The Starfield Improvement Machine Rolls On
Starfield is a difficult game to wrap my head around. What I mean by that is, I WANT to love it. Desperately. By all accounts, it should be exactly in my wheelhouse. I’ve played all the way through, jumped into the Unity a few times, and even restarted with new characters a handful of times. What’s missing, you may ask? I don’t exactly know. Everything and nothing, all at once. It has a lot going on, but it lacks that Bethesda magic that made exploring vaults or taking arrows to the knee so enticing.
Years on from its release, updates have come slowly. Shattered Space was woefully underwhelming, but additions like vehicles made the most mundane activities somewhat more palatable. So, obviously, given the chance to take a sneak peak at what’s next for Starfield, I jumped at the chance. I didn’t get to touch any of what’s below, but I did get a guided tour of what’s coming this April.
Free Wheelin’, For Free
One of the largest complaints about Starfield’s experience is all the loading screens. Fast travel to planet orbit, fast travel to the surface, and endure the 3-5 loading screens necessary to continue on your journey. Free Lanes is solving at least one of those immersion breaks by introducing a ‘Cruise Mode’ during space flight. Yup, you can now hit the boosters and fly between bodies within a system. This looks to be a unique game state vs flying around next to a planet, where there’s a critical transition point between the two. In between planets, there’s some amount of radiant content that might crop up. During our demo that took the form of some wreckage to loot. The team was tight-lipped about how elaborate those encounters can be, but I’m certainly hoping it’s more diverse than just loot.
I also have questions about the mechanics of flight. In standard Starfield, you literally can’t change your frame of reference with respect to the body you’re ‘orbiting’. We ran out of time to get this answered, but I want to know if I can cruise a few thousand km and observe a different frame of reference to the planet in question. Mechanically, I’m guessing that would be pretty hard to implement, but the flexibility to do that sort of thing would help immersion tremendously. Rest assured, this is Thing One I’ll be trying when the update hits.
X-Treme Tech
We also saw the Introduction of X-Tech, which seems to be the elite currency powering much of what’s in Free Lanes. It can be used for a bunch of things, some brand new, others quality of experience related. For example, X-Tech can be used to buy new ship modules like EM Pulse Shields or a Stealth Drive, or to add legendary effects to your weapons through a dice roll system. These seem like added layers on top of the existing systems, but should be welcome for anyone who has had to ditch a weapon because its tier was too low.
The other way we saw X-Tech used. was buffing ship stats through a new optimization terminal. These looked to be simply % boosts to power, shields, etc, but time will tell if there’s more to it.
More Interesting Points?
The final major gameplay item that caught my attention revolved around the thing that killed Starfield for me – points of interest. For a game with 1000+ places to land, there sure were an awful lot of identical abandoned listening posts scattered around – right down to the clutter on the tables. Free Lanes is tweaking how those POIs get shuffled an placed to keep things fresher, and it was mentioned that there are more POIs generally. They weren’t keen to describe what that means or how many there are, so don’t hold your breath thinking it might go from 25 – 500. I’m guessing there are likely a dozen or so new planetary locales.
Potentially more interesting is Starfield’s version of the Vault Boy – Colony War action heroes! The figures are scattered around (boxed, and unboxed versions!), and can be displayed and played with in your outposts.
Quality? Of Life
Quality of Life seems to be on Bethesda’s mind, with a number of changes aimed at making things easier for players. Some of these changes sound handy – for example, a UI codex helping you track materials etc – but I’m overall concerned that they tend to allow avoidance of core mechanics instead of improving those core mechanics. Again, this is speculation since I didn’t get to play myself, but for example:
- the new Quantum Entanglement Device allows you to take items into the Unity – so, where’s the motivation to keep exploring?
- Quantum essence can be used to improve Starborn powers – so, what’s the point of doing temples?
- after a few legendary mod dice rolls, you can just pick the legendary effect you want – so, why are there dice rolls?
- a shared inventory box now exists for outposts – so, why would I use the tools to build shipping lanes?
I get that they’re trying to pivot and meet the concerns of fans, but these feel like bandaids, not solutions. I’d much rather see Bethesda risk trying to make Temples more interesting than just letting me skip them.
Terran Armada
Robots attack! At least, I think that’s what happens. We got a scant few details about Starfield’s next, smaller, DLC mission set, but it looked, honestly, pretty great. Evil robots attacking is never a bad time, and that’s exactly what we’re getting. With a bit of luck, we’ll get a little more agency and choice than in Shattered Space.
PS5, Finally
This one’s a quickie. Starfield is finally landing on PS5 on April 7th, including all the previous updates, and the new ones discussed here. We’re told the base edition will run $49.99.
What do you think? With the new updates, is Starfield worth jumping into for PS5 players? Or jumping BACK into on PC and Xbox?
