Yesterday we brought news of a new bite-sized update for Starfield, and in a follow-up post on Reddit, Bethesda has confirmed that there's lots more to come - including some huge new features for the Xbox RPG.
Basically, the team was justifying yesterday's minor update by explaining that "hotfixes" will sometimes drop more regularly if the team is ready to go with certain tweaks, but more substantial updates are also in the works. Here's a chunk of the dev's message - including hints at a brand-new way of traveling:
"We’re also hard at work on many of 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.
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."
The team says we can "expect an update early next year that will include a large number of 'in-progress' quest fixes" while the team works away on these bigger features. Some of these would mark major changes to Starfield, so we'd expect them to be in the works a little longer yet!
Speaking of traveling in Starfield, Todd Howard touched on the subject right around launch - claiming that adding land vehicles would "change the gameplay", so we're curious as to what these new travel methods end up being. Hopefully we'll find out soon enough.
Interested in what's next for Starfield? Tell us what you'd like Bethesda to implement down below.
[source reddit.com]
Comments 43
New ways of fast traveling
Fixed it for ya!
I don't even have a jetpack and am 200 hours in. Scan every planet 100% before leaving.
Gonna be funny if they add vehicles when you can already traverse everything so quick.
Don't see how they can really fix the fast traveling it's one of the down points of the game but it's still a good game would love better ship combat in the game if you could have huge epic battles in space hopefully in the paid dlc
@InterceptorAlpha Why no love for jetpacks so far Into the game?
That’s the thing that got me.
An exploratory game, land on a planet, scan a few items about 1000 meters away and a painful trip of travelling on foot and help from the jet pack to get there.
A massive omission of suppling a form of transport, how dumb can you get.
Even if it was some sort of hoover board at three times the speed would have done the job.
I mean it’s the basic rules of open world or exploration games. Also the attention span/points of interest to travel distance is terrible.
I’ve uninstalled the game for now and will wait for more updates. I think about a year from release we will have a really super decent game once Bethesda get their act together with patches.
Tod Howard’s excuse for not having planetary transport is an extremely poor excuse.
Ok maybe not on the main populated planets but once out exploring on other planets they could have easily added a little hoover board to get to points of interest that you have scanned a lot more quickly.
They need to release since Skyrim etc the gaming world has moved on, just look at the amount of door loading and long loading times, that’s at least a decade old gaming not 2023.
Obviously their game engine tech and development processes are decades behind others in the business.
@eire-shabba I feel the jetpack takes away from the NASA punk vibe of the game and ruins some of the realism.
To add, it was clearly an after thought. Absolutely everything in the game is accessible without it. It is merely a convenience.
Same reason all the complaints about no ground vehicles are silly.
I 100% survey planets typically on 10 minutes or less, unless there's water fauna. Any extra time is for gathering resources or exploring POIs.
When you can sprint from you ship to the edge of the boundary in maybe 5-6 minutes if you have O2 upgrades, the jetpack just seems like a wasted point.
I need to get back to this. I really enjoyed what I played of the game. Just got sucked away to finish games like Alan Wake 2. But I’m all improvements!
@InterceptorAlpha I agree no real need for vehicles but I wouldn't overly mind if they were fun to use and I love the jet pack to get around I use it all the time a boost feature for it wouldn't go a miss and if more enemies used it aswell usefully the combat would be more enjoyable
There were some aspects of this game I liked, but it was the most broken game I've ever played. I couldn't even finish the Crimson Fleet quest because of a bug. With games like Starfield and Redfall MS could have had infinite better ways to spend 8 billion. The only upside to Starfield is all the Gamepass subscribers that didn't pay $70 for a janky piece of trash.
Wow after all my moaning about Starfield just looked at my end of year Xbox stats.
Most played game Starfield over 60 hours, dam shocked 🤯.
@OldGamer999 Well you probably only spent about 30 hours of actual gameplay and the other half was inventory management 😂
@Tanuki_Bob I'm kind of the same, but I like space faring RPGs quite a bit so I thought Starfield might work for me. But BGS had all their problems the fanboys of gaming give them a pass for, but ratcheted up a few notches.
so we're curious as to what these new travel methods end up being. Hopefully we'll find out soon enough
People have made it clear they are not enthused by realism (unless it's mindless bloody visceral violence) so the travel method will probably be flying unicorns or to really go to town, how about riding on Nazgŭl.. that should cheer everyone up 🤣🤣
Hopefully they send all the hideous New Atlantis NPCs to the Enhance shop. I'm not sure how they can fix the terrible storyline and dialogue with patches though.
