Bethesda Executive Producer Todd Howard has answered fans’ frequently asked questions about why Starfield has no land vehicles.
Todd Howard, Bethesda’s Executive Producer has gone on record to clarify why there are no land vehicles in Starfield. His explanation also gave a broader insight into the game’s unprecedented development cycle compared to the company’s previous projects.
Regarding Bethesda’s open-world RPGs, there is never a shortage of gameplay features that some fans always feel are missing from the final package.
For example, Starfield boasts incredibly deep spaceship building and customization mechanics. However, some players online have already lamented the lack of land vehicles in the game.
After addressing concerns about Starfield’s PC optimization, Howard responded. He explained that Bethesda did consider the idea of including land vehicles at one point during development. The studio ultimately dropped the idea because of the pace. Because land-based transport would inherently change the gameplay in a direction they didn’t want to pursue. Howard clarified that the problem was that the developers needed to anticipate “how quickly [players] would see things”; since land vehicles would add a significant variable to that equation, the idea was ultimately scrapped.
The Bethesda official’s comments probably refer to the fact that Starfield extensively uses procedural generation to populate planets with POIs (“points of interest”). Their actual topography is, of course, the same for all players. That is, they usually contain at least some hand-crafted locations. The player will never walk in a straight line for long without stumbling upon something interesting. This is because the game actively creates POIs if they are not nearby.
Throwing vehicles into the mix with this specific implementation of dynamic content can make the world feel more sparse, which is probably what Howard was aiming for.
That’s not to say that fans who want to travel around the hundreds of planets in Starfield won’t eventually have the opportunity to do so. At least if they play on PC. If Bethesda’s previous games are anything to go by, it’s only a matter of time before modders add a wide range of vehicles to the game. Just like they did with Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. But while hundreds of Starfield mods have already popped up online, complex additions like vehicle packs are likely years away. That’s because they can’t even begin active development until Bethesda releases the game’s official Creation Kit, which offers official modding support.
Source: YouTube
