Starfield's Hand-Crafted Content is a Masterclass in Balance

Summary

Starfield leverages procedural generation to enhance its hand-crafted points of interest and interior spaces, creating a balance between exploration and immersion.
With over 1000 planets to explore, Starfield provides one of the largest interactive spaces in video games, offering worthwhile exploration on several hundred of these planets.
The game continues the tradition of Bethesda RPGs with engaging side content and rewarding exploration, featuring beautifully designed hand-crafted "dungeons" filled with foes and loot. The use of these dungeons stops the game from feeling too random and ensures that few planets actually feel empty.

Ahead of its release, many players shared some concern regarding Starfield's use of procedural generation and questioning how the title would leverage the technology. One of the larger concerns voiced was that most of Starfield's planets would be procedurally generated and lack the distinct, hand-crafted content and worthwhile exploration of Bethesda's other RPG series The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Thankfully, Starfield doesn't just present players with a massive galaxy to explore devoid of character, but instead is able to use procedural generation as a tool to make its hand-crafted planets and meticulously designed interior spaces shine as some of the best the studio has produced.

With more than 1000 planets for players to explore across the Milky Way galaxy, Starfield brings one of the largest interactive spaces in video games to players' screens. In terms of the amount of content in these spaces that's actually hand-crafted, Starfield takes an atypical approach by using procedural generation only to generate the layout of each planet's surface. Each point of interest that is populated on these planets via procedural generation comes from a selection of hand-crafted spaces, meaning that several hundred of the available worlds in Starfield feature worthwhile exploration for players to get lost in. It's a delicate balance that pays off toward enhancing the game's immersive qualities.

What's Procedurally Generated vs. What's Hand-Crafted in Starfield

Since The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, all Bethesda RPGs have utilized procedural generation to some extent. Oblivion was the first game produced by the studio to implement the technology, using it to help with the generation of terrain and landscapes in order to free up the development team's talents toward crafting detailed interior spaces. Every game that the studio has released since Oblivion has followed this same general format, with foliage, landscape layouts, and textures being procedurally generated from pre-designed templates and then interior spaces (such as various points of interest on a map or cities and settlements) still retaining the distinction of being hand-crafted spaces.

Starfield is no different, despite its impressively large map. The game features over 1000 planets, and while some of these planets are entirely hand-crafted and will be the same for each player, most of them are procedurally generated. This means that the layouts, locations of points of interest, available resources, and flora and fauna will vary from player to player. Still, the actual spaces that players enter and explore on these planets are all hand-crafted spaces, striking a balance between Starfield's scope and the benefit of exploration and adventure. Sure, there are planets that are mostly "empty", but even these planets have value as spaces for the player to establish resource collection outposts.

Starfield's Hand-Crafted 'Dungeons' Are Almost Always Worth Players' Time

Even though every planet the player comes across won't have points of interest that the player can enter and explore, those that do retain the same level of quality that players are used to seeing in a Bethesda RPG. It's no secret that the bread and butter of the studio's games are their engaging side content and distractions from the critical path, with many players spending dozens of hours in-game before even touching the main quest. Not only does Starfield continue the tradition of worthwhile exploration, but it has some of the most rewarding out of all the Bethesda RPGs.

Abandoned research and science centers, as well as various types of production plants, often appear as points of interest on planets' maps and act as the game's "dungeons". Each of these spaces are painstakingly detailed and feature beautifully designed interiors that highlight the brilliance of Starfield's art direction. Not only that, but they're often teeming with foes for players to take out as well as a bevy of loot to discover and store back in the ship's cargo hold. Starfield is a game that could have collapsed under the sheer scale of its open world, but the hand-crafted spaces help to ground the title as a Bethesda game through and through.