It looks like Bethesda has begun teasing new content for Starfield, after fans spotted a hidden message in a social media video released to celebrate the game’s two-year anniversary.
The video, below, starts off innocently enough, but soon the tone of the music shifts and the image becomes garbled. Clearly, there’s a tease in there somewhere!
Celebrating two incredible years in the #Starfield. ?
— Starfield (@StarfieldGame) September 5, 2025
Thank you to everyone who has explored the Settled Systems with us. We look forward to the adventures yet to come. pic.twitter.com/AeWN8DVlO2
And indeed there is. It didn’t take long for Starfield fans to arrange the frames in such a way to form the words ‘Terran Armada,’ which has sent the game’s community down a rabbit hole of speculation.
Warning! Spoilers for Starfield follow:
The most obvious suggestion is Terran Armada is the name of Starfield’s long-awaited second expansion. If so, it suggests a DLC that revolves around Earth, people who left Earth, or people who still are on Earth. Some are speculating that Terran Armada, if this does in fact relate to DLC, will be about the return ships that left Earth at some point in the past, perhaps a fleet of generation ships. Another popular theory is that the Terrans are the name of a new enemy faction of survivors left on Earth after its destruction, which could evoke Mad Max vibes.
In Starfield, Earth became a barren, uninhabitable wasteland after its magnetosphere collapsed in 2203, leading to the dissipation of its atmosphere and the evacuation of humanity. The collapse was a direct consequence of the invention and widespread use of the Grav Drive, a technology enabling faster-than-light travel. The planet is now exposed to dangerous solar and cosmic radiation and is covered in toxic vents and impact craters, with no signs of life.
Or perhaps Terran Armada isn’t DLC 2 after all, and instead is a stop-gap update designed to tide fans over until the promised second expansion finally materializes.
Whatever this is, clearly Starfield fans who have stuck with the game since its launch in 2023 are chomping at the bit. Apart from vague words of reassurance, Bethesda has remained tight-lipped on the future of Starfield, only recently teasing improvements to space travel.
“We've waited 11 months for a three-second screen that changed colors and revealed a few letters of a broken up word (and we're probably gonna have to wait another 4-6 months for anything more),” said redditor Elkupalos. “We're beyond starved at this point haha. Next trailer or update of actual substance is gonna hit us fans like a nuke.”
Last month, Bethesda confirmed improvements to Starfield space gameplay “to make the travels there more rewarding” after datamined fragments of code suggested the developer had a more streamlined space travel experience in the works. Based on this datamine, while you may be able to travel between planets within the same system, you won’t be able to fly all the way between systems, nor fly directly from a planet's surface into orbit, like No Man's Sky.
In a new video discussing his career, veteran Bethesda developer Tim Lamb confirmed that the studio had been working on Starfield’s space gameplay, and that a new DLC story was still coming at some point.
“I think as it comes to Starfield, I'm really excited for players to see what the teams have been working on,” he said. “We have some cool stuff coming, including free updates and features the players have been asking for, as well as a new DLC story.
“I can't go into all the details just yet, but I will say part of the team has been focused on space gameplay to make the travels there more rewarding. We're also adding some new game systems, and a few other smaller delights. There's also some really interesting stuff coming down the pipe from our verified creators. There's some fun stuff.
“I just want to say thanks. We really appreciate the support and the enthusiasm. We can't wait to get it into the hands of our players.”
Last month it was reported that Starfield's second expansion and much-anticipated PlayStation 5 port would now arrive in 2026, following the poor reception to 2024 add-on Shattered Space. Bethesda boss Todd Howard had previously talked of expansions arriving annually.
Starfield launched in September 2023 as Bethesda’s first brand new IP in 25 years, but it was not as well received as the studio’s previous games in the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls franchises, and the Shattered Space expansion, released a year later in September 2024, has a ‘mostly negative’ user review rating on Steam.
Starfield went on to reach 15 million players, but the question of whether Bethesda might walk away from the game to focus on its other franchises has been a running theme since release. In June 2024, Bethesda insisted it remained committed to supporting Starfield, and confirmed at least one other story expansion would come out following Shattered Space. And in an interview with YouTube channel MrMattyPlays, Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard said the developer was aiming to release an annual story expansion for “hopefully a very long time.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
