Fans are frustrated after leaked gameplay footage reveals Starfield is harder to explore...

[Cal Jeffrey]

A hot potato: Can you walk to that distant mountain range in Starfield (masthead)? If recent leaked footage is legit, maybe not. The most ambitious and highly anticipated project of 2023, Starfield, is coming under fire as being far less than what Bethesda said it would be. Fans came unglued after gameplay footage and screenshots leaked showing out-of-bounds warnings when exploring on foot.

A few people got their hands on advanced copies of Starfield and began leaking screenshots and footage alleging the game is not as open and explorable as Bethesda has led us to believe. Of course, as the internet is known to do, social media went full-on torches and pitchforks, bad-mouthing the studio before having a chance to play the game.

It started with a Chinese player posting a video to a forum showing their starship flying against an invisible wall, or at the very least, flying to a waypoint very slowly. There is nothing too damning about the clip. Even No Man's Sky makes you warp to other star systems, and if you travel too far in one direction with your pulse engines, you hit an invisible limit. However, the video sparked responses from others claiming that the travel limits are not restricted to space flight.

One Redditor posted 10 minutes of walking in one direction (above) condensed into a one-minute time-lapse that showed the game throwing up popup messages, warning:

Boundary Reached

Open the map to explore another region, or return to your ship.

Bethesda was quick to take down the video with a copyright strike, but not before others reposted it. Early players reported similar instances and posted screenshots to X (formerly Twitter). As the user below points out, the boundary message clearly states that you can continue exploring the planet by loading into a different region.

You guys probably already saw this screenshot flying around & people saying "You cant explore planets, bethesda lied!". Guys, There is nothing stopping you from exploring the planet. It just may be a loading screen or you may have to land at the next spot (a short loading or… pic.twitter.com/Qq161IZ9Dl

– Darrius Fears (@TheRealDfea) August 26, 2023

Reviewers also said that people crying about being "unable to explore planets" and Bethesda lying are blowing things out of proportion.

"This is actually not entirely accurate," tweeted Windows Central Managing Editor Jez Corden regarding the uproar. He could not elaborate further due to Starfield's review embargo, but if anybody should have a more informed opinion, it would be a legitimate reviewer.

However, it does fly in the face of Bethesda's hype train. Even at the highest levels, Bethesda has been shoveling coal about the game's vast scope and potential for endless exploration. As late as last week, Pete Hines responded to a question on X from a player asking if he could explore the entire planet after landing on it.

"Yup, if you want," Hines replied. "Walk on, brave explorer."

Yup, if you want.

Walk on, brave explorer.

– Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) August 22, 2023

While Hine's answer is technically true, it is not accurate in the spirit of the question. The player was not asking if he could explore the entire planet after multiple load instances, he meant just getting out of his ship and wandering around. The head of publishing even nodded to this assumption by adding "walk on, brave explorer." The comment further confounds the issue, implying that you can walk however far you wish, which doesn't appear to be the case.

Perhaps Hines was unaware of the walking distance limitation. However, considering he said that on August 22, this seems unlikely. Of course, being completely transparent about it would have flushed out just as many internet trolls condemning Bethesda for not ever mentioning it before now, and they would not be entirely out of line in doing so.

Starting with Todd Howard, Bethesda has heavily pumped Starfield enthusiasm with claims of a massive galaxy with over 1,000 fully explorable planets, which is entirely accurate, albeit less than fully transparent. To its credit Bethesda did show that planets are segmented into landing zones, meaning exploration of a planet will be broken into a series of load screens as you land in each LZ.

No Man's Sky doesn't have such a problem. Players can seamlessly circumnavigate a planet if they have the time and patience. So, will Starfield be a massive letdown on launch? Maybe, but not for these reasons. Nitpicking a 10-minute walking limitation seems petty. We'll have to see for ourselves when Starfield reaches Earth on September 6.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/99942-fans-frustrated-after-leaked-gameplay-footage-reveals-starfield.html

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Did anyone expect otherwise? It's Bethesda, and its still the creation engine.

 

[i like foxes]

It looks like an ugly remake of a Mass Effect game .

