Starfield May patch beta

During the week, Bethesda released the beta for their upcoming Starfield patch. I took the opportunity to try out the Steam beta and these are my thoughts on the matter.

First off, lets talk difficulty. On release Starfield had a classic difficulty scale going from Very Easy to Very Hard. The patch takes that and breaks it into several distinct pieces.

You can now set you own efficiency in combat, as well as the enemies efficiency, and you can set them separately! The same goes for space combat. If you make the game easier you get less XP and likewise if you make it harder you earn more XP. This means that seasoned FPS players can give themselves a harder challenge on the ground, but make the dog-fighting in space much easier until they get the hang of it.

You can adjust your carry capacity, and at max you can carry over a thousand pounds of stuff. To go along with this, you can adjust how much or little money vendors have, to buy all the things you salvage. Like with combat, these changes modify the amount of XP you get.

There are also options for environmental effects and healing, but I haven't had much time to test those.

The ground map is significantly changed. Gone is the boring field of dots and instead we get a vibrant map that actually shows you things. Cities are also mapped out and I can't tell you how nice that is. To make things even better, if you pull up your scanner in town, you can see all points of interest, and if you have been there at least once, you can quick travel from the scanner. Such a great quality of life improvement!

Next up is ship interior decoration. All ships have a button on the wall that opens a building interface similar to the one you build outposts with, and you can also get there through the scanner. This allows you to decorate your ship any way you want. I haven't had time to properly explore this yet, but it looks very promising. You can also buy habitat modules that are empty from the start to give yourself a clean slate to build on. This makes it so that your ship can be a proper base and not just a vehicle.

A smaller thing is that when you start a New Game + you are given the option to change your character including redoing your traits if you wish.

Finally, they are experimenting with adding ground vehicle to the game, but as far as I know, this isn't in the patch and only in the testing stage at the moment.

The addition of these changes do so much to make Starfield an even better game. I liked it from the start, but this patch gives me great hope that this game will bloom into an even better experience. I'll add a video showing off the changes if you want to learn more.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great week!