In a nearly 3 hour long podcast interview Bethesda studio director Todd Howard spent 20 minutes talking about upcoming action roleplaying game Starfield.

New details emerged.

Moving Planets and Moons?

Their first design challenge was developing a method for rendering entire planets.

Creating rectangular tiles like they would for any other game and then wrapping them around a sphere and blending them together.

There was a big design problem to solve in terms of what's fun about landing on a planet where there's potentially nothing? Cos there's a lot of planets and moons in reality there's nothing on them. Except resources. So we spent a lot of time figuring out, let's lean on a) that can be a lonely experience as long as we tell the player here's what's there. Here are the resources that are there. Go find them. But I equate it that moment of listening to the window and watching the sunset. I do think there's a certain beauty to landing on a strange planet being somewhat the only person there, building an outpost, and we are modelling all of the systems. Cos that's how we like to do things. So you can watch whatever that gas giant or moon. It will rotate and go sunrise, sunset and all of those things that you would expect. It's all really happening. Most people probably won't notice or appreciate all of that but I think it gives them the ability to say I want to go see that on that place as long as we tell them, "Hey the quest leads over here. Here's where the handcrafted content is that you would expect and then here's more of the open, procedural planet experience.

Agree that there could be beauty in vast empty planets.

Looking forward to that.

Possibly we're reading too much into this but it also sounds like he's saying that systems are "modelled" in the sense that their planets and moons will move.

At least to the best of our experience, this isn't something any major space games have done.

Space maps are static.

So this could be a point of difference feature they'll boast over for example, No Man's Sky.

On the negative side of that equation, No Man's Sky allows players to fly seemlessly between space and planet / moon surfaces, and being entirely procedurally generated, contains 18 quintillion planets.

Levels

In Starfield entire systems are levelled, like level 40.

This is interesting because their previous roleplaying games have utilised different content gating systems.

Oblivion scaling content to player level, Skyrim scaling up to a player's level within a limited range and Fallout 4 scaling up to the player's level with a lower but no upper limit.

He didn't provide any additional details but this rules out Oblivion style scaling.

Moon Frequency

Having previously told us that there about 1000 planets in the game, he said there are about 100'ish systems, meaning approx 10 planets / moons per.

Todd didn't go into any further detail but our solar system has over 200 moons, most attached to planets. Only Mercury and Venus having none.

Probably wouldn't be much point or fun in making a realistic number.

No Man's Sky systems often have none and at most two or three.

In response to another question he confirms that moons are in the game and can be landed upon.

Some of it we were doing when you're standing on a planet and you see the other moons go by and then you realise I could get in my ship, blast off and land there and build myself a home. I think that's pretty cool.

Robot Frequency

Another thing present under-represented according to what we'd expect the future to look like is robots.

There's the player companion Vasco, who has a fully realised personality, generic enemy robots and utility robots.

Because Bethesda wants the game to be a human experience, they've scaled back their numbers.

Some Minor Extras

There'll be different space suits and buffs for different gases, toxicity and temperatures on planets.

Other ships will land at and take off from starports, which is just for atmosphere. There's nothing you can do with them.

Out in space there'll be freighters and they can contact you. Space isn't only about combat.

Starfield is scheduled to release on PC and Xbox X|S in the first half of 2023.

[ Main Image: Todd Howard. Credit: Lex Fridman via YouTube. ]

References

Fridman, Lex (November 30, 2022). Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield | Lex Fridman Podcast #342. YouTube.