Starfield is the new upcoming Bethesda RPG, set to at some point before The Elder Scrolls 6. The studio recently revealed that its upcoming titles will make significant use of procedural generation as a way of creating large in-game worlds for players to explore.
However, there’s one lesson Starfield needs to learn from Mass Effect when it comes to creating its galaxy. When it comes to the number of planets players can explore, size isn’t everything, and Bethesda will need to avoid some pitfalls to make its upcoming game-world feel as alive as it could be immense.
Mass Effect’s Planets
The original three Mass Effect games let players visit huge numbers of planets across the Milky Way. These can be used to collect resources, prepare for missions, and players can also explore the surface using the Normandy’s land vehicle.
However, there is a big problem with the way Mass Effect handles its planets. There are only a few locations in each world that are actually worth visiting in terms of population and story. Areas like the Citadel and Omega limit themselves to a smaller scope, but feel far more alive that some of the large but mostly empty planets that players can explore elsewhere in the galaxy.
While Commander Shepard can take the Normandy and its crew across the galaxy, that freedom is undermined by how bare some of the planets players can visit actually are. This doesn’t have a huge impact on a series like Mass Effect overall. The games always prioritized their tight, character-driven stories, and never relied on exploration as one of their key marketing points like many open-world RPGs do.
Bethesda games, on the other hand, tend to do exactly that. Skyrim’s open world was one of its most praised aspects, and the freedom to explore a huge open world has often taken design precedence over storytelling in Bethesda games. To see the difference in priorities, players need only look at the different size of the explorable area in Skyrim vs. Mass Effect 2, which came out the year before and had a smaller in-game world separated by more loading screens. Similarly, players can look at the difference in depth and the amount of dialog afforded to Mass Effect’s companion characters compared to followers in Skyrim, who mostly use a few default phrases shared across multiple NPCs.
Starfield's Planets
Starfield’s planets cannot afford to be as bare as Mass Effect’s if its potentially huge game-world is going to be exciting to explore. Players will likely need to be faced with new alien civilizations, spacer settlements, hostile wildernesses, and dangerous creatures if the galaxy is going to feel alive. Rumored Starfield leaks seem to suggest that players will have to consider some survival-oriented mechanics, such as oxygen levels and gravity. This could come some way to making a large open-world compelling, but will likely be insufficient by itself.
The Starfield leaked images also show a player standing on what appears to be a mostly barren moon. Hopefully other areas are more dense, filled with life and NPCs to interact with. If not, the game risks feeling to large and too lonely, especially now that Bethesda has confirmed that Starfield will be an exclusively single player experience.
Bethesda is holding back details about Starfield until its closer to launch, apparently to avoid a situation like Cyberpunk 2077’s where revealing too much information about the upcoming title too early can leave some fans frustrated waiting for its eventual release. It is possible, however, that more details like the ones mentioned by Todd Howard this week will come out, and fans may get more news about Starfield sooner than many were expecting.
Starfield is in development.