Starfield fans were feeling restless after yesterday’s small update fixed a handful of bugs. Bethesda jumped in the comments and explained the tiny update was mainly meant to fix the ‘pet-asteroid’ bug before the holidays.
The developer then provided a status update for what’s coming in the new year.
“We’ve been hard at work on many of the issues you’ve posted, and expect an update early next year that will include a large number of “in-progress” quest fixes as well as FSR3 and XeSS.”
And now to the good stuff (emphasis mine):
“We’re also hard at work on many new features you asked for, from city maps, to mod support, to all new ways of traveling (stay tuned!). These will be rolling out with a regular cadence of fixes and updates we expect to have roughly every six weeks.”
The new travel options are intriguing. Land vehicles are the obvious guess, but Bethesda’s Todd Howard explained (via PureXbox) in an interview with Bloomberg why they opted against including them at launch.
“Once you do vehicles, it does change the gameplay, so by focusing once you land in your ship that you’re on foot, it lets us really — for the players — make it an experience where we know how fast they’re seeing things.”
You can see his complete response in the video below (the question starts at 3:03 if the video doesn’t play there).
Maybe we’ll see better solar system navigation or changes to the jetpack. Or they do add land vehicles despite originally deciding against it. But are the play areas big enough to warrant land vehicles? We’ll have to wait and see what Bethesda is doing on this front.
They also mentioned mod support again, but there is still no firm date there. I previously wrote how there’s a three to five-month window from launch to the inclusion of official modding tools in previous Bethesda titles. We’re at the three-month mark from launch, but it’s also the holiday season. Mid-Feburary would put us at five months. We know the dev team is planning significant updates about every six weeks starting in 2024.
In the meantime, we could still see more minor hotfixes between these larger updates.
From Bethesda:
“If something can be done in a smaller hotfix in between (like the asteroid), and we feel it’s safe, we’ll get one of those out as well. 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.”