By
Andy Chalk
Bethesda will start talking about the future of Starfield "really soon," but he warned that it may not be all that some fans are hoping for.
The concept of 'Starfield 2.0,' essentially a major update/overhaul of Bethesda's less-than-stellar sci-fi RPG, has been kicking around for quite a while now. Fans have been huffing the copium since at least
the middle of 2025, and started hitting the pipe extra hard at the end of last year when it came to light that Bethesda had given content creators a
behind-closed-doors look at what's coming next. But you should probably dial back your expectations: In a new interview with
Kinda Funny, Todd Howard said the next update "is not Starfield 2.0," and warned that if you don't like the game now, that's probably not going to change.
The good news is that the long wait for actual Starfield news is almost over: Howard said
Fallout has been the focus over the past several months but with that now out of the way, Bethesda is going to start talking about what's next for Starfield "really soon."
"We're moving into a phase where we're ready to talk about Starfield, and really show that in the right way, and what's coming to the game," Howard said. "We've been doing a lot of work that we like a lot."
Ah, but then he dropped the hammer. "It is not Starfield 2.0. 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.
"But look, is Starfield 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 going to change that fundamentally."
It's a refreshingly frank statement if nothing else, although Bethesda might simply feel that there's no sense sacrificing any more credibility on this particular altar. Some diehard Starfield fans have been holding out hope for a turnaround akin to that of Cyberpunk 2077, which enjoyed a massive recovery campaign culminating in a
2.0 update in September 2023, three years after launch. Starfield is moving into a comparable window—it came out, coincidentally, in September 2023.
But the very big stumbling block for Bethesda is that while Cyberpunk 2077 was a phenomenal game that was broken as hell, Starfield just isn't all that great. It's not
awful, but that middling reputation is pretty much carved in stone at this point, and players have long fallen away:
SteamDB says there are currently four times as many people on Steam playing the 16-year-old Fallout: New Vegas than there are Starfield, and that's the sort of thing that's bound to give Bethesda leadership pause as it considers how long it wants to continue working on updates. That said, Howard clarified that the release of not-Starfield2 2.0 will not signal the end of work on the game: "We're doing more Starfield stuff coming up. We've been laying that out. It's something we see continuing for a while."
