Seamless Starfield spaceflight is important to me, Todd Howard

pcgamesn.com:

Bethesda’s open-world games offer some of the best examples of freedom in gaming. They’re true sandbox game experiences, so Starfield had me very excited – until studio head Todd Howard confirmed that there is no seamless space travel from planets to space.

Basically, this means that you cannot get in your ship and fly it from a planet’s surface directly to outer space and then go back down again. Instead, you get in your ship, presumably get a short cutscene of taking off, but don’t have control over it until the ship is out in space. While you seemingly can land anywhere, it’s just a matter of approaching the planet and selecting a point on a map – like fast travel.

“People have asked, ‘can you fly the ships straight down to the planet?’ No,” Todd Howard confirms, without ambiguity. “The on-surface is one reality, and when you’re in space, it’s another reality.” As for why Bethesda decided not to allow players to seamlessly fly ships between space and planet surfaces, Howard says the team didn’t want to spend time developing something “that’s not that important to the player.”

Well, it’s important to me, Todd. I do understand that the engineering behind it would be immense and I have no idea the developmental hurdles Bethesda would have to go through – especially if it’s still based on the Creation engine, which still has loading screens for interior locations. I  fully respect, and don’t want to downplay, the effort it would take to accomplish this feat.

But for me, Bethesda RPG games are all about direct control, immersion, and freedom. Skyrim and Fallout 4 aren’t the best in terms of their individual parts – areas like story, characters, shooting, quests, or even world design are done better in other games. Instead,