Starfield is currently out in its early access form, playable to all who preordered it ahead of its full launch on September 6. And if the numbers are anything to go by, it’s going to be huge.

SteamDB, which is able to track player data on Steam, shows that Starfield has already managed an impressive peak player count of 236,834, with 223,113 playing right now. That’s roughly a quarter of what Baldur’s Gate 3 peaked at. Of course, Baldur’s Gate 3 launched on PC a month before hitting the PS5 making it much easier to gauge the metrics.

The point is, Starfield is already on track to become the most-played game of 2023 on Steam, not to mention all the players on Xbox and PC Game Pass who will be joining in the fun when it launches properly on September 6th.

And yet it hasn’t quite been the critical hit that it was hyped up to be. Prior to the game being put into the hands of reviewers, the chatter made Starfield out like it was going to be the second coming of Jesus Christ. It hasn’t lived up to that, though. On Opencritic it currently holds a score of 88 from one hundred critic reviews, making it the 20th highest-scoring game of 2023.

That’s not bad. In fact, it’s pretty damn good, especially since it’s been such a strong year for games. Starfield’s 88 makes it the second-best Xbox game of the year, just one point behind Hi-Fi Rush. But it’s not quite the slam dunk that Microsoft was undoubtedly hoping it would be.

Dan Stapleton of IGN gave Starfield a 7 while noting that it has some major issues: “It’s never a great sign when someone recommends a game on the grounds that it gets good after more than a dozen hours, but that’s very much the kind of game Starfield is, and I do recommend it. There are a lot of forces working against it, and the combination of disjointed space travel, nonexistent maps, aggravating inventory management, and a slow rollout of essential abilities very nearly did it in”

Christoper Livingston of PC Gamer also wasn’t completely sold on Bethesda’s space epic. He gave the game a score of 75, wrapping up his review by saying, “So, I don’t love Starfield, but I’m happy to say that I do like it. Those first 90 hours I played were far from perfect, but I’ve got plenty of reasons to play 90 more.”

Gamespot is another big player in the review scene and Michael Higman handled their review. He scored Starfield a 7, closing out the review by writing “For all its reverence for scientific philosophy, its stories and characters paint a rather tame and sterile vision for what our spacefaring future could look like. When you strip Starfield down to its essentials, it relies on a tried-and-true, but well-tread formula while missing some of the depth of the games that came before it. Starfield is a game more concerned with quantity than quality, and leaves the experience at the surface level.”

Gamesradar delivered a far more positive review, handing out 5 stars out of 5. Wordsmith Leon Hurley handed this one and described Starfield in a way that I think speaks to fans of Bethesda’s other massive RPGs: “Starfield isn’t really a game you play to complete, it’s more about living whatever sort of life you want in the literal universe Bethesda has created. Whatever you’re thinking of doing, you almost certainly can do it, and the scale is almost a release in a way – you’ll probably never see or do it all, so just enjoy the moment.”

The reviews have not been without controversy, however. Eurogamer posted an article explaining that their review would be late because Bethesda didn’t send out review code until a few days before the embargo lifted, making it impossible for them to review it in a timely fashion.

Now it goes without saying that review keys and codes is not a right. Companies can hand them out to whoever they wish and that’s understood across the industry. What’s odd about this is it wasn’t just Eurogamer. In their post, Eurogamer noted, “Access to the game appears to have been heavily restricted in the UK, where Bethesda has also not provided copies of Starfield to other websites and YouTube channels owned by Eurogamer parent company Reedpop”

Reedpop owns a substantial amount of gaming-related websites, including PushSquare, Rock Paper Shotgun and Outside Xbox. The decision to withhold code from them is a strange one. In what way has Reedpop seemingly offended Bethesda?

It’s not the first time Bethesda and Eurogamer have clashed, either. In 2019 Bethesda doubled down on its policy of handing out reviews keys at launch because they wanted everyone to experience the game at the same time. Eurogamer responded with a fairly scathing article that pointed out Bethesda’s hypocrisy because while they weren’t handing out Dishonored 2 codes, Skyrim Remastered had been in the hands of influencers for quite some time.

Edge magazine also didn’t get a review key, going against the idea that Bethesda was specifically targeting Reedpop, as Edge is owned by Future PLC.

We’ll probably never know exactly what happened, but I find little insider stories like this fascinating because they provide glimpses into the weird and wonderful industry of videogames and writing about them.