You can join Starfield religions and one can hurt you for not jumping

Starfield’s religions, which you can choose from when selecting background, factions, and other traits when customising your character, include an obscure sect which forces you to repeatedly grav jump or risk losing health.

Bethesda’s Summer Games Fest presentation didn’t focus much on Starfield’s religions, but a closer look at the open-world game’s extended character customisation trailer reveals that you have several options when initially selecting a faith, each providing both gameplay benefits and disadvantages.

‘Serpent’s Embrace’ is the one that caught our eye. If you decide your character is going to be a follower of ‘The Great Serpent’, it means they have some sort of uncontrollable impulse to jump – if while navigating one of the game’s 1,000 planets you continually use your boosters to grav jump, it will give you a temporary boost to health and endurance, but neglect to jump and the Serpent will be displeased, punishing you by lowering your key stats accordingly. Imagine being at a nightclub, and feeling like you have to bounce up and down to ‘Mr Brightside’ or everyone will think you’re a killjoy. It’s a bit like that, but in space.

If you’re not the jumping kind, however, Starfield has plenty of other religious options. ‘Raised Universal’ means you’re a member of a slightly ominous-sounding faith called the ‘Sanctum Universal’. We don’t exactly know what their beliefs are yet, but from the name they sound like the strongest and most predominant religion in the universe, and being a member grants you a discount at any of their church’s stores, where you can buy ship and weapon parts.

The downside is that you will be shunned by the ‘Enlightened’, presumably Starfield’s science-based, unbelieving faction, who won’t trade with followers of the Sanctum – if the Enlightened are selling something that you want, it’s too bad, because they don’t like your god.

Your choice of Starfield religion is combined with other starting traits like faction allegiance and personal background, and we can imagine spending hours not only designing our character’s face, hairstyle, and ship, but making sure they have exactly the right personality type to ensure galactic success. Either that, or just spamming jump until god deems us worthy.