Here Are Some ‘Starfield’ City Maps, Since The Game Doesn’t Have Any

In the future, maps have been banned. Somehow this never effected space travel.

That explains why whats-his-breakfast in space cowboy town has his locked up.
- Don't forget the map points to literally a viewing distance from town, in a game where you theoretically have the entire planet to explore.
Now every map is Taco Bell

It is a little mystifying that they continue to be so bad at maps across so many games.

They're just bad at UI in general. Every one of their RPGs end up with a UI mod that makes their terrible menus not only useable, but infinitely better than the crap they made.
- Yeah I'm already running about half a dozen UI mods on Starfield and it makes the game a hell of a lot better!
- if you like how those mods are opinionated. I personally hate SkyUI as it's hideous and would take the base game anyday.
- Skyrim needed UI mods, and to wit, still needs UI mods, despite being re-released like 15 times with limitless opportunities to improve basically anything - instead they focused on high resolution textures, which is something that the fanbase basically already makes on launch week.
Why waste time and money if the customers fix it?

At the very least, they could have added viewable maps at those terminals in the cities, a lot like how some zoos usually have a fairly readable map, often with a "you are here!" marker to help out.

Yeah, but instead it's a laughable description of what shops are in town. No flavor. No directions. Just x y and z are here. Just silly BS
- I would love to know what shops are selling rather than guessing based on the shop's name. I remember running around Jemison for like a half hour trying to figure out who the fuck sold ammunition when I started.

Once again fans are stepping up to help Bethesda patch up their latest release. Still, the fact that there are no city maps is just kind of baffling. I could understand a bad map or a confusing map, but just a bunch of icons in blank space? It still feels like it should be a glitch even though it is apparently completely intended.

Tbh Bethesda has never really been great at maps. Even skyrims is a little jarring

"A little jarring" is being very generous. For me, Skyrim's map is one of the worst maps I've ever had the displeasure of using. Skyrim is a grey game with grey landscape, and the map really emphasizes how grey everything is: grey land with grey icons on top and grey clouds covering most of the landscape (such a great idea). I don't mind that the map is 3D, but the camera angle limits is what pisses me off, they seem to choose the worst possible angles to showcase the map. There are no road markings whatsoever, and the LOD is so low that you can barely make out any feature on the map (considering you're lucky to find a patch in the map that isn't covered by the grey clouds).
I know that Fallout's maps are bad as well, you can barely see shit in them except for the markers, but at least it's in theme with the game, so it gets a pass. Starfield's is in theme and is pretty much like the Fallout maps, but the fact that there's literally no other features make it terrible as well, but I much rather have a completely blue screen with some markers spread around than trying to navigate Skyrim's map.
Oblivion's where it's at. They should have expanded on what they did there: simple 2D maps that are in theme with the game, clearly depicting main roads and some minor paths and simple depictions of the main cities' walls.
- I just wrote a little jarring because I frankly didnt play much of Skyrim. I know, I'm such a heathen ;). So I was just going off of memory. You're right that it's bad though now that I've looked at videos of it.
I wonder if it's done on purpose to make the world appear larger?
We've all been hoodwinked
- Perhaps. I think in terms of Fallout they may have made the maps kind of "stylized" like how the rest of the pip-boy is, but it definitely didn't make the game very fun. Especially when I was lost in one of the many maze-like dungeon levels and the map just wasn't helping.
- I honestly didn't think about this but I kind of fell like a lot of things where done to hide the limitations.

I love TES. I played so much Daggerfall that I almost failed out of my undergrad program, and that was one of the most bug-filled games I ever played. I loved Morrowind and I very much got into the lore by playing underclass characters with a chip on their shoulder. I didn’t like the console-inspired simplifications in Oblivion, but again I eventually let that go and got into the game. That goes double for Skyrim. With each release, Bethesda simplified the game and removed functionality that really added to my enjoyment, but I still ended up logging uncountable hours into the games. There’s 2080 hours in a work-year, and I’ve probably spent at least a few of those on Bethesda games, with about half going into TES.

That said, I am waiting on this one. I’ve mostly moved over to playing PC games on the steam deck, and I’ve heard nothing great about that. More than that, it looks like this one whipped with much less functionality than it should have had. Again, that’s typical of Bethesda, but I have too big of a backlog to worry about paying to be their beta tester. They can fix bugs while I finish BG 3 and Stray, and if it looks good at that point I’ll dive in.

I’m at a point in my life where spending $50 or $100 on a game isn’t a tough decision, and I’ve even had to become comfortable with the fact that, even having done that, I might never fire it up. That’s one reason I bought the deck, actually. But I’m not at the point that I’m going to buy a game that I know I’ll find unplayable (by my current standards) just to be one of the multiple millions of people who get to see it “first.”

It's perfectly reasonable to wait. Games only gonna get better.
I'd try not to read too much into the internet fuss. It's a better release than Bethesda's usual in most regards. I wound up sinking almost the entire weekend into it, haven't done that in ages. The games really fun. That said, it is only going to get better with time.
- It's better than usual because Microsoft put literally all their QA teams onto Starfield, and to wit, it's been probably the least buggy launch of any Bethesda game I've ever played. It's funny because they were getting worse.
  Skyrim had bugs, became a classic. Fallout 4 had basically the same bugs, because it was the same engine. Vertibirds are technically recoded dragons. Fallout 76 was once again a copy/paste of the engine with netcode slapped on top and Jesus fuck was that probably the buggiest game I've ever played on launch.
  It does get better with time, but it's inexcusable that they need to rely on the community to make it better. Skyrim got re-released 20 times and they never once improved on it in any meaningful way besides deploying it on a newer engine and building a high resolution texture pack rather than addressing the UI or map issues. A solid decade later and I'm still playing with the same UI mods and map mods.
Hey it's me, your cousin. You can just buy games for me and I'll play them for you.

The menus are pretty fucking awful. The map is really really bad. For a game that's like 90% based around fast travel you would think they would have a map that makes sense.

Skyrim never improved on any of these aspects even though it got re-released like 15 times. I still have to use UI addons a dozen years later. I love that Bethesda has a great, strong modding community, but it's really really shitty that they're constantly relied on for regular, baseline things that shouldn't be bad.

Yeah, it's kinda sad I played for about an hour before I started looking for mods. I don't understand why they have the same crappy menu system still.