Vertical ladders have been appearing in Bethesda games for a long time, but with a very dubious implementation – in fact, they have always served as an object of transition between locations with a loading screen without appropriate animation and have never been used to move within one location due to an engine limitation (apart from scripted NPC animations).
In Starfield, as in past Bethesda games, stairs will also appear, but this time the studio decided to surprise the players and made full-fledged working stairs with climbing animations. Animated ladders were first hinted at in the teaser trailer for the 2022 game, when the person climbing the ladder was given special screen time, but now, thanks to a leaked still from the game, it’s clear that the ladders will actually work. Meanwhile, “classic” stairs without animation and with reloading will still be present in the game (at least when entering the player’s spaceship).
It is noteworthy that for Fallout 4 there is a working mod for the ability to climb stairs, which at the same time works without a script expander. When using a ladder, the camera switches to third-person view and the hero automatically climbs or descends it. It is possible that in Starfield the stairs will work on the same principle.
