Starfield players are coming to terms with the RPG’s loose approach to cartography.
My mom recently showed me that you can pick a point on Pikmin 4’s map and then press a button to return to the game with your character looking in that direction—a delightfully convenient feature. Nintendo really has a knack for designing in-game maps. Bethesda, however… well, we all have our strengths and weaknesses, don’t we?
Among all the praise and other commentary, „bad maps“ has emerged as a common Starfield criticism as players make their first excursions into outer space. The starmaps aren’t very exciting, but it’s really the surface maps that are the target here. They’re rendered as topographical point fields, which looks sort of cool, but communicates little, especially in cities, where buildings and streets aren’t represented at all. To illustrate how devoid of information they are, the map above represents the city of New Atlantis, which looks like this from the ground:
We’ve all played enough GTAs or the like to expect at least a basic street map, so when he started working on his Starfield review, Chris reasonably wondered if the maps were bugged or something—nah, that’s just how they are.
