Since its release in September 2023, Bethesda has not exactly made a whole lot of significant updates to Starfield, but they promised that would start to change in 2024 with larger and more frequent patches.
Now, they are putting one of their new patches into a Steam beta with “100 fixes and improvements.” Then, it will launch in full by the end of the month.
There’s a lot of boring stuff like fixing bugs in various quests which again, some people have been encountering since early September at this point. But the thing to highlight is that Bethesda says that this update brings “brings stability improvements and numerous graphic improvements ranging from additional widescreen support to improved textures, lighting, and shadows.” The example they show for this part is two different characters in the creator mode:
Then, there are additional updates for “sun disk geometry, planet ring shadows.” And they have examples for that as well:
I am…a little perplexed about both of these, especially with the examples being show. The differences between the faces, at least from these example photos, seem really quite minimal, and the texture improvements have certainly not translated into the chunky hair and beards. Additionally, most of the game’s faces already looked pretty okay in the character creator itself, while things got a lot more questionable out in the open world with many, many more different kinds of lighting, so I’d have to see that in action.
As for the planet stuff, Starfield already has many vistas that look incredible. But if we’re talking about “planet ring shadows” I find that example given where there’s just a perfect straight-line cut going across that ring, that actually looks pretty weird to me.
So, this patch will be four months after launch, but it feels like it’s going to be mostly bug fixes and then these somewhat minor graphical improvements. The game has had close to no quality-of-life upgrades since launch, the most major being the ability to eat food right off a counter instead of putting it in your inventory.
Hopefully Bethesda’s promise of 2024 patches bring more improvements. We’ve been promised new means of traversal, which people think could be anything from land vehicles to the erasure of so many loading screens, but we’ll have to see. For now, in two weeks you can see how this patch makes things look. Or you can test it in the public Steam Beta on January 17.
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