The latest Starfield patch, currently in Steam Beta, has players optimistic for the future of Bethesda’s massive space RPG.
Since its release last September, Starfield has garnered pretty mixed reviews. While some have spent hundreds of hours in the game and are still delighted to find more secrets in its massive universe, others fell off of it pretty quickly, citing a weak gameplay loop and underwhelming story content.
Not helping the matter was the fact that Bethesda was initially slow to release updates.
That’s changed recently, with the developers launching two updates since the beginning of 2024, with another currently in Steam Beta. These patches and their many fixes have players feeling good about the game, a positive sign for Starfield’s future.
Starfield players hopeful following two major patches
Bethesda shared patch notes for the latest Starfield update when it entered Steam Beta this week. There’s no word yet on when the update will go live for all players on both PC and Xbox, but considering the last update was in Beta for about two weeks, the wait probably won’t be too long.
While most players won’t be able to experience the changes just yet, the patch notes alone have some feeling better about the state of Starfield and Bethesda’s post-launch support plans.
As Reddit user Loose_Respond_6855 put it, “I was greatly surprised by the number of fixes (over 500!) brought by the latest update, in addition to the first quality of life updates.”
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The poster goes on to praise Bethesda’s strategy of “first fixing bugs, then gradually introducing quality of life updates,” speculating that QoL changes and new features will eventually outnumber the bug fixes.
As the comments show, they aren’t the only ones “reassured” by the update.
“Honestly very surprised at the sheer volume of them,” said one user in reference to the number of patches and significant changes within them.
While there’s plenty of work still to be done – the comments are full of players asking if specific bugs or frustrations have been addressed yet – it’s certainly a positive sign for Starfield. At the very least, it’s Bethesda fulfilling a promise it made at the end of 2023 when it announced it would be “targeting updates roughly every six weeks starting in February.”
It’ll likely be a while until we get significant content updates, including the Shattered Space expansion that was announced pre-launch. Still, these recent Starfield updates seem to be laying the groundwork for future additions that could have more players putting at least another 800 hours into exploring the universe.
