Bethesda Confirms You Can't Manually Land On Planets In Starfield

The only issue for me is they said something like "you can land any where on the planet" so not sure how that will work?

@mus422 I would assume that you pick where you want to land on the planet - assuming its an area that is solid and flat enough as you can't land in the sea or on a very steep slope - and the animation sequence will kick in.

I would assume its very much like the opening of the Game-play sequence they showed. You'll see the area you've selected to land on the planet surface and then you'll see the Ship come in and Land. From there, you can then leave your ship to explore...

@mus422 They will probably have hot spots on a 3 dimensional planet map.

Personally I don’t mind if they don’t have manual landing on planets. It will be the same as any other Bethesda game with environment transitions, which I am already used too.

This isn't even an issue, and I don't think it would improve gameplay experience for a game with a story. There needs to be set landing locations so you have to travel certain routes designed by the developers.

I also honestly didn't expect them to make a full Flight Simulator.

NMS does what BethesDon't.

Its an issue only because NMS already does this and it gives an amazing feeling of a seemless universe where you can go anywhere seemlessly.
We can already see that this game will not have that sense of true exploration and will instead limit you to the areas they have scripted.
Its a ballance to get freedoom with control of gameplay and narritive. If they get the gameplay right, then limiting your exploration options will have been worthwhile.

However, its not a good look when your biggest tech showcase fails to do what a similar already existing game does and has done for years. Hence the story I guess.

Generally speaking I think every time you have a non playable moment in a gameplay flow it hurts immersion. But I’m the kind of player who skips videos whenever possible so maybe it’s just me

Seems fine. With the ssd's the loading between flying and being on the surface should be minimal anyways. No busy work landing and more exploration time sounds good to me!

Considering this is a space themed RPG and not a space simulator, I'm ok with that.

I'd hate to be killed off by what would be the space equivalent of me opening a load door too hard.

I'm fine with that. The fact the game just generally looks rough and quite boring is more of an issue with me at this point...

Jeezo Todd, pre order and game pass sub cancelled. M$ must do better rofl!!!!!

@CaptainCluck I kinda disagree with it not effecting gameplay. The news of this yesterday was pretty disappointing imo as removes the ability to get that feeling of chancing upon something interesting on one of these 1000 planets.
Take No man’s sky this keeps being compared to. There’s a sense of discovery as you fly around a random planet, spot something in the distance, and simply land next to it to investigate. So you do have to wonder just how starfield is going to keep their random planets interesting enough to explore…if I’m picking a spot from space…watch a landing animation play out…see it’s just empty land… do I really want to then pick a direction to start walking in hopes of coming across something? Possibly wasting hours. It would end up making me reluctant to explore…resulting in the aspect of having a whole planet cut to small sections of a planet. I think that fundamentally effects gameplay.

Of course starfield if going to have a far more engaging story, side quests, and populated areas than no man’s sky could ever hope to evolve into. But without that ability to just fly in all those planets outside of the main story and side quests… it does make them seem less engaging. Hopefully they’ll be some other form or transport to get around.

@BANJO yep it just looks boring.

I think expectations for this game are too high, I get the impression that it'll be like Outer Wilds(is that the name, the RPG), but may be more involved. And with space fighting. I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed when it drops

@Bleachedsmiles
Flying around the atmosphere of 1000 planets would get boring also. With a defined landing spot, the feeling of exploration can be better but it depends how they designed it. I’m thinking of games like Mass Effect, KOTOR and The Outer Worlds.

Also flying in the atmosphere would probably ruin the balance of the game. Imagine the gameplay teaser where they didn’t land in that specific location and you could just land on top of the outpost held by the crimson fleet. No point in seeing any of the planet along the way as you fly from objective marker to objective marker.

This game is going to be much better than No Man’s Sky.

It's disappointing because the whole immersion aspect and ship aspect looks so well thought out, it just would have felt natural to be able to transition yourself between space and land and to everything unbroken.

OTOH, No Man's Sky is an empty sandbox/simulator/survival game with nothing really going on other than the exploration and navigation itself. You can spend time on that travel/transition because there's not really much else urgent going on or compelling you. Deeper sims like Derek Smart games, Elite, etc feature that, but those are games where the tutorial for landing can take hours to learn (and in my case, I STILL can't make it past that flipping docking tutorial in Elite and never got into the game because of it.) You can go the all arcade route like Starlink where you just aim at the planet and descend through the clouds and go for it....which works, but in hindsight it's cool at first, then adds little, and then you just fast travel through it anyway.

And games like KotoR, Mass Effect, etc that are more proper comparisons as space RPGs never suffered for not having it.

