Starfield’s development team has made leaps and bounds correcting its bugs and glitches so far in 2024. While we still haven’t seen any content-heavy patches — or much sign of the promisedShattered Space expansion— the developers have madefixes to hundreds of problemsthat had been plaguing its players since the game’s launch in early September 2023.
Recently, though, one player has noticed a new anomaly in the game, and it’s unclear whether this is yet another problem the fine folks atBethesdahave to add to their to-do fix list or something they put in intentionally.
Resurfaced Starfield Art Has Fans Reminiscing On What Could Have Been
Fans think the concept art is incredibly Star Wars-esque, and not like anything we have currently.
There’s A Hole At The Center Of The Sky
As you can see above, Reddit user ameliog recently looked up while in the United Colonies capital city of New Atlantis and found a massive hole in the atmosphere, hovering just above the city. If it’s a simple graphical glitch, it would be far from the first one players have discovered, as lighting issues and even theimage mapping of planet surfaceshave caused problems for Starfield in the past.
… it’s always cool to see the little nuances of space travel that we wouldn’t always think about.
But one person responding to the thread presented a theory that sounds a lot more scientifically sound, and it could point to the hole in the atmosphere being an accurate representation of what would happen in the air above a city with a major spaceport.
“That my friends is a fallstreak hole caused by supercooled water suddenly freezing after a departing ship passed through,” commented elquatrogrande on the Reddit thread. Now, none of us here at DualShockers has an astroengineering degree (theoretical or otherwise, thanks for that timeless gem, Fallout 4), but it seems space-jargony enough that it might potentially be true.
If it is, well done, Bethesda! You went for a NASA-punk vibe with your game, and it’s always cool to see the little nuances of space travel that we wouldn’t always think about.
Of course, both the OP and several other people in the comments had a different idea of what might have caused the hole, and it may be making some people reconsider the quality of the game’s writing team.
Starfield Players Say New Update Made Ship Power Allocations “Worse Not Better”
The latest update was supposed to address an issue with ship power allocations, but players believe it’s even worse.
Grav Jumping: Does It Make More Sense Than We Thought?
This section contains spoilers for Starfield’s main plot.
Starfield has been thesubject of heavy criticism since its launch, and its delivery of its story has been one of the main targets of that criticism. Much of Starfield’s lore centers around the futuristic technology of grav jumping, which lets ships with a grav drive jump to another part of the galaxy within mere seconds.
However, the lore goes much deeper than that. The creator of the technology that made grav jumping possible,Dr. Victor Aiza, used an artifact given to him by his future self in the original model, and the process of grav jumping near a planet while using one of these early models led to the destruction of Earth’s magnetosphere, turning the entire planet into an uninhabitable, sandy desert with no atmosphere.
That all seems to be common knowledge, but based on the comment section, what many players might have missed is that Dr. Aiza knew the effect that the artifact’s prolonged use would have on the Earth and proceeded with it intentionally to carry out his own devastating agenda. “It’s also important to note that the flaws in the design aredeliberate,” Reddit user Just_A_Rose summed up succinctly in the thread. “The scientist and his future self collaborated to deliberately use this machine to kill Earth to force humanity into the stars, conveniently requiring them all to use his invention to survive cementing him in history as the savior of Earth, even though he’s the one who killed it.”
While the handling (and general glossing over) of how the technology was fixed still seems to be disappointing a lot of players, the resurfacing of information that a lot of players may have missed at least has them talking again, and as the saying goes, no publicity is bad publicity.
And it all started with a hole in the sky that may or may not be yet another glitch.
