Starfield Won't Feature Land Vehicles, But It Does Have The 'Boost Pack'

How many articles can you get out of this interview

@Total_Weirdo Take a like good sir!

If console version have mod support then i guess we can only depend on that for ground vehicles and other stuff (could be part of dlc too in the future). I didn't even thought of ground vehicles tbh until someone else talking about it in twitter. It just sounds very cool to me and a bit of let down that vanilla starfield won't have it.

flashbacks of the Mako from Mass Effect 1

Yeah... I'm cool with there being no vehicles.

@Kaloudz in the direct they said you can fast travel back to your ship, so that's something

are these 1,000 planets open world?

@abe_hikura Exactly lol! I can't recall that any of my favorite RPGs had ground vehicles... DA: Inquisition had horses but they weren't that convenient to use so...
This doesn't bother me at all.

@rustyduck I'd say they are semi open world, similar to mass effect maybe, but I wouldn't expect them to be fully open like no man's sky.

That suggests these planets aren't as big as they're letting on. Hello Games added vehicles early on to NMS because well you kind off needed them if you wanted to really explore. Not too fazed either way but i do think if its more open zone then world then Bethesda should say.

@UndyingInsurgent95 Skyrim and The Witcher 3 had horses. Worth noting most RPG's take place in medieval fantasy time where cars don't exist and RPG's what do place in modern or the future usually feature smaller worlds negating the need for cars and planes, there are examples though that so like Cyberpunk or Final Fantasy 15.

Wish there were quads / or motorcycles

@Kaloudz ship garages

signs of how half finish this game will be

@WallyWest Exactly. It's not like the main story areas are huge dead areas where it's necessary to travel for 10 minutes straight. And the boost pack looks to be a ton of fun.

If you are genuinely supposed to be exploring, then lack of vehicle and sticking to foot exploration of a planet is super lame. It wont stop me enjoying the title for what it is, but its clear there is little real exploration like if you were genuinely exploring space. No mans sky has aleady shown how to get genuine scale in your exploration.
Im hoping that the other game mechanics help to cover this issue.

I don't like using vehicles as they inhibit my ability to interact with the environment. As an example, I have thus far put 106 hours into Diablo 4 and still haven't completed Act 1. You don't get a horse, I understand, until after Act 3..! I walk everywhere (except for fast travelling to my stash, and to sell/upgrade equipment) open everything, and kill everything too. If you gallop past on a horse, you would miss so much stuff. The same is true of a vehicle. Another example would be Fallout New Vegas into which I put over 900 hours in a single playthrough, without utilising any vehicle at all. And as for Skyrim, that playthrough, for a single run, lasted over 1100 hours, and again, not another mode of transport used other than walking.

I've always felt that if you want to get the most out of a game, you need to avoid vehicles, so I'm absolutely fine with walking.

Now, I wonder if I can jetpack between planets... 😂

Considering the size of this game, I am surprised to be honest. Thinking on though regards our ship, do you think we'll be able to fly the planet surface and land where-ever we like? You know, like in No Mans Sky.

I wasn’t expecting land vehicles, but was hoping for small aerial traversal of the planets, not with a jet pack, but either in the ship we create or on a mini-shuttle or something.

Maybe we get something in the form of DLC or Mods. More reasons to play this on PC.

Don’t be shocked if we get Skyrim horses via mods rather quickly. Just slap an extra set of eyes and paint them green, call them alien horses.

@RetroMan71 Bethesda confirmed you can't do that. I expect its because you can't explore the whole planet, having a loading screen between space and planet means they can put you in a set play space.

@abe_hikura totally seconding that. That mako vehicle was absolutely horrendous.

Not a fan of walking miles in games so I’m disappointed there’s no moon buggies, could have been a lot of fun. Submersible vehicles for underwater caverns would be cool too. And what about being able to tame local wildlife and hitch a ride on its back?…

So starfield will be a walking simulator like no man’s sky used to be? This practically confirms you will not be traversing an entire planet but instead just a smaller chunk of one.

@Dalejrfanfreak more likely part of future paid dlc.

