Starfield’s latest update draws player ire by sticking a bounty hunting quest behind the Creation Club paywall

As part of yesterday’s Xbox Showcase – which also offered us a first proper look at the Shattered Space expansion – Starfield also got a pretty substantial update right away. While the fact it’s come with the release of the game’s long-awaited Creation Kit for modders has gone down well, one thing that’s drawn a bit of a mixed reaction from players is the decision to make one of the Trackers Alliance quests paid Creation Club content.

First of all, let’s be very clear about what exactly is going on here. A big part of Starfield’s June update are some new bounty hunting missions and mechanics. The first of these missions – which sets you up as a bounty hunter – and all of the new features like the bounty scanner system and Elite Trackers Alliance mission board are available for free as part of the update.

So, what are some players not happy about? Well, the second Trackers Alliance bounty hunting quest available as part of the update – The Vulture – isn’t just included as part of the free update. It’s instead being sold via the Creation Club storefront that’s also been added to the game as part of this update, for a price of 700 credits.

For a bit of context, purchasing a pack of 1000 Creation Club credits – which is what you’d need to be able to buy this quest if you haven’t just gotten that same amount for free thanks to owning the Premium Edition of the game – will set you back £8.99/$9.99. In this case, that’s the price for something made by Bethesda Game Studios, not a paid mod made by a creator, as a lot of the other stuff that’s part of this new Starfield Creation Club is.

So, the player frustration this quest is inspiring isn’t a straight-up next entry in the long-running paid mods debate that’s been going on within the Bethesda community with regards to the Creation Club for a while now, but rather folks simply being unhappy with the monetisation practices Bethesda’s employing with regards to its own stuff.

As has often been the case when it’s come to Creation Club stuff over the years, it’s the pricing that folks are really taking issue with – especially following Bethesda lead creative producer Tim Lamb’s suggestion in a video about the update that, going forwards, more missions in this questline of sorts are going to be added to the game via the Creation Club.

As some players on Reddit are pointing out, if the credit price point is the same as The Vulture each time, the amount folks may have to pay to get all of these Trackers Alliance quests could quickly get pretty high.

“They’re chopping up what could have been a small, but feature-complete DLC focused around the Trackers Alliance into separate pay-as-you-go quests that each cost as much as you’d expect to pay for a DLC of that size,” one argues, adding: “It’s a lot easier to squeeze 10 $7 payments out of players over a year, than it is to drop a $70 DLC with 10 quests in it.”

At the end of the day, as some of the frustrated players have admitted, the game’s new modding tools should mean there’ll be plenty of free modded missions avialable to folks who don’t want to pay for quests like this soon, but the debate as to whether the Creation Club is the best way for Bethesda to distribute content – and pay selected modders for their good work – going forwards is still one worth having.