Forget 30FPS, Starfield's map is the game's biggest problem

What is your favourite in-game map? There are plenty of good ones out there – I have a particular soft spot for Destiny and its ‘navigator’. The UI is simple, clean, readable. Navigating from place to place is obvious, and the way the design elements move in parallax as you hover your cursor over your next destination is oddly satisfying on a deep, primal level. For Destiny, getting the ‘navigator’ right was an essential part of the game’s success, and the glue that helped bind a lot of its rival elements together. I wish Bethesda had taken some tidy, clean notes from how Destiny does interstellar travel. Because – unless you’re fast-travelling to your next mission – getting anywhere in Starfield is a massive pain in the arse. Earlier today, I was trying to find the system that the Mantis' hidden outpost is on (I needed more screen shots for our Mantis quest guide). I had the name, Denebola, and the specific planet, Denebola I-B.But because I’d already cleared the quest, there was no quick way of finding it. Opening up the star map from the main menu – or manually booting it from my ship’s navigation table – I was only met with the weirdly-tiered map that goes [local planet], [local system], [galaxy]. When you’re zoomed out to that last level, there’s simply a 2.5D map of the stars, with about one in 10 of them labelled with a name. Read more