Nope, not a bug: Starfield's city maps just look like that

pcgamer.com:

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 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 during this early access period. 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—like novelty stationery, maybe—but communicate 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, but that's just how they are.

Others have had the same feeling: A Reddit post with over 3,000 upvotes compares a Skyrim town map, which illustrates walkways and buildings, with one of Starfield's city maps, which mainly illustrates that dots can be arranged to form a grid. The poster doesn't need to elaborate to make their point.

There's something to be said for not over-feeding players with directions, though. Some games used to scoff at the idea of in-game maps: they came in the box, printed on cloth, or you drew them yourself. I've heard from the Starfield players at PC Gamer that finding your