Bethesda’s Starfield is getting another year of content, at least. While Bethesda previously committed to ‘years’ of new updates for its often-maligned sci-fi game, recent shake-ups could mean that this upcoming year of content may be the game’s last.
For Starfield Year 3, Bethesda confirmed that the upcoming DLC and updates will introduce “new Starborn content”, focusing on the game’s universe-hopping space wizards. The updates will continue adding “new stories, targeted gameplay improvements” and more, and they could fix the biggest issues with the game.
Starfield is, admittedly, a very imperfect game, but it is still an often-brilliant one. There are some fantastic quests hidden within the game’s overly-large universe, and the mystery of the Starborn is supposed to be its biggest one.
For those who have not finished a run of Starfield, the Starborn are a mysterious group of people. Across the universe, you can find their temples, which can grant mysterious powers to you in the same vein as Skyrim’s Dragon Runes. The Starborn themselves, at least as we know them, are not really a race of people, but a collective of humans that have jumped from one universe to another, often dozens of times.
There’s an interesting story somewhere within the existence of the Starborn that Starfield doesn’t really tell. Outside of The Emissary and The Hunter, two rival Starborns fighting across universes, there’s very little story to latch onto when it comes to the mysterious trans-dimensional story. Instead, in a very non-Bethesda way, the Starborn become a gameplay mechanic and very little else.
Expanding the Starborn is something that fans have been asking for since the game’s launch. Players want to know more about these characters. Starborn aren’t a race or a species, as far as we know, just a collection of people, but they have their own style of ships, their own symbols, and their own spaceships. There must be a Starborn society somewhere, there must be more to learn.
Outside of that, expanding on the game’s Starborn systems would be a major boon to Bethesda’s RPG. As they stand right now, the Starborn gameplay systems are weak: acquiring powers in temples is the worst part of the game, upgrading them is boring, and fighting the Starborn is largely uninteresting compared to fighting other foes.
If the resources are there, Starfield Year 3 needs to expand on all of the above. There should be more powers, and getting them should be more interesting than performing the same annoying temple minigame two dozen times. There should be more Starborn stories with unique power rewards, maybe even some quests that require you to follow a character throughout multiple unities to complete.
The Starborn and their handling within the world of Starfield is actually rather indicative of Starfield as a whole. As far as concept goes, they’re an incredible creation with a strong unique hook and a brilliant theme. However, as you start playing with them, they seem unfinished, missing something, and they’re often stretched too thin across the game’s massive universe.
If Year 3 really is Starfield’s last expansion, although there’s no announcement that it will be, then a major expansion to the Starborn is more than warranted. The Starborn are, unfortunately, one of Starfield’s strongest ideas and weakest executions, even more so than the game’s procedural generation, and they deserve their time in the sun… or suns considering there’s multiple in the game.
Alongside Starfield’s new updates, Bethesda is also working on multiple other games. The Elder Scrolls 6 is deep in active development, Fallout 5 is officially in pre-production, and remakes of Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas are both in development.
