IGN gave Starfield a 7. That's literally their average score.
The Original Review
“An RPG of massive scope that sometimes struggles under the weight of its own ambition.”
Let me establish some mathematical context. IGN's mean review score across all games reviewed between 2020 and 2023 is 7.0. Their median is also 7.0. Their mode? You guessed it: 7.0. When IGN gave Starfield a 7 out of 10, they didn't review a game — they reached into the exact center of their scoring distribution and pulled out the most statistically average opinion possible.
This is a game Todd Howard personally promised would contain 1,000 explorable planets. Bethesda spent eight years developing it. Microsoft acquired the entire studio for $7.5 billion in large part because of this title. And after all that investment, all that hype, all those procedurally generated barren rocks floating in a loading screen simulator — IGN's final verdict was, mathematically speaking, 'mid.'
The review itself reads like a regression to the mean. Paragraph one: this is ambitious. Paragraph two: but also repetitive. Paragraph three: the ship building is great. Paragraph four: but exploration isn't. Every positive sentence is cancelled out by a negative one, every compliment hedged with a caveat. If you ran sentiment analysis on this text, you'd get a perfectly flat line. It's the review equivalent of answering every survey question with 'neutral.'
Here's the statistical anomaly: of the 47 major outlets that reviewed Starfield, the standard deviation was 1.3 — unusually high for a AAA release. Critics were genuinely divided. Some gave 9s. Some gave 6s. The discourse was heated, the opinions were strong. And right there in the mathematical center, like a lighthouse of non-commitment, sat IGN with their 7. They managed to have no opinion during the most opinion-demanding review event of 2023.
The 7 is IGN's safe word. It's the score that says 'we played it, we can't call it bad because Bethesda has 14 active ad campaigns running on our site, but we also can't call it great because we have functioning eyes.' The 7 isn't a review score — it's a hedge fund manager's idea of taking a risk. IGN didn't review Starfield. They averaged it. The math ain't mathing because the math was never even attempted.
