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Todd Howard explained how Bethesda Game Studios managed to create a large number of planets in their most ambitious role-playing game, Starfield. Starfield gameplay was first revealed at the Xbox Summer Show last June, and Howard revealed that the massive space RPG will have over 100 star systems and over 1,000 planets to explore.
The revelation of this Starfield information has left many gamers stunned and wondering how Bethesda Game Studios is ever going to pull off such an epic feat. Such information sparked natural skepticism, as well as comparisons to No Man’s Sky, an indie game that had similar sci-fi ambitions but ultimately fell short upon its release in 2016. The comparisons between these two space exploration games were backed up by another fact: Starfield’s gameplay featured resource gathering mechanics similar to those of No Man’s Sky. Fans of Bethesda RPGs feared that most of the 1,000 planets would only exist for players to collect certain resources.
Information on the long-awaited space RPG has been sparse since a gameplay reveal last summer, as Howard rarely appears in public outside of his own events. However, the renowned game designer did show up on the Starfield Signal podcast to talk about the process of creating over 1,000 unique and custom planets for Starfield. In the podcast, Howard revealed that the studio has come up with a new method for developing Starfield, which involves taking large pieces of terrain, many of which include hand-crafted structures and elements, and literally wrapping them around the surface of the planet, interlocking them in the process.
When the 1,000 planet figure was announced last summer, many gamers speculated that Starfield would use procedural generation for most of its planets, and thus only a small number of carefully handcrafted areas or planets would be represented. This concern is well-founded, as games with a lot of procedural generation, mostly survival games, often lack a handcrafted feel, with many areas looking overtly repetitive. Bethesda’s world-famous RPGs always meet high standards when it comes to high-quality environments. Hearing the words “do some things by hand” on this podcast, Howard can reassure fans who have enjoyed incredible environments in past Bethesda RPGs.
While the technique described by Howard doesn’t look like full procedural generation, it looks like the Starfield team is using a lighter form of generation to create tiles and landscapes that envelop entire planets. As the Starfield Direct follows Xbox’s Showcase on June 11, eager fans will get another look at this unique development technique in action.
