Starfield Will Be the Meme Game for Years to Come

It's not easy to balance space combat without seriously dumbing down the enemies, Todd Howard says.

Starfield's planets were originally supposed to be much more punishing for players, that is until Bethesda "nerfed the hell out of it," reveals Todd Howard.

Now that Bethesda’s massive space RPG has been with us for a little while, some of you are already wondering if there will be any Starfield DLC or not. You can’t have seen and done everything yet, though, surely?

It’s no secret that Starfield requires a powerful gaming PC. Even if you have the latest generation hardware and the best graphics settings, the game will still crush your framerate. PC optimizations are on the way at last though for Nvidia users, because the latest game drivers improve Starfield performance by a small margin on systems that support Resizable BAR.

Starfield's jogging speed can appear to be a little fast but thankfully if you're finding it to be an issue a few players have already created some mods to help. 

Starfield is getting official mod support in 2024, game director Todd Howard confirmed in an interview. Since the expansive space RPG's debut in early access, thousands of unofficial mods have been made available online, ranging from ones that enable Nvidia's DLSS upscaling system to making the inventory more compact and user-friendly. However, official modding tools make it easy to add fresh, custom content such as new planets and story quests, essentially opening the playing field for more experimentation. This has been the custom for Bethesda games at launch, where the modding community has been deeply involved with eliminating bugs or enhancing the experience, thanks to a deep understanding of the engine.

Bethesda has confirmed plans to introduce official mod support for Starfield in 2024.

Bethesda Game Studios RPG have a tendency to be mind-bogglingly massive experiences even at launch, and continue to only grow in size with significant post-launch support in the form of various updates and expansions. The recently-released Starfield very much seems to be following that same trajectory- but though we know Bethesda will release DLC for the sci-fi RPG, when exactly can we expect that DLC?

With Starfield now out, modders are already beginning to use the tools that they have at their disposal to improve and change the massive sci-fi RPG in a number of ways. And of course, this being a Bethesda RPG, there’s plenty of excitement surrounding what will be possible once the game’s full modding toolset is at the disposal of the community.

In late 2001, the dot-com crash struck ZeniMax, and a team of thirty-some developers in the company’s basement feared for their jobs. They were late delivering their new role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, to Microsoft; their board of directors had begun having doubts about the whole videogame enterprise. People were pulling seven-day workweeks on something none of them were sure would ever see the light of day. Morale was in the toilet.

Starfield fans were initially surprised to learn that there wouldn't be any land vehicles to explore the thousand planets available in Bethesda's new sci-fi roleplaying game. Game Director Todd Howard commented on the topic once again in the Bloomberg TV interview, where he reiterated the message that it was purely a design decision.

Starfield players are a creative bunch, and when they're not filling spaceships full of potatoes or building New Atlantis in Lego, they're using the robust character creator to recreate a bunch of famous faces.