If you were hoping for new ways to bounce about Bethesda’s jumbo-sized galaxy in space RPG Starfield, you might be in luck. In a recent Reddit response on Reddit t, the developer appears to have teased an upcoming feature update that will add “new ways of traveling” and that fans should expect regular updates moving forward.
Though Starfield impresses with its galactic scale, the lack of more diverse ways to traverse—whether that’s within star systems or on its 1000 planets’ surfaces—has remained a sore spot for players of the open-world RPG. Bethesda has gone on the record saying the lack of ground vehicles is to encourage a slower paced exploration game loop. But a recent Reddit response to player feedback about the latest patch suggests there may be some new ways of getting around coming to Starfield. Bethesda’s response does not indicate what “new ways of traveling” means, but it’s sparked the imagination of fans hoping for the inclusion of vehicles or improved means of traversing star systems.
Starfield’s most recent update addressed a few sore spots: Namely the bug that sees asteroids getting stuck to ships (though it doesn’t fix the issue where a whole-ass city gets stuck), a fix to an outpost building bug, and a resolution to save issues cropping up when players stay on the same save file for too long without triggering the New Game Plus function. Fans of the game were eager for more updates, however. In responding to this, Bethesda said on Reddit:
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. Though we fixed several quest issues from occurring, in-progress quest fixes are much harder to fix and we’ve built a new system to correct those without you having to roll back your save.
We’re also hard at work on many of the new features you asked for, from city maps, to mod support, to all new ways of traveling (stay tuned!).
Kotaku has reached out to Bethesda for comment.
Bethesda aims for updates ‘roughly every six weeks’
The developer response on Reddit also indicates that fans should expect major updates to come every six weeks:
[Updates] 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.
Though Starfield is a single-player game, Bethesda and Xbox have been clear that they want to see it enjoy the same longevity and player retention as Skyrim.
Todd Howard, Starfield’s creative director, has stated that the game was “intentionally made to be played for a long time,” and has sometimes used live-service adjacent language to describe future growth.
What exactly Starfield’s future is remains uncertain, but it’s clear that what shipped on September 6, 2023 was only the start of Bethesda’s ambitions with its space RPG.
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