A big part of Starfield’s marketing campaign has orbited around the enormous number of explorable planets in the game. It has since turned out you land on planets via a loading screen, like entering a dungeon or new area in most RPGs, but former journalist and current Sony Santa Monica dev Alannah Pearce has discovered that you can also fly directly to the surface of these interstellar bodies—in a way.
Pearce fast-traveled to Pluto due to the distance between where your ship starts and the planet itself was the smallest she could find. We’re not getting into the debate of whether or not Pluto is a planet, save that for NASA. She then flew for seven hours to find out if she could actually land on the planet.
As Pearce approached Pluto she discovered it had an orbit, a fact she found rather cool. It is impressive that Bethesda has simulated this detail. Upon closer inspection, Pluto appeared to be a rather low-resolution rendering, but she persisted.
Upon finally reaching the planet, Pearce clipped straight through it. Initially believing the planet to be flat, something that would delight flat-Earthers everywhere, she turned around to discover she couldn’t see it, so reasoned she must have been inside it. Turns out Pluto is a hollow sphere, Rick and Morty was right all along.
Pearce explains that if all the planets in Starfield are just hollow spheres with low-res images, they won’t be too taxing on the game. This makes sense given the game is about “talking to people” rather than space exploration, she said, but this news is still sure to disappoint some fans. That being said, it took her seven hours to get to Pluto due to its orbit, so I can’t imagine anyone would actually have fun planet-hopping manually.
If you want a game where you travel from planet to planet yourself, then pick up No Man’s Sky, like a lot of others have this week. But now that you know the game’s limitations, if Starfield is still your jam, then you can get stuck in and start building bases.
