Are humans mostly alone in the universe? Todd Howard seems to think so, as the director behind Starfield discussed his latest RPG in a new episode of Kinda Funny Xcast and revealed that while the game will technically feature over 1,000 planets, only “about 10%” of them will have any life on them. This isn’t the greatest news for gamers who were expecting to land on a planet and do more than collect resources and talk to themselves, but Howard suggested that this was actually a great way of making players feel the “magnificent desolation” that comes with landing on another, alien world. Elsewhere in the interview, Howard revealed that Starfield doesn’t have any land vehicles or fishing, something that Skyrim fans might be upset about.
From a Kinda Funny Games transcript:
Obviously it’s procedural, so there’s no way we’re going to go and handcraft an entire planet. What we do is we handcraft individual locations and some of those are placed specifically, [like] the main cities and other quest locations, and then we have a suite of them that are generated or placed when you land depending on that planet.”
…you look at a system, here’s the menu of things you could do…about 10% of those planets have life on them. …if you look at a planet you see the resources it has, things you want, there is, I love the Buzz Aldrin quote, the “magnificent desolation,” I think there’s a certain beauty to landing on those and feeling I’m one of the only people or the only person to ever visit this planet.
…there [are no land vehicles]. ….but we do have the boost pack. You saw some of that in the video and you have skills for the boost pack, so the boost pack almost acts like this vehicle where you can fly through. It’s super fun. And then the low gravity planets are just really, really something special in the game.