I was just saying on Twitter yesterday that Starfield’s post-launch support has been terrible, and there has not been a patch that has improved the game in a meaningful, significant way. Now, another big patch has dropped and…I believe Bethesda continues to prove me right.
We already knew what this patch was going to be, given that most of the notes were listed earlier and it was tested in the Steam beta, but it’s now live for everyone. And again, it’s almost entirely bug fixes and some quality-of-life updates that are honestly pretty absurd for being more than six months past launch here.
You can read the several hundred fixes in the patch notes if you want to see if any of them affect you, and finally, all these months later, some of the larger ones have been gotten to (though some still remain.
But the quality-of-life stuff? Here’s the list with my own commentary after.
- PHOTOMODE: Added the ability to set Expressions and Poses on player and companions in Photomode. – This is probably one of the least important updates I’ve ever seen. One of the new expressions is “duckface.”
- SCANNER: You can now open doors and harvest with the scanner opened. – An extremely basic functionality thing that should have been changed immediately.
- Setting course on an inactive quest will now make it the active quest. – Logical, obviously.
- Added support for adjusting FOV when using 3rd Person Ship view. – A good visual update, albeit I don’t like flying in third person personally.
- Added an Anisotropic filtering quality slider (PC). – This is more of a visual update than an actual quality of life feature.
- Removed the digipick cost for using Undo during the Security mini-game. – This should have never been like this in the first place and we should not needed to have save scummed locks for six months before this.
- Added an autosave when fast travelling from a planet’s surface to orbit. – This was a great way to lose a lot of progress so yes, this is needed.
- Updated the Ship UI to perform more smoothly at higher framerates. – Again, this is just visuals working how they’re supposed to, not true quality-of-life.
I simply cannot give Bethesda much credit for uploading patches that are still 98% bug fixes six months later, and quality-of-life features that are A) mostly visual changes or B) incredibly small things that should not have taken six months to add or change.
Yes, I recognize that Starfield is not a live service game. I am not asking for extra missions patched in every month. But there are countless QoL and balancing issues this game has needed since launch that it still doesn’t have. And even minor content updates like additional ship or base parts would go a long way. As would a roadmap revealing when we’re getting things like city maps or new traversal like they’ve said will come this year. And it’s halfway through March and we’ve heard nothing about when the Shattered Space expansion arrives this year.
Yes, this game needs much better post-launch support than it’s getting, and Bethesda feels painfully slow compared to most modern game devs. I would take even one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s big patches (they’ve done a bunch) and we have had nothing close to those here. This new “big” patch changes almost nothing, and I’m not going to humor people who say otherwise.
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