Starfield could be less: a former Bethesda employee spoke about internal debate about the number of planets

In the early stages of Starfield development, Bethesda has already discussed the issue of the size and scale of the Universe of the game, which could be less.

This story was revealed by Bruce Nesmit, who was the leading designer of Skyrim and participated in the development of Starfield, after which he left Bethesda in 2021. In an interview with Miinmax, he said that the initial idea of ​​Starfield was to create a game on a much more limited number of planets, namely "Two dozen" systems.

This is much less than 120 systems that were later included in the game, as a result of which the total number of planets exceeded 1000, about which Todd Howard boasted on the eve of the launch of the game.

It was quite reasonably noted that after the creation of one solar system, the creation of 100 such systems did not mean a significant increase in the work done.

This is due to the fact that the creative process of creating systems in Starfield is built by mixing handmade and procedural generation, using a system that can be (relatively) easily reproduced in large quantities.

You should know how to build a planet so that people can walk on it. You should have various objects: life forms with which they interact, rocks, all this. You must create ice worlds, worlds with craters. Just having studied our own solar system, all its diversity that you need to have for this, you have already done 90% of the work for the rest.

Todd almost from the air issued the number 100 for the number of stellar systems, but the further we went, the more they became convinced that the main activity takes place in these two dozen in the field of populated systems, and everything else is an open space for research.

But people like our big games. They love an open space that can be explored. So let’s give them such an opportunity. And then we moved to the question of how to make a study meaningful. And again you need to succeed on one planet. As soon as you get this formula, you will get a formula for all planets.

Given that users usually love the huge spaces offered in Bethesda games, the idea turned out to be successful, although Starfield research was also criticized.