I was one of many players who awaited Starfield’s arrival in 2023 with bated breath, but ultimately bounced off the game due to what I felt was an underwhelming story and a yawn-inducing gameplay loop. I revisited the game after its massive May 2024 update and found it to largely be a similar experience–lots of loading screens, lots of strange bugs, lots of one-note characters, and lots of barren planets.
But with the recent release of Starfield’s Free Lanes update and Terran Armada DLC, I once again felt my subconscious tugging me back towards the game. I hadn’t touched it since before Shattered Space launched, so with two DLCs and a massive free update to explore, I decided to give Starfield another chance and dove back into the Settled Systems. What I found there was pretty darn disappointing.
I started with the Free Lanes update, which adds a number of new features and quality-of-life fixes to the game, but its biggest draw is the fact that you can now fly your ship from one planet to another. In practice, this is painfully boring. It’s a neat option if you’re really, really into role-playing, but since you still cannot manually land on a planet from space, its impact is dulled. The real star of the show here is Cruise Mode, which allows you to fly from one planet to another via autopilot.
Depending on how far away your destination is, it can take a few minutes to get from one planet to another using Cruise Mode. You can spend this time in the cockpit watching the stars fly by, or you can get up and walk around your ship, talk to companions, craft items, etc. If you can do it while your ship is grounded, you can do it in Cruise Mode. But the best part of Cruise Mode is the random encounters and POIs you’ll find while flying from place to place. When an encounter occurs–let’s say you stumble across a derelict ship–autopilot will automatically hit the brakes and let you decide if you want to go off-course to investigate or continue to your intended destination. It makes the enormous expanse of the Settled Systems feel more alive, but I find it ironic that the best aspect of Starfield’s three-years-too-late “you can fly your ship now!” feature is the part that lets you use autopilot so you don’t have to actually fly your ship.
Another aspect of the Free Lanes update that I’ve come to cherish is X-Tech, a new resource that allows players to upgrade their weapons, gear, and even their ships, rather than just modding them. There’s an element of chance involved–for example, players can use X-Tech to “roll” for an upgraded weapon with unique qualities, increased damage, and a higher weapon tier. So if, like me, you fell in love with a weapon you came across early in your playthrough, X-Tech allows you to upgrade it so you can take it with you to the end of the game. Free Lanes also introduces two new weapon tiers above Advanced: the Superior tier and the Exceptional tier, making endgame fights less taxing.
Speaking of Starfield’s endgame, you’ll need to be pretty close to it if you want to survive the new Terran Armada DLC, as it’s intended for players who have hit level 50. If you’re underleveled, it may be a struggle (those new weapon tiers will certainly come in handy if you’re having trouble taking down enemies, though).
Acquiring Terran Armada’s opening quest is odd, and it’s easy to miss, given Starfield’s enormous size. To start the quest, you must listen to a Settled Systems News Network (SSNN) broadcast. The MAST building in New Atlantis is the best spot for this, as there’s always a broadcast going on nearby, and luckily for me, I had ended my last play session in New Atlantis, so I was already there when I started the game. I fast-traveled to the MAST District, wandered around until SSNN broadcast subtitles started showing up on my screen, and listened.
And listened.
And listened.
After about 15 minutes of listening to fictional space news with no sign of a quest, I started wondering if I was doing something wrong. Over the last week, the /r/Starfield subreddit has seen quite a few posts from players expressing confusion over how to start Terran Armada and sharing tales of their struggle to acquire the quest. I finally managed to activate the quest by flying out of New Atlantis, stopping by The Den to offload some stolen goods, then flying back to New Atlantis, going back to the MAST building, and listening to the SSNN broadcast again. Within roughly one minute of arriving back at the MAST building, I finally acquired the first quest. A luxury space-cruiser, Opulence of the Stars, has evidently been hijacked by some jerks called the Terran Armada and went missing somewhere in the Nirvana system. It’s up to the player to join the search team and figure out what’s going on.
The Terran Armada is a new hostile faction created by former Freestar Collective and United Colonies soldiers who mysteriously disappeared during the Colony Wars. Now they’ve mysteriously reappeared with a huge army of robotic soldiers in tow. The Terran Armada are using their robotic forces to terrorize the Settled Systems and abduct the aforementioned luxury cruiseliner for reasons unknown. Story-wise, it’s a decent hook, and much like Starfield’s Shattered Space DLC, Terran Armada features handcrafted locations rather than relying on procedural generation, giving it a lot more life (and color) than many other parts of the game. Still, it’s a much smaller DLC than Shattered Space, so don’t expect any breathtaking locales on par with the likes of Va’ruun’kai.
I will say one thing: If you are not a fan of Starfield’s ship combat, Terran Armada is probably not the DLC for you. Once you piss off the Terran Armada by getting involved in the search party looking for the Opulence of the Stars, you’ll start bumping into them wherever you go. These encounters are called Incursions and occur when the faction invades an existing location, turning it into an active warzone that you cannot fast-travel or grav-jump away from. Once you’ve defeated the Armada and the Incursion ends, you can travel again, but it won’t be long before you encounter yet another Incursion. While this is a really cool concept, it can get annoying fast, so I recommend finishing the DLC in one go unless you want this robotic army following you to the moon and back.
