Starfield’s new update won’t fix the problems with its dire exploration

I liked Starfield, or at least, I liked parts of it. While not up there with the very best like Titanfall 2, the gunplay was solid and genuinely fun. The game’s factions were largely interesting, and they had some of my favourite quests to have come out of a Bethesda title. But any positivity I hold towards Starfield because of the things I like was dashed time and time again by what I found to be Starfield’s greatest downfall – its exploration.

Starfield promised a massive in-game world to explore, and technically, they did deliver that. Dozens of star systems house over a thousand planets for you to explore. But as became apparent to most players within about 30 minutes of jetting off from New Atlantis, there’s actually very little there.

I remember heading to one of the nearby planets and finding absolutely nothing. ‘Hey, no problem, it’s fun to jump around in the low gravity and harvest a few resources. I’ll just head to another planet and check out what’s there. What’s that? There’s nothing there? No problem, I’ll just head to another planet and ch-’. You get the picture.

Bethesda had crafted a galaxy of procedurally generated planets, with almost all of them being wholly unique in that they all had different amounts of nothing for you to explore. Sure, you might get the odd spacer base to blast your way through, but destroying these gets old after the third or fourth time, never mind beyond that.

Thankfully, Bethesda has finally come up with the goods. A major update just over the horizon is set to completely change up the exploration game – a map. In case you’ve purged it from your memory, the surface maps of these planets were often just a blank, empty space, making it barely more useful for navigating than if you had just picked a random direction and started walking.

But what does that actually solve? Armed with this new and improved map, players can now more effectively traverse the barren wasteland before them. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a welcome addition to important planets where you actually have quests to do, such as Akila or Mars. But on the vast majority of planets and moons, all a map serves to do is let you know how pointless it would be to spend your time there.

And that’s because Bethesda has fundamentally failed to make Starfield a game that’s worth exploring in. When I first heard Todd Howard promise the vast number of planets on offer, I and many others assumed that these would be worlds that had things to do there. If I wanted a completely blank world, I could load up a custom map in Garry’s Mod, and at least then I would have a gravity gun.

If you compare the world of Starfield to that of another space exploration game, Outer Wilds, the difference is night and day. Outer Wilds might only consist of five planets and a few orbiting moons and asteroids, but it manages to be one of the most content-rich worlds I have ever experienced in gaming. Where Outer Wilds builds a small, but high-quality world, Starfield has procedurally generated one with 200x the planets, but 200x less to do.

So, what can Bethesda actually do to remedy this? If rumours are to be believed, they are taking the first step of adding vehicles. Not being able to fly around a planet in your ship was bad enough, but the lack of any cars or rovers meant that not only did these planets have nothing to see, but they weren’t even fun to travel on.

But after a few minutes of driving around in your little car, Starfield’s big problem arises again – the lack of content. In an ideal world, Starfield would never have gone beyond a couple of star systems, in which every planet was handcrafted to provide the same experience you get on the likes of Neon, with quests, key locations and more.

Unfortunately, it’s a bit too late for that. They can still create a few new planets, perhaps for the upcoming Shattered Space DLC, but that still leaves all the previous planets bare. Instead, Starfield needs to be much more aggressive with its procedural generation. If exploration is ever going to be genuinely enjoyable as a core feature of the game, it simply doesn’t fly to have every few planets have a single piece of copy-pasted content.

Have bases occur more frequently, or at least have them be larger and harder to take down. One of my favourite features of Starfield is the randomly occurring dogfights you get when jumping to a planet. Add them onto the surface so that players can join a platoon of New Atlantian soldiers in a battle against the Crimson Fleet.

There is so much that can be done within the universe that Bethesda has created, which makes it all the more disappointing to see how little has been done with it. I’m hopeful that Starfield will only get better with time, but if this upcoming update is Bethesda starting as they mean to go on, then I certainly have my doubts.