Even After a Year of Release Starfield’s Space Travel Continues to Be a Massive Missed Opportunity That Bethesda Failed to Address Even With a DLC

Ever since its release in 2023, Starfield has been the talk of the gaming community for all the wrong reasons. It was Bethesda’s most ambitious project, and with the promise of exploring distant star systems and colonizing planets, it presented players with an exciting premise. However, the game has failed to fully live up to its potential.

While the game’s narrative, exploration, and ground-level gameplay have certain moments that show Bethesda’s brilliance, the fundamental aspect of the game is still remarkably underwhelming: Space Travel. This missed opportunity became even more apparent with the release of the Shattered Space DLC, which did little to address the lack of meaningful, engaging space travel mechanics.

Players Asking Bethesda to Add Cruise Mode in Starfield

At the core of Starfield lies a vast universe, filled with hundreds of explorable planets, space stations, and cosmic phenomena. The game promised a world where players could traverse the stars at their leisure and engage in everything from combat and piracy to trading and scientific discovery.

To make each planet feel different, Bethesda even used a procedural generation feature to create various planets that offer endless variations in terrain, weather, and biomes. It was an exciting premise that promised an exploration experience unlike anything seen in the studio’s previous games.

However, once players began their journey to explore the vast universe, the reality quickly set in: while the game offered an immense space to roam, the mechanics of getting from one place to another were oddly shallow. Traveling between planets involves a simple fast-travel mechanic, where players initiate a jump and arrive at their destination almost instantaneously.

This type of travel makes the journey feel lackluster (good for fast farming) and has left many players feeling disconnected from the very space they were supposed to be exploring. Recently, players have been asking the developers to add space cruise to the game. While certain mods allow it, it is not very immersive and can be buggy.

Features that would’ve made Starfield cooler #1: Supercruise
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The entire thread is filled with players discussing the Space Cruise feature. Players argue that a cruise mode would make travel feel more enjoyable, while others prefer the fast-travel system, which helps make grinding materials faster. Since the community is somewhat divided, a toggle option to switch between the two would be an excellent solution.

The Shattered Space DLC Was a Missed Opportunity

Recently, Bethesda released the Shattered Space DLC for Starfield, with the hope of expanding the game’s experience and addressing some of the community’s concerns. However, the DLC did not address many of the player’s glaring issues. In fact, it made it clear that developers are unaware of the issues and focused on the wrong aspects.

The DLC was meant to expand the scope of the game, adding new systems to explore. While it did that, all the new stories (main and side quests) were spread over the same few planets, making the core of the game, Space Travel, feel even more nonexistent.

It is clear that Starfield delivers on various fronts but it’s also a game that leaves a lot to be desired. The DLC expanded the lore and content, but the lack of significant changes to the space travel mechanics continues to undermine the game’s potential.

In the end, if Bethesda doesn’t understand that it is missing the opportunity to improve the game by implementing a more dynamic and immersive travel system, it will remain a game with a vast, empty world that players can’t fully engage with.

This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire