Starfield - Daggerfall in Space?

My predictions for Starfield, which will most likely be wrong lol
Discord Server:   / discord  

Watch some retrospective analysis and reviews:
   • Retrospectives  

Subscribe!
   / jwlar  

Timestamps, click to skip ahead!
Introduction 0:00
Procedural Generation 0:45
Hand-Made Worlds 4:06
Quests and Immersion 04:57
Gameplay 07:09
My Thoughts 10:11

Starfield - Daggerfall in Space? in text form:
We’ve all seen the Starfield reveal, and it’s clear that Bethesda has taken some inspiration from their older titles, which is great to see in some areas… and maybe concerning in others.

What we have seen is pretty self-explanatory so far, so in this video, I instead want to predict or theorise, what I think Starfield will be like. How it will be similar to past Bethesda games, and how it may attempt to grow outside of what they are known for.

We can then go back to this video after the game is released to see where I was right, and where I was, most likely, wrong.

Procedural Generation
This is the big word on everyone’s lips. The word is associated with pretty much every space simulator you can find, and it gave The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall its famously, or should I say, infamously colossal game world.

It is all but confirmed by this point that procedural generation will be a cornerstone of Starfield's world design - with 100 Star systems and over 1000 planets, the task of hand-making those would be impossible to the standard people expect. If they were to try it, Oblivion’s 200+ “handmade” dungeons, all put together by a single man with a limited tool set would come to mind.

The first thing to consider is “just how big are these planets going to be?”. I highly doubt we will be able to access every corner of them like in No Man’s Sky, and with landing and taking off being a set animation, it seems far more likely that we will be given a large area of each planet where we are free to explore.

How big will this playable area be, we obviously don’t know yet. If I was to throw out a ballpark size based on nothing but conjecture and my limited knowledge of the Creation Engine, which they are still using - It’s Creation Engine 2 now sure, but it’s still the same dinosaur with a million pieces bolted onto it. Knowing that then, I believe each planet will range somewhere between the size of the Shivering Isles in Oblivion, Solstheim in Skyrim, and on the larger side - Vvardenfell from Morrowind. With an amalgamation of sizes in between.
Much like dungeons in Skyrim, some will be huge and others may be tiny. Think of an Earth-like planet that can sustain life being large, versus something closer to Pluto being small and desolate.

Depending on this planet size, I think there will be 5 to upwards of 100 handmade planets that will have more of that Bethesda TLC fans have come to expect from their titles. People are terrified that everywhere is going to be as barren as Daggerfall, and while that may be true for some of the planets, I feel confident that some are going to be as intricately designed as Skyrim’s game world was.

#starfield #daggerfall #jwlar