Summary
While much of the pre-release coverage for Bethesda Game Studio’s sprawling sci-fi epic,Starfield, focused on the over 1000 planets included in the game, navigating across their surfaces is proving to be an exercise in tedium for some players. Despite giving players a vast number of celestial bodies to discover, the time and effort required to actuallyexploreStarfield’s planetson foot has led to frustration and renewed calls for a much-requested traversal feature to be added to the game.
The procedurally generated planets inhabitingStarfield’s expansive cosmos are an impressive technical feat, but their vast size can make on-foot exploration a chore. Although there’s a surprising amount ofenvironmental variety onStarfield’s planets, moving from one biome to another currently requires hopping back into a ship and choosing a new landing site. Many players feel that this additional step in the exploration process slows down the pace of gameplay, breaking the sense of immersion. In an attempt to speed up this sometimes glacially slow process, some gamers are now pleading for Bethesda to add ground vehicles to the game.
RELATED:Starfield Player Discovers Purple Planet
In a new post on r/Starfield, these frustrations came to a head for Redditor WhiskeyCloudBackup, who shared a picture of one of the ground vehicles fromElite Dangerousand stated that the inclusion of a similar vehicle was “literally the only thing I want in this game.” Bethesda’s Todd Howard has previously attempted to explainwhyStarfielddoesn’t have land vehicles, citing the problems it could cause with the game’s procedural generation system, but these justifications seemingly fell flat for many Redditors responding to the post. Regardless of the technical problems it could introduce, it seems clear that players want land vehicles added to the game.
Starfieldfans responding to the post added their suggestions for introducing vehicles to the game, with the ideas ranging from the practical to the comical. Offering a solution that could potentially work within the limits ofStarfield’s procedural generation system, one response suggested adding a floating motorcycle that could speed up the pace of exploration while still limiting players from moving so fast that they break the maps. Another response posited a slightly tongue-in-cheek way of addressing the traversal issues inStarfield, joking that Bethesda should just put wheels and handlebars on robot companion Vasco and “let me rip.”
It’s obvious that many players are unhappy with the on-foot exploration inStarfield, but it remains to be seen what will be done to address this issue. While Bethesda may tweak the speed of on-foot exploration in future patches, players hoping to hop into a Warthog-style ATV to tear acrossStarfield’s version of Reach fromHalomay have a long wait ahead of them.
Starfieldis available now for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
