Bethesda has just revealed the most game-changing update yet for Starfield in the form of Free Lanes. Announced alongside the game’s PS5 port and new Terran Armada DLC, this new form of spaceflight brings real-time space travel to the game.
While not the end of Bethesda’s journey as the team commits to “years” of additional Starfield support, bringing Free Lanes to fruition was not an easy task. As one of the biggest requests from fans, bringing full space travel to Starfield required a lot of work and a lot of time as the game simply wasn’t designed around this activity.
“There were a number [of technical hurdles,” Starfield lead producer Tim Lamb said. Starfield, while a space-faring game, was designed more around jumping from content to content, which now had to be reformatted to fit in a world where players can move more freely.
“I think, first and foremost, is that all of the existing content that we shipped still has to work,” Lamb explained. “So, when you look at the logistics of bringing it into the game, all of that stuff that existed before still has to work.”
Lamb said that “there’s no content that existed out there between the planets” as every space encounter was designed to ping around the orbit of a planet. With this in mind, Bethesda had to shift a lot of content to be out in space for players to discover, or add the possibility of those encounters existing in a space that existed before, but what entirely empty.
“It’s the system of putting those things out there in space for you to discover and find, how frequently do those things pop up, does it make sense for that space encounter to exist in that system because of lore or other context and things like that,” Lamb started. “How do you communicate it to the player, like: ‘Hey, this is a thing that’s interesting to you’ or ‘this is a thing that’s dangerous’ so there’s all the visual and audio with that [as well].”
While Free Lanes was teased last year, it’s been a long time coming with the team having to balance its encounters while also adding new content for players to discover. Lamb explained that the team worked extensively on “the iteration of finding that right moment of tempo for how it feels when you arrive at a planet [so] that it hits that science-fiction, cinematic sweet spot”.
“For me, when you look at the total package of how all those pieces come together, one of my favourite things is targeting a space encounter that’s on the far side of a planet while I’m cruising at high speed because as you approach the gravity well of a body, it’ll slow you down,” Lamb said. “So, you kind of get super-fast, you see the planet appear, you slowly kind of go around it, and you arrive at a space encounter on the other side.”
Lamb explained that Free Lanes, and any update of this scale requires a “lot of tuning”. While Starfield is still being supported by Bethesda Game Studios, the existing team is not the same size as the team working on the development of The Elder Scrolls 6. Game-changing updates take time for teams of any size, and Free Lanes is a huge mechanical shift under the hood for the team’s sci-fi RPG.
Alongside the new travel, Starfield’s huge update also comes alongside a full PlayStation 5 port, new POIs, a new DLC and additional quality-of-life improvements. While these updates may not make players who already hated the RPG suddenly fall in love with it, they’re certainly huge improvements for fans that already enjoyed the game.
