2024 is supposed to be an eventful year for Starfield with its Shattered Space expansion coming and a promise of significant new patches every six weeks. This comes in the wake of the game barely being updated at all past bug fixes and graphics support since it launched early last fall, and now it’s just…well, we haven’t heard a whole lot. Anything, really.
The last major update we got from Bethesda about what was coming in 2024 was back on December 12 in 2023. And it’s now March, with one big patch come and gone, though that was mostly about visual fixes and again more bugs. They said it also had quality of life updates but I couldn’t actually find anything to meet that definition in the entire release. Before that, they made it so you can directly eat food off tables. I am not exaggerating when I say that’s the biggest quality of life fix we’ve seen in Starfield since launch.
So where is all the actual…stuff? In the December 12 note, which was literally just a developer comment on reddit, they mentioned things like city maps and an “all new way of traveling” which many players took to mean land vehicles. Personally I was hoping for a “new way to travel” that just involved fewer loading screens, but they shared no details. Official mod support has also been promised too but…yeah, none of it is here. And none of it has even been dated past “some time in 2024.” It also stands to reason that the ship and base builders will get new additions as well, given that Fallout added a ton of that stuff over time. Though again, nothing released, nothing even mentioned.
If we’re following the “every six week” cadence of patches, then the next one should be hitting in mid-March. No, Starfield is not a live service, but you don’t need to be a live service to have open communication with fans or frequent patches for rebalancing or adding quality of life features or minor additions. Baldur’s Gate 3 has been loaded with huge, often majorly significant patches since launch and Starfield in contrast has really done nothing at all in almost six months. It’s pretty weird.
I do think mod support specifically could help Starfield find at least some measure of new life, as it has with past Bethesda games, and there is a lot of potential there. No, many core issues of Starfield will never be fixed, but new additions or just fixing quality of life issues could really help the game. Instead, all we have are very old comments and the most relevant news cycle about the game focused on whether or not Microsoft would release it on PlayStation (they aren’t. Not yet, at least).
I have no idea what Bethesda’s plan here is for Starfield, but their communication has been abhorrent and their patch timeline has been essentially non-existent. The idea was to do better starting in 2024, but so far, with one patch down and another allegedly coming soon, it doesn’t seem like much has changed at all.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
