The Most Exciting Part About Starfield Is Its Futuristic Cities
Have you heard? Starfield is going to be big. During the game’s big unveiling at the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase on Sunday, Todd Howard, head of Bethesda Game Studios, said that the game will have more than 1,000 planets spread across more than 100 systems, all of which you will be able to travel to in your customizable spaceship.
That’s a lot of planets. Arguably too many planets. I'm holding off on judgment for now because as anyone who has played Super Mario Galaxy knows, a planet is not a standardized unit of measurement. And, if Starfield is attempting to reproduce a version of the way that our own solar system actually works, some planets will be very large, some will be very small, and only a few will be suitable for life.
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It's those areas — the ones where groups of people can scratch out a life — that I'm most interested in. I don't have strong feelings about how big Starfield is. I do have strong feelings about what makes a good video game city.
I've written before about how much I was looking forward to Cyberpunk 2077 in the run up to its release and how disappointed I was, at launch and, recently, upon revisiting it, to see how little of Night City was explorable. It's an impressive city to look at, but the interiors of the vast majority of its skyscrapers and shops are locked off to the player. Given that Bethesda used Starfield’s futuristic cities to show off its authored content, I hope it can avoid a similar mistake.
Last year, on Bethesda Softworks' YouTube channel, the studio released short videos showing off concept art for three of these cities — Akila City, Neon, and New Atlantis — narrated by Emil Pagliarulo, design director at Bethesda Studios,
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