Why ‘Starfield’ Doesn’t Have Land Vehicles For Its Vast Planets

One question about Starfield that most everyone has the first time they land on one of its large planets is…why aren’t there ground vehicles to get around faster? It seems pretty logical, given that you have to trek anywhere from 400 to 1000 meters to get to points of interest, which can be a slog on foot, especially with limited oxygen.

As part of a somewhat bizarre Bloomberg interview where Todd Howard fielded questions about the game (the “you may need to upgrade your PC” one), he was indeed asked about this.

His response was: “Once you do vehicles, it does change the gameplay so by focusing once you land in your ship, you’re on foot, it lets us really for the players make it an experience where we know how fast they’re seeing things.”

This seems to draw an obvious conclusion that what he’s implying here is that this is a rendering issue. Producing all these rocks and plants and animals and such is one thing when on foot, but another when you’re speeding toward them in a vehicle.

However, I think there are probably a longer list of reasons for this past rendering/draw distance/pop-in alone, and these likely all combine into the decision not to do vehicles, which I doubt would even change in DLC, despite the fact that its forever-comparison point, No Man’s Sky, did add vehicles eventually. Not that these are all good reasons, but here’s what I think is happening:

Those Invisible Walls – Before the game came out, we heard leaks about people walking anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes to reach the “end” of one of the game’s generated tiles. While in 140 hours with the game I never hit one of these walls, because who is going to walk across what is essentially the entire map of Skyrim for fun, that dynamic changes when you introduce vehicles. Suddenly, if you have vehicles that move 4-5x the speed of a player, you do start having people run into those walls with some amount of frequency, which would indeed be very bad. So this is a safeguard against that.

It Negates Most Of The Oxygen System – The oxygen system in Starfield is effectively the game’s version of stamina, and where do you run out of oxygen the most? Going long distances on these planets, which encourages you to upgrade oxygen, which includes investing in perks or upgrading your gear to combat that. It just is not as much of a factor in smaller cities or during combat.

Compare To Past Bethesda Games – Yes, Skyrim and Oblivion obviously have their horses, but it’s also true that player spend a ton of time off their horses as well, so maybe it felt more optional. And the Fallout series obviously does not have any speed ground vehicles to whip around the wasteland, and gameplay is most similar to that game. Of course the counter-argument here is that those games were much more dense with its POIs compared to these vast, explorable planets.

Terrain Design – The way these maps are generated, many of them just would not work with vehicles at all. Dense forests, loads of rock clusters, just lots of impassable locations that would make vehicles largely pointless, and then there would be complaints about that.

Reduced Exploration, Faster Power Leveling – I think Bethesda wants one of the core loops of the game to be wandering around, scanning rocks and plants and animals, which zipping around in a vehicle is less conducive too. I also wonder if this might be an XP gain thing, as if suddenly the distance between bandit bases on the horizon is a 15 second drive instead of a slower walk, or driving between large clusters of farmable creatures, perhaps that’s too much XP too quickly. Though again, the NMS comparison stands, as that game is also about cataloguing things, and there are plenty of ways to hyper farm XP including having your base literally print it for you super fast when set up properly.

I don’t know where I land on the whole ground vehicle thing. I think it could be a fun dynamic, something to invest in and build besides ships. And no, especially on desolate moons I’m not sure what is gained by those long treks, and it would be fun to bounce around in a moon rover. And yet I can sort of understand why they’re not doing it due to all of the above, and technical issues we may not fully grasp. Regardless, I don’t expect the game will ever get them, so upgrade that oxygen.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.