Highlights
- Fans have suggested improving Starfield's traversal options by making the existing miner rovers pilotable, gaining support from the Starfield fandom.
- Bethesda Executive Producer Todd Howard revealed that land vehicles were considered during development but abandoned due to hindering the prediction of player exploration.
- While it's unlikely that vehicles will be added as DLC, modding could make drivable rovers a possibility in the future, though it would require substantial development effort and wait for official mod tools to release in 2024.
Some Starfield fans have taken to social media to support an idea for how the game's traversal options could be improved using its existing assets. And though Bethesda almost certainly won't be adopting their suggestion, the proposal gained plenty of online traction, raising the possibility of inspiring some Starfield mods in the future.
Running around has been the go-to immersive traversal option in Bethesda's open-world RPGs since their inception. The company occasionally experimented with some alternatives, as underlined by the fact that The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion and TES 5: Skyrim also allow fans to ride a horse. But aside from that, players who got tired of walking in Bethesda games historically only had their fast travel systems to fall back on. And while the studio's latest title does shake things up a bit with the introduction of spaceships, land exploration in Starfield is still only done on foot.
Dissatisfied with that state of affairs, Reddit user Iiana757 recently took online to bemoan the fact that the miner rovers in the game aren't actually pilotable, even though the developer went through the effort of modeling them. Their complaint hit the front page of the Starfield subreddit over the weekend, indicating that the idea of drivable rovers has plenty of support among the Starfield fandom.
And while some players even expressed certainty that vehicles will eventually be added to the game as DLC, such post-launch content is extremely unlikely to happen, as previously indicated by Bethesda Executive Producer Todd Howard; during a recent interview, Howard fielded a fan question on why Starfield doesn't have land vehicles, which prompted him to reveal that the feature was actually considered at some point during development. However, Bethesda abandoned the idea after realizing that land vehicles would inhibit its ability to predict how quickly the players are exploring the game's hundreds of planets, the studio official explained.
Nevertheless, given how many players are clearly on board with the idea of making some of the RPG's existing rover models drivable, the notion of such functionality being modded into the game is very much within the realm of possibility. After all, that is precisely what the modders did with the company's single-player Fallout games, both of which were eventually treated to a number of popular vehicle mods, as was Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas.
Fans hoping to drive around Starfield's many planets still shouldn't hold their breath for that ability because adding an entirely new gameplay system to the RPG would require a substantial development effort. Any such mods would hence likely require years of work for a small team of enthusiasts, as was the case with their Fallout counterparts. Moreover, serious modding efforts won't even be able to begin until the official Starfield mod tools release in 2024.
Starfield is available now for PC and Xbox Series X/S.