If you’re still exploring the vast reaches of Starfield and are somehow hungry for more, you’re in luck. An “End of the Year Update” dropped by Bethesda outlined some of what’s to come in 2024.
04.12.2023 - 20:39 / screenrant.com / Todd Howard / Bethesda Softworks / Inon Zur / Best
is Bethesda Softworks’ biggest game yet in almost every respect, featuring an unprecedented amount of playable space, an inventive New Game Plus feature, and a record-breaking launch. The game took roughly seven years to complete—typical Bethesda games take around four—and is considered a true passion project on behalf of Bethesda director Todd Howard and the rest of the developers. In December 2023, was reported to see 1.2 million daily players, and had amassed somewhere around 12,000,000 players in total.
Although the game has been largely well-received (’sreview dubbed it an instant classic), there has been plenty of discourse around the best way to approach playing the game; the main campaign is said to take 30 to 40 hours to complete, but ship customization, settlement building, and exploration offer players endless hours of activity. Todd Howard has weighed in on the subject himself, as has longtime Bethesda Softworks composer Inon Zur. Zur, who previously composed music for Bethesda games including and, had this to say:
Inon Zur: I would say to players: Go out and explore. Don't treat Starfield as something that you need to start and finish. Imagine that this is a world that you live in right now, and you live with, and this is where you go and you escape, and this is where you build your home, and this is where you create friends and enemies and relationships. This is the right way to treat Starfield, [as opposed to] a movie that you watch from beginning to end. It's a very different approach in order to maximize what Starfield has to offer.
’s campaign has been lauded by many as one of Bethesda’s best but, as evidenced by Zur’s comments, it’s far from the full vision the developers had for the game. The game is so big that it may be easy for players to miss some of best quests on a first playthrough, especially if they are laser-focused on completing the main story. Much of is optional, but that means that players may miss something that could be their favorite part of the experience. Zur spoke on that subject as well:
Inon Zur: Again, this is very individual, because some people like this area of the game [and] some people like this area of the game. The only thing I can say is that you need to play the game again and again and again to really hone in on what you like. I heard [about] people that started and played it and, after 80 hours or whatever, they finished the game, but to me, to finish the game doesn't mean that they really experienced what Starfield had to offer yet. There are other elements that you need to dive into and develop that you cannot really do when you [just] finish the game.
Despite the massive amount of content already in, the developers are already looking past
If you’re still exploring the vast reaches of Starfield and are somehow hungry for more, you’re in luck. An “End of the Year Update” dropped by Bethesda outlined some of what’s to come in 2024.
Starfield will receive updates "roughly every six weeks starting in February" if Bethesda hit their target, according to an end of year wrap-up. "These updates will include everything from quality-of-life improvements to content and feature updates," including previously mentioned city maps, mod support and new methods of travel.
Microsoft has appointed Jill Braff as head of Bethesda/ZeniMax studios.
Can you believe it, but it is nearly the end of 2023. We made it guys! While many of us will likely be setting our sights on a bottle of Baileys and novelty Christmas pudding shaped confectionery, Bethesda is still all business, and has laid out its Starfield plans for 2024.
Bethesda Game Studios has confirmed that the first story expansion forStarfield, Shattered Space, will launch in 2024. It confirmed that more details on the “major expansion” will be revealed next year. Players can look forward to new locations, gear, story content and “much more.”
Today Bethesda posted a recap of the year Starfield has had in the form of a few fun facts: in 2023 players visited a collective 1.9 billion planets, spent 26 million hours building ships, and ate more than 18 million battlemeal multipacks. (Weirdly, no sandwich tally was provided.)
A new Starfield mod has gone out of its way to buff the Adoring Fan — the iconic (and rather irritating) companion character first seen in The Elder Scrolls4: Oblivion.
It's looking increasingly unlikely Starfield will have the quite same kind of longevity as its Bethesda RPG stablemates, but that isn't discouraging the studio from continuing to tinker with the space adventure's core — and one intriguing addition Bethesda has now confirmed is that «new ways of traveling» are coming at some point in 2024.
Bethesda Game Studios plans to update Starfield every six weeks or so in 2024, a studio representative posted on the game’s Reddit forum. This comes after Bethesda addressed several issues in a patch on Monday, one of which fixes a bug that gave player ship’s a “pet asteroid” — space stuff was getting stuck to ships.
Fallout 4’s “next-gen update”, announced just over a year ago as part of the series’ 25th anniversary celebrations, has seen its release date pushed back into next year - meaning it will arrive close to a decade after the last major entry in the franchise.
Open your map in Starfield and you won't see much more than a height map, even in cities. If you want to then travel around, you're limited to walking huge distances when on planet surfaces and using fast travel spaceship hops when in outerspace.
Bethesda has released a new and quite chunky update for Skyrim Special Edition, which in itself isn't all that remarkable. Sure the game is several years old now, but it is still very popular with players, so why not give the game a boost if it needs it.