Bethesda Game Studios is fixing one of the worst things about Starfield — its maps. The lack of readable maps was one of my biggest gripes with the spacefaring adventure game; regardless of how many times I visited a city, I got lost. Thankfully, that’s changing. It’s an essential part of Starfield’s latest patch, which is currently in beta, that also adjusts several other annoying issues with the game. Bethesda doesn’t have a release date for the patch just yet, but it shouldn’t be too long.
“We’ve heard your feedback, and we’ve made some big improvements to surface maps, so you’ll always know just where to go and no longer ‘get lost’ on the way to your parents’ place (and they weren’t buying that excuse anyway, you should really go visit them),” a Microsoft representative wrote in the latest Starfield patch notes.
The next-best update that’s part of this patch is expanded difficulty options; the example Bethesda pulled out is that you can make ground combat harder but ship combat easier. As someone who found Starfield’s ship combat occasionally infuriatingly hard, I love this change. The other big change is the ability to decorate your ship like you can with outposts, forgoing the way you had to previously (i.e. just imprecisely dropping stuff everywhere). Now, you can use tools to place your stuff exactly where you want it to go.
Beyond that, there’s a new way to manage container inventory, and there are new traits and dialogue settings. Frame rate fanatics will also now be able to play Starfield at 60 frames per second. Here are the display updates, straight from Bethesda:
Frame Rate Target: You can now choose between 30, 40, 60 or an Uncapped frame rate on VRR displays. If you do not have a VRR display running 120hz, you will still be able to select from 30 or 60. Screen tearing may occur at times when selecting 60 on a non-VRR display.
Prioritize: You can now prioritize between Visuals and Performance while trying to maintain the frame rate target. If you’re choosing a frame rate target of 60 or above, we recommend changing this to Performance. Prioritizing Visuals keeps the highest resolution while maintaining full detail for special effects, lighting, and crowds. Prioritizing Performance lowers internal resolution and detail for special effects, lighting, and crowds. Both modes may adjust internal resolution dynamically when scenes or action get heavier as well. When switching between modes, you will see the lighting change briefly as the system catches up to the new mode.
The rest of the updates are bug fixes, which you can read about on the Starfield website.
While these updates are essential, it may be too little, too late for a lot of Starfield players. Starfield publisher Microsoft is, however, reportedly targeting a September release date, The Verge reported, for the game’s Shattered Space DLC — a big update that’ll bring players back to the game.
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