Starfield does not feature land vehicles which means you will walk to that distant mountain.
- Starfield, the open-world game by Bethesda, lacks ground vehicles, relying solely on jetpacks for planet-side exploration.
- Bethesda’s Todd Howard explained that this design choice allows players to experience the planet’s exploration at a deliberate pace and ensures they see the game world in detail.
- While some players hope for future DLC that adds ground vehicles, the absence of vehicles may be related to Starfield’s limited playable area and potential impact on exploration.
A ground vehicle of some kind is present in most open-world games to aid players in navigating the map. There were horses in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but Starfield only has jetpacks, which led to some unfavorable reviews.
It might become apparent that there aren’t any ground vehicles in Starfield after playing for a few hours. When you have assignments that need you to travel more than a thousand meters from your landing point, the game might occasionally feel like a walking simulator. Fast travel is disabled when a player becomes encumbered, which makes the game extremely tedious.
Regarding the absence of cars in the game, Bethesda says that it was a purposeful decision. Game director Todd Howard stated in a Bloomberg interview that they had thought about include cars in the game. To enjoy as much of the planet-side exploring as possible, the developers intended for users to utilize jetpacks.
“We take it into consideration,” Howard remarked. “The game does alter once you work on automobiles. By concentrating after you’ve set foot on your ship, we can truly give the players an experience where we can observe how quickly they’re perceiving things.”
And in a way, you do have a car, he continues. With your spacecraft, you are able to travel across space. You have a jetpack that you can upgrade on the surface, which is a lot of fun.
The decision by Bethesda to remove ground vehicles from the game is an intriguing one. Open-world games from today, such as Horizon Forbidden West and Using cars made traveling through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom faster. Considering the vast spaces in Starfield that players can explore, players had hoped that Bethesda would follow suit.
But Bethesda might include automobiles in a later DLC pack that’s akin to No Man’s Sky. Ground vehicles were added to the Hello Games space exploration sandbox, which is sometimes likened to Starfield, about six months after the game’s first release. Numerous ground vehicles can be found in No Man’s Sky, such as a submarine, a swift space buggy, a huge hauler, and even a mechanical walker known as the Minotaur.
Many players speculate on social media that the reason Starfield doesn’t have ground vehicles is because it doesn’t have actual planetary exploration, unlike No Man’s Sky, where players may circumnavigate a planet. The playable and explorable section of Starfield is small, and after roughly 10 minutes of walking from the landing zone, players will come up against an unseen wall. Players would find themselves hitting the invisible barrier more frequently and the exploration time would be drastically reduced if a vehicle was included.
Comparatively, a stroll across Skyrim from one end to the other takes thirty minutes. It is estimated that traveling from one end to the other on horseback will take only twenty minutes, as horses have a 1.5x faster speed than characters on foot. In Starfield, it would only take slightly more than 6 minutes to reach the wall if the same mechanism were implemented. That would not be good for a game that advertised “unrivaled exploration” to keep striking an unseen wall.
It’s unlikely that Bethesda will add cars very soon. Still, it’s possible that modders are already working on ground vehicles for the game right now. If we discover a fantastic vehicle mod for Starfield soon, we’ll let you know.