Todd Howard, the director of Bethesda's hotly anticipated space RPG Starfield, has explained how Bethesda Game Studios managed to create a stunning amount of planets in its most ambitious title ever. It was last June during Xbox's summer showcase where Starfield's gameplay was first unveiled and where Howard expressed that the massive space RPG will offer over 100 star systems and over 1,000 planets for players to explore and get lost in.
The reveal of this information about Starfield left many gamers stunned and wondering how Bethesda Game Studios would even begin to pull off such an enormous feat. Such information drew some natural skepticism as well as comparisons to Hello Games' No Man's Sky, an indie game which had similar sci-fi ambitions but ultimately failed to deliver upon its 2016 launch. The comparisons between the two space exploration games were backed up further with Starfield's gameplay reveal featuring a resource collection mechanic similar to that of No Man's Sky's. Fans of Bethesda's RPGs feared that most of the 1,000 planets would exist merely for players to collect specific resources.
Information on Xbox's highly anticipated exclusive space RPG has been sparse since the gameplay reveal last summer, as Howard rarely ever makes appearances outside of Bethesda's own events and updates. However, the acclaimed game designer did appear on the Starfield Signal podcast to dole out some insight on the process behind creating over 1,000 unique and individual planets for Starfield. On the podcast, Howard explained that the studio came up with a new development technique for Starfield which takes large tiles of landscape, many of which feature handcrafted structures and elements, and literally wraps them around the surface of a planet, meshing them together in the process.
When that 1,000 planets number dropped last summer many gamers speculated that Starfield would make use procedural generation for the large majority of its planets, thus featuring only a small number of carefully hand-crafted areas or planets. Such a concern is a valid one, as games which feature a heavy amount of procedural generation, mostly survival or roguelite titles, do often lack a handcrafted feel as many areas tend to look obviously reused. Bethesda's world renown RPGs are always held to high standards when it comes to high quality environments. Hearing Howard use the words "hand-do some things" in this podcast clip may be reassuring for fans who've enjoyed the incredible environments of Bethesda's past RPGs.
While the technique Howard described doesn't sound like full-blown procedural generation, it does sound like the Starfield team is using some lighter form of generation to create the tiles and landscapes that are being wrapped around whole planets. With the Starfield Direct following Xbox's Showcase on June 11, eager fans will be getting another look at this unique development technique in action.
Starfield is coming to PC and Xbox Series X|S on September 9.