Starfield Planetary Exploration isn’t Fully Seamless, Evidence of Invisible Walls Leaks

wccftech.com:

Bethesda has been very canny with their Starfield promotion, boasting endlessly about the size and scope of the game, which includes thousands of explorable planets. It’s left fans trying to separate hype from reality and searching for possible cracks in the game’s façade. Well, with a number of leaked copies of Starfield now in the wild, it seems one has been found.

Bethesda has implied that you’ll be able to fully explore Starfield’s procedurally-generated planets once you land on one, summoning up images of players being able to set off toward the horizon and continue walking forever. Bethesda head of marketing Pete Hines seemed to imply this was the case.

Yup, if you want.

Walk on, brave explorer.

— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) August 22, 2023

Unfortunately, it isn’t quite true. While the specifics are still slightly sketchy, there’s now enough Starfield footage in the wild to provide a pretty solid picture of how planets actually work in the game. Basically, when you arrive at a new planet, you establish a landing area, and the game generates a large tile or swatch of land around that landing area. A number of leaked images and videos online show players being able to reach the edge of these titles, at which point they hit an invisible wall and are given a warning telling them they can go no further. It seems like players are typically able to run for around 10 minutes in one direction before they reach the edge of a tile.

I don't know. Personally I still think boundaries in #Starfield aren't a big deal. I'm more curious how the ratio between empty barren planets and interesting planets is. pic.twitter.com/hYBWjBb74q

— Oliver Darko (@oliver_drk) August 27, 2023

While a big deal wasn’t made about it at the time, Bethesda creative