I’ve only just started playing , and I’m already mad at . I’ve been making my way 🎀slowly through the game’s introduction and landed on Jemison a little while ago, and decided I would take my time doing some side quests before jetting off to another planet and amassing more tasks. I like to clear my little shopping list of quests before it gets too long and overwhelming tౠo handle, and with a game as big as Starfield, I’m likely to find myself completely overrun with errands for strangers within hours. One of the things I wanted to do was give a sweet, upbeat janitor a cup of coffee to make her day a little easier. This simple errand turned out to be a whole damn odyssey.
It’s not like there’s a ton of work to put into the quest. She wants a cappuccino from the nearby cafe, so you just need to go and buy one and bring it back to her. The problem is getting there. I play games, obviously, so my first instinct is to open the m﷽ap of the city and mark the location I need to get to. So I pressed a button and opened the map, only to find a sea of white dots on a blue background. There is no indication of landmarks, only icons indicating districts. The dots vaguely indicate topography and not a single other thing that could help me.
I don’t know where the cafe is, so I wander around the district for a while until I figure out the cafe isn’t there. It’s probably in the commercial district. However, the map doesn’t indicate how to get between districts on foot, which means I start wandering off in what I assume is the correct general direction. That means jumping into ponds and climbing obstacles in my way instead of taking a normal, walkable, civil path because Starfield apparentlyꦫ doesn’t want me to know where those are either.
I remember the scanner exists, and that I can use it to locate landmarks like my ship, and fast travel to it. Maybe I can find my objective in the distance and know I’m on the right track, I think. No such luck. I can see t🀅he icons indicating the direction of each district, and that’s it. I wander, and wander, and wander. Eventually, I realise I’m going in circles, after seeing the same signposts a couple of times. I don’t remember where the NAT, the high-speed rail I took to get here from the landing pad is, and my head starts to hurt. I see what looks like a gigantic arching bridge and cross it – no luck, but I do find a preacher telling a bunch of people that God wants them to have empathy or whatever. Eventually, I wander my way back to the NAT, take it to the commercial district, and lo and behold… coffee. Right across from the station. I am infuriated.
Is part of this due to player stupidity? Yes, definitely, because it shouldn’t have taken me twenty minutes to figure out I’m in the wrong place and co🌟rrect the course. But more than that, it’s due to a complete lack of a helpful map system. It’s like the stereotype of a Ubisoft game, a map filled with meaningless icons, except this one doesn’t even show you anything distinguishing about the city you’re in. You might as well not even have a map at this point, considering how little use players are getting out of it. Sure, it pushes you to engage more with the setting – I find myself wandering and paying attention to street signs and shop fronts instead – but the game is set in the future! We already have maps on our phones! You’re telling me my character wouldn’t be able to check what path to take to get to a cafe?
It’s an egregious design problem, one that’s🉐 so stunning and obvious that I find myself utterly shocked that this got through to the final version. It’s especially painful for people like me who want to get tasks done as quickly as possible and not wander around aimlessly. I don’t know what the design choices were behind this map, I only know that everything about it confuses and upsets me. Please, Bethesda, do so🎐mething about these maps, I can’t live like this.