One of the biggest back-of-the-box sells for Bethesda’s upcoming Xbox and PC exclusive sci-fi RPG, Starfield, is the vastness of its simulation of space. The team hasn’t shied away from calling out just how big the game is, with the long-awaited epic reportedly featuring a whopping 1000 planets that players can find and explore.
If it’s all sounding a bit No Man’s Sky, that’s not entirely inaccurate as Bethesda detailed during the recent Starfield Direct that the game’s planets feature a mix of procedural and handcrafted elements. That still leaves a lot of room to wonder just how engaging and interactive each planet will be and what the balance of procedural and handcrafted content is, so in a recent interview with Kinda Funny, game director Todd Howard gave fans a little more insight into how it’ll all work.
“So there’s no way we’re going to go and handcraft an entire planet. What we do is we handcraft individual locations and some of those are placed specifically, obviously the main cities and other quest locations. And then we have a suite of them that are generated or placed when you land depending on that planet. Now, I’ll also say for us, we view it as giving you, when you look at a system, here’s the menu of things you could do and, and we’re pushing it, about 10 percent of those planets have life on them,” Howard tells the Kinda Funny crew.
“We’re pushing it to the edge of what do people think, what plants are in that Goldilocks Zone versus planets that have resources, right?”
“It is that moment when you land on some of these barren planets – and again, we will generate certain things for you to find on them – but when you look at a planet, you see the resources, it has things you want… I love the Buzz Aldrin quote – ‘the magnificent desolation.’ I think there’s a certain beauty to landing on those and feeling like ‘I’m one of the only people or the only person to ever visit this planet.”
So essentially, knowing that fans expect a certain level of intentional design and Bethesda RPG magic, and knowing that realistically the percentage of planets in a given system in space that actually support any kind of life would be incredibly low, the developer has gone the route of still giving players the opportunity to go anywhere they want in said system and visit places that, realistically, don’t have anything to offer aside from the potential for resources and the knowledge that they’re boldly going where nobody has before.
Still, 10% of 1000 planets means there are 100 out there with some form of life on them, life that I can’t wait to find.
You can watch this specific section of the interview at around 16:06 in the below video:
