Summary
Bethesda Executive Producer Todd Howard went on record to clarify whyStarfielddoesn’t have any land vehicles. His explanation also offered some wider insights intoStarfield’sunprecedentedly long development cycle, relative to the company’s past projects.
When it comes to Bethesda’s brand of open-world RPGs, there’s never a shortage of gameplay features that a subset of the fandom will always feel are missing from the final package. For example, whileStarfieldboasts incredibly in-depth spaceship building and customization mechanics, some players have already taken online to bemoan the fact that there are no land vehicles in the game.
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Fielding a question on why that is the case afteraddressing someStarfieldPC optimization concerns, Howard explained that Bethesda actually considered the idea of including land vehicles at one point during development. The studio ultimately decided against such an addition on account of pacing, as land transportation would inherently change the gameplay in a direction it didn’t want to pursue. Elaborating on that point, Howard explained that the issue came down to the developer’s need to anticipate “how fast [the players] are seeing things;” since land vehicles would add a major variable to that equation, the idea was eventually abandoned.
The Bethesda official’s remarks were possibly made in reference to the fact thatStarfieldmakes extensive use of procedural generation to populate its planetswith points of interest (POIs). While their actual topography is the same for every player and usually features at least some handcrafted locations, the player will never walk in a straight line for long without stumbling on something interesting because the game actively spawns POIs if there are none in their vicinity every so often. Throwing vehicles into the mix with this particular implementation of dynamic content might hence make the world feel more sparse, which is possibly what Howard was alluding to.
That is not to say thatStarfieldfans wanting to drive around its hundreds of planets won’t be able to do so eventually, at least if they’re playing on PC; if Bethesda’s past games are any indication, it’s only a question of time before modders add a wide variety of vehicles into the game, as was the case withFallout 3andFallout 4. But while hundreds ofStarfieldmods have already surfaced online, complex additions such as vehicle packs are likely still years away because they won’t even be able to start active development until Bethesda puts out the game’s Creation Kit offering official modding support.
Starfieldis available now for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
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