The Free Lanes update will finally demolish Starfield's most annoying loading screens, sort of

One of my fondest memories of Wing Commander Privateer is the time I was chased by a kilrathi for what felt like an hour. You can't activate a jump point when under attack in Privateer, so after I was ambushed at one by a kilrathi ship that outclassed me early on I had to flee the old-fashioned way—emptying my afterburner to gain a lead, watching my pursuer catch up as I waited for it to refill, then emptying it again. I flew like that all the way to an inhabited planet where the local Confed ships could save my bacon.

Unfortunately, that kind of thing turned out not to be possible in Starfield, a game where space exploration was mostly a bunch of loading and cutscenes. As this video from Alanah Pearce proved, you could spend seven hours flying to a planet only to find it was a hollow jpg floating in space. It just wasn't a game about freewheeling exploration.

That will potentially change when the Free Lanes update rolls out, adding a Cruise Mode you can activate to travel along lanes between planets. You can alternate between four different speeds in Cruise Mode to fly between planets in a system, with radiant "Space Encounters" popping up along the way.

As Starfield's lead creative producer Timothy Lamb demonstrated during a digital preview event, when a random event appears as you cruise the free lanes you can steer toward it or set your autopilot to take you there, and when you're about 1,500 kilometres away a soft transition will trigger rather than a loading screen. Everything goes out of focus for a few seconds, but there's no jarring switch to an external view of your ship or fade to black, just a moment of blur and then the encounter loads.

The anomaly that appeared in Lamb's demonstration was low-key—just an asteroid field with some wreckage in it which he looted for items including a new crafting material called X-Tech. Hopefully there are more interesting Space Encounters that Bethesda just didn't want to spoil.

"Being in the free lanes isn't just about getting there and experiencing things you can find along the way," Lamb said. "It's about living a life on your ship. [While] I'm cruising in the free lanes I can get up, I can walk around my ship, I can talk to my companions or my crew. I can go in, I can decorate, I can take items from my containers, I can re-equip myself."

While Lamb was demonstrating this by walking around his cockpit, the autopilot was taking him toward a planet. "One of my favorite things about this is arriving at a planet," he said, as a world with rings around it grew larger in the viewscreen. After another soft transition he was in orbit, ready to land if he wanted to, or fly on if he didn't.

That was the part of Free Lanes that interested me the most, and made me wish I'd held off until this update to play Starfield for the first time. Maybe it would have held my interest for longer if space travel had felt less like a loading-screen simulator. But it's not the only change coming with the update, which will also add:

• The moon jumper, a new land vehicle that has so much jump boost it can basically fly.
• Muria, a base game NPC who was memorably sarcastic, can now be recruited to your crew, as can a cute miniature robot.
• You don't have to lose all your items when you start a New Game+ if you construct a container to bring a selection of them with you.
• Outpost tweaks, such as storage containers with shared inventory and a pet called the "milliewhale" that lives at an outpost.
• Collectable action figures that give buffs when found, like Fallout's bobbleheads, and can be placed in special displays—either pristine in their packaging or open and added to a playset.

• An additional external spaceship view with a wider FOV, especially for players who design outsized spaceships.
• An asteroid manor player home.
• The X-Tech crafting resource, which can be used to upgrade weapons and ship modules, among other things.
• Higher-tier enemies with modifiers like elemental damage or faster attacks.
• Additional locations and encounters to discover, which hopefully means less of that thing where you explore a pirate base, travel to another planet, and find another base with the same enemies in it.

The Free Lanes update will be available on April 7. That same day the Terran Armada DLC will go on sale, offering a questline that sets you up against opponents who have an army of robots.