Todd Howard has answered gamers’ recurring question about why there is no ground transportation in Starfield.
Bethesda actually considered the idea of including ground vehicles at one point during development, but the studio ultimately decided against the addition.
Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard recently spoke out explaining why Starfield doesn’t have any ground transportation. His explanation also offered some further insight into Starfield’s unprecedentedly long development cycle, relative to the company’s previous projects.
When it comes to Bethesda’s open world RPG franchise, we can see that they sometimes lack gameplay features that a group of fans feel should be included in the game. While Starfield boasts surprisingly deep spaceship building and customization mechanics, some players have gone online to lament the fact that there are no ground vehicles in the game.
After responding to some concerns about Starfield’s PC optimization issues, Howard explained that Bethesda actually considered the idea of including road vehicles at one point during development. But the studio ultimately decided against such an addition for reasons related to the game’s pacing, as traveling by ground would have changed the gameplay in a direction they did not want to pursue. Elaborating on that point, Howard explained that the problem comes from the developer’s need to predict “speed [người chơi] see everything.” Since ground transportation would add a large variable to that equation, the idea was eventually scrapped.
The Bethesda senior leader’s comments could be related to the fact that Starfield makes extensive use of auto-generation to include key points of interest (POIs) on its planets. While their actual terrain is the same for almost every player, and there are usually at least a few hand-generated locations, players will never stay on the same path for too long without stumbling upon something interesting since the game will proactively generate POIs if there are no locations in their vicinity. Therefore, the introduction of vehicles with this particular deployment of automated content could make the world more sparse and desolate, which is likely what Howard is implying.
Of course that doesn’t mean Starfield fans who want to drive around hundreds of planets can’t do so at all, at least if gamers play on PC. It will only be a matter of time before modders add more types of vehicles to the game, as was the case with Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. But while hundreds of Starfield mods have appeared online, complex additions e.g. like vehicle packs may still be years away as they won’t even be able to begin active development until Bethesda releases the game’s Creation Kit to provide modding support official.
