A new Starfield update is planned for next week's Steam beta, with a focus on quality of life improvements and bug fixes: the scanner gets an upgrade, mission tracking gets improved, and you'll finally be able to smile in your photos .
Detailed patch notes won't be released until next week, but Bethesda will break down the highlights shortly Series of tweets. The update changes the scanner so you can still use it while harvesting resources or opening doors. If you set a course for an inactive mission in the mission tracker, it will be activated automatically.
The practical improvements are great, but my favorite is a purely cosmetic change: the expressions are coming to photo mode.
“Now you can customize your character and companions to match the mood of your recording,” Bethesda tweeted. “And Vasco gets some new poses too.”
It's a mood, okay:
📷 We're adding expressions to photo mode! Now you can customize your character and companions to match the mood of your shot – and Vasco gets some new poses too. pic.twitter.com/6oZhJuBqvQMarch 1, 2024
A bug that caused David Barron to disappear in the Sabotage mission will also be fixed, as will one that caused players' heads to turn left when sprinting, and another that prevented that Starborn Temples were displayed correctly.
Apparently there won't be any new content in this update, but Bethesda said it's preparing to add more content later this year. The studio announced in late 2023 that major changes were coming to Starfield in 2024, including “survival mechanics” and “all-new types of travel,” with updates expected to be released approximately every six weeks starting in February. However, so far the focus has been almost exclusively on the technical side, such as bug fixes, gameplay optimizations and support for FSR3 upscaling, which went live last week.
That's all good – Starfield could certainly use the work – but fans are really hungry for more things to happen and that hasn't happened yet. It's been six months since Starfield's release, which isn't a huge amount of time, but only nine months separated the release of Skyrim and its first expansion, Dawnguard – and so far Starfield really doesn't seem to have the breakthrough power of Skyrim. Official modding tools would probably do a good job of filling this particular gap, but while this was promised for 2024, no release date has been announced yet.
The next Starfield update is scheduled to go live in the Steam beta on March 6th.
