10 Percent of Starfield’s 1,000+ Planets Will Have Life on Them

gamingbolt.com:

Bethesda Game Studios is no stranger to making massive RPGs, but it looks like its upcoming space-faring epic Starfield is going to be by far it’s biggest game to date. Something that the developer has mentioned time and again to convey just how large the game is going to be is that it will have over a thousand different planets for players to explore- and though that is an impressive amount of content, it does raise a few potential concerns.

For instance, at a time where bloat is more of a problem in games than it has ever been, how is Starfield going to strike the right balance between quantity and quality? Additionally, with the game also making use of procedural generation (in addition to a whole lot of handcrafted content), exactly how compelling can players expect that category of content to be in Starfield?

In a recent interview with Kinda Funny, director Starfield was asked those very questions, in response to which he talked about how the upcoming RPG will use its procedural generation systems, and how it will balance that against its offerings of handcrafted content.

“We wanted to do the planets because we like to give you that choice,” Howard said. “‘Where do you want to go?’ You feel like you would want that choice in a game like this. And so first it was, technically, could we pull it off? And we were, technically, able to draw these planets, make them feel believable on the screen.

“Now, obviously, it’s procedural, so there’s no way we’re going to go and handcraft an entire planet. What we do is we handcraft individual locations, and some of those are placed specifically – obviously, the main cities and other quest locations – and then we have a suite of them that are generated or placed when you land