Starfield has no ground vehicles or mounts and only 10% of planets have life-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Starfield – life is relatively rare in the galaxy (pic: Microsoft)

Bethesda’s Todd Howard has been answering fan questions about Starfield, but he’s still being cagey about Steam Deck support.

Although Starfield made an excellent impression at the Xbox Games Showcase the truth is all anyone saw was carefully edited, pre-recorded footage – with almost no one outside of Bethesda being allowed to play the game.

That means that not only can you not take anything said or shown at face value but there’s tons of little details we know nothing about. As a result, fans have all sorts of questions about the game, some of which director Todd Howard has provided an answer to via an appearance on the Kinda Funny podcast.

None of the revelations are especially groundbreaking, but it is interesting to know that only ‘about’ 10% of planets have life – presumably either non-intelligent aliens or human colonists. Since there are said to be 1,000 planets in the game that means around 100 will feature life of some kind.

Don’t expect to be using any of the alien critters as transport though, as Howard confirmed that there are no character mounts in the game and no ground vehicles either – although that does sound like the sort of thing that could be added later as DLC.

Instead of vehicles you have a jetpack, which on low gravity worlds in particular should be more than enough to get you around in a hurry.

Howard also confirmed that there would be an in-game radio station, but only in one specific location – so not something you can turn on all the time.

He also addressed the controversial issue of the game only running at 30 frames per second, stating that Bethesda ‘never’ thought of removing gameplay features that might have enabled the game to run at a higher frame rate.

‘We boil it down to we wanted the consistency,’ said Howard. ‘We don’t want players to ever think about it. We have obviously seen other games that have performance modes, and we lean towards consistency overall and we talk to our fans and hear that from everybody, so we’re feeling really great. The game feels great in your hands.’

Other titbits include the fact that the game has a large font mode, to help with both accessibility and running on portable devices – although Hodward refused to comment on whether Starfield would or wouldn’t run on Steam Deck (probably because he doesn’t know yet).

There’s no fishing mini-game but apparently the character histories you chose when you create your avatar will have an effect on your interactions beyond just determining stats.

You don’t have to use AI companions if you don’t want to and while there are generic, randomly generated side quests there’ll also be lots of hand-crafted ones with more depth.

It’s not clear if and when Bethesda is going to show off more of the game in public but given it’s out on September 6 it’s not much more than two months before it’ll be out.

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