Starfield Includes More Handcrafted Content Than Any Bethesda Game, Alongside Its Procedural Galaxy

ign.com:

Amid a huge amount of new information on Starfield from the Xbox-Bethesda showcase, likely the most-discussed detail was Todd Howard's announcement that the upcoming sci-fi RPG will include 1,000 fully explorable planets. Howard has now told IGN more about the game's approach to procedural generation, what it offers, and assured us that players can ignore them in favour of a huge amount of fully handcrafted content, if they want to.

Speaking to IGN, Howard addressed the huge reaction to the news of Starfield's massively explorable space: "We’re pretty aware you throw that [information] out near the end, people will go ‘What did you just say?’, and then they’ll have a lot of questions [about] how that works."

While Howard says that the team will offer a future deep-dive into exactly how that content was made, and how it feels in action, he offered us a glimpse into the thinking around it, centred on a single philosophy: "We try to say yes as much as possible."

"We do a lot of procedural generation [in Starfield], but I would keep in mind that we’ve always done that," Howard explained. "It’s a big part of Skyrim in terms of questing and some other things we do. We generate landscape using procedural systems, so we’ve always kind of worked on it. [The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall is] one we look at a lot in terms of game flow. And we had been developing some procedural technology and doing some prototypes, and it really started coming to a head with Starfield, in that we think we can do this."

While he didn't go into details, Howard stressed that Starfield's procedural generation is robust enough to handle the sheer scale of variety required to build 100 solar systems' worth of planets:

"So it starts with: Can you even pull it