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Completion rates always make me so sad. No matter how good a narrative/game is the majority won't finish it. That must be so depressing for the people who worked on them.

In light of that I have the utmost respect for devs like Larian who put in so many variables knowing that maybe 1% of players will see a certain scene. That's real passion and dedication and respect for players who do appreciate the details.

Coming back to Starfield: I have lost all respect for Bethesda for keeping the same hack writer who openly admits he puts zero effort into his writing because people don't care for the narrative as a lead writer. That's NOT the kind of conclusion you should draw from those completion stats. Good grief, either do your fucking job well, have some pride in your work, or fuck off. This sort of phoning it in is exactly the kind of "good enough" attitude that just ISN'T good enough anymore in 2023. 2011 was a long time ago. The industry has evolved. Games have become so good they're rivalling movies with Hollywood class actors and beautiful cinematography. Just look at Cyberpunk. Bethesda has been sleeping on all this still high on their Skyrim idolization. That's either incompetence, ignorance or complacency. Or probably a little bit of each. Bethesda today feels like they spent the past 12 years in a bunker with a game that does nothing better than the competition because apparently they have not looked at the competition, including their own previous games. Sorry for ranting again but Starfield was supposed to be my new forever game and I'm still salty.

Oof. That was cold, Melbella. Cold.

I don’t know. I waited until it was done saving so it shouldn’t have been the firmware issue. And it did have a Cloud save but it’s gone too.

Xbox

Yeah, I don't fully understand the complaining about lack of support now, Bethesda games I have always found to be a buggy near unplayable mess and it could take months if not years to make them playable.  Not sure why people expected a massive shift after Microsoft got involved for wasn't the concern that Microsoft would change too much?

Speaking of SteamDB:

Starfield has lost 97% of its Steam players in less than six months
www.pcgamesn.com/starfield/player-decline

This must be one of the reasons why rumors of Starfield being ported to the PS5 came about.

why not both? Or all three really. Playing Saints Row right now, and have been keeping somewhat of an eye on BG, the new Dragons Dogma game, and the Avatar game. There is enough time to do a lot of different things in the day.

It's pushing gamepass numbers so well there's rumors floating around about it's PS debut.

But let's examine the steam numbers and apply it to gamepass and then maybe we can extrapolate it to why those rumors exist atm. Starfield had a peak on steamcharts of 330,000 concurrent players. That's good (obviously it's a lot higher when factoring gamepass numbers) but still actually very good. This equates to over a million daily players and millions of players playing on steam in general. It's 9k current daily concurrent playerbase on steam is a steep drop off. That's less than 3% of it's overall playerbase still playing. You can safely apply these figures to gamepass btw, there's nothing unique to steam that says this drop off rate would be any different. So why does this matter? Because gamepass is a subscription service, longevity matters because you need people to keep subscribing to this service. So if we extrapolate that same drop off to gamepass then suddenly Starfield isn't pushing insane numbers anymore. Or even good numbers.

Time to launch it on PS to get more money from old fashion sales.

And this might hint at a future strategy. These sorts of games pushes gamepass numbers only in the beginning, so releasing initially on gamepass then eventually taking things to PS might be the strategy for the future.

Going back to Starfield, I'm not sure what metric people can use to say Starfield met expectations when it clearly hasn't in every aspect. Clearly it does better than some games but this is Bethesda, the studio Microsoft spent 8 billion dollars on. Don't make me bring up the game you hate talking about and their retention rate even though it released a month before THAT would be a good retention rate for a subscription service.

There are 3 times as many daily concurrent players playing Skyrim on Steam than there are Starfield. There are twice as many daily concurrent players playing Fallout 4 on Steam than Starfield. And that's because there's only 9k concurrent daily players on steam. Paul Tassi and the Bethesda PR can put out as much cope as they like, but for what they were expecting (and they were expecting a ten year game and players playing for a long time, not players trying then dropping it) it didn't do well at all. They want to retain players and keep them playing for a long time (so they can sell mods to them for exorbitant prices).

EXCLUSIVE | Microsoft plans Starfield launch for PlayStation 5
xboxera.com/2024/02/04/exclusive-microsoft-plans-starfield-launch-for-playstation-5/

According to sources, we understand that currently Microsoft are planning a launch for Starfield on PlayStation 5 post the release of the already announced “Shattered Space” expansion for Xbox and PC, which is on target to arrive at some point later this year. We’ve also been informed that Microsoft have made additional investment into PlayStation 5 dev kits to support ongoing development efforts – adding further fuel to the fire.

Looks like the latest patch added some bugs. If we add my invisible attacked of the other day to the hurricane ship, random difficulty bump and Xbox freezing (or the XBox is something else since people had freezing issues since launch).

smilesja to know if the problem is the FormID limit, you'll have to move to NG+.