Since launch, Starfield has dominated online discourse – it has sparked heated debates, from its exclusivity to its reception and review scores. Among the contentious aspects of the game, space exploration, or lack thereof, stands out. Bethesda boldly claimed that players can engage in this activity “with complete freedom.” This set expectations the developers ultimately couldn’t match.
Bethesda spent a lot of time marketing the exploration in Starfield as a key element. The studio highlighted that there are 100 systems and over 1,000 planets that could be explored by daring spacefarers. To make this feasible, the game sports procedurally generated settlements, dungeons, and caves that players could stumble on during their exploration.
Following launch, as the days and weeks passed gamers discovered that most planets were completely empty and a lot of the procedurally generated structures and explorable areas were exact copies of places they had been to before. Others hated that game for being a walking simulator and having invisible barriers. The game’s review scores on Steam massively plummeted as a result.
In a recent interview with MinnMax, former Bethesda veteran and Starfield senior systems designer Bruce Nesmith revealed that the studio made Starfield as big as it is because “people love our big games.” Nesmith believed that condensing exploration to just two dozen planets was the way to go but game director Todd Howard wanted 100 star systems, a number he said was “pulled out of thin air.”
Players do love exploration, especially in space games. Bethesda went on to make the biggest game that it could but at the expense of having vast swats of open emptiness which Howard calls “the magnificent desolation.” Nesmith said that Bethesda had to make some tough choices in designing a big game and exploration did not turn out the way the devs wanted.
“I think some of the exploration stuff didn’t come through as well as it could’ve because they decided to make other choices,” Nesmith stated. “And never misunderstand this. In every game studio on the face of this planet, they know the choices they’re making. They know the things that are not going to be in there. They know what the players are going to moan about. But you got to make the hard choice.”
Bethesda had a lot of difficult choices to make in the final version of Starfield. Howard revealed that the studio “just nerfed the hell out of” the space exploration and even intentionally dumbed down the AI. Bethesda also chose to not have players control planetary taking off and landing. Interplanetary travel is also done via the galaxy map and fast travel.
Hardcore fans of Starfield would defend the systems in place saying that the game is a Bethesda RPG not a space sim like No Man’s Sky or Star Citizen. Even so, it remains that Bethesda’s Pete Hines said that Starfield had fully explorable planets which wasn’t really true as invisible barriers and procedurally generated content limited where gamers could go.
The studio instead focused on creating a handful of well-designed locations and then left everything else barren or with repetitive content – which is fine, however setting unrealistic expectations resulted in blowback that, if we’re honest, shouldn’t have been so unexpected.
Bethesda has let players know that it is aware of the flaws in Starfield, and has listened to the complaints about the game. Howard did previously say that the studio would take a look at exploration again just a month after the game came out, and that the survival system and exploration “might be something we address going forward.”
Can Bethesda fix what is wrong with the exploration elements in Starfield? The short answer is yes – hopefully. Hello Games managed to turn things around for No Man’s Sky, from one of the most disastrous releases in modern gaming to one of the current benchmarks for space exploration games. However, it will take time and a lot of resources to turn Starfield into a proper space exploration title.
