Post-release support for Starfield has been abysmal, and there hasn't been a single patch that has improved the game in any significant way. Now, another "big" patch has been released and... Bethesda continues to disappoint players..
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We already knew what this Starfield patch would include, given that most of the patches were previously listed and tested in the Steam beta, but now it's available to everyone. Again, though, it's almost exclusively bug fixes and some minor quality of life improvements that are frankly disappointing to be more than six months after the game's release.
You can read through the several hundred fixes in the Patch Notes if you want to see if any of them apply to you, and finally, all these months later, some of the biggest ones have been resolved (though some still remain).
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The Most Important Changes:
- Photomode: Added the ability to set expressions and poses for the player and companions in Photomode. – This is probably one of the less important updates (One of the new expressions is the “duckface”).
- Scanner: You can now open doors and collect with the scanner open. – A very basic functionality thing that should have been changed immediately.
- Setting the course to an inactive mission will now make that mission the active mission. – Makes sense.
- Added support for adjusting the FOV when using the spaceship in third person. – A nice visual update.
- Added an Anisotropic Filtering (PC) quality toggle. – More of a visual update than a real quality of life feature.
- Removed the digital lock cost for using undo during Safe Game. – This should never have been the case in the first place, and we shouldn't have had to back up locks for six months before this.
- Added autosave when fast-moving from a planet's surface to orbit. – This was a great way to lose a lot of progress, so yes, this is necessary.
- Updated the spaceship UI to run smoother at higher fps (frames per second).
Bethesda can't be given much credit for uploading Starfield patches that are still 98% bug fixes six months after release, and the new quality of life features are A) mostly visual changes or B) very small things that shouldn't have taken six months to add or change.
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Knowing that Starfield isn't a live-service game, players shouldn't be asking for extra missions to be added every month. But there are countless quality of life and balance issues that this game has needed from the beginning and still doesn't have. And even small content updates like extra spaceship or base pieces would go a long way. As would a roadmap that would reveal when we'll get things like city maps or new transports like they've said will be coming this year. It's mid-March and we haven't heard anything about when the Shattered Space DLC (expansion) will be coming this year.
Starfield needs much better post-release support than it's receiving, and Bethesda seems very slow compared to most modern game developers.
For example, Baldur's Gate 3 , which has been around for almost the same amount of time since its release, has received quite large patches.
This new "big" patch changes almost nothing.
Source: Forbes
