Starfield’s first major update of 2024 delivers bugfixing, mostly

Though it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, Starfield certainly has made a name for itself among gaming audiences. The developer, Bethesda, is thankfully not dropping its post-launch updates anytime soon. The game’s latest update is about to get a beta very, very soon, in fact.

As Bethesda promised late in 2023, Starfield is due to receive major, meaningful patches every six weeks or so in 2024. This improvement to the game’s updating cadence won’t be dropping in until sometime in February, but the good news is that Bethesda’s plans for the interim update are more substantial than we might’ve expected. On top of the usual suite of bug fixing, for example, we’re due to receive a whole assortment of graphical improvements to boot.

Starfield’s first update of 2024 is promising, but not groundbreaking

Certainly, Bethesda’s plans for Starfield‘s official updates are hardly as exciting as one modder’s plight to develop pilotable mechs, but they’re fairly promising in their own right. On top of fixing some truly infamous bugs, such as those sticky asteroids and inaccessible ship hatches, Bethesda also appears to be working on a few interesting graphical improvements for Starfield.

As per Bethesda’s explanation, players can expect “improved textures, lighting, and shadows” in the game, as well as improvements to sun disk geometry and the rendering of planet ring shadows. Objects torn down to build up outposts will no longer pop back up, either, which was a royal pain when building on steep terrain and the like. Further, “additional widescreen support” is being touted as well, though there’s no word yet on what, exactly, that might be referring to.

This means that the “new ways of traveling” update isn’t on Bethesda’s docket just yet, but we’re still looking at some fairly promising improvements here.

Much as was the case with Starfield‘s DLSS update, the first patch of 2024 will first be available in beta form via Steam, starting on January 17. Bethesda claims we’ve got “over 100 fixes and improvements” to look forward to, and the fact that it’s all coming in relatively soon is good news indeed, and a solid start of the year for Starfield. Let’s see if Bethesda can keep this up.