Highlights
- Exploration in Starfield is a polished and standardized experience, with boss enemies, hidden equipment, and guaranteed rewards, but it doesn't hold the player's hand.
- Learning how to use a boost pack and discovering the usefulness of emergency doors are things players have to figure out on their own.
- Players can creatively use objects like fuel containers to open emergency doors and gain an advantage in combat, and the modding community will likely create more content around these mechanics.
While any old gun or grenade can break through an emergency door in Starfield, a player managed to showcase a way to do it in style. In many ways, exploration in Starfield is a much more standardized experience than what fans have come to expect from Bethesda. It's the culmination of over a decade of design choices made in Skyrim and Fallout 4. Locations with boss enemies, digipick locks hiding powerful equipment, circular layouts, guaranteed end-of-dungeon rewards – it's a much more polished experience, and yet, Starfield isn't at all interested in holding the player's hand.
Learning how to use a boost pack involves taking a mandatory perk in Starfield's skill tree, and yet this is something players have to figure out on their own. In a similar vein, emergency doors are scattered throughout Starfield's random dungeons, and though they can lead to air vents, computer consoles, and secret passageways, they are also easy to miss. Chances are that players walked by a huge number of emergency doors in Starfield before figuring out how useful they can be.
A Starfield player by the name of Good_Boye_Scientist opened the emergency door by carefully dragging a fuel container to the entrance, creating a healthy distance, and then triggering a powerful explosion. While one might argue that it's a dramatic way to break through an emergency door, it does take the phrase "break in case of emergency" quite literally. That being said, these doors can offer a huge advantage to players who prefer to sneak through a hostile location in Starfield, and exploding a fuel container is anything but subtle.
A staple of any Bethesda sandbox built on Creation Engine, players can drag and position objects in Starfield, and even use it to decorate houses, outposts, as well as habitation decks on their starship. Any small or medium-sized object can be moved, and fuel containers just happen to fall into those two categories. They can be used for more than just opening an emergency door, and with proper preparation, can turn the tide of even the most difficult combat in Starfield.
As Starfield continues to break player milestones, the community anxiously awaits the release of the Creation Kit. Though Todd Howard has revealed that official modding tools will only arrive in 2024, it has done little to stop modders from already creating some amazing Starfield content. Given how much Starfield encourages players to use the environment to their advantage, there's little doubt that fuel canisters and emergency doors alike will receive special treatment from the modding community once the proper tools come into their hands.
Starfield is available now on PC and Xbox Series X/S.