 

[m4a4]

Yeah, I don't see a point fully speculating until something more concrete is out. It is definitely pretty petty to nitpick, considering how bland most of the planet's surfaces would be if they didn't concentrate stuff to do (an inconvenient truth some gamers won't want to hear).

I do feel that the loud PS fanboys will also blow this out of proportion. At least, the ones who don't also have a gaming PC lol

 

[i like foxes]

There s nothing thrilling , futuristic . it makes the game simple , not attractive .

 

[Uncle Al]

Yawn .... won't be finding a place in my stocking this year .....

 

[brucek]

I don't think I've ever played a game that didn't have some boundaries somewhere as to how far you could go on the map.

I do prefer the approach of making it feel natural by for example the boundary being a mountain that's obviously too steep to climb, vs. an invisible force field that inexplicably and unpredictably stops you mid-tracks.

 

[TomSEA]

So someone's angry because you can't run forever over mindless terrain? That's considered "gaming?"

I recommend they play Silent Hunter III - the submarine simulation game - and set it to real time and try doing a patrol in the north Atlantic. It'll take them 60 hours in the open ocean alone just to find a ship to sink. And that's if they're lucky.

 

[y6Tq2RGXEejb]

I don't think I've ever played a game that didn't have some boundaries somewhere as to how far you could go on the map.

I do prefer the approach of making it feel natural by for example the boundary being a mountain that's obviously too steep to climb, vs. an invisible force field that inexplicably and unpredictably stops you mid-tracks.

No Man's Sky would be a good example of a game where I don't even know if there are boundaries to prevent you from flying straight out of a galaxy if you so please.

I guess the fact that you can't drill straight to the planet's core can be considered a boundary? I don't know.
Either of the two would be so readily expected that I wouldn't expect anyone to raise any sort of fuss about it.

And then there are space sims like Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen.

 

[RudyBob]

I love walking on endless sand in game.

 

[arrowflash]

No Man's Sky would be a good example of a game where I don't even know if there are boundaries to prevent you from flying straight out of a galaxy if you so please.

I guess the fact that you can't drill straight to the planet's core can be considered a boundary? I don't know.
Either of the two would be so readily expected that I wouldn't expect anyone to raise any sort of fuss about it.

And then there are space sims like Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen.

No Man's Sky does have boundaries. Maybe not on planet surfaces, but get your ship in orbit and try reaching and flying close to a star, even the star in the solar system you're in... you'll quickly find out you can't and that the other visible planets and stars are just a jpeg background. It was a huge disappointment for me in a game that promised so much, since you can actually do that and seamlessly fly into others planets and stars in Elite 2: Frontier and Elite 3: First Encounters, DOS-era games.

 

[azdadgo]

Well! At least when Bethesda lies now, it's not Todd Howard doing the lying! What a beautiful change of pace, and much appreciated.

 

[dangh]

How the hell is old indie no man sky even remotely comparable to bethesda multimilion starfield? Those excuses do not work. At the same time, it is normal to create hype, but even so lying is not needed at all. If the game is good no matter if you can spend a year on walking a planet around, and there is no reason to make such claims.
I sure not going to buy it anytime soon, I'm not excited with upcoming skylines 2 and still have bg3 to go through, so will wait to get most patches ready - knowing bethesda it will be worthwhile wait.

 

[Threadcount]

Lets just comment on other things that don't make sense also. Take RE, why do I have to search for a key when you could just let me kick the door down, boundaries are sometimes there for a reason. I for one will wait till the game comes out and give it a fair try and formulate my own opinion. All this PS5 negativity makes you think that the games not coming out on their console, Oh wait.........

 

[TechSavy101]

Its funny because back in 2017-2019 some games were released with huge distances to walk and everyone was complaining about long distance to run until you finish 1 side quest. Great examples are Nier Automata with its huge sand and jungle area. Also, The Witcher 3, Hogwarts etc. Obviously, you can't run every inch of the planet, duh!I rather have less crashes/bugs.

 

[Dimitriid]

Saw the footage before it got taken down. While they could have done something more elegant than invisible walls and pop up boxes (Fade to loading screen and load the next area at least) which might mean the planet maps are tiny it doesn't bothers me too much.

The big issue here is that just about the only thing Bethesda games have going for them lately (Meaning after Skyrim so Fallout 4 and 76) is that they're really good maps: very good representation of actual areas or decently thought out regions like Skyrim is not too big of a map and the "cities" barely qualify as outposts most of the time but they're distinctive and just enough to drive the dungeon crawl and loot selling aspects and such.

This is like a launch version of No Man's Sky: just generic desert and rocks you can walk through for 10 minutes but there wasn't a single feature in the entire footage worth stopping for even momentarily. Basically it's going to be like a much worst version of Skyrim because there is no point in actually walking the maps you will be expected to fast travel to a specific planet to reach and outpost as either a dungeon or town, but probably 1 or 2 per planet so it's just you getting on your ship, fast traveling between planets and doing standard Bethesda's tried and true (but at this point tried and tired) kill the exact same enemies for progressively better loot and enemies that scale exactly to your level so there's always no challenge.

If you take the exploration out of Skyrim and follow Todd's advice and just 'Fast travel!' to whatever you want to do, it's a short and boring experience. Except this time there's no single map modders can populate with lots of things like new NPCs, new missions, etc. For you to do since everything was probably just procedurally generated by Bethesda so just a bunch of empty planets you visit once to do exactly one thing and move on.

I guess there might be like a dozen planets with actual things to do on them worth exploring both the huge galaxy of endless planets? Yeah that never works it gets boring fast.

 

[Nandiman]

I'm extremely disappointed. I would be perfectly fine with a short load screen (aka Half Life) and continue walking. But if the game actively blocks you, that's just rude. No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, you can freely walk around the planet if you wanted too. It would take bloody forever in Elite Dangerous ('cause, you know, it's an actual planet sized planet, not a "game" sized planet), but you could technically do it.

 

[PEnnn]

Yep, the true mark of a great game is spending hours walking across a desolate planet.
/s

People love to whine about something and if there isn't anything to whine about, they'll create one!!

 

[kira setsu]

It must be hard to be a game dev when your fanbase is an ocean of mean, criticizing, cheapskates.

who will legit drop death threats and harass you at every opportunity.

but still beg and plead that they want constant, neverending, cutting edge amusement from those they b**ch at.

 

[sreams]

How the hell is old indie no man sky even remotely comparable to bethesda multimilion starfield? Those excuses do not work. At the same time, it is normal to create hype, but even so lying is not needed at all. If the game is good no matter if you can spend a year on walking a planet around, and there is no reason to make such claims.
I sure not going to buy it anytime soon, I'm not excited with upcoming skylines 2 and still have bg3 to go through, so will wait to get most patches ready - knowing bethesda it will be worthwhile wait.

"Old indie" vs "multimillion" has no bearing on the conversation. The asking price on release is the same between these two titles.

 

[mrvco]

Sure, the planet looks like a sphere, but try walking around it and you'll soon discover that it's not actually a sphere when you hit the giant (albeit invisible) Ice Wall. Flat Earthers rejoice!

 

[FaTaL]

Anyone complaining needs to get a life. Christ you got 1,000 planets to dck around on. stfu and play the game when its out.

 

[nnguy2]

There are many, many legit things to complain about in a Bethesda game. This is not one of them.

 

[kwc813]

Harder to see why Elder Scrolls: 6 wasn't developed faster every day. Console sales have flattened, as have VR sales. Bethesda was saved by the modding community from the kind of criticism this title is getting though, so maybe they hope that will happen again?

 

[ThrakazogZ]

I've known it would be like this from the beginning. Bethesda also said it would be like this in an interview during one of the past game shows. They clearly said you could land on a map (on the planet), and if you wanted to go to another part of the planet, you could go back to your ship to fly (load into) another map on the planet. They were never going to be able to do seamless transitions from space levels (yes, there will be invisible walls in space) to planet levels (or space map to space map, and planet map to planet map), with their game engine. This will ultimately be a space themed Fallout game, and that's ok. Traversing planets with no boundaries, and traversing from planet to space (and back) with no transitions is hard....and there's only one game I know of trying to make that all work, right now.....and it's taking them a long time to make it all work.