How Much More Work Will (Or Should) Bethesda Sink Into ‘Starfield’?

There has been a lot of talk about Bethesda and their priorities lately, namely due to the resurgence of interest in Fallout as a result of the Amazon show, big sales and a next-gen update for Fallout 4. This has led many to wonder why Bethesda has put a new Fallout game so far on the back-burner to the point where we might not see a new entry for the better part of a decade.

The biggest reason for this is, of course, is Starfield. This was a new IP that Bethesda wanted to develop, which pushed back Elder Scrolls VI and Fallout 5 four or five years because of its lengthy development cycles. Bethesda has proclaimed they want Starfield to be played for years, but so far, they haven’t exactly set the game up for that sort of success.

The question now is just how much work will Bethesda put into Starfield going forward, and how much should they, if it sacrifices resources that could be applied to getting Elder Scrolls or Fallout out faster?

We are now seven months from Starfield’s launch in September of 2023, and there have been incredibly few major updates for the game outside of long lists of bug fixes and some visual improvements. We are four full months into 2024, a period when Bethesda said the pace of updates would pick up, but no substantive content has been added to the game, nor official mod tools.

Bethesda has confirmed a number of updates are coming, which include city maps (a bit late on that) and new means of traversal, which many players believe will be land vehicles. And of course, the biggest thing in the Shattered Space expansion. But that has not been teased or previewed. We don’t have a 2024 release date for it. We don’t have any idea about its scope or content at all as we approach the halfway mark of the year.

Bethesda has stuck with many of its past games through multiple new content updates, and not just Fallout 76 which is a live game that essentially demands them. As such, it feels like Starfield should be getting new content updates over time, but in seven months, it just hasn’t happened, and we have no firm dates on when that will happen. Meanwhile, players are lamenting that if Starfield was skipped we’d probably be playing Elder Scrolls VI by now and Fallout 5 would be much closer. But I can’t blame Bethesda for wanting to branch out, and I’m not willing to call Starfield a failure (and as everyone always reminds me, I gave it a very high score at launch, as I personally really enjoyed it).

Not to go all “playercount” but given current events the last four Fallout games now have a higher playercount than Starfield (peaking at 7,700 players on Steam this week) and it’s Xbox’s 39th most played game (and is behind 2011’s Skyrim). Yes, it’s a single player game, but it was specifically set up for more or less infinite playthroughs through its NG+ new universe system, but that has more limits than it appeared to, initially.

I wonder what Microsoft may have to say about all of this, and devoting more resources to building out Starfield in a way that has a larger, longer-term playerbase. The Shattered Space expansion is actually pretty important because while Starfield launched on Game Pass for “free,” expansions or DLC are rarely offered on the service and have to be purchased separately. I would be amazed if Shattered Space was any less than $40 at launch, and Starfield (mercifully) has no microtransactions otherwise.

My gut tells me Starfield support is going to wind down faster than Bethesda may have originally planned. Players, and I’m guessing Microsoft, wants them to really focus on these huge future titles, but we’ll see what they do.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.