Bethesda has yet to fix many of the issues in Starfield, but two months later, a group of players are still committed to working on the Starfield Community Patch, through which they hope to fix several bugs in the game themselves.
In fact, the group was already working on fixes even before Starfield arrived and the goal of improving the Starfield experience includes fixing both major bugs and other small errors, such as errors in dialogue. If it poses a problem for the player, it will be corrected, but nothing will be done to divert Starfield from Bethesda’s vision.
Timothy “Halgary” Baldridge, one of the project’s members, spoke to our colleagues at Eurogamer They explained how they are trying to do Bethesda’s own work. The idea of creating an open project available for anyone to work on improvements has grown since the first steps in December 2021 and there is currently a team of very dedicated individuals to improving Starfield.
The main goal is to serve the community and make sure that the tools are available to all players. The code is readily available to anyone, but its use requires respecting the authors and mentioning them in any work that results from it.
However, the team encountered something unexpected: the difficulty of working with Starfield code without official tools and support. The delay in the arrival of modding tools only complicates the task of those looking to improve Starfield.
“Modification is still very new to the Starfield Community Patch,” Halgary said. “It is clear from analyzing the data structures in the provided standard files and disassembling the game code that modification possibilities have not been taken into account in the development of the game engine so far.”
“We can also assume this from the fact that there was no quality control testing of the mods functionality by Bethesda, as it would have been easy to detect many existing engine bugs that arise in the course of using mods.”
As he says, all of Starfield’s modification capabilities exist by chance, as a result of the engine code that was used.
“For me, it’s basically a hack. They built the game thinking they were going to add mods, but they haven’t actually done so yet. The only reason we can create mods these days is because we’ve modded other games that use the engine and ‘we know what Must be done. But a lot of things are really off, compared to other matches.”
According to this group, only with the release of official Bethesda tools will Starfield mods start to really gain steam, and they even say that the 400+ bugs highlighted could be fixed by Bethesda, but they don’t know if that will happen or not.
“Coffee trailblazer. Social media ninja. Unapologetic web guru. Friendly music fan. Alcohol fanatic.”