It's probably the right call. The focus of the game is the on-foot TES-like gameplay and exploration of the different locations, not the navigation to them. But when they spent so much time on OCD ship building, you'd think they'd have included landing as an option. I'd rather have stock ships you can land than a build-a-ship workshop, but I see why they did it.

Plus, the PC version will have it modded in in a year and then they'll sell it back to us in the anniversary edition 12 years later.

@Bleachedsmiles like others have said, people are assuming that Starfield is a full fledged space sim instead of and Action RPG that just happens to be set in space. I see no problem with Starfield not letting you land on a planet however you want it, since like 99% of space games don't let you either. NMS is the only one I can think of, and even the devs had a hugely hard time making it work.

@Bleachedsmiles Physics wise/worldbuilding wise I don't think it would work like NMS, even if they allowed it, where NMS basically lets you turn your spaceship into airplane mode so you can ground scan like a helicopter/dropship. Which is kind of cheating. If we go more of the traditional NASA-like spaceship view which this seems to have, you're probably not going to be able to use these ships like helicopters to conduct visual searches of the ground and stop on the fly like an air taxi. They're big, non-aerodynamic, bulky vessles designed for space that strike me much more VTOL than having reasonable ground searching to see something interesting and stop. Meaning even if you could land them yourself their design doesn't seem like it would be meant for using it that way, you'd still have to lift off to high altitude, navigate to a marker and land (if we were to assume ship physics rather than video game logic were used to design movement.)

In this case I think "landing" is more about the transition from space to planetary atmosphere and then the actual descent/docking more than it's about not being able to conduct ground searches in the ship. I admit I want to be able to transition to atmosphere and land manually, but I don't think searching/navigation comes into it.

Think less NMS and maybe (I'm dating myself slightly) Star Trek Voyager, where only a handful of episodes had them land the ship, doing so was a massive endeavor and expenditure of resources, and was mostly only done for emergency situations or necessary engine shutdown maintenance times. These ships in this game are smaller and meant for planetary drops more than a large ship like that, but landing them is more of a process than NMS, more like Elite. Or like Star Wars. The Falcon rarely flies in atmosphere other than a vertical landing. Too big/bulky to use like a shuttle, unlike Imperial shuttles that come and go.

How boring it is or isn't depends on their design. If they use BotW like signposting where a carrot on a stick subtlety guides you where you need to go from where you land, it could work without being empty. If it's like Morrowind....well...... It's like Morrowind

@CaptainCluck
How you can state that? No mans sky may not have an rpg story tacked onto it, but it terms of pure exploration and joy of discovery it has more ambition than this title does, and delivers it now. I had hoped for a game with similar scope and ambition, but with an rpg too.
What starfield is apparently offering, is a bunch of predetermined locales you can play at, opened no doubt as you open the relevent bit of the story. How is that exploring the stars, which is the promise we all wanted to see?

Its just another bethusda rpg with fast travel between story points. Those points could be anywhere. Just because those points are in a different biome, diesnt mean like im going to feel I expored to get there. My ship will travel from planet to planet, no doubt with odd space battle between, but thats not exploring. If I can then only land at predetermined points then this is just mass effect?

The promise of what id hoped this game would be has been stifled. Its clearly just fallout in space with a space battle section.
That may turn out to be fun and a very good game, I certainly hope so.
But as the game becomes ever clearer, its clearly not 'reaching for the stars' in its ambition in my opinion.

Maybe more info in the next year will allay my fears, but its starting to look unlikely.

The problem isn't the game itself but people's wildly different expectations as to what the game should be. From a Flight Simulator in space, to expecting FPS iD style action people are wanting all sorts of things.
It's a Bethesda Game Studios game, it's going to have the same game structure as Fallout and Elder Scrolls but only with a space ship, interplanetary vibe and additional gameplay to suit that.
I'm happy with that!

@Titntin Because I like story RPGs and especially Bethesda RPGs. Fallout in space sounds incredible. This could be like a more serious version of The Outer Worlds - which was also good. No Man’s Sky was cool but it starts to feel like some first person version of Stardew Valley and can’t sustain my attention for long.

I feel you’re wrong about Starfield and you’ll be playing it next year when it releases.

@CaptainCluck
Thanks for your reply. Seems like they are making exactly what you want, so you have every right to be excited.

Its probably just me, or outlets that have hyped the game, but I expected more, and without looking at what they promised, that potentially my issue for expecting more than fallout in space.

That I'll be playing it next year is certain, I have a long time left of gp ultimate, so it would be rude not to. I also hope I enjoy it.
But im likely to always think of it as a wasted opportunity to push beyond the same old rpg troupes to make something genuinely fresh and new, and thats a shame.

