Starfield

Three decisions at character creation, a ship you rebuild, outposts to link together, and two paid stories on top of a free update that changed how you get around a system.

The character is three decisions you name out loud

Character creation comes down to how you look, your Background and your Traits. The store treats those as the foundation of a run rather than a wall of numbers to push around, and it offers four pictures of who you might be: an experienced explorer, a charming diplomat, a stealthy cyber runner, or something else entirely.

That framing is doing useful work. In a galaxy with more than a thousand planets, knowing who your captain is becomes the thing that gives the map some direction, and deciding it early is one way to keep an enormous sandbox from turning into a list of errands.

A free update changed how you travel

The Free Lanes update, which the developer says is free for every player, added the ability to travel between planets inside a star system in Cruise Mode, with everything you could do while docked or in orbit still available while you travel.

That means decorating your ship, talking to your crew and using the workbenches are all still available while you are actually travelling rather than parked. Autopilot slows you down when you arrive, so a long flight is not a test of reflexes, and new points of interest appear dynamically along the way so you can redirect toward one or keep going.

The update also added new space encounters and raised how often they happen, and some of them pull you out of Cruise Mode automatically, so travelling is livelier than it was.

Gear has a new currency

Free Lanes also reworked how you improve things. A new resource called X-Tech turns up on bosses and in chests and ship wreckage, and it is the currency for pushing weapons, gear and ships further.

Legendary effects are where the rules changed most. You can reroll a legendary effect for X-Tech and credits for five attempts, and if the modifier you want has still not appeared by then, the full list opens up and you simply pick it. The new rank 4 legendary effects work the other way around: once an item is a rank-three legendary you pay credits and X-Tech and choose the effect outright, and some of them change how a weapon behaves rather than just how hard it hits.

Two new quality tiers sit above Advanced, named Superior and Exceptional. Ships gained a buildable optimization terminal that spends X-Tech on systems such as shields, weapons, engines and grav drive, and gear gained an upgrade-module slot that pushes a single stat. That is a lot of new dials for anyone who enjoys tuning a loadout.

Outposts get a shared container

Outposts were always a chain: extract materials, link them by cargo, invest them into research that unlocks better crafting, with logistics as the friction. A new container you can install at an outpost shares items and resources between them, so whatever you drop in one is accessible at any other outpost that also has a shared container.

A new Database gathers everything you have learned in one place, including locations you have visited, recipes you have gathered and where to find the resources you have researched, and it lets you favourite planets you keep returning to. A new land vehicle built for verticality also makes reaching the high ground less of a chore.

New Game Plus keeps some of your gear

Starfield's ending has always offered a new beginning, and the device that makes it less of a reset is the Quantum Entanglement Device. You build it in the Lodge once the Armillary has been assembled from all the Artifacts, and it lets you bring some of your favourite items into the next playthrough, with its capacity expanded using Quantum Essence.

The same essence can rank up the Starborn powers you have already unlocked without leaving your current playthrough and hunting down more temples. Neither system carries everything, but stepping through the Unity no longer means arriving at the next run empty-handed.

What you pay for on top

Two paid stories sit above the base game. Shattered Space takes the investigation to House Va'ruun's hidden homeworld, and Terran Armada is a story DLC about a faction of military deserters who have built an army of robots to unite humanity by force, along with new locations, technology and weapons.

The Digital Premium Edition bundles the base game with both stories, 1,000 Creation Credits, the Constellation skin pack and access to the digital artbook and soundtrack, and a Premium Edition Upgrade exists for anyone who already owns the base game. Creations are bought with Creation Credits in the in-game Creations menu, and the developer counts more than a thousand of them from Bethesda and verified creators, covering new weapons, spacesuits, missions and even reworked systems. Not every one costs credits, either: some Creations, like the free Doom-themed At Hell's Gate mini-quest, cost nothing.

On platforms, the game arrived on PC and Xbox, and it has since come to PlayStation 5 as well. The base game alone is a very large role-playing game, so the expansions are a question of how much more story you want rather than a gate on the rest of it.

Should you play it

Yes, if you want a science-fiction role-playing game that rewards picking a direction and committing to it. The free update added travel, gearing and outpost systems without asking for anything in return, and none of that is behind a paywall.

Two things to decide first. Work out who your character is before you start, because the galaxy will not do it for you. And decide up front whether you want the stories, since both paid expansions are optional additions rather than required pieces of the campaign.