It looks like 2024 will be a year of significant improvement forStarfield, as Bethesda plans to ship a number of major updates for the game ahead of its Shattered SpaceDLC this fall. Some of these updates will help with things like technical performance and stability, while others, likeStarfield’s new map system, have the potential to dramatically alter the experience of playing the game. Land vehicles, coming to the game at an unspecified date in 2024, fall into the latter category.
The lack of alternatives to on-foot traversal has been lamented by numerousStarfieldplayers since the game’s launch. To be fair, Bethesda Game Studios never indicated that there would be cars or some other sort of terrain vehicle in the final product, but it’s not necessarily unreasonable to expect such vehicles in the game. In a game likeSkyrimorFallout 4, on-foot traversal works because of the concentration of points of interest; players won’t have to venture very far before finding something worth investigating, so slow, boots-on-the-ground movement is appropriate. This is not the case for the sprawlingStarfield, which will regularly put players in environments where they need to walk for several minutes before finding something interesting.
Setting plays a big role in this disappointment as well: it seems likely, from a worldbuilding perspective, for characters inStarfield’s world to have access to land vehicles.
Starfield’s Eventual Land Vehicles Need Spaceship-Level Customization
Land vehicles are just part of a largerinitiative to redeemStarfieldin 2024, and while they won’t fix all the game’s problems on their own, they certainly have the potential to make things more enjoyable. To this end, land vehicles shouldn’t feel like a band-aid or afterthought: they should be smoothly and meaningfully integrated into the experience, and applying some of the same boundless freedom that players have enjoyed with spacecraft customization would be a good way to do this.
Most players would agree thatStarfield’s ship customizationis one of its biggest strengths. Bethesda nailed the ship-crafting system, presenting players with customization tools that are simultaneously expansive and easy to use. Indeed, it can feel like imagination is the only real limit when it comes to creating unique, stylish, or outright bizarre ship builds. Once land vehicles are brought to the game, players will probably be spending even more time with them than with their spacecraft, so a similar range of customization options feels like a must-have.
Starfield’s Land Vehicle Customization: How It Might Work
Applying spaceship-level customization options to land vehicles would help make them not just convenient and practical, but genuinely fun to engage with. That said,Starfield’s land vehicles already run the riskof being unwieldy and frustrating thanks to the rugged topography of the game’s diverse planets, so boundless customization could be tricky.
In other words, the mechanics of land vehicles in their vanilla state could be hard, and adding extra components, like wheels, cabins, or boosters, could simply be an additional complication. Spaceships don’t have this issue, as they can be maneuvered across all axes in zero gravity, with far fewer obstacles to contend with.
With these possible stumbling blocks in mind, alongside the fact that these land vehicles won’t serve as a base of operations in the same way that spacecraft will, customization options probably won’t be on exactly the same level as those for spaceships.
Still, Bethesda shouldn’t shy away from more outlandish personalization tools as itprepares the land vehicle update forStarfield. Spacecraft customizationhas already proven to be a fun and surprisingly deepStarfieldmechanic, so it would be a shame for the game to take a more conservative approach with its other vehicles.
Starfield
WHERE TO PLAY
Starfield is the first new universe in 25 years from Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning creators of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4. In this next generation role-playing game set amongst the stars, create any character you want and explore with unparalleled freedom as you embark on an epic journey to answer humanity’s greatest mystery.The year is 2330. Humanity has ventured beyond our solar system, settling new planets, and living as a spacefaring people. From humble beginnings as a space miner, you will join Constellation – the last group of space explorers seeking rare artifacts throughout the galaxy – and navigate the vast expanse of the Settled Systems in Bethesda Game Studios’ biggest and most ambitious game.
