28 December 2023 , 14:07
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Even though Starfield was delayed by one whole year, it's still managed to be somewhat of an embarrassing flop for Bethesda, but the planned updates set to roll out next year might actually save the game.
Starfield launched back in September, after a delay saw it pushed back from its original launch date of November 11, 2022. Expectations were high, thanks – in no small part – to Bethesda's Todd Howard hyping up the game during Starfield Directs and all of the possibilities that awaited us. But it turns out that not having land vehicles, city maps, or other basic features at launch, and a plethora of generic, procedurally generated planets for the sake of bragging rights (1,000 of them, remember!) didn't resonate with players in the way the studio thought it would. Shocker.
But there's always time to right the ship, as we saw with No Man's Sky, and Cyberpunk 2077; of course, maybe games should actually be in a polished, finished state at launch rather than retroactively patching them into a half decent product promised to consumers in the first place. But that's the new norm for the industry in recent years. Now I'm not saying horse armour is to blame but when a butterfly flaps its wings...
Bethesda has shared an end of year update detailing the Starfield roadmap for 2024, promising mod support and updates every six weeks. While it hasn't outright said that land vehicles are being added, their absence has been a point of contention in the community since the game's release, so spotting "new ways to travel" in the blog post surely has to be referring to this. If not, there's going to be more grumbling among players!
Here's everything Bethesda is promising to add to the game in the Starfield roadmap for next year from the official blog post and a reddit post from the studio.
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Starfield roadmap 2024
- A large number of 'in-progress' quest fixes following update 1.8.88
- Support for AMD FSR3 and Intel XeSS
- City maps
- Mod support
- New ways to travel
- New ways to customise ships
- New gameplay options to affect difficulty
- Starfield Shattered Space DLC
- Updates and fixes roughly every six weeks
- Hotfixes in between updates where possible
Bethesda has highlighted that while it's fixed some quest issues, the in-progress quests are "much harder to fix" and it's had to build a whole new system to sort those out so players don't have to roll back their saves. The studio stresses that any small updates rolling out between the big six-week ones will only be implemented if it's safe to do so.
"Safe is the key here. We do take a lot of time to test even the smallest change in a game this large and dynamic," reads the reddit post, so temper your expectations on how fast bugs can be zapped accordingly.