Todd Howard comments on the lack of land vehicles in Starfield

Todd Howard has explained why Starfield doesn't have driveable land vehicles at launch, but hasn't ruled out the possibility of them being added in the future.

Tom West

Published 08 Sep 2023

Although you can blast your way across the universe in gargantuan spaceships or bounce along a planet's surface with a jetpack when collecting the Starfield achievements, it's only natural to wonder why there aren't any land vehicles available in Bethesda's sprawling RPG. The game's director, Todd Howard, has now explained why land vehicles aren't available right now, but hasn't specifically said that they won't be added in the future.

Vehicles in Starfield would "change the gameplay," Todd Howard says

starfield lack of land vehicles todd howard

Many of Starfield's planets are littered with various kinds of vehicles, all sitting there gathering dust (or whatever other planetary particles might settle on a motionless object), and according to Howard, the reason we can't drive them is that "Once you do vehicles it does change the gameplay."

"Once you land in your ship and you're on foot, it lets us really, for the players, make it an experience where we know how fast they're seeing things," Howard told Bloomberg Technology. "In one sense, you do have a vehicle, you obviously have your spaceship so you can go around in space, but then on the surface, you do have a jetpack, which you can upgrade — it's super fun and new experience for us — and obviously planets have different levels of gravity, which make that unique for many planets."

Whether or not land vehicles will be added in the future is anyone's guess, but Howard didn't rule it out, so there could be a possibility. While it'd obviously be super cool if you could drive some of the vehicles scattered around the map, there's so much to do in Starfield already. We're still too busy trying to fill our spaceship with 20,000 potatoes.

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Written by Tom West

Tom has been playing video games since he was old enough to hold a controller, experimenting with a number of systems until he eventually fell in love with Xbox. With a passion for the platform, he decided to make a career out of it, and now happily spends his days writing about that which he loves. If he’s not hunting for Xbox achievements, you’ll likely find him somewhere in The Elder Scrolls Online or fighting for survival in Battlefield.