Above starfield‘s 100 star systems and more than 1,000 planets there will be a lot of procedurally generated content. But Bethesda game director Todd Howard said there’s still a lot of “handcrafted” work to be done in the ambitious upcoming space RPG.
Microsoft showed an extended trailer on Monday during the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase to build the world and set its plot: It’s the year 2330, and a group of space explorers – you, the player, are one of them – want to recover lost ones artifacts. The story twists from there and is expected to branch out. When the trailer released, Howard dropped those huge numbers — that starfield would have an unimaginable number of worlds to explore thanks to procedural generation. It worried some players who asked: Is 1,000 too many? Will these be really polished, believable worlds?
Howard told IGN that the answer is basically yes and no.
Howard said in an interview with IGN the starfield has more
Yes, there’s a lot of procedurally-generated content — but Starfield isn’t only that, game director Todd Howard said
Manual work… than any game [Bethesda’s] done” before. He said Bethesda wanted to say “yes” to the player – meaning players could do something that’s way off the mark starfield‘s main game and be meaningful. Some of the worlds will be expanded story areas below starfield‘s main path, which will look familiar to Bethesda fans. Howard told IGN that the main quest is about 20% larger as games like The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and failure 4and lasts 30 to 40 hours, without additional incidentals.
But alongside this built-in questline, players will also find worlds that are essentially barren balls of ice, Howard said. And if a player wants to, they could explore that.
“So we’re pretty careful about saying, ‘Here’s the fun, here’s this type of content,’ but still tell the player ‘yes’ and ‘You want to land on this weird planet, check it out and build an outpost and live your life there and watch the sunset because you like the sight of the moons there? Go for it’,” Howard said. “We love the stuff.”
The areas that starfield “handcrafted,” as Howard puts it, includes four capitals. One such city is New Atlantis, which was featured during Monday’s showcase. Much of the main questline will take place there, Howard told IGNnoting that it is the largest city Bethesda has built.
starfield was announced alongside it in 2018 The Elder Scrolls 6, which Howard said is currently in pre-production. The game was originally slated for a November 11, 2022 release date before being pushed back to 2023.
starfield will be launched for Windows PC and Xbox Series X and will be playable via Xbox Game Pass at launch.
