Starfield may be lonely, but that's exactly what Bethesda wants
When it comes to Starfield’s expansive open world, you shouldn’t be scared of the isolation in this vast universe. In fact, the loneliness you may encounter hopping from one desolate world to another is exactly the tone developer Bethesda is going for.
Rather than focusing on the horror of solo space travel, Bethesda wants to highlight its magnificence in Starfield. During a recent interview with Lex Fridman(opens in new tab), Todd Howard, the game's head director, explained how the team at Bethesda embraced the “beautiful desolation” of Starfield's massive open world.
From what the official gameplay trailer(opens in new tab) showed us, there will be “over 100 systems” with “over 1000 planets” in Starfield. That means the intergalactic explorer is set to be 20% bigger than Fallout 4 or Skyrim. While this sounds amazing, is there such a thing as a game that is too big? Considering that Starfield is set to be a single-player game, millions of planets seem like lonely work for just one person.
Loneliness isn’t the only problem the developers faced when making Starfield. Such an expansive universe isn’t easy to develop; hence there was a decision to be made. Either “you can’t land on all the planets you see”, or the universe you explore is a “very controlled small world space”, Howard explained during the interview.
It was decided that the latter would probably set “the wrong tone,” Howard said in the interview. Instead of focusing on the limitations, the development team instead chose to look for ways in which “we can say yes”. The best way around the complications of making a playable and detailed expansive open world was by focusing on creating it tile by tile. By rendering these small tiles of landscape offline, the
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