Starfield 'boundary reached' leak leaves some worried Bethesda's planets have more limits than anticipated
«Boundary reached,» reads an in-game Starfield text box that circulated online over the weekend. «Open the map to explore another region, or return to your ship.»
The biggest game of the year is springing leaks just days before release, the latest of which is creating some uncertainty about one of its most anticipated features: planet exploration.
As collated by Kotaku, a «boundary reached» message appeared in leaked Starfield gameplay videos from both YouTube and a Chinese forum post that appeared over the weekend, both since removed but surviving via archive, seemingly indicating that Starfield's planets aren't one continuous open world. In a timelapse video, the player runs in a single direction on a planet for 10 minutes before reaching an invisible boundary.
Possible restrictions on planet map sizes came as a surprise to fans who expected Bethesda's boundless RPG to work more or less like No Man's Sky, a space exploration game that continuously renders planets in their entirety as you walk or fly around them. We've known all along that Starfield's exploration would have some limits, like how won't be able to fly your ship manually into a planet's atmosphere to land, but Bethesda hasn't been as specific about on-foot travel in official presentations.
The Starfield “boundary reached” drama is very stupid, that’s all I’ll say https://t.co/TcqNkVjpxoAugust 26, 2023
We know from June's Starfield Direct that you can select a spot anywhere on a planet and land there. That's not necessarily contradicted by the «boundary reached» message, but it may indicate the game can only load the planet you're currently on in chunks. That's not how I assumed it'd work when Todd Howard said you can go anywhere in Starfield, but it would
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