Any word on how big these planets will be? I guess you'll only be able to land in specific landing spots from orbit rather than a seamless transition from space to ground like Elite or NMS.

I'm not sure how practical it will be to explore planets then.

You're only able to land at predetermined points. You can't fly in atmosphere.

How are you supposed to explore these 1000 worlds?

@PhileasFragg I think you are right. Planets will likely be huge square map patches on certain spots of a planet, not total planet exploration. Either that or planets will be very very tiny ( for a planet).

I really can't tell how much this and NMS will cross over. There's a lot that seems similar at a cursory look, but other than concept, the more we hear the less it sounds similar.

I'm a huge bethesda fan but as also a huge NMS fan I'm glad, I don't want this to replace that because that's simply amazing, even if it's repetitive.

It's a little weird though. It's open galaxy procedural planets but you can't actually re-enter or land yourself like in NMS, you just point at a planet and select "load this map", Oblivion and Skyrim had horse mounts to explore the ground, and Starfield has no ground vehicle at all. We're really going back to Morrowind era land traversal in this game?!

So I take it a lot of us picture NMS with huge planets and outer space to navigate between them but in this game I'm guessing that space is actually the replacement for the Skyrim/Oblivion open world between cities wandering the forests, while the planets are the replacements for Skyrim/Oblivion cities more than actual open areas to explore on foot? It does make me think planets are much much smaller than we're thinking, if you don't even need a mount/vehicle to explore them (or it's really just Morrowind where you literally walk for an hour with nothing but flat ground between point A and B.)

I thought that planets where like whole world maps, space was a travel system between biomes, and cities were dotted in those planet biomes just like in Skyrim/Oblivion. But it's sounding more like maybe space in your ship is the open world overworld, planets are more like cities or dungeons rather than actual maps to explore. The concept is cool, but definitely not what I pictured and a bit more dated in design. Sure you have your jet pack, and even in NMS I spend more time jet packing than riding in exocrafts, but that's because I'm often using a ship with maxed S/X class thruster upgrades to skip to a new valley or something and then get out on foot and look for what I'm looking for. Without ship OR exocraft, IDK that the jetpack would be so helpful for covering ground in worlds that big. I'm getting ME1 vibes from this more than NMS. Which isn't a horrible thing but very different than it appeared.

Personally, I’d have loved to have a ‘Lunar Rover’ type vehicle to explore in. Or other on planet crafts like boats and so forth.

Hopefully they can add it in future DLC.

Doesn’t bother me too much at all. The game looks good so far and I haven’t seen anything I don’t like about it yet. Even people crying about 30fps without playing first haven’t phased me. I have played a few games that play better for me in 30fps in that they add a bit more of a sluggish weight feel. I preferred Spider-Man in 30 because I didn’t feel like a piece of cotton wool swinging on a piece of string. 60 is better in most cases but in some 30 can be just as good and in a small number of cases feel better (minus the camera swivel of course).

@Kienda I can see that happening. Make big empty maps that are dull to traverse in the late game, and then sell people a solution to a problem they designed.

@PhileasFragg haha. Well that’s a very cynical way of looking at it.

I actually think it’s more that they didn’t think they were needed and then will likely add them after people repeatedly ask for them.

A example is Guild Wars 2 which launched without mounts. They didn’t have them in GW1 and even though World of Warcraft (their main competition) had them from the get go they didn’t think they were needed. Then when they did add them in GW2 they were the best mounts of any MMO and they complimented the game perfectly and the new content they added was made all the better for it.

So Starfield could be the same. Right now they don’t seem needed (by the developers) but in future they could come up with great DLC for them. Underwater content, long distance travel on planets etc could be enhanced with their addition.

@Kienda After decades as a gamer cynicism has served me well

It could be that they are added in a future, free, update, but from what we've seen of the large open maps of Starfield a "moon buggy" or "hover bike" seems an obvious addition. Perhaps they weren't able to get it to work in the engine or something.

Of course not all their RPGs have "mounts" (like fallout), but inevitably in late game you just fast travel everywhere as the novelty of walking from place to place gets tiring.