Bethesda Game Studios’ Starfield gives you an entire universe to explore in your ship or on foot. However, the game does weirdly lack any form of ground vehicles, such as rovers or other objects, to traverse across the game’s vast planets
In an interview with Bloomberg, creative director Todd Howard revealed why they decided to omit any and all land vehicles in Starfield. While you can create ships from scratch to fly some truly weird vehicles, you can’t use a motorbike on the moon.
Howard explained that the purpose behind cutting out land vehicles is all to do with controlling players. While Starfield is currently very much a game filled with freedom, the addition of land vehicles would’ve made optimising the distance between interesting content much harder.
“Once you land in your ship [and] you’re on foot it lets us really, for the players, make it an experience where we know how fast they’re seeing things,” the Bethesda veteran told Bloomberg.
Howard explained that there are technically vehicles in the game, albeit in the form of your ship and your jet pack, according to Howard. While your jet pack may help you shoot through the air like a Titanfall wannabe, it’s not exactly a UPC slamming through craters on a planetoid.
“In one sense, you do have a vehicle,” Howard reminded fans. “You obviously have your spaceship so you can go around space, but then on the surface, you do have a jetpack which you can upgrade. Which is super fun—new experience for us. And obviously, planets have different levels of gravity, which makes that unique for many planets.”
Land vehicles will likely come to the game once the best Starfield mods are created by fans. While we do have some weird mods bringing annoying oranges and sharted pants to the game, we’ll need to wait until official mod tools are out in the wild before we see anything as massive as working land vehicles. (Personally, we’re hoping for some Star Trek style shuttlecraft!)
Starfield is currently available on Xbox Series and PC. If you don’t want to buy a new PC like Todd Howard suggests, you can also stream the game to PC and mobile via Xbox Cloud Gaming.