Official Bethesda Comment Says City Maps, Mod Support, and New Travel Methods Are Coming for Starfield

There were quite a few Starfield players that took to Reddit to voice their opinions about the recent Starfield Update 1.8.88, and we for one are happy they did. This prompted a response from the developers at Bethesda, which came in the form of an official comment. The comment is chock-full of information and definitely warrants analysis.

Let’s dissect this paragraph by paragraph; the first part is a nice gesture that basically says “we’re listening”. It’s unfortunate that the bar is so low for developers and community management these days that we need to give Bethesda a pat on the back with this official comment. That being said, this was a considerate announcement, and it shows that they do actually have people reading your Reddit comments for critiques of their game and its updates.

The following section gives us some information on the next update they’re planning to release. If nothing changes, we can expect these changes to Starfield in early 2024:

• “In-Progress” Quest fixes – I don’t know about you, but I never thought I’d see the day when I didn’t have to reload a save for a Bethesda glitch.
• FSR3 Compatibility – This is the upscaling technology from AMD. This newest iteration should help gamers eke out some more frames while playing at high resolution.
• XeSS Compatibility – Confusingly, this is Intel’s upscaling technology. Like FSR, it can be used on any GPU, so you might want to try it out to see if it works better for you than FSR.

The third paragraph is definitely the juiciest, and gives us a behind-the-scenes peek at what they have cooking up for future updates. One of these we already knew about, the mod support (we got a look at what it might look like with Skyrim’s recent update). However, we weren’t aware that Bethesda was working on “city maps”¦[and] all new ways of traveling”.

No city maps and having to spend tons of time walking across barren planets has been a sore spot for fans since the release of the game. We actually included both of these in our article titled “The 5 Skyrim Features Starfield Should Have Kept“. Including these two features would significantly improve the playability of the game, and frankly should have been shipped with the game’s release.

The last interesting topic they cover is their timetable for these updates. It’s always pleasant knowing when they plan to implement these changes, and the language here tells us that they’re shooting for every 6 weeks. So after their next update early next year, we can hopefully expect at least one of these features a month and half afterward. They also mention that if there’s any other fixes or improvements they can rush out with a hotfix, then they will. However, they want to take their time to make sure it integrates into their systems correctly.

We’re extremely interested in hearing your take on this. Are you still playing Starfield? If not, then is this enough to bring you back to the Settled Systems, or are these changes a Universal Time day late and a credit short? Tell us in the comments!