Starfield Doesn’t Have Land Vehicles or Fishing, Todd Howard Confirms

Todd Howard just appeared on Episode 143 of the Kinda Funny XCast to talk about Starfield. While Bethesda dedicated 15 minutes last year and 45 minutes this year just to showcase Starfield, there were still lots of unanswered questions, and the Game Director answered some of them.

Arguably one of the most discussed within the community was whether there would be any land vehicles for exploration. Unfortunately, the answer is no.

No. You know, we do design it, I’m sure you’ve seen this with our other games, where we want to design it so it feels good on foot, but we do have the boost pack. You saw some of that in the video and you have skills for the boost pack, so the boost pack almost acts like this vehicle where you can fly through. It’s super fun. And then the low gravity planets are just really, really something special in the game.

While the jetpack will alleviate some of those concerns, it is still admittedly a bit underwhelming that we won’t be able to explore the planets with a proper vehicle. Even the first Mass Effect, released for the old Xbox 360 console, allowed that, albeit with many limitations. On the other hand, Bethesda Game Studios has never released a game with support for land vehicles, though The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim had mounts. Modders eventually managed to add a land vehicle to Fallout, so there’s a chance Starfield will get it in an unofficial capacity.

Another missing feature confirmed during the interview is fishing. Skyrim received fishing eventually, so maybe that will happen to Starfield as well over the course of its presumably lengthy post-launch support, with the Shattered Space story expansion already confirmed.

These look like minor shortcomings if Bethesda can deliver on everything it confirmed to be in the game, from the space combat to spaceship building, from the improved RPG aspects to much-refined gunplay, the romance options, the outposts, and just the amount of handcrafted content (more than in any other game they made so far). In a previous interview, Todd Howard said it felt like having five or six games into one. If they can deliver that alongside the most polished Bethesda Game Studios release (Xbox Game Studios Head Matt Booty claimed Starfield already has fewer bugs than any of their previous titles), this could be a game of the year contender.

Starfield lands on September 6th for PC and Xbox Series S|X, though early access with the deluxe edition and the constellation edition starts five days earlier than that.