"It is not Starfield 2.0": Todd Howard says the RPG's big update is for the people who already love it, and if you "found it boring in places, I don't think this is gonna change that fundamentally"

Last year, rumors began to circulate of behind-closed-doors meetings between Bethesda and influencers over a major, mysterious update for Starfield – a patch which was quickly dubbed "Starfield 2.0" by the community. Today, Todd Howard has confirmed both that those meetings and the update are real, but warns players who bounced off the RPG the first time around that this won't be a massive overhaul.

Speaking with Greg Miller of Kinda Funny – one of those who saw the update last year – Howard acknowledges that Bethesda has "been working on a lot of Starfield content." The studio decided not to show that content publicly because it likes to "have periods where we focus on IPs or franchises, and Fallout really obviously dominated the fall and a little bit into early this year."

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"It is not Starfield 2.0," Howard says flat out. "You know, I've seen some of that. For expectation setting, I think it's the kind of thing where if you love Starfield, we think you're gonna love this. It's updates and things that change the game, not in an isolated way, but sort of 'meta.' Using outer space and things in ways that we haven't."

Interestingly, that matches with some of the more exciting murmurings around the update last year, which suggested that the game might break free of some of its loading screens in favor of more free-form space travel. That would be a fundamental change addressing the biggest problem that kept me from embracing Starfield, but again, Howard says we should keep our expectations in check.

"Look, if Starfield's something that didn't connect with you right away, or you bounced off it, or found it boring in places, I don't think this is gonna change that fundamentally," Howard says. But for those who loved Starfield, and Bethesda itself? "We're really happy with it. We like it a lot."

Interestingly, Howard says the team has "more Starfield stuff coming up," even beyond this update. "We've been laying that out. It's something we see continuing for a while," and that's not even counting additional community content that Bethesda plans to support. "We're going to be a part of that as well," Howard concludes.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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