The bizarre post-launch saga continues for Starfield, a game that has had almost no significant updates since its release in early September, leaving large bugs and apparent quality-of-life issues in place for months. A new sheet with a patch this week in the beta area, and all of this just confuses me more about what’s going on here.
We were told beforehand that this patch would include bug fixes and visual improvements. But when the patch notes arrive, we’re told that quality-of-life fixes will be available online:
“Our latest update is now available in our Steam beta. This update brings over a hundred fixes and tweaks, most of which focus on quality-of-life innovations and quest fixes.
I was excited by this until I…read the actual patch notes. The vast majority of this is just individual bug fixes for screwed up or blocked quests. The other small part is a list of some improved lighting and reflection tech in parts of the game, including on character’s faces.
What isn’t here is anything that would remotely be a quality-of-life solution. The game is in dire need of a lot of those fixes, weapon and difficulty balancing, stock management, shipping decorations placed in your shipping hold, oxygen or shipping capacity upgrades, saving. Continuous shipment of construction specifications, skills and origin, companions. They constantly lose their minds after the slightest crime. It’s a long list.
There is nothing like this. The only thing that could perhaps improve with a quality of life update is better widescreen support. But even that is more of a technology question. The rest is. . . bug fixes and graphical innovations, which are in no way quality of life innovations unless you use the maximum literal definition of the term (“this quest is no longer interrupted, my quality of life in Starfield “has just been interrupted”).
And they haven’t even steadied some of the larger bugs players have encountered since launch. Underneath the announcement tweets, dozens of gamers ask for fixes for the location of the ECS Constant error. And while it’s a less serious issue, my character has had a “weather risk” warning plastered on the character’s screen for literally 170 hours of gameplay. And on the generation side, there are no updates for FSR3.
Simply put, Bethesda is moving at a snail’s speed when it comes to Starfield updates, and they are now actively referring to bugs and lighting tweaks as quality-of-life improvements. While we know that more important updates are coming this year and that Bethesda is promising patches every six weeks, if they’re going to be like that, they may not be extremely useful or interesting.
I tried the beta and I didn’t have any of those mission blockers, so it doesn’t matter. Maybe the faces look a little better, but if you hadn’t told me there were changes, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. It’s just a strange situation, and next time we’ll get something really meaningful.
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