If the Incursions are driving you nuts, you can decrease how often they occur in the game’s settings menu, but just like many of the game’s other quality-of-life settings, doing so will decrease the amount of XP you earn. Taking advantage of other quality-of-life settings–like the one that gives vendors more credits so you don’t have to wait forever to sell off your loot, or the one that increases your carrying capacity so you’re not constantly encumbered–further reduces experience earned, and depending on your settings, you can lose out on significant XP. With vendor credits and my carrying capacity set to “increased,” ship cargo access distance set to “limited locations,” and Incursion chance set to “reduced,” I earn 14% less XP. I’ve written before about how strange it is that Bethesda offers these options but punishes players for using them. It’s not as if Starfield is a multiplayer game and I’m getting some sort of unfair advantage against other players by using them, so I’m not thrilled that Bethesda has added another way to make the game less annoying that punishes you for taking advantage of it by… making the game more annoying in a different way.
Without spoiling anything, Terran Armada’s story is solid, though like just about every other quest in the game, choosing different dialogue options rarely has a tangible effect on gameplay. Is it worth the $10 price tag? Absolutely, but only if you already enjoy Starfield. I say give the Free Lanes update a try and, if you feel your gameplay experience has been drastically improved, then go ahead and buy Terran Armada. If, like me, you’ve struggled to stick with Starfield despite enjoying certain aspects of it, Terran Armada is probably not going to change much.
Starfield’s Free Lanes update and Terran Armada DLC adds a lot of good to the game, and the previous updates’ additions of ground vehicles and detailed surface maps have improved the game from where it was at launch. But as much as I wanted this update to result in a Cyberpunk 2.0 or No Man’s Sky-esque comeback, that just isn’t the case, because Starfield’s problems go far deeper than bugs or game crashes–and just to be clear, there are still plenty of those to go around, too. The frame rate constantly drops on Xbox Series X, companions disappear during dialogue or suddenly drop into the scene like they fell from the sky, and my character occasionally walks around with her eyes closed. Those issues are small potatoes (and honestly, pretty much expected from Bethesda games at this point), but combined with the game’s improved-yet-still-generally-underwhelming state, anyone still waiting for Starfield to make a comeback may not want to hold their breath.
While I respect Bethesda’s continued attempts to right the ship, Starfield’s problems go deeper than anything a post-launch update is likely to turn around. Terran Armada and Shattered Space add two relatively small, beautifully handcrafted areas to the game, but the difference between playing Starfield’s DLCs versus playing the rest of the game is stark. Cruise Mode encounters and Terran Armada Incursions do make the Settled Systems feel less empty, but outside of its DLCs, the rest of the game’s quality is just as bogged down by Bethesda’s overreliance on procedural generation as it was at launch. You will still find the same named NPC’s corpse in the same spot inside the same building on two “different” planets. Exploring the game’s plethora of star systems and planets is still a slog–sure, we can finally drive around in Mako-style rovers, but none of the charm of the Mass Effect series is present, largely because the game’s characters–companions included–are still charisma vacuums with identical moral compasses who will all get mad at you if you shoot the wrong person.
Terran Armada does add a new companion who is an exception there: Delta, a reprogrammed Armada bot with a grey moral compass. While it’s incredibly refreshing to finally have a companion who doesn’t clutch their pearls every time you do something they disagree with, you tragically cannot woo Delta, so your choices for a romantic partner are still limited to the goody-two-shoes members of the Constellation crew, all of whom will divorce you the minute you shoot the wrong person (and in the case of Starfield, the “wrong person” is literally anyone aside from whoever your current quest is directing you to kill).
Half the time you can’t even kill characters anyway–Starfield has more unkillable NPCs than any Bethesda game I’ve ever played, and it’s worse off for it. I understand not wanting players to shoot everything they come across, but some of my best experiences with games like Fallout 3 came from killing someone I “shouldn’t” have, and then having to live with the consequences. Heck, players had more options for handling the bomb in Megaton during one of Fallout 3’s very first quests than they do in most of Starfield’s biggest endgame missions.
At its core, Starfield is still an enormous game with loosely connected systems, some of which are great (see: ship-building), but many of which are frustrating, boring, or not effectively integrated with the rest of the game (e.g. outposts). Dialogue options almost never matter aside from the rare Persuasion or Intimidation check. It may have had some tune-ups, but in the grand scheme of things, the Starfield experience hasn’t changed much, even with updates and DLC.
After taking Starfield’s latest update for a spin, I feel that if you enjoyed the game at launch, you’ll almost certainly enjoy it more now. But if, like me, you already found its story underwhelming, its game design baffling, and its combat hit-or-miss, the Free Lanes update and Terran Armada DLC are unlikely to change that. The game is definitely in better shape now, but not by much. At launch, I felt it was pretty “meh.” I now feel it’s okay-ish. It’s not a terrible game, but it’s still not the enjoyable, lively, action-packed “Fallout in space” we were promised.
After three years, I’ve given up on any hope that Bethesda will “fix” Starfield or turn it into the game many of us expected it to be. Fleshing out the game’s enormous amount of empty planets, boring NPCs, and illusion-of-choice quests would require years of development that Bethesda simply cannot afford if it wants to get The Elder Scrolls 6 out the door before the heat death of the universe.
At this point, I’m just hoping Bethesda learned something from Starfield and will apply that knowledge to The Elder Scrolls 6. Skyrim is a hard act to follow, and I’m praying Bethesda has internalized player feedback enough to ensure the next entry in one of its most-beloved franchises doesn’t suffer the same fate as Starfield. Launching a new IP that falls flat is a definite bummer. But releasing an Elder Scrolls 6 that feels anything like Starfield would be even worse.