Todd Howard, the creative champion of the new space-based sandwich-theft sim, Starfield. IGN In the aftermath of last Sunday’s Starfield Direct, we talked about the game ahead of its release on September 6th. What are the key points? Starfield still has a large space, but it’s not entirely due to procedural generation.
Asked about the ratio of handcrafted to procgen content in the game, Howard said of Starfield’s 1,000 planets, “Landscapes are almost all procedural. It’s like generating a . Create his 1000+ procgen wonderland of “Wrap the Earth” game.
But don’t worry. Because Howard was quick to add that Starfield still has “more handcrafted content than any game we’ve made.” He didn’t give specific numbers, but it appears Starfield has more handcrafted content than “Skyrim and Fallout 4 combined with just dialogue.”
“We’ve been doing more than ever before in working on locations, art, and everything else,” Howard continued. Well, it’s encouraging. Some members of the PCG staff, myself included, are more than a little worried that Starfield’s long, broad planetary roster might be, well, a little boring. Procgen is a great way to gain breadth, but not depth. The idea of 1,000 planets isn’t really alluring if there’s nothing interesting on the surface. I think so anyway. Some sick people disagree with this.
So it’s not surprising to hear that Bethesda is keen on producing handcrafted content, but at the end of the day, Bethesda is a very well-resourced studio, so it’s not surprising that Howard doesn’t want man-made content. It’s still good to hear you stressed that there will be a lot of thing (Sandwiches, etc.) Be devoured when the game starts.
Oh, if this conversational comparison sounds familiar, it’s because Howard loves making it. Before Fallout 4 was released, Howard was outside talking about: or This game had more dialogue than Fallout 3 and Skyrim combined. In case you somehow forgot, the base version of Skyrim had around 60,000 lines of dialogue, while Fallout 4 had 111,000 lines of dialogue.
In 2021, Howard said Starfield had over 150,000 lines of dialogue, more than 171,000 lines required for both games combined. I think the Bethesda writers have been doodling for years.
