Ex-Bethesda dev says Starfield could've focused on 'two dozen solar systems', but 'people love our big games … so let's go ahead and let 'em have it'
Starfield's big. Real big. Over 1,000 planets big. However that illusion of bigness really vanishes when the game reuses particular prefabs. You can only go through the exact same space base so many times before you start feeling like you're on the Truman Show.
As PC Gamer's Fraser Brown pointed out a while back: «there's just not much to see in Starfield outside of its busy, quest-filled hubs. Fast travel makes it feel small, but even when you do get to walk around for hours it's rare that you'll find something you haven't seen countless other times. Another dead moon. Another nickel deposit. Another pirate base.»
While I enjoyed my jaunts around Starfield in a MMO-style checklist fugue state, I have to admit—that's not exactly the 'wonders of space' feeling Bethesda tries to sell you. Interestingly enough, Ex-Bethesda dev and Skyrim's lead designer Bruce Nesmith (who was present for the start of Starfield's development but left Bethesda soon after) suggests a more condensed galaxy was on the table, if only for a moment.
«There was a lot of discussion about the scope of the game … at one point, I said 'I bet this game would be a lot better if we restricted ourselves to about two dozen solar systems',» Nesmith says during an interview with MinnMax.
However, the team saw an opportunity to leverage procedural generation to cut down on the workload of going even bigger. «Once you've done one solar system, doing a hundred is not really adding to your work all that much,» he goes on to list the types of planets players might want to explore, then remarks: «Just doing our own solar system, all the variety that you have to do just to have that, you've done 90% of the work for the rest of it.»
While that's true in a sense, I'm
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