So this is the Todd Howard was wrong patch? It's still amusing how much No Man's Sky envy that Starfield has. It is still very early in this games life. Just stop making Definitive statements and say it's a process.
I played over 100 hours and did really enjoy it at times, but this game should have been delayed another year. I ran into one serious bug that caused me to lose quite a bit of time. That was my biggest complaint, but mostly it just felt unfinished. All the things they are talking about adding should have been part of the game at launch. I have no desire to play again. It just doesn't have that "pull" like Oblivion, Skyrim or Fallout 3 & 4. I am a bit worried about ES6. Why can they not just use Unreal Engine? Is it an ego thing?
@Serpentes420
Shame there wasn’t a break down of that 😂
@husker42c I'm the exact same. Now on over 110 hours while having the game crash almost every play session and lost large game time over than 110 hours.
I'm desperate to finish the game now and not really enjoying it anymore but can't stop after committing that much time already.
They should have delayed it a year, got it stable, implemented the quality of life improvements and generally improved the game.
Does anyone else get creeped out by Phil Hill. Every time I speak to him he talks facing away from me and slowly moves his head to talk in my general direction. His body remains the same direction.
How this game launched without city maps is beyond ridiculous. That been a staple of bugthesda games for decades. Even long before starfield went into development.
Also fix the sgt yumi quest. Says go talk to him. I do. He just says hi and no quest update.
@OldGamer999 Todd Howard is well known snake oil salesman. Really became public knowledge after the whole "it just works" fiasco and the Fallout 76 release that was simply pushed out for money.
Glad I haven't played Starfield yet. Waiting for more and more updates. It's a Bethesda game afterall.
@OldGamer999 Out those 60 hours you probably spent 80 hours fast traveling and 80 additional hours in load screens.
@Serpentes420 but....but....but.....all those bugs are just.... "endearing".
rolls eyes at the brainwashed fanboys
@StonyKL Is there an exorcism skill tree in the game? I'd try that and see if solves the problem.
@GuyinPA75
When they made Skyrim I really liked Bethesda but since then, Fallout didn’t do it for me and Starfield really isn’t what it should have been.
So as a studio I really don’t understand any Bethesda hype and if you look around apart from the Bethesda fans, no one really thinks much of them nowadays. They not even know to the masses like in the Skyrim days.
I'm not going back until I'm able to skip the unskippable cutscenes. Even Andromeda devs patched that ability in.
Was my most played game this year. Playing both on Series X and PC, and it is amazing. So many things to-do.
Best questline so far was Crimson Fleet, simply amazing.
Had some bugs but nothing a save reload didn't fix.
Game is awesome. Hope Bethesda keep updating it for years to come.
Lack of city maps was probably the most baffling part of this game, to me.
This also sort of makes me want to hold off on playing much more of the game. I'd rather play it with the updates to get the full experience, as it were.
GP member and dloaded on release but really just started playing it in the last few weeks. I am enjoying it and haven’t experienced any lockups or game breaking bugs. I haven’t gotten a jetpack yet but the thoughts on vehicles and the NASApunk vibe….umm when NASA did the moon visits they had moon buggies to get around. That was like 50yrs ago….so to think in the future they have space bending FTL gravity drives but no basic terrain vehicles is lame. I do think the planet exploration (only visited a handful) could be spiced up some, hopefully future DLC will add more to planets/mokns that is story driven giving reasons to explore. A few tweaks to inventory management would be nice as it annoying to not be able to see the quantity of items you already hold when shopping. The encumbrance system is OK but would be handy to be able to manage all party members and yourself at the ship hold. The upgrade system seems good and same with the character leveling. I am finding the main story compelling enough and the factions and missions seem good as well. As to those wishing the game had been held longer before release…..this is the world we live in now, just about every major game that isn’t published by Nintendo comes out in some incomplete format. CP2077, No Man’s, most Ubi and EA games all seem to release ‘too soon’. These games are major investments and usually devs stick with the game after release to get them right. My recommendation if this irks you…..DON’T pre-order or by a game at launch and wait for things to get sorted out. I waited on CP2077, just bought it used on disc for $15 and now its fully next gen, in a great state and worth playing. Starfield seems more than worth playing in its current state but I am sure its gonna be even better in another year.
I just want more backgrounds/traits for character creation.
I've got the exact complaints of everyone in here, but the Temples...... my God the Temples are such an inane game mechanic. There is nothing fun, challenging, redeeming or sensible abut them and it's an important mechanism.
No 60fps update? Absolute shambles that games are still been made at 30fps.. Boycott
I saw somewhere that a Ship Building career mod was added. Allows you to take on job requests to built specific spaceships for clients based on their needs. Then you could actually chance upon them in space. With such a big part that ship building is in the game i would love to see something like this added. Also, naming all the solar systems would be nice. You could turn them on and off like in the powers menu. Love the game but so much can be made better.
if they can make us travel smoothly it would be so amazing no loading time between galaxies if they could do that my 8/10 would become 9/10.
@OldGamer999 Yeah, I was over 3 days played without even noticing. My focus was on getting Lies of P and Yakuza 6 complete so I could concentrate more on Starfield and The Man Who Erased His Name. Now I've shifted to Starfield and have over 5 days completed. I've just completed the Mantis mission and am basically at the start of the main mission.
@Kalele Do you mean we would just "drive" to planets?
@eire-shabba Getting the vehicles right would be tough due to the terrain on some planets. I would somewhat welcome them though. When I see a POI 1+ km away, I wish for in-game land vehicles.
@theduckofdeath
I did the Mantis mission and took their ship.
Maybe do the Join the Ranger missions, I have their ship now and find it is better.
@husker42c Why would you be worried about ES VI? It will have a similar scope to Fallout and the previous ES games. Most of the complaints about Starfield due to it being set in space and all the factors that introduces. SF is less buggy than Bethesda's previous games, so that should get carried forward.
Switching engines is not so simple. UE does not do a ton of what CE does. Bethesda would need to hire a team with UE expertise and get the veterans up to snuff. First, then would have to do a feasibility study on porting CE systems in UE.
@theduckofdeath He's not the only one who is slightly worried for ESVI. You say it will have a similar scope to previous BGS games but that is part of the problem. Many feel BGS have been on the slide since Skyrim and aren't innovating like they used to. Fallout 4 was a good game but a backwards step, Fallout 76 a disaster at launch, Starfield was a good game but another backwards step. These aren't the industry leading games of yesteryear. You can't put out the same thing 15 years later and expect similar praise when everyone else has evolved. It feels a bit like Bioware all over again.
To give a bit more context. Several people have put out polls about this question. e.g. Luke Stephens put out a poll that 30,000 gamers answered and around half said they were less excited for ES6 after Starfield. It isn't a crazy niche view.
That said I don't want to overstate it, I still think ES6 will be good, probably very good, but I am worried it will be safe and that the days of Bethesda leading the industry in terms of innovation in RPGs are over. At the end of the day we all just want really great games.
@husker42c There are some valid reasons not to use Unreal Engine. Their team is used to Creation Engine, modders are used to it, etc. They can probably get out games quicker with it in the short term as they are used to this workflow and pipeline. Changing engine would delay things and have teething problems.
But there are a lot of downsides to Creation Engine too.
Theoretically there is no reason UE5 couldn't be modified to run all the systems Creation Engine has, as it's completely modular. But at some point if you are replacing so much it might make better sense to build your own engine from scratch. But in my view it does need to change, it causes so many of the issues in their games, don't think we will see it though.
@themightyant I don't think it is worth worrying about. ES has a massive advantage over Starfield; it's set in a fantasy world (singular) that we all have preconceived notions about. They're all based on Tolkein and popular cultural myths/tales. The highest technology are swords (and magic, if that counts). There are fantasy races of people, mythical creatures, and the ruins of ancient civilizations to discover, strewn throughout the wilderness.
I'll be in my 50's by the time ES VI arrives so no, I'm not counting the minutes until arrival.
As for polls, people with negative views will always dominate polls. That is human nature. The guy in the clip compared the anticipation of ES VI for people who (allegedly) played Starfield to that of people who played Phantom Liberty awaiting The Witcher 4.
Do I really need to say anything about this? CP2077 came out 3 years ago (I bought it on PC at launch and have yet to play it). The game was in rough shape, even on PC. Only now is it redeemed, and not universally, after 3 years of patches, added features, and a full-fledged $30 campaign DLC. Starfield was received far better and was in far better shape at launch...which was 3 months ago.
CPDR pushes the technological envelope and the Witcher tends to have complex storylines, I'll give them that. All their games are set on a single map and single planet, that worry is assuaged.
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