Will Starfield use procedural generation for its planets?

Starfield, as Bethesda announced earlier this month, will not be coming till 2023.

The statement the developers issued regarding Starfield, as well as Redfall, was that they wanted the community to have the "best, most polished version" at launch. Considering the big leap Starfield is to the developers and the propensity for bugs in the Creation Engine, the delay makes complete sense.

An earlier insider leak on the ResetEra forums, however, also mentioned that the game currently has too much content - rather than a lack thereof. We do not know the exact nature of the content this refers to. An educated guess would pin it on the one aspect where Starfield is trying to market itself as the next big thing: scale.

The question, therefore, is whether the game will have procedural generation to fill out the gaps in its professed scale.

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Procedural genertion in Starfield might not necessarily be like Minecraft

Procedural Generation (procgen) is best understood as a way to automate the creation of in-game content - be it the enemy inventories, or the map itself - through an engine-level algorithm. Games with survival and roguelite elements tend to do this the most - like Noita, or Minecraft, the golden standard for procgen.

In Minecraft, the procedural genration to fill out the landmass is done when the world is created, where the topography is determined. The game then fills out the gaps on-the-fly with more details as the player explores the map.

Bethesda's brush with procedural generation lies at the very doorstep of their RPG journey. The first two entries in the Elder Scrolls franchise, Arena, and Daggerfall, use procgen to fill out their world.

To bring this argument in line, we must also take note of the context in which Arena and Daggerfall were released. They are far from modern medieval RPG that mark the current era of Elder Scrolls. Rather, they were Bethesda's attempt to recreate the then-trending dungeon crawling formula of the Ultima series.

Starfield, set in the Settled Systems, will have several different solar systems. The total number of planets are currently unknown, but there are likely to be over twenty, each arguably the size of Skyrim. Connecting the dots, the question is whether it would make sense for Starfield to procedurally generate some planets.

The answer is a resounding yes, but not in the way one would initially guess. Minecraft, Terraria, and the like fill out their worlds with a custom seed each time it is created. Skyrim and Oblivion also used something similar, but not at the level of user-end execution.

Bethesda's Creation Kit can utilize an algorithm to first generate randomized topography. The logic of this is, in truth, not far from that of Minecraft's world generation. However, the procgen map is then changed and polished with details as directed by the developers.

Thus, Bethesda's worlds since Morrowind classify as hand-crafted rather than being pure procgen.

It's likely that Starfield won't stray from this formula. However, whether its procgen basis will only be there to lay out the initial draft of the planets or not remains to be seen. In the vein of the old games, Bethesda's return to their roots may also signal a return to the ocassional procgen.

This could be anything from a number of additional planets that are different on each playthrough, to a randomized dungeon, dungeon-crawler style.