Starfield has more ‘handcrafted’ content than any previous Bethesda game

polygon.com:

Across Starfield’s 100 star systems and more than 1,000 planets, there is going to be a lot of procedurally-generated content. But Bethesda game director Todd Howard said there’s still a lot of “handcrafted” work in the ambitious, upcoming space role-playing game.

Microsoft showed an extended trailer during the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase on Monday to build out the world and establish its storyline: It’s the year 2330, and a group of space explorers — you, the player, are one of those — are looking to recover lost artifacts. The story spirals out from there, and is expected to be branching. When the trailer was released, Howard dropped those huge numbers — that Starfield would have unthinkable numbers of worlds to explore, thanks to procedural generation. It worried some players, who asked: Is 1,000 too many? Will these really be fleshed out, believable worlds?

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Howard told IGN that the answer is basically yes and no.

Howard said in an interview with IGN that Starfield has “more [content] handcrafting… than any game [Bethesda’s] done” before. He said Bethesda wanted to say “yes” to the player — meaning players could do something way off the path of Starfield’s main game and have it be meaningful. Some of the worlds will be built-out story areas, following Starfield’s main path, which will look familiar to Bethesda fans. Howard told IGN the main quest is around 20% larger than games like The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Fallout 4, and takes 30 to 40 hours to complete, excluding extra side stuff.

But alongside that built-on questline, players will also also find worlds that are essentially barren ice balls, Howard said. And if a player wants to, they could explore that.

“So we’re pretty careful about saying,