Starfield's Land Vehicles Need to Avoid One Major Problem…

Summary

Fans eagerly anticipate Starfield's Shattered Space expansion and the upcoming addition of highly requested land vehicles.
Bethesda needs to make land vehicles more efficient and player-friendly compared to the often tedious ship travel.
The seamless integration of land vehicles in Starfield will offer more customization and streamline exploration on planets.

Bethesda has been working hard to flesh out the content and overall gameplay experience of Starfield ever since it launched in 2023, with fans gearing up for the game's exciting upcoming expansion, Shattered Space. A huge amount of quality-of-life improvements and brand-new gameplay features have come to the title throughout its post-launch life, and Bethesda recently confirmed that one highly-demanded travel feature will be coming to the game in the near future.

It was announced that Starfield will finally be getting land vehicles in an upcoming update, with this being one of the most highly demanded features that fans have been hoping for ever since the title was released. The sprawling and often barren landscapes of Starfield have always called for the presence of land vehicles, and their addition will undoubtedly improve the game, but Bethesda needs to ensure that using these new travel options is not as tedious and time-consuming as the game's ship travel can be at times.

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By LB Beistad

Starfield's Land Vehicles Should Be Much More Streamlined Than Its Ships

Aside from being the first brand-new IP to come from Bethesda in 25 years, a lot of the hype around Starfield came from the sheer scale of space exploration and adventure that the game promised to portray. With Starfield having well over 1000 planets for players to explore across over 100 star systems, it was always clear that space travel was going to be one of the most important gameplay aspects of the release.

Starfield boasts a huge range of different ship types that players can pilot, coming in a variety of shapes, sizes, speeds, and offensive capabilities. Players can spend a lot of time fine-tuning and customizing the appearance and functionality of their ships, truly making each ship feel like a home among the stars. Despite this, the practicality of space travel in Starfield leaves a lot to be desired from a gameplay and quality-of-life perspective.

Ships in Starfield often require the player to manually enter the cockpit and take flight, with most ship-related gameplay actions coming with short cinematics that can become extremely repetitive and time-consuming in longer playthroughs. While it might be hard to avoid a lot of this due to the cinematics sometimes covering up loading screens for demanding gameplay actions, the upcoming land vehicles of Starfield need to try their absolute best to not cause even more downtime for the player.

Efficiency Should Be Key For Starfield's Land Vehicles

The demand for land vehicles in Starfield comes from how much of a time-saver they would be, with players no longer having to walk miles across a planet's surface to explore or reach a quest marker. Of course, land vehicles also have a lot of appeal in offering even more customization and personalization to Starfield, but the main benefit of these vehicles largely boils down to how much more efficient and engaging they would make the game.

With this in mind, Starfield should avoid having repetitive animations for things like deploying vehicles on a planet's surface, or even for entering and exiting one of them. It should be similarly seamless to recall a vehicle back to the player, and Bethesda should consider having a land vehicle customization station on a player's ship as opposed to in human settlements, allowing vehicles to be fine-tuned on the fly. Land vehicles are just one of many upcoming additions that fans of Starfield should be very excited about, and it only seems right that Bethesda should take the lessons learned from the pre-existing transportation of the game to make land vehicles as accessible and enjoyable as possible.

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OpenCritic Reviews: Top Critic Avg: 85 /100 Critics Rec: 83%

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Released: September 6, 2023
ESRB: M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood, Suggestive Themes, Use of Drugs, Strong Language, Violence
Developer(s): Bethesda
Publisher(s): Bethesda
Engine: proprietary engine
Cross-Platform Play: no multiplayer
Cross Save: no