Starfield‘s first expansion, Shattered Space, is out, and alongside it came a new massive patch that addressed the game’s many issues. Here are the most important changes the Shattered Space patch introduced to Bethesda’s flagship title.
Biggest changes in Starfield’s Shattered Space patch
Performance should get a bit better
Right off the bat the patch notes, shared on Steam, give us a glimpse into what’s probably the most important part of any Bethesda game’s update: performance changes. While Bethesda didn’t clarify much as to what precisely they changed performance-wise, we know the developers made “general” improvements to the game’s technical side, focused on numerous visual bugs, enhanced lighting, and made the game more stable. Bethesda titles are known for poor performance and technical problems, so it’s always welcome to see the company work hard to make its games as stable and well-running as possible.
Big-time modders should have an easier time overhauling the game
The number of loaded creations would sometimes be limited to 255, making some modded Starfield runs become completely unplayable as textures and other parts of the game would refuse to load. With this patch that is now fixed, and big-time modders should have a much easier time loading in dozens if not over a hundred mods at a time. Mods are a core part of any Bethesda experience, with some mod packs containing hundreds of mods weighing a ton, and it seems that even Starfield can now be modded almost infinitely.
Numerous quests have been fixed
Several quests which previously contained numerous bugs have been cleared of their issues and should now function as intended, allowing players to cruise through them with ease. These include Brownout, Due in Full, Eye Witness, Hostile Intelligence, and many others. The fixes focus on minor problems such as the wrong music playing during scenes to the quests themselves being completely broken for some players, making them now functional and available for all players to enjoy.
The REV-8 vehicle has been improved
Bethesda focused its efforts on improving the REV-8 vehicle, the ultimate way of traversing the game’s thousand planets. It previously had many bugs, related to its functionality and otherwise, that have now been patched up to allow players to more easily and smoothly explore the planets (though, there aren’t that many of them worth exploring even with the REV-8 vehicle unless you have mods, but alas).
Many locations in the game have been improved
Better textures, collision fixes, patched-up missing textures, and more across several locations have been introduced to improve the overall experience of players passing through them. Visual bugs can often take away from the game by breaking immersion, and that should no longer be the case in many Starfield locations including New Atlantis and others.
Alongside these fixes above, Starfield‘s Shattered Space patch also introduced several gameplay improvements, a couple dozen UI fixes and upgrades, as well as other rudimentary bugfixes that are part of just about any patch for any game out there.