests but also fails to fix issues in the $70 base game. It’s no surprise that its Steam review score continuously dropped from 39% a few days ago to a poor 30% at the time of writing this article.
Among the voices of criticism, being optimistic about the DLC could be out of place, at least in the eyes of some fans. One of them is a long-time Bethesda fan, who expressed their sentiment by writing a few comments under a tweet from Emil Pagliarulo, Studio Design Director of Bethesda Game Studios, saying that the director’s optimistic tone in a recent interview could be “tone deaf” to the community and “reads the team is patting yourselves on the head.”
To respond and clarify, the director wrote in a lengthy thread to share how the studio thinks about the negative reviews and reacts to players’ criticism. He emphasized that “nobody, and I mean nobody, at Bethesda is patting themselves on the back while ignoring our players.”
Pagliarulo explains why he shows optimism during the interview, saying it is “standard for interviews” and his optimism “in no way meant to be mud in the eye of any dissatisfied fan. That's not how it works.”
Except for the optimism shown in the interview, Bethesda's direction also concerns the fan, as the developer seems to be “protecting choices that at best have had mixed reviews while ignoring issues your fan base has been pointing out for years.”
To address this, Pagliarulo tells how the team has been trying to build a relationship with the community by spending “a lot of time this year addressing community concerns and making fixes.” They aim to keep doing so and listen to fans’ feedback “every step of the way.” “We make these games for all of you,” he notes. Nonetheless, he admits that, sometimes, it could be risky to fix things for such a massive game as Starfield.
“It takes time for us to address things. We move as fast as we can, as safely as we can. Game development is always tricky, but with a game as big as Starfield, every fix could potentially break something else,” Pagliarulo said.
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