It’s 2008, Fallout 3 has launched, and fans want vehicles. It’s 2015, Fallout 4 has launched, and fans want vehicles. It’s 2023, Starfield has launched, and fans want vehicles.
While The Elder Scrolls has mounts, even with armour thanks to an infamous DLC that rocked the gaming world in 2006, Bethesda’s sci-fi games don’t have that luxury. In Fallout, fast travelling at least curbs the need, but Starfield is huge, and you’ll spend a lot of time travelling via menus and loading screens. When you eventually reach the surface of one of its 1,000 planets, you then have to run around with limited oxygen to reach points of interest hundreds of meters away.
You’ll be walking, running, walking, and running a lot across giant empty stretches of nothing, which in the early access release alone, has proven tedious. So, fans are calling on Bethesda to implement land vehicles, like rovers and bikes, to make charting the many worlds of its universe less monotonous.
“It would be nice if there was a ship module for vehicles,” one fan suggested. “A two-person machine that lets you travel faster, but not too much faster, and it having some storage capacity. Something like Picard and Warf use in Nemesis.”
In all likelihood, there aren’t vehicles in Starfield because of the map boundaries. If you could travel too fast, it might make the planets feel less seamless. You aren’t meant to run in one direction for hours – Starfield guides you into a pattern of flying out of orbit and landing somewhere new – but with a car, it might be too easy to reach those invisible walls.
Many also believe that the Creation Engine is to blame given how buggy carriages were in Skyrim (if you’ve ever started in Helgen with a modded playthrough, you’ve probably ended up in orbit of Nirn). As such, some have suggested that Starfield use mounts.
If not horses in spacesuits, then one of the many critters you find across the many planets you explore. Maybe a taming mechanic for the less hostile ones, so we can at least have something to get around faster.
Or, as another commenter suggested, “Just let us ride robots”.