There are 1000 fully-explorable planets in Starfield, and director Todd Howard insists Bethesda isn’t just palette swapping the same location ad nauseam.
Speaking with IGN, Howard explained that while Starfield uses procedural generation for some environments, virtually every major Bethesda Game Studios title does too.
“We do a lot of procedural generation [in Starfield], but I would keep in mind that we’ve always done that. It’s a big part of Skyrim in terms of questing and some other things we do,” Howard said. “We generate landscape using procedural systems, so we’ve always kind of worked on it. [The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall is] one we look at a lot in terms of game flow. And we had been developing some procedural technology and doing some prototypes, and it really started coming to a head with Starfield, in that we think we can do this.”
Though if you’re someone that would rather avoid randomized content when possible, Starfield‘s lengthy main quest is primarily handcrafted.
“I should also add that we have done more handcrafting in this game, content-wise, than any game we’ve done. We’re [at] over 200,000 lines of dialogue, so we still do a lot of handcrafting and if people just want to do what they’re used to in our games, and follow a main quest, and do the questlines, you’re gonna see what you’d kind of expect from us.” Howard continues. “But then you have this whole other part of, ‘Well I’m just going to wander this planet, and it’s going to provide some gameplay, and some random content, and those kinds of things.'”
Howard also states that Starfield will inform players when planets are random offshoots. It makes me wonder whether the recent gameplay footage was all main storyline content.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.
