Massive games with broad appeal like Starfield tend to make me feel a little disconnected from the average gamer. Every time I see discourse about puddle reflections or the simplicity of a title screen I feel like I’ve lost touch with the common man. How can people care so much abouꦏt Tears of the Kingdom ‘reusing&rsqu🤪o; Breath of the Wild’s map when I don’t care at all? Why does anyone care if Starfield’s planets can be circumnavigated? I could not possibly care less.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, there's some leaked footage of Starfield going around that shows a time-lapsed clip of someone walking ten minutes across a planet and finding the edge of the map. Apparently you can’t walk all the way around a planet until you wind up back where you started. Big whoop.
This is a very stupid thing to care about, but it seems like people care a lot. , with almost 7,000 likes, claims Bethesda should’ve “made it clear before launch that you can’t do one int🧸errupted run around a planet” and that it’s weird they’ve never mentioned it. Why? Where is this expectation coming from? Why is it weird that Bethesd♓a didn’t mention you can’t do something that you can’t do in almost any other game?
There’s only two games I can think of that allow you to completely circumnavigate a planet. The first one is No Man’s Sky, a game t🎉hat seems to get pulled into every Starfield conversation because of its obvious similarities. NMS seems to have become a benchmark for space exploration games, despite its status as gaming’s go-to punching bag for many years. ‘If No Man’s Sky can do it, why can’t Starfield do it too?’ seems to be the sentiment, despite the fact that NMS is a survival/crafting game, and Starfield is a hand-crafted RPG. Different games, different design priorit𝐆ies.
But more to the point: why do you even want to circle the globe? What value is that adding to your gameplay experience? Why does it matter if you have to run back the same way to return to the start? The leaked clip speeds through ten and a half minutes of a space man sprinting across a desert in about a minu🀅te, and I still got bored wat﷽ching it. I don’t know why anyone would want to do this, or why they expect Starfield to facilitate this bizarre behavior.
I can only assume it’s a function of realism to them. They don’t want to hit an invisible wall or receive a pop-up message that they’ve reached the end of the map because it ruins the illusion that the planet they’re exploring is a real place. Immersꦍion is an overused term that’s become a bi💮t of a catch-all for ‘engaging’, and as such it’s lost a lot of its meaning. The quality of immersion is about how emotionally invested and mentally focused you are in the experience you’re having. Making the world as realistic as possible isn’t necessarily a function of immersion, and believing that one relies on the other will only hinder your experience.
What’s realistic about walking all the way around a planet in ten minutes anyway? You know how small that planet would have to be in order to do that? ⛄That’s not realisღtic at all. Just consider the other game that lets you walk all the way around a planet: Super Mario Galaxy.
There’s a contingent of players that see games as tech demos and are only impressed by revolutionary, ground-breaking technology. I’m sure those people are upset that Starfield’s planets can’t be circumnavigated because they just wanted to see the next leap in video game fidelity, but there’s plenty of things about Starfield to be impressed by as it is. Being able to walk in a straight line until you get back to the beginning of your trip is a novelty. It wouldn’t make exploring more interesting or the gameplay more immersive. It’s just another thing to get mad about in a game you’ve never played. Maybe these folks should go take a walk around the neighborhood, touch some grass, and see if they end up back where they sta🦂rted.