They should have sent a poet.
Good news for all the prey animals out there: Starfield’s latest dinky update will finally allow you to achieve a field of view roughly equivalent to your own. The 1.7.36 patch for Bethesda’s spacefaring RPG doesn’t make many changes—in fact, it makes barely any—but it does fulfil Bethesda’s promise of introducing a proper FOV slider to the game instead of forcing you to go rummaging around in .ini files to change the setting.
I rarely mess with FOV sliders in games, mostly because my inert and docile brain doesn’t suffer the same motion sickness that afflicts some people who find default FOVs too wide or too narrow, but I spent ten minutes noodling around with the new setting to see what was now possible.
To my inexpert eye, it seems quite comprehensive. You can change the FOV for both first-person and third-person modes independently of one another, and each setting goes from a porthole-esque 70 to an expansive 110. You can see some screenshots of what the new FOV extremes look like below.
Starfield’s default first-person FOV. (Image credit: Bethesda)
The minimum first-person FOV. (Image credit: Bethesda)
The maximum first-person FOV. (Image credit: Bethesda)
Starfield’s default third-person FOV, which is also its minimum. (Image credit: Bethesda)
Starfield’s maximum third-person FOV. (Image credit: Bethesda)
But apart from that, well, uh, there isn’t really anything apart from that. The “Fixes and improvements” list for Starfield’s new patch consists of four bullet points. One of them is the FOV slider, the other is better stability for Intel Arc GPUs, and a fix for the “Echoes of the Past” quest. The final bullet point is my longstanding nemesis “Various additional stability and performance improvements,” which compresses myriad tweaks that each could get their own bullet point down into a single, utterly information-free sentence.
Regardless, I’m glad Bethesda has put in the FOV slider, the absence of which has been a bit baffling since launch. With any luck, the studio will soon get around to putting its promised proper DLSS support in, reducing Nvidia users’ reliance on mods and, hopefully, letting me attain a decent frame rate in New Atlantis. It might not be enough to pull in PCG’s Chris Livingston, who’s already drifting away from Starfield a mere month after release, but a boy can dream.
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