This again is why modern gamers are just fucking impossible to please. Bethesda gives you BOTH options. If you need to get to a planet from one solar system to another, you CAN just press a button and be on that other planet, or in its orbit if you haven’t been on it yet.
But that’s just it, you CAN instead pull up your starmap once that mission is active, see the star you’re at, and all the little dots youll follow to get where you’re going. You can then jump to each dot on the way, look around, scan planets, get hailed by ships, visit places your scans found, etc on your way to your mission. Doing this, you’ll often get sidetracked with another mission, the choice is yours. They dumbed down interstellar travel as hard as they could without it no longer resembling what interstellar travel would be like.
I’m of the opinion thats what Bethesda wants you to do, and the fast travel is just for people who want to level/“beat” the game quickly as its own end instead of taking it all in, possibly and understandably due to player time constraints.
Fast travel is a convenience feature. People would be bitching if it wasn’t in there. Sometimes you just want to zip back to
WhiterunDiamond CityNew Atlantis to sell some crap.It’s not really “both” from a space simulator perspective. There’s no option to fly down to a planet and skim the surface, there’s no option to fly from planet to planet without a loading screen (or even just to a moon), etc.
Starfield is a good RPG set in space and I’m enjoying it, but I think it’s fair to criticize that it was marketed like it was going to be a space sim by Bethesda and that’s not really what we got. If you were excited about the simulator part you are going to be disappointed.
I really have no idea where anyone got the idea it was a space sim from. They showed a good bit of gameplay that made it very clear that it was a traditional Bethesda game, with much more modern mechanics, set in space.
I can agree that you absolutely can navigate without fast travel, but the whole design seems to be guiding you towards just fast traveling. From the menus always offering a “show on map” option, which then pulls up the prominent “land” prompt, to the fact that even fast traveling you’re apt to hit 4 loading screens completely killing any sense of continuity, and that only gets worse if you try to actually navigate.
It feels like a big series of set pieces broken up by a ton of liminal either loading screens or menus, depending on your preference of poison. I’ve never felt like I was discovering cool things, just going to the next set piece.
Maybe it’s because I’ve only just made it to Mars, but I didn’t know there was any other way to travel except for clicking and fast traveling. Click load click load click load planet. The tutorial tells you to do just that… is there something later on that says differently?
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I mostly agree and have been defending it from haters recently myself. But there is one thing in the way of “You can then jump to each dot on the way, look around, scan planets, get hailed by ships, visit places your scans found, etc on your way to your mission… I’m of the opinion thats what Bethesda wants you to do.”
Starfield is a “looter shooter RPG” like other Bethesda games. And like other Bethesda games, your time off-leash is limited by your inventory size, with valuable items dropping that take up to 10% of that or more a piece. Awkwardly, ship storage is just not that incredible, until/unless you either go all-in on outposts or all-in on megaships. Which means you do end up having to stop and go to a city often, probably the one with your next mission goal.
It’s not a huge gripe, but I think Bethesda has always used inventory to drive people back to populated centers to pick up quests.