Despite Starfield being a poster-child for AMD's technology on PC, one glaring omission from lift-off was support for frame-generation technologies such as AMD's FSR, Intel's XeSS, or Nvidia's DLSS. But it seems that particular ship will leave the yard sooner rather than later: Via a subreddit post, Bethesda Softworks has confirmed Starfield support for both AMD's FSR3 and Intel's XeSS is coming early next year, along with other potentially impactful changes, such as a "new ways to travel" promise.
According to the subreddit post from the official Bethesda Softworks account, Starfield is bound to receive at least some of what amounts to significant updates to both the Starfield game engine and gameplay experience. Support for both AMD and Intel's frame-generation technologies should be a boon for players sporting anything but the Best PC Builds (which is most of us). Extra frames per second and increased game fluidity are always welcome - especially for notebook or portable handled gamers.
Beyond FSR 3 and XeSS support, the Bethesda post also clarifies that a number of features and requests are being worked into the game. There are quest fixes; city maps (anyone who can only memorize routes by driving them, like me is sure to thank Bethesda for that one); mod support (here's hoping the Starfield community can outdo the tremendous mod work done for Skyrim, in time); and an intriguing "all new ways of travelling" bit that's sure to catch the minds of anyone who thinks that being able to pilot a ship but not a hoverbike kind of defeats its purpose. There's no telling what other ways of travelling actually means: whether leisurely strolling with the set of in-game parents you get with the "Kid Stuff" trait, riding hoverbikes through a dune-like planet, or merely a review of ship piloting and exactly how scientifically-exhaustive (to the tune of empty) interstellar travel can actually be.
According to the post, Bethesda is looking to pace Starfield updates around every six weeks, each of these dealing with a variety of bug fixes and gameplay improvements. But as Starfield's launch came and went, we had the opportunity to see just how well it held up to other Bethesda titles in terms of "shipped bug" count. And while FSR3 support would have made perfect sense to make the cut towards the launch version of Starfield, it's a well-known quantity that for something to be brought in, other things, other work, other improvements have to be let go. Perhaps our experience of Starfield being more bug-free than usual at launch is also a result of these frame-generation technologies not being programmed into the (facelifted, but still ageing) Gamebryo-based "Creation 2" game-engine, which Bethesda developed in-house.
Hang tight to those frame-rates, space cowboys.
