What To Expect From Starfield's First Beta Update Of 2024

Starfield, Bethesda’s enormous, 1,000-planet wide space RPG, arrived on September 6, 2023. After years of considerable hype, the game has had somewhat of a rocky first year. That said, Bethesda has promised new features, critical bug fixes, and more in 2024 and it’s opening the door for Steam users to beta test those new features and improvements, with the first update arriving on January 17, 2024.

How do you sign up for Starfield’s beta tests on Steam?

If you have Starfield on Steam, you can sign up for beta tests by right-clicking on the game in your library, selecting “Properties,” then “Betas,” and choosing “beta-Beta” from the dropdown. Check out our guide on Starfield’s upcoming 2024 updates for more details.

Bethesda promises more than ‘100 fixes and improvements’

In a post to X (formerly Twitter), Bethesda states that the full set of updates will ship to all players on all platforms around January 31. But if you’re in the Steam beta channel, here’s what’s getting deployed on January 17 for you:

• Fixes to the “Eye of the Storm” quest that prevented the story from advancing
• Temples in “Into the Unknown” should appear correctly
• Additional widescreen support
• Improved textures, lighting, and shadows
• Fixes for planet ring shadows and other visual space phenomena
• A fix to address asteroids getting stuck on ships
• Ship hatches stubbornly inaccessible

While next week’s beta won’t contain any brand new features, such as the “new ways of traveling” that Bethesda has teased in previous weeks, fixes to quests that repeatedly get stuck are perhaps some of the most welcome changes this time around. Bethesda previously promised to deliver updates around every six weeks starting in February. Expected features include city maps, extra ship customization and building options. Starfield is also slated to receive some story DLC with “Shattered Space.” Not much is known about this expansion, but it’s expected to arrive in the first half of 2024.