If Starfield's 1,000 Planets Scare You, Play Outer Wilds Instead

thegamer.com:

Over the next few days, you’re going to see a lot of articles about Starfield’s thousand planets. We’ve already got one ourselves. Even a studio as big and experienced as Bethesda can’t possibly populate over 1,000 fully explorable planets in a meaningful way. The promise tells us we can expect a shallow, lifeless cosmos, not the deep, rich worlds that make space exploration so alluring.

This recent trend of triple-A video games promising hundreds and hundreds of hours of content should terrify us all. I hoped the medium would be moving away from its dull, artistically bereft checklist of filler objectives and steering towards more focused, nuanced stories, but that doesn’t seem to be the case just yet. Is it technically impressive to put that many planets in a game? It sure was when No Man’s Sky did it several years ago, yeah. Is it worth the crunch and time that could have been spent on other more exciting projects? Definitely not.

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While it’s easy to get caught up in the desire to explore an entire galaxy or universe, the sheer scale of space is so astronomical (geddit?) that all the intrigue and mystery you could ever need can be put into a single solar system. Instead of a game with over 1,000 partially procedurally generated planets with nothing of substance to offer, I’d rather traverse a handful with engaging, deliberate design. I already have. And you can too. Just play Outer Wilds.

There are a total of thirteen astral bodies you can set foot on in Outer Wilds. Seven planets, two moons, two space stations, a comet, and an enormous spaceship. You can also technically set foot on the sun and a volcanic moon, but only for a split second as