Bethesda's Starfield roadmap for early 2024 has the space RPG's community feeling optimistic for the future

Vasco action figure on a sandy planet
(Image credit: PureArts)

News that Starfield will be getting updates "roughly every six weeks" starting in February has already gone down well with fans.  

On December 22, Bethesda shared its Starfield End of the Year Update, which revealed that new gameplay and ship options, a "major update in February," and the RPG's first story expansion are coming early next year. 

You can read the official post to get the full details of what to expect next year. To summarise, Bethesda has promised "new ways to travel," which include access to city maps while exploring major cities, new ship customization options, and new gameplay options that will give players the option of "an easier or more challenging experience" that goes beyond the usual difficulty settings.

More specifically, these new gameplay options will allow players to change carry capacity, cargo access distance, ship damage, vendor credits, survival mechanics, and more. Official mod support is also set to go live in 2024 in the form of the controversial Creations hub now live in other Bethesda titles. 

Perhaps most exciting, though, is that Starfield will be getting its first major expansion sometime in 2024, called Shattered Space. Bethesda has promised to share more on this content "next year" but has said it will feature new story content, new locations, new gear, and much more. 

By the looks of this Reddit post, it seems many people are happy with what Bethesda is proposing for 2024. The player in question has highlighted the game's upcoming gameplay features (specifically the ability to customize vendor credits and how you suffer afflictions), adding: "This is EXACTLY what I was hoping for!"

"Great news! If implemented well, survival mechanics could potentially make a lot of useless mechanics actually have some meaning - which could resolve a lot of my issues with the game," a different Reddit user replies. "This is awesome. I hope that the ship-building feature allows persistent interior decorating and placing of storage," another adds.

On the flip side, some users are concerned that we likely won't get anything new added to Starfield until February, which isn't great news for those encountering "quest-breaking bugs" - like the player linked above. It's worth noting that Bethesda did say in the post that these new updates will start in Beta, so there's a chance not everything will be added to the game as soon as February rolls around. 

Need something new to play until then? Take a look at our best RPG games list. 

Hope Bellingham
News Writer

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training.  My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.