I'm now hooked on Starfield, and it's all thanks to its recent game-changing upgrade

I tried to like Starfield when it first launched, I really did. I'd enjoyed all of Bethesda's past RPGs in some form or other but, as PC Gamer's Starfield review indicated could happen, I found myself oddly cold, held at arm's length from the developer's biggest-ever virtual creation.

I'd tried restarting the game multiple times, building different characters and attempting to explore different aspects of its vast offering of in-game activities to see if that would make it stick, but each time my initial enthusiasm faded away and, pretty quickly, I'd find myself playing something else.

Honestly, there was a point a few months back where I'd relegated Starfield to the vast pile of games that I'd tried, but would never go back to. I'd even started a replay of Fallout 4 to fill the Bethesda itch that Starfield had failed to scratch.

But then, out of the blue, Starfield got the upgrade I'd seemingly been waiting for. Lost among the furore over the recently released $7 DLC mission was the game's new Creations centre, powered by Bethesda's release of the Starfield Creation Kit, a free piece of software that lets regular gamers make mods for the game and then share them with others.

And, let me tell you, while mods for Starfield had obviously existed before Bethesda launched Creations, with me myself downloading a few from trusty old Nexus Mods, they had been far from ideal. Especially because when I played Starfield back then, I'd played it across three different systems, my main gaming PC, my gaming laptop, and occasionally on an Xbox Series X. 

This meant that, not only did I have to download my mods on every PC every time I added one, but they also wouldn't work on Xbox. Basically, it was a deal breaker, as I'd spend more time curating mods and getting Starfield on each system ready to play than actually playing the game.

Creations, though, solves that problem instantly. This is because when you download a mod from its in-game menu of Creations, it ties the mod in