Why there are No Rovers in Starfield

so it was just revealed in a recent interview with Todd Howard on Starfield that it's not going to have any ground vehicles on release where he went on to explain that jet packs instead were going to be the mode of transportation aside from ship point-to-point travel or you know just walking across the vast Landscapes on foot and this has got a lot of people kind of upset like scratching their heads how are we supposed to Traverse these massive thousand Planet Landscapes on foot is Starfield going to be yet another walking simulator well I don't think so and I'm gonna explain why this is not really a big surprise especially when you take a closer look at how other space games have handled ground vehicles in the past so let's take a closer look and if you like this video and you want to see more Starfield videos let me know by hitting that like And subscribe button to show your support I'm just getting into content creation for this game and I'm really excited to talk more about it as information comes to light so if there's one thing I've learned by covering Star Citizen primarily on this channel for so long is that you can't really take the videos that they released for marketing at any more than face value if they don't show something it's probably because it's not ready or it's not going to be in the game and that's how I went into the Starfield trailer if I didn't see ground vehicles I was going to assume there wasn't going to be any and I want to reference another video I made a year ago about how they never showed any atmospheric flight where I said it's likely that there's not going to be any and lo and behold it's been revealed that there's not going to be any so I wasn't really surprised to learn that we're not gonna have them in Starfield at least on its initial release and I think I know why let's first talk about the mechanics of making ground vehicles in a space game if we look at games like say no man's sky and how they handle it when you spawn a ground vehicle you actually just spawn it like out of nowhere using like a device or one of the vehicle terminals it virtually appears it's not being physically transported in any way now this is a little bit immersion breaking but that's not really ever been the point of no man's Sky it's just kind of whatever it's how you get a ground vehicle on to the crowd right and then you have other games like Star Citizen which have taken a more direct approach where you can actually Park your vehicles on the insides of ships and initially this didn't work out so well there were a lot of collision issues and if you played Star Citizen for a while you'll remember how vehicles used to just completely fall out of the ship and this just comes down to having two different vehicle grids moving around in a gameplay space it so turns out that it's a really difficult nut to crack there's a lot of issues especially when dealing with net coding and thankfully Starfield doesn't have to deal with any online net coding so that's definitely a plus for them but still it requires some development time and thought for the gameplay to be able to do this so then Bethesda has some gameplay decisions to to make how do they do it do they do it Allah no man's sky where it just appears via say nanotechnology where you actually park it physically on the ship my guess is that the No Man's Sky approach was probably a bit off the table as it looks like they're trying to go with the more immersive approach of having things more physicalized such as with the sandwiches that they showed and what have you they clearly are putting some effort in to make this game feel immersive and so if they're gonna go that route well then they have to figure out things like the physics engine and collision with those vehicles and then how it works once it's been parked is it gonna get in the way of players if the space isn't big enough is that going to cause gameplay issues well these issues might seem small on the outside it surely would be no small task to figure out these are a lot of complex questions and problems for the developers which is why I think they just didn't bother but that was only one reason in my estimation that they didn't do it the other is that if we look at again no man's sky and even Star Citizen there's a lot of issues that up with Collision on the ground with ground Vehicles the way no man's Sky handles it is that a lot of the small rocks and objects and plants actually just explode when you run them over so there's no Collision issues whatsoever it's a pretty simplistic and straightforward solution and it also helps to resolve issues where the vehicle does actually get stuck such as in a cave or in a divot or when it gets flipped over you can just recall the vehicle and it'll be respawned right in front of you ready to go for you once again but it's also not a perfect solution ignoring the fact that it's kind of immersion breaking there's also an issue with how much development time you have to put into the Collision models so when things are collided with you actually have to create a collision model for it so that it knows that it should interact with another vehicle and then you also have to let the game know what happens after the Collision occurs if the destruction occurs you have to replace the original model with a collision or destroyed model it could be in one or several pieces and it's basically the same model but destroyed and changed slightly to make it look like that you've run into it now if they have a thousand planets in Starfield like they said and they have a lot of unique Flora that requires them create a lot of extra Collision models in order for the game to feel believable and immersive that's no small task for Bethesda but that's not all they also have to worry about navigation for the round vehicles in addition to the physics of them colliding with the ground surface of planets with automated generation they would have to take into account the size of the ground vehicle to make sure that you could travel across all of these locations without getting stuck and that is another difficult problem to solve it's a problem that no man's sky and Star Citizen both haven't been able to solve there are situations where in both games you can actually get your ground builds just completely stuck and have to leave it there well no man's Sky already said you can respawn it but Star Citizen you're just kind of screwed now you might say that well Bethesda has done ground Vehicles before I mean look at Fallout New Vegas you could drive vehicles in that game and yeah you could but they had roads in that game they had clear areas where you could drive it looks to me that star field has a lot more dense force and areas to drive through and a lot more potential problems with the vehicles being stuck and just traversing the environment in general but I don't think any of these issues are problems that Bethesda couldn't solve given enough time and money I'm sure they could get Brown vehicles in the game and five were to guess they probably intended to do it to begin with the issue is that they have a deadline and they have a budget and they probably ran out of both unlike another game in the genre my assumption is that at some point in the future they'll probably do a DLC where they continued the work that they started on ground vehicles and put it into the game it does seem like something that people would like to have I mean when you think of space travel you think of the Rover that we had on the moon it's just kind of a basic thing that comes hand in hand with a space game but having a ground vehicle might not actually matter and here's why it's hard to judge by looking at the 45 minute gameplay video how the experience of Starfield is going to be when they made the marketing material they clearly wanted to show non-stop action and so they showed us non-stop action so there's always interesting things to look at the reality of the game might be similar or it might not at all be similar but my point is is that they could be designing Starfield to be a lot more of a dense experience where where you land with your ship is going to always have something to do there's always going to be an activity so even though the planets are supposedly very big you'll always find something in the immediate vicinity of your ship which will somewhat negate the need to travel long distances without having to use your ship I strongly suspect that this is the approach that they're going to take the thing that will vary most will just be the activity that's available to do is it going to be mining is it going to be going through an outpost and killing Pirates is it going to be discovering a new mystery 3 to solve it's hard to know for sure but my guess is that this is the direction that they're going and in my view it's not at all a Bad Thing games like Star Citizen are great for their massively simulated environments but a lot of times you're spending huge amounts of time traveling and virtually doing nothing getting between things to do I'd rather have a lot of things to do in a much more dense area so if they're going with that I think it's going to be a lot more fun to actually play regardless of how realistic it actually is despite that though I still hope that at some point they find the time to come back and add ground Vehicles into the game they have so much potential and opportunities for a more interesting gameplay you could have vehicles that increase your amount of storage so you can bring back more stuff to your ship you could have vehicles that have a mining heads so that you could mine more stuff more quickly and in more hostile environments it could provide protection against say biohazards extreme cold or extreme heat enabling you to travel to locations more easily really than you otherwise could in just your spacesuit and if they go the extra mile and really want to make it more similar to their ships they could even add some customization options to it that would be really cool being able to personalize your ground vehicle to match your ship and more importantly match the way that you want to play the game because everybody plays these games differently so then in the end I think the moral of the story is that if you're new to this sort of thing don't ever take gameplay videos at more than face value don't speculate too much and read past what they're showing you because they're probably not showing you things because they're probably just not there but then also don't jump to conclusions thinking that it's going to make the game terrible I'm gonna give it a chance it might be bad but I'm hoping it's gonna be pretty ain't good I mean from the face of it it looks like it's going to be pretty dang good but what do you guys think are you with me on this thinking that it's probably not going to be that important that they don't have ground vehicles on release because it's going to be a really dense experience or are you more in the camp that they should have just waited if they needed more time and delivered Starfield with ground vehicles for that cool factor and of course for the possible utility that I could provide over longer distances I mean who knows maybe they didn't put ground vehicles in the game because they just don't want people to know that the planets aren't actually round maybe that's the secret who knows let me know down in the comment section below and of course if you want to see more videos like this you know what to do see out there in the Stars

Channel: Morphologis

Views: 43,731

Keywords: starfield, starfield news, starfield gameplay, starfield direct, starfield news update, starfield release date, starfield info, bethesda, starfield leaks, starfield breakdown, starfield details, starfield rumors, starfield update, star field rovers, starfield vehicles, starfield rovers, starfield ground vehicles, starfield cars, starfield mods, starfield planets, todd howard

Id: oO2QUet5piw

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 02 2023