The ability to manually fly from space to a planet’s surface and back again rules.
If videogames had to flawlessly simulate everything they depicted, developers would still be stuck on the behavior of neutrinos. Games are illusory. The cool take-off and landing animations in Star Wars Outlaws are essentially live loading screens, but if it feels like we’ve just gone from the surface of Tatooine to outer space, they’ve done their job.
But, having acknowledged that games are smoke and mirrors, I want to stand up for a feat of simulation that has gotten a little beat up as of late: the ability to seamlessly, manually fly from outer space to a planet’s surface and back again. It’s just really, really cool, no matter how good the reasons are to not engineer it into every space game.
Bethesda space RPG Starfield didn’t include seamless planetary landings because building them would’ve meant spending a lot of time on something that’s «really just not that important to the player», Todd Howard said in 2022, and Ubisoft said something similar about Star Wars Outlaws. Including the ability to fly around over the surface of planets would have required «a huge amount of effort for very little payoff», game director Julian Gerighty told Edge. (See the video above for a comparison between planetary landings in Star Wars Outlaws, Starfield, and No Man’s Sky via YouTube channel NikTek.)
Bethesda and Ubisoft both might’ve been right not to design the kind of space travel you find in No Man’s Sky or Elite Dangerous. How would it be useful to land anywhere on a planet in Outlaws? What would be there? Starfield and Outlaws are RPGs which direct players through a story.
