I wouldn’t say that Starfield has seen its Cyberpunk 2077 moment just yet, and I’m not sure it ever will. While some have claimed that the release of Free Lanes is a game-changing moment for the sci-fi RPG, it really just feels like Bethesda has finally filled in some of the glaring gaps the game has suffered from since launch.

While the release of Free Lanes and Terran Armada is giving Starfield a sizable resurgence with soaring player counts, this isn’t the end of Bethesda’s oft-maligned sci-fi game. In fact, as we reportedly just weeks ago, the studio has committed to “years” of additional support for the game, likely including at least one more expansion in the future.

Starfield Free Lanes hasn’t fixed every issue with the game. There are still a few too many interstitial animations that cut immersion—such as docking animations—that could be made seamless with background loading instead. Additionally, the game could still benefit from some more unique locations, if that’s within the scope of Bethesda’s update plans.

Whatever Bethesda’s actual plans are for Starfield’s future, it’s a game that deserves more updates and more exploration. As an RPG, Starfield has both benefitted and suffered from its almost imperceivable scale and with the slew of additional POIs you can now explore as of the game’s recent update, that gigantic mass is starting to justify its own existence.

The issue with such a huge scale—as Bethesda has learned in the past with The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall—is that you need to fill it, and as one of the biggest game worlds around, Starfield certainly struggled to make the vast expanse of space work within its gameplay loop. It is now better, absolutely, but with such a vast amount of space to work with, so much more could be done.

There’s also a lot more to explore within Starfield’s unique dystopian RPG universe, lore-wise. While the game does quite a fair bit with its multiverse-hopping Starborn in terms of New Game Plus options, the game leaves a lot of space for future expansions to actually explore this faction more. In fact, Starfield as a whole could probably benefit from even more factions for players to play with, especially following the introduction of the new Terran Alliance.

Bethesda’s game has imagined humans spread out across the stars, split into their own factions and sub-factions, and there’s infinitely more that could be done with this. There’s an entire universe on offer here, one that could always be hiding something new around every corner, and it’s worth exploring more. After all, some of Bethesda’s best work is often found in DLC expansions. (Far Habor, anyone?)

Starfield, similarly to Fallout 76, has always had potential, and just as Bethesda has continued to support its multiplayer game—which launched in asignificantly worse spot than this game—there was always something great here. As someone who played hundreds of hours on launch and has continued to play since, Starfield boasts Bethesda’s best combat and even some of its best quests, and I think it’s a game that deserves to be continued, even if future updates are smaller than Free Lanes.

At the end of the day, with each passing update, it seems that Bethesda’s vision for what Starfield actually should be is continually getting stronger. Even if the game doesn’t receive updates to the scale and speed of No Man’s Sky, it’s clear that there are more ideas that the team has for Bethesda’s RPG, and I desperately want to see them realised. Nowadays, a game’s being is temporary; Fallout 76 today is a largely different game than it was on release, even Crimson Desert is quickly becoming a different game just weeks after release. If this is what Starfield is in 2026, what is it in 2027? And what could it be in 2030? It’ll always be Starfield, just maybe a better version of itself.