Summary
- Navigating the vast number of planets in Starfield on foot is frustrating for players, as it requires hopping back into a ship to explore different biomes.
- Players are pleading for Bethesda to add ground vehicles to the game to speed up the slow exploration process and maintain immersion.
- Suggestions from fans range from adding a floating motorcycle to putting wheels on robot companion Vasco, but it remains to be seen if Bethesda will address the issue.
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 actually explore Starfield’s planets on foot has led to frustration and renewed calls for a much-requested traversal feature to be added to the game.
The procedurally generated planets inhabiting Starfield’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 of environmental variety on Starfield’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.
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 from Elite Dangerous and 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 explain why Starfield doesn’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.
Starfield fans 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 of Starfield’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 in Starfield, 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 in Starfield, 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 across Starfield’s version of Reach from Halo may have a long wait ahead of them.
Starfield is available now for PC and Xbox Series X/S.