How It Feels To Play Starfield In 2026

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.