Bethesda has been very canny with their Starfield promotion, boasting endlessly about the size and scope of the game, which includes thousands of explorable planets. It’s left fans trying to separate hype from reality and searching for possible cracks in the game’s façade. Well, with a number of leaked copies of Starfield now in the wild, it seems one has been found.
Bethesda has implied that you’ll be able to fully explore Starfield’s procedurally-generated planets once you land on one, summoning up images of players being able to set off toward the horizon and continue walking forever. Bethesda head of marketing Pete Hines seemed to imply this was the case.
Yup, if you want.
Walk on, brave explorer.
— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) August 22, 2023
Unfortunately, it isn’t quite true. While the specifics are still slightly sketchy, there’s now enough Starfield footage in the wild to provide a pretty solid picture of how planets actually work in the game. Basically, when you arrive at a new planet, you establish a landing area, and the game generates a large tile or swatch of land around that landing area. A number of leaked images and videos online show players being able to reach the edge of these titles, at which point they hit an invisible wall and are given a warning telling them they can go no further. It seems like players are typically able to run for around 10 minutes in one direction before they reach the edge of a tile.
I don’t know. Personally I still think boundaries in #Starfield aren’t a big deal. I’m more curious how the ratio between empty barren planets and interesting planets is. pic.twitter.com/hYBWjBb74q
— Oliver Darko (@oliver_drk) August 27, 2023
While a big deal wasn’t made about it at the time, Bethesda creative director Todd Howard essentially confirmed this is how planets work in Starfield in an interview with IGN earlier this summer, saying planets are made up of “kilometer-sized tiles” that get “kind of wrapped around the planet.”
Emphasis on the kind of, as it seems like these tiles don’t really fit together. In other words, while you can set down multiple landing sites on a planet, it doesn’t seem like you’ll be able to create a cohesive contiguous map of the planet. One leaker showed evidence of this by setting down a landing site on Jemison, home to New Atlantis – one of the major handcrafted settlements in the game. The player sets their landing site down near New Atlantis, so if the tiles actually connected, presumably you’d be able to travel to the edge of your landing area and see New Atlantis, but that isn’t the case. Each landing area is basically its own standalone sandbox it seems.
Of course, the big question here is – does this matter? One the one hand, being able to set down on a planet and truly get lost in it is an appealing fantasy, and one that’s been achieved by other games like No Man’s Sky. That said, Starfield is also a full-on story-driven Bethesda RPG. In other words, there’s going to be a lot of other things to do. Also, the tiles created when you touch down on a planet are still very large. Big enough, that the illusion of being able to fully explore planets will be preserved for most players. We’ll see how meaningful this ends up being once the game actually launches. And hey, maybe modders can make changes to how planets work.
Starfield hits PC and Xbox Series X/S on September 6, with an early-access launch on September 1.