Guess I'll see you here next year! 😁

The glass is half full, friend. It’s going to be great. It’s still a Bethesda game and will reasonably have Bethesda DNA in it like Fallout and Skyrim. They put so much ambition, effort and time into it to get a bit down on it so early.

And definitely 😂

Can you imagine the bethesda bug experience if you could try to land anywhere? That would be chaos with plant life, uneven terrain, etc.

@CaptainCluck @NEStalgia @Savage_Joe I don’t think starfield is a full fledged space sim. I think it’s fallout in space. But then you have to wonder what is the point of having 1000 planets? That’s going, for the most part, to be separate from the story focused worlds where there are the main cities or plot beats. So what’s the point of having planet 965 if there’s no real freedom to explore it? Why do I need say 900 planets for just mining? How much does that add to the game? You’d assume Bethesda want a sense of discovery and you to discover things.
If I could freely fly around in that planets atmosphere the possibilities of coming across something interesting as I traverse far greater distances in far less time … we’ll, it offers far more chance of discovery from these planets. Adding to gameplay. I think that’s a real miss opportunity.
I dont need to be able to land upside down, on the edge of a cliff, or on top of a space pirates base. You could still offer that freedom to explore in your ship whilst placing restrictions on where you land and have it auto land for you on appropriate surfaces. That doesn’t really take away that much.
I do think though having the freedom in flying around and exploring planet 965 would have added more to the gameplay and enjoyment than picking a spot from space and walking around for a bit hoping you’ll see something in the distance. Then, I’m assuming, getting back in your ship…back in space…and picking another spot to land and walk around abit hoping you’ll see something. That doesn’t sound as fun to me. Hence was a disappointment to learn you can’t freely fly in that planets atmosphere.

The game is "Elder Scrolls in Space". Todd literally said it's "basically Elder Scrolls in Space" in so many words a year or two ago. Why do people think the game is supposed to be like No Man's Sky, a space exploration/survival sandbox sim when we were told precisely what to expect long ago?

The most practical ways to view the game other than TES in space was always to think of other classic space RPGs like KotoR and ME, fused with TES's scale and freedom, and maybe some aspects of NMS or Elite added in to sweeten the pot, and it sounds like that's exactly what's on offer here. I DO wish you could land the ship because that would be awesome, but I don't think expecting this game to be more like a space/survival sim and less like an RPG ever made sense.

If you try to make it too much into an open survival/sim it looses any grounding that makes it an RPG. RPG requires progression and completion of designed content. If it's too much sandbox, you can't really focus the RPG satisfactorily. I think there's a very fine line between bridging those two genres and you can't fully merge them without breaking it entirely. If you add too much RPG to a sim, it stops being a sim and starts scripting what you have to do. If you add too much sim to an RPG, it loses it's focus and progression and just kind of meanders aimlessly. The IDEA of merging to two sounds like it would be cool, but I think that's one of those realities that sounds better than it actually would be when you play it and it would fail to satisfy on any level. I think this game sounds like it walks that tightrope of remaining fully RPG, but incorporating as much of that sim aspect as makes sense to do without breaking things. Far more than ME or KotoR, but far less than NMS or Elite.

@Bleachedsmiles The way I picture it probably is intended to work is the concept of the ME1 Mako / ME2 "scanning" except more tactile and interesting, combined with t he Fallout idea of discovering settlements in the wasteland. Or....all of Morrowind...

What it sounds like to me is a set number of planets that are hand-crafted and huge where most of the actual game takes place, and I expect it to be massive in an MMO-sense of the word (with one city being described as larger than all of Skyrim, the handcrafted content should be more than satisfying without any of the 990 other planets.) Most of the rest of the planets are probably mostly procedurally generated (even if static), but with actual content scattered around on them, perhaps as easter eggs, perhaps like BotW shrines except on planets instead of terrain. I don't expect you have to walk around for hours in an empty barren rock to hopefully find something or maybe not (which....is how Morrowind played, though.) I'm assuming some kind of system will be in place to make navigation more meaningful. Radar/sensor/scanner/iPipBoy 3k....something to give direction to finding random things. We don't know that, but I'm expecting there's something like that involved. Aimlessly wandering 1k empty rocks would be pretty boring. It doesn't seem to be likely they designed it like that. (I think people assume that because that's more or less how NMS works.)

It's a Bethesda game so the main campaign is like 15% of the actual scripted game content, and most of it is side quests you're likely to miss entirely if you don't explore. The main quest is just a glue to bind the content, but isn't most of the actual content you're supposed to play, if it's like other Bethesda games. Those many planets certainly will play a part in it. Including the likely design that you'll get a quest in one of the main cities that takes you to multiple solar systems to go on some of those "empty" planets for scripted quest content that's there, and along the way stumble into other scripted quest content, etc. Bethesda's game design template usually is built around that loop. Obviously the script won't use all 1000 planets, but you need misses to make the hits feel like you found the needle in the haystack. Otherwise it's Watch_Dogs with icons everywhere.

That's speculation and interpolation based on most prior Bethesda games, though. We don't, obviously, know for sure how they're handling all those details, but I think it's safe to assume some variation of that overall game loop is going to be in play. Not all of the planets are core content, but a chunk of them are likely to be used, and the others populate the world so that it's not just a universe consisting of nothing but predetermined important locations.

That makes me think of Ghost of Tsushima though, in terms of needing to gate important content somehow, and how too much freedom is bad. I spent 2 days trying to solve the mystery of the abandoned town and what I was supposed to do there, in all it's horrifying atmosphere, before finding out it was actually story content that doesn't spawn until you complete certain objectives, and the town wasn't supposed to be empty, and I shouldn't have been allowed into it in it's "not yet ready "state

I don't think the overall game's world would be helped by free flight. That's a design choice in NMS, it works for them, but I don't think a space flight game, even another sim like NMS necessarily ought to have atmospheric flight. Short of the Space Shuttle no existing space vessel is designed for atmospheric flight, and the design for atmospheric flight absolutely crippled the Space Shuttle's utility as a space vehicle making it a master of nothing. (It was designed at the request of the USAF for use on covert missions as a joint program, then after they build it , USAF decided they didn't actually want to use it after all and built the X-51 instead, leaving the Shuttle worse for it. This game is going for a sort of "future NASA" approach to spacecraft, very visibly in what we've seen. I genuinely don't think any "future NASA" space vehicle will be designed for simultaneous space and atmospheric flight. It's a counter-productive design. I like that the game takes that into account. As such, even fully featured, I think the game would have included "manual re-entry and docking/landing", but not necessarily free-flight in-atmosphere. The ships are VERY clearly not built for that in their design.

Edit: I contradicted myself as the X-51 and X-51A are of course also designed for atmospheric flight...but importantly, they're barely designed as capable space vehicles, and technically aren't designed to exit the upper atmosphere in low orbit, so they're technically "extreme high altitude airplanes" more than they are spaceships.

Another edit: In a realistic space environment they're going for there's also another problem with designing ships for atmospheric flight even in a theoretical sense. Our flight avionics are designed for the density and makeup of Earth's atmosphere. You couldn't possibly fit enough avionics and wing designs to accommodate 1000 planets worth of different atmosphere densities, compositions, etc. Atmospheric aviation, realistically would need to be designed on a local per-planet level, or at least useful for specific planets. Obviously unless going the far-future "repulsor engine/anti-grav field/artificial grav/ion impulse drives" etc kind of stuff. But this game isn't set in that kind of far future, hyper-tech world, at least not the human tech, it's very near-future, NASA, full space suits, chemical burn engines, etc kind of stuff.

@Bleachedsmiles Also, the assumption that space ships can't free fly doesn't mean there are not other ground (or air?) vehicles that can be used. TES has horses, Fallout has cars. IDK if we'll have planes/shuttles, but it's reasonable to assume there will at least be ground vehicles of some sort to utilize to accelerate foot travel.

.....unlike......Morrowind........

If NMS didn’t already do this I would totally not care, but it is a little disappointing to be outdone by an indie studio like that. (That being said I am just waiting for TES news)

@Titntin it's jot a similar game to NMS and it doesn't failt to do what NMS does, it doesn't want to do what's NMS exactly because it's jot similar.

@GADG3Tx87 you are free to play NMS, you don't have to play starfield

@NEStalgia I don’t think anybody really thinks this is the same game as No man’s sky. There’s a weird thing going on right now over the last few days where Sony fanboys brand this ‘no man’s sky’ and Xbox fanboys try furiously to deny there’s any comparison. Since when did No man’s sky become an insult? A universally regarded bad game?
I think starfield showed clear gameplay mechanics similar to no man’s sky. Odds are most of us were thinking ‘that reminds me of no mans sky’ when the first gameplay we saw was something being scanned and resources being mined. And those thoughts repeated themselves when they zoomed out of the planet, told us we could land anywhere…and that there were a 1000 of them.
I’ve watched several YouTube reaction vids and all of them have said the words ‘no mans sky’ without a fault.
But I don’t think anyone really believes that just because there are influences there that that’s all there is. We all know what Bethesda games are. We know exactly what to expect from its core game.

Well it’s been confirmed that the spaceships won’t fly in the worlds. I honestly think that had more to do with engine limitations than ‘we didn’t do it because we knew it wouldn’t be important to the player’. Exploring worlds that may end up offering very little quickly and efficiently will be important for most players. Hopefully there will be other forms of transport offered…the back of the ship looked pretty big. And it looked like the robot tells you if there’s anything of interest near by.
It’s going to be interesting to see how effective it all works. We can only compare how being able to land anywhere on so many planets and exploring them with No man’s sky as it’s the only other game that really offers it.

I've had my fair share of flying, taking off and landing in space, with elite dangerous. After a long while, the devs enabled auto takeoff/landing. So not really to bothered with the lack of flying aspects. Maybe it's "choose a planet. Upon entering atmosphere, it switches to manual controls" and off you go. Searching for your landing site or A landing site.

@Bleachedsmiles funny thing about that is NMS was presented at a Sony show like a first party game... 😂

But yeah I mean obviously we could be disappointed but just thinking of Bethesda design, kotr, etc, I'm not anticipating it being boring or cumbersome in that regard. The caveat consistently being Morrowind, the true definition of a walking simulator, but that was a long time ago and they've learned a lot since then. Not even horses, just endless walking. But yeah, I'll be shocked if theirs no other vehicles for exploration. It would be the first Bethesda game since oblivion not to have vehicles/horses excluding fo3 but that had the subway tunnels.

I want to land ships but I still don't think just flying them around would be fun either. Kills real exploration. (Seriously, nms is cool but cruising above planets looking out the window to find shrubs seems incredibly wrong ) I just hope they do something that makes it more productive than Morrowind aimless wandering. I get wanting to make it an on the ground feel. It could be engine, too. Creation/Gameryo isn't that great. But I honestly get the decision purelu for design reasons too.

Tbh I personally like to compare nms more to Minecraft. The environmental sim is more of the loop than the flight simulation. Elite is a sim. If you ever played any of the Derek Smart starship Sims that's a little TOO sim. Like sea of thieves meets flight sim in space level sim. Cool. But it can take 18 hours real time to fly somewhere....

@Bleachedsmiles "But then you have to wonder what is the point of having 1000 planets?" You are talking about the creators of Skyrim, a game that has hundreds upon hundreds of side quests, most of them pointless.

To people that love simulation games especially space simulation games. This news will be a massive let down. Not being able to fly down from space to a planets surface will lose all immersion for them. I wonder what was so difficult that they agreed early in the project that this wouldn't be the case. Ever since frontier stuck it to console players with elite dangerous, I was hoping that starfield was going to take over from NMS and be something more in line with star citizens than outer world but then again it is Bethesda.

this isnt Elite its an RPG

Game is not really on my radar but I have gamepass so I can check it out with zero expectations and commitment. 2023 will be where the true value of GP kicks in.

Also it’s a spaced themed RPG not a simulator so I didn’t expect this mechanic like in space simulator games.

The landing thing doesn't really bother me personally it's more of a nice to have but not essential.

I see a few comments doing to strange mental gymnastics about the 1000 planets thing being pointless while praising NMS which has a ***** ton more planets.

From what I read you treat those planets in the same way as you would in NMS. Explore, look for interesting stuff, gather resources etc. Then maybe build a base in a certain place because it has a nice sunset and 4 planets on the horizon. Sandbox lite essentially where you make your own fun.

If that isn't your thing you still have a curated Bethesda style adventure spanning 30-40 hours for the main quest plus however many hours for whatever side quests you do.

You can safely ignore the rest of the planets and just get on with your day. It's not for you and that's ok not everything will be in every game. It is a cool option for folks who want to enjoy some sandbox fun in addition to the usual Bethesda story stuff.

Other than people that just want to hate anything Bethesda because it's evil Xbox, I think the big problem is just false expectations. People just kind of pictured an NMS like play environment just because it is in space and then got excited for a game they assumed existed in their minds, despite every indication being that it would be exactly what it is, a Bethesda game set in space.

there are saying that allowing the player to manually land on a planet is just spending a lot of time that's really just not that important to the player. It's the complete opposite ! It's exactly that kind of detail that makes the game way more interesting. Same thing for multplayer. Those devs really have a twist mind.
Are they dumb or what ? They could even add a setting where you can choose between manual landing and automatic landing like it is initially ! Why can't they think in this way ! "it's not worth the time"...that's not true at all....there is no such thing as not worth it in this kind of situation. It's more important to satisfied the experience than anything else.