Summary
- Land vehicles are coming to Starfield, addressing one of the game's biggest issues.
- Future updates aim to make traveling less monotonous and more exciting.
- A May update will improve navigation, difficulty settings, and ship customization.
The wait for significant updates to sense of hollowness and repetition has been its biggest sticking point. Coming off of the more densely bespoke worlds of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, it doesn't take long for the monotony of traveling across Starfield landscapes to start wearing thin.
A video from the official Bethesda Softworks YouTube channel addresses some key updates coming to Starfield on May 15, but it also contains a tease for an exciting addition in the future. At the end of the video, Lead Creative Producer Tim Lamb says that "the team is working on [its] first land vehicle," a statement accompanied by footage of a rover speeding across a planet's dunes.
It's mentioned separately from the Shattered Space DLC progress, so it's presumably intended as an addition for the base game. Currently, planets and moons can only be traversed on foot, with some form of rover being a popular request from players.
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Bethesda's Todd Howard has finally announced a release window for Starfield's first expansion, Shattered Space, after months of speculation.
Starfield Land Vehicles Should Make Planets More Fun
A Future Update Will Stave Off Boredom
Wandering around on foot is often a big part of the fun in Bethesda games, but the fundamental differences in Starfield design make the appeal wear thin a lot more quickly. When a lot of points of interest end up being similar and the large spaces between are often empty, the meditative aspect of ground traversal can quickly give way to straightforward boredom. Adding land vehicles makes it easier to focus on the more interesting stuff, and it also provides a nice neutral option that sits between walking and pinging around via fast-travel.
Starfield’s Shattered Space DLC Can Fix The Game’s Most Annoying Issue
Starfield's Shattered Space DLC has the opportunity to avoid the game's most annoying issue by being a smaller, more condensed story.
For now, the May update additions can help tide things over, and there are a few very welcome inclusions already. More detailed surface maps can make navigation less painful in general, as can the ability to tune a number of individual aspects of gameplay up or down in difficulty to make things either more casual or more thrilling. Improved ship decoration options are also a very nice addition, making it so that ship interiors don't all have to follow prefab templates that pale in comparison to the amount of exterior customization that's possible.
There's no timeline yet for when land vehicles might come to Starfield, but the inclusion of brief gameplay footage in the update video is definitely a good sign. It's something that would have been nice to have at launch, but it's definitely still a situation where late is better than never. Starfield is on the path to becoming a significantly better game than it was at launch, and the addition of land vehicles should be one of the biggest steps that it can take in achieving this goal.
Source: Bethesda Softworks/YouTube
Bethesda Game Studios presents Starfield - the first original IP from the studio in twenty-five-plus years. Set in the year 2310, the United Colonies and Freestar Collective are observing a shaky truce after a war set 20 years prior. The player will customize their character as a member of a space exploration team called Constellation while navigating The Settled Systems and the conflicts between the warring factions. According to Bethesda, players can explore over 100 systems and 1000 planets to find resources and build their ships, living out their own sci-fi journeys.
- Platform(s)
- PC, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S
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