Starfield is the sort of game that starts conversations, and one of the conversations I’ve been hearing a lot over the last few days has to do with fast travel. This is one of those elements of games that has become so common as games have gotten bigger that it can be easy – for me at least – to overlook how interesting it is in the first place. Now that I’m thinking about fast travel, I suspect it’s one of those fascinating, unsolvable conundrums of game design: an idea that will always be in flux. It’s convenient, and when games hit a certain size – Starfield with its thousands of planets certainly counts here – it becomes pretty much essential. But it’s also one of those mechanics that can become part of a game’s philosophy, part of its approach to how it handles things in the game world, and how it truly thinks about the game world. Fast travel says something about what the designers value in a game. It feels like this is a conversation worth having.
So, to begin with something obvious: Starfield is huge. You’re dropped into a spaceship and there’s a good chunk of galaxy to explore, with hundreds of planets, systems, and all that cosmic jazz. Starfield wants to be as realistic as it can be about space, and that means it has to deal with the fact that space is awkwardly, infuriatingly massive. It takes an absolute age to get anywhere in space. Even things that seem close are separated by huge gulfs. Starfield needs to create a sense of all this. It wants you to understand that our sun and the nearest sun are not really that near each other at all. If you want to travel in a place like this, you’re dealing with massive distances. But massive distances are annoying when you’re following the thread of a storyline. So Starfield uses fast travel to get you from one place to another.
I’ve only played a bit of Starfield so far, but I’ve started to realise that fast travel is intoxicatingly simple here. You’re on a planet and you can fast travel to your ship and then jet into space and pick a route to the stars. Or, I think you can often just stand on a planet, pull up the menu, and jet yourself somewhere else without bothering to head to the ship first. It makes a massive game like Starfield, with quests that send you across the galaxy, less unwieldy, but like a lot of conveniences it comes at a price.
And the price is that, if you’re not careful, you can turn a space game into a menu game. You move from planet to planet and cut out a lot of the space travel stuff. Starfield’s designers were open about this in advance: it’s not a No Man’s Sky or an Outer Wilds where you blast off in your ship in total control, swoop up out of the atmosphere and then swoop down onto a nearby planet all by yourself. Starfield’s a bunch of discrete spaces, separated by loading screens and animations. Animations are where the spaceship takes off and lands.