After let’s say a half dozen articles of me complaining that Starfield has had poor post-launch support these last 7+ months, Bethesda has finally come up with a patch that yes, I would consider significant, at least in terms of quality of life features it adds.
The new patch was announced yesterday, and it goes live on May 15. But you can test the patch now in the game’s beta client, which is what I’ve been doing. And I have some things to report about its major changes and additions. I’ll go through them all one by one:
Maps – The freeze frames of these being circulated did not look great, but in practice, they are actually solid enough. Better than nothing, certainly, even though many of these cities are layered in ways that make maps sort of hard to convey, hence why I don’t think those maps existed in the first place.
Open world planet maps are much, much more basic, vast stretches of flat space with distributed landmarks relative to your ship. Not really much to expect beyond that, but better than the bizarre blob we had before. I do think the whole map thing is going to mainly be for newer players to the series because I mean, it’s a nice feature but you’re not exactly returning to the game for it, are you?
Gameplay Difficulty Options – This was the one I was the most curious about, as I have said that in the “endgame,” Starfield gets way, way too easy, even on its hardest difficulty. For a game that wants you to keep doing Unity loops but lets you keep your power level, that’s a problem. Now, there is a new “Extreme” difficulty setting you can apply to make enemies do more damage and you do less.
Unfortunately at least one major aspect of this is…very broken in the beta. Many enemies simply cannot scratch me. I’m receiving tiny amounts of damage from even max level enemies in a way that was not happening before. I was strong pre-patch, but not literally immortal.
This is very inconsistent. It feels like some enemies and gun types do do normal, heavy damage, but the majority of humans I fought were shooting me with marshmellows. Meanwhile, my guns still feel extremely strong and a handful of crits remains enough to take down anyone. This doesn’t seem “bugged” per se, but from what I can tell this is not dramatically transforming difficulty.
It’s more than just an extra hard mode, however. There are a lot of survival aspects Bethesda has thrown in here like settings for food, medicine, sleep, injury and disease that you can make more unforgiving for XP bonuses. If you really want to be a sadist you can lower your carrying capacity. It’s perhaps not a full survival mode, but a way to make the game more challenging in a way that doesn’t necessarily just have to do with combat difficulty. I don’t like that sort of thing but others might, and this was something people were asking for.
Ship Interiors – No fully new exterior ship parts, it seems, which is really disappointing, but they are fixing the problem where it was almost impossible to customize your ship interior as if you did so, moving or editing ships would throw everything in storage. Now, there are empty modules you can put in for complete customization and the whole thing works very similar to base-building now. I am not someone who would spend hours on this stuff, but it’s a nice feature for those who really want to make their ship a home.
Unity Respec – You can now respect your traits when you go through the Unity, when previously you could only remove them in various parts of the game. It’s a good feature, and one I would have probably taken advantage of had I not done the Unity three times already and I am very tired of losing my progress and wiping all my ships, bases and gear, which I maintain is a very poor NG+ system, which I even said in my ultra-positive review.
New Dialogue Camera – This is such a small thing, but it gets rid of the “Bethesda stare” where characters look right at you center frame every time you talk. In third person, it won’t zoom you in and you’ll just bring up the dialogue options where you stand. While this may not be the best in every situation, I find the option to have this really nice as in my opinion, it helps with immersion a bit.
This is more or less it, as I’m not testing framerate stuff on Xbox Series X. We also got a tease for land vehicles coming to the game, but that’s not in this May 15 patch, and I have many questions about how that’s going to work.
In summary, this is more of a patch for players just starting out, I’d argue. Things like city maps or the dialogue camera are probably more usefully employed for new players rather than being something veterans return for. If you really want to respect traits you can do another Unity run, but that’s it. The difficulty change options are nice, but again, if you’re “done” with the game, it’s not a reason to head back, and at least one aspect is super broken right now. Even new players should probably just wait for future updates, if not the Shattered Space expansion this fall, as it feels like a building block, not a jumping off point.
We’ll talk more when the patch itself is here, so stay tuned for that in two weeks.
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