On January 16, hours before Starfield’s massive update was scheduled to go live in beta form on Steam, developer Bethesda Game Studios announced its delay. The team said it still plans to drop the patch sometime this week, but until it can iron out a newly discovered (and unnamed) issue, we’ll have to wait for those “over 100” tweaks coming to the spacefaring RPG.
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Bethesda Game Studios delivered the news on its official Discord server and X/Twitter on Tuesday, January 16. In the relatively short post, the studio wrote “we discovered an issue we want to address before releasing our update into the Steam Beta.” The new release date, which is still set for this week, is imminent.
The delay is a bit of a bummer because the Starfield update was promised to be massive and all-encompassing. The over 100 tweaks and improvements are set to include fixes to the Crimson Fleet’s “Eye of the Storm” mission, additional widescreen support, changes to the game’s lighting and textures, and other critical adjustments to smooth out the RPG’s performance. The Steam beta launch approach offers a staggered approach to updates that will ideally give the team room to test features before they go live for everyone else.
Kotaku reached out to Bethesda Game Studios for comment.
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This patch, which Bethesda Game Studios says is scheduled for later this week, doesn’t include the “new ways of traveling” the studio teased in December 2023. That addition doesn’t have a release date yet, but the team promised that Starfield updates are currently slated for roughly every six weeks, with one of the more recent ones fixing the pet asteroid issue that saw little space rocks (and other objects) endlessly following players throughout the galaxy. It sounds like the plan for Bethesda Game Studios is to pave the cracks on the space RPG’s road before the Shattered Space DLC drops in the first half of 2024—if that window remains unchanged, that is.
