Will Starfield Have Atmospheric Flight?

Hopefully, Bethesda had the good sense to let their players decide how to approach this game mechanic.

Atmospheric flight is a popular feature in space exploration games, if you’re a huge fan of those kinds of games. It seems not everyone is confident that kind of gameplay is something everyone would want to experience in Starfield.

As reported by GameRant, there’s a redditor named DoradoPulido2 that has put forward their belief that Starfield won’t have atmospheric flight. A quick check on reddit indicates that DoradoPulido2 is not the first person to post about it there, but they have put forward a good explainer for what he believes the situation is.

Just so we’re on the same page, when we talk about atmospheric flight, we do refer to the actual act of launching and landing your spacecraft. This is actually a potentially tedious, or boring, game mechanic, if you aren’t particularly that intrigued by space exploration. Video games try to approximate the motions of launching a hypothetical spacecraft, as if it were aircraft. It’s a simulation, so it can be immersive, but not everyone would enjoy it.

Now, you have to understand that even smaller games like No Man’s Sky have atmospheric flight.  This isn’t necessarily a game mechanic that they can just skimp on – if you are someone who is inclined towards space exploration games, you want something like that in the game.

Here’s how DoradoPulido2 believes Bethesda handled atmospheric flight in Starfield:

To sum, DoradoPulido2 believes Bethesda will just have their players go through loading screens. In this way, they won’t accidentally crash their spaceships multiple times because they couldn’t figure out how to fly or land properly.

How you react to this story definitely depends on what kind of gamer you would be. Are you an old school Bethesda fan, who enjoys the action and the emergent gameplay? Or are you someone who has real dreams of going into space, who has played No Man’s Sky and is a Star Citizen backer, and has certain expectations going into this? Do you expect Starfield to be more Skyrim or Star Citizen?

Hopefully, Bethesda has thought about atmospheric flight in terms of accessibility. In that case, they could opt to make this game mechanic optional, something players can choose to enable or not. It would really harm nobody if the players got to decide how they wanted to handle this aspect of the game.

Starfield will be released on September 6, 2023, on Xbox Series X|S and Windows via Steam. It will be Day One on Game Pass.

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