Starfield's exploration looks like searching a quarry for the best piece of gravel

rockpapershotgun.com:

"So why go this big with Starfield?" asks Bethesda Softworks' lead landscape artist Matt Carofano at the beginning of a segment in tonight's Starfield Direct. "Because we want to give you freedom on a galactic level," is the unsatisfying response.

Starfield features over 1000 planets to visit, each procedurally generated upon your approach but populated with handcrafted elements. Your "freedom" upon landing on these planets - many of which seem near-barren - is whether you spend your time doing some quests, 'surveying' the local flora and fauna, or shooting rocks with your space laser.

The quote above is from the Starfield Direct segment on exploration, which begins at 32 minutes and 49 seconds.

No Man's Sky is the obvious point of comparison in everything that's shown during this segment. That includes the heavy emphasis on the tech underpinning Starfield's galactic simulation, in which the planets, moons and stars you can see in the sky above you are all fully simulated celestial bodies that can be visited with your spaceship.

But it extends to the planets themselves and your activities on them. Starfield's droop-beaked dinosaurs, flap-mouthed pipe beasts, and skew-whiff crabs and scorpions are all handcrafted, not procedural, but they still look like the sort of creatures No Man's Sky might have generated. Your interactions with the local fauna also include scanning them to collect XP-bestowing data about them, with extra bonuses should you successfully survey an entire planet or star system, just like in Hello Games' space survival 'em up. I'm not sure the freedom to do this is meaningful.

Starfield remains a Bethesda RPG, of course, so there are quests, too. Lead technical producer Jean-Francois Levesque