Last week, Bethesda’s Starfield received its “biggest update to date” after a brief delay. However, the players had doubts whether the developers would really live up to their promises and after the release they spoke in a not always positive spirit. Either because they actually found the long list of fixes to be so short or simply because the update is only released in beta on PC and is not yet available on consoles. Either way, players have learned to rely on the art of mod writers in addition to developers, who deliver all sorts of fixes and improvements faster than developers and essentially non-stop. Thanks to this, Starfield is even without official tools for making modifications to 11th place of the most modded games on the NexusMods portal and players are asking the developers why they can’t add a little. They answered questions on Reddit through community manager Robert O’Neill and explained how their work differs from fans.
“Official patches and content additions go through lengthy certification and localization processes, especially across consoles (which is why the beta is only available on Steam),” O’Neill explained at the outset. He also added that it is for these reasons that it is more efficient for developers to compile updates into larger packages that target a larger number of flaws than to release them one at a time. “It also ensures better testing of the entire build when we put new code together,” the community manager also said, confirming that the development team is working tirelessly to fix bugs reported by players, for which he also thanked them. Naturally, not everyone can be satisfied with this statement, but the more constructive ones add that the developers should have chosen a similarly careful approach from the beginning, or tried to release those packages of fixes and improvements faster. At this point, we can remind you that more than two months have passed since the last major update, regardless of the fact that during December players received two smaller ones with fixes for only the most serious or annoying bugs.
Is Starfield the beginning of the end for physical copies from Microsoft?
There is also another current case connected with Starfield, although so far conducted purely unofficially and lacking any statement from the developers or Microsoft. However, as an insider with the nickname Wario64 pointed out on Twitter, the Walmart chain was supposed to start dealing with the liquidation of the game’s stock by February 5 of this year. There are screenshots available from the application used by Walmart employees, as subsequently confirmed by a user of the portal Resetera with the nickname Rychu, who identified himself as an employee of the chain. Later in the same discussion he added that according to his information Walmart’s management was supposed to address the issue of selling physical copies of video games and thus follow, for example, the move of a competitor in the form of the Best Buy chain, which got rid of the physical sale of movies. “This note is specifically about Starfield, but that doesn’t mean it can’t apply to other things as well. This is just the beginning,” added Rychu. So it’s possible that we’re seeing another of the stronger indications of a move to purely digital distribution, which Microsoft resorted to for example in the case of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II.
I saw this memo earlier as well (not through these same exact screenshots) – Walmart will prep to remove Starfield Xbox physical copies from their stores but you could get very lucky and get it for 3 cents on Monday (the memo says the system will block the purchase)
— Wario64 (@Wario64) January 19, 2024
2024-01-22 09:27:44
#mods #patch #Starfield #faster #official #patches #Vortex
