Bethesda has revealed more details about how it takes player feedback into account when further developing its games through updates. As we get closer to Starfield’s Free Lanes update—out on April 7th—the studio has noted in an interview with GamesRadar that, while it has its own opinions on its games, it also keeps an eye out for where player feedback could align with these opinions.
“We have our own opinions as far as things we would like to see,” said studio design director Emil Pagliarulo. “After we release the game, we keep on playing it – we say, ‘oh, I wish this had more of X or more of Y as well.’ And then as we play more, we are also seeing what is connecting with players and what isn’t – where our thoughts align with player feedback, which reinforces our beliefs.”
Using exploration as one of the examples for this, Pagliarulo spoke about how players provided feedback about wanting to find going off the beaten path that a quest might lead them down more rewarding. This, in turn, leads the development team to making a list of priorities, like fleshing out points of interests, or making dungeons more interesting.
“It still amazes me how different Starfield is now compared to launch,” he said. “We were doing an update every six to eight weeks for the first year, addressing all of these little things. But with all of those smaller things that we did, they are big and meaningful to the person who was waiting for that one thing.”
Creative producer Tim Lamb spoke about how updates for Starfield had slowed down since its initial launch. However, this means that the development team has been able to bundle up what would otherwise be smaller patches into something larger, like Free Lanes.
“I feel like we held back a little while we were working on all of this stuff,” he said. “Based on everything you’ve seen in Free Lanes, would that feel different if it had been spread out over six or eight weeks? I think there’s a certain punch to it, when you get it all together in one day.”
As for the obstacles that Bethesda might face, a major one comes in the form of the sheer amount of player feedback it gets, and how fast this feedback tends to come in. Art director Istvan Pely spoke about how the in-game experience of a community at large also tends to be different from the developers’ own experiences.
“What the community or internet is experiencing is not always what we’re experiencing,” said Pely. “You might have a streamer who is very popular and they have an issue, a thought, or maybe they want some very specific thing which is isolated to that person, but then it gets a voice and gets a lot of people around it. Then it comes back to us and we’re like, oh, we have a laundry list of stuff we need to do before we can get to that.”
Lamb explained that, while Bethesda gets feedback from across several venues, he sits on a call each week to sift through community discussions. “We’re always looking at how we’re doing with certain problems and how we are funnelling that up to the team, and that’s been consistent for us for the three years,” he said. “So we’re always checking in on what’s on the list, and looking for things that bubble up to the threshold where something becomes really important to address.”
As for the future of Starfield, Lamb noted that Bethesda doesn’t really think of any change that could be made to the game as being “impossible”. However, he brings up the importance of being able to add community-requested features in a way that actually satisfies the community, especially in light of the studio having limited time on its hands.
“I’m not going to undersell what it took to get that right, but we wanted to deliver that,” he said, referring to interplanetary travel. “There’s always a balance. We have finite time, right? We always want to say yes to our players if it aligns with the things that we agree with, or if they have played the game so much and now really want to poke into this corner or explore that thing next. That’s what helps us to decide what to work on next”
Starfield is available on PC and Xbox Series X/S. The title will be coming to PS5 on the same day as the Free Lanes update—on April 7th. The free update and PS5 launch will also be accompanied by a new expansion: Terran Armada. Recent reports have also indicated that Bethesda has remained hard at work on a Nintendo Switch 2 port of the game. However, “it hasn’t been a smooth process,” according to an industry insider.
