Starfield. It’s the game gamers love to hate, and also love to hate play for hundreds of hours, if what they say and what they do is anything to go by. A Bethesda game through and though. Now, Bethesda is at the point where they are delivering some much needed improvements, but it’s also raised questions in the community.
As they have shared on their website, Update 4 will add a toggle to prioritize either visuals or performance on Xbox Series X, just like most current generation games today. Performance mode will focus on keeping the game at 60 FPS, which may come at the cost of certain visual effects, but again, none of this is new.
They have also added new functionality for gamers who have VRR screens. For VRR screens below 120Hz, you will get to choose between 30 and 60 FPS, but if you are at 120Hz and above, your choices go up to 30, 40, 60, and uncapped FPS.
Other chances coming are new surface maps with more information, new difficulty settings, including an Extreme difficulty mode, and the option to set different difficulties for things like ship combat and ground combat, Ship decoration, the choice to reset Traits and your appearance on New Game Plus, and of course, the usual set of bug fixes.
In their video, Starfield’s lead creative producer Tim Lamb revealed that Bethesda is working on land vehicles now. That’s not quite ready, but if walking through planets until the endgame was what bothered you about this game, Bethesda is going to address it too.
Of course, you were probably already thinking, why Bethesda did not deliver 60 FPS to Starfield at launch? Well, if you think about it a few minutes, Starfield was already way delayed as it is when it released last September 6, 2023.
This meant that Bethesda and Microsoft made a difficult call at that time between two choices that they knew wouldn’t make everyone happy. If they waited until Bethesda was able to get 60 FPS ready for just the Xbox Series X version of Starfield, that would have been an eight month delay. Over half a year!
Let’s pass on the debate about the quality of Bethesda’s games in general. Clearly, Microsoft made the assessment that Starfield was ready to release, and that there was enough interest in the game that not being able to launch at 60 FPS shouldn’t hold them back. Of course, PC gamers could get to 60 FPS, depending on their builds.
Maybe you personally didn’t like Starfield, but they have the numbers showing it was a critical and commercial success. An 85 PC/ 83 Xbox Metacritic, with many reviews on 9s and 10s, and a concurrent player peak of 13 million last December 2023.
Now, Bethesda is working to address at least some of those criticisms that dropped that Metacritic from the 90s range. While it won’t change the actual metascore, these changes might lead to making Starfield a real GOTY-worthy title in the future.
