When it was revealed that Starfield would have more than 1,000 planets to explore, many of us were apprehensive rather than excited. More doesn't always mean better, and in fact, sometimes less is more. Especially when dealing with a studio like Bethesda, who is best remembered for its handwritten content, not its procedural generation.
Perhaps acknowledging these fears, Todd Howard has elaborated on just what this will entail in Starfield. Speaking after its huge showing at the Xbox Games Showcase, Howard reassures fans that Starfield has "more handcrafted content...than Skyrim and Fallout 4 combined" in dialogue alone, adding that overall, there will be more to do than ever before.
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"The planets themselves, the landscape's pretty much all procedural," says Howard, speaking to IGN after the showcase (thanks, PC Gamer). "As far as handcrafted content, [there's] more than any game we've done. I've stopped giving out numbers, but just in the dialogue...it's more than Skyrim and Fallout 4 combined."
Howard adds that this extends outside of dialogue: "As we get into locations and art and everything, we've done more of it than we've ever done." So while he isn't giving us the typical Howard-levels of promise (16 times the detail! 300 endings!) it definitely seems that there will be something for us RPG boomers who want handwritten content, not just procedurally generated visuals.
Of course, we'll have to wait until we have our hands on the game ourselves to be the judge of all this. Starfield has been in development for a ridiculously long time, so there are some fears that it has simply missed the boat on procedurally generated space games. I mean, the No Man's Sky renaissance has come and gone already. That being said, Bethesda is hardly known for releasing major single-player stinkers, even if there are elements to them that don't please everyone (looking at you, Fallout 4).
But if Todd Howard is worried about Starfield's success with fans, he's hiding it well. In the same interview, he boldly compared Starfield to Red Dead Redemption 2 as well as Bethesda's previous games.
"It's the games that put you in a world, that transport you to a place. So I think it also as a flow, probably has more of a feeling of a [Red Dead Redemption 2]," says Howard. "I'm living the Western fantasy. So in this, you're living this science fiction explorer fantasy, and sometimes that's being on a barren planet and nothing is going on."
Starfield will launch on PC and Xbox Series X/S on September 6. It will be skipping Xbox One and PlayStation altogether.
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