The Starfield universe will have more handcrafted environments than any Bethesda game before. Do you know how much that is? It's going to be huge.
Yes, I'm aware lol. That's the part that gets me excited. Well, that and the RPG systems, as well as the level of customization for character builds, ships, and bases.
Not every planet of the 1.000 is procedural generated. So not only will you have unique hand-crafted planets with in total more detail than any Bethesda game before, on top of that you have the experience of a huge universe due to the other planets generated procedurally.
Of course not all 1,000 of them will be
entirely procedurally generated, which isn't my argument. However the vast
majority of them will be, and that's more or less confirmed.
This is still an RPG, not a space sim. Having more of them doesn't make them inherently more interesting or compelling to explore simply because they exist in the game.
Especially with the increased likelihood of repetition due to the amount of them and the use of procedural generation techniques.
Not even taking into consideration the probability of bugs occurring in the game could hamper the experience.
You are acting as if they would've created 20 more detailed planets if they didn't include those 1.000 procedurally generated planets, but that's not how it works.
No, I think that just makes more rational sense tbh. It's not so much that it's
guaranteed to be the case,
it's that focusing on a fewer amount is likelier to lead one to invest more time and effort into them, rather than spreading one's efforts across a considerably larger amount. The latter tends to lead to more compromising.
After all, it's not as if Bethesda have infinite time and resources to get everything to the same level of polish at that scale, they're not even the largest studio in the industry.
My concern here is that their design decision to have that many planets could lead to an over-reliance on procedural generation techniques, which can often have less than desirable results when scaled up.
It's a genuine concern, and I'm not saying it just to simply rag on the game. I enjoy my fair share of sprawling open worlds, but I'm also someone who appreciates thoughtful level design.
There were many things shown off thus far that I like about Starfield, but I'm not going to pretend that I'm 100% onboard the hype train or that Starfield will be the greatest video game ever made without question.
My experiences with past Bethesda games are simultaneously the cause of my excitement and my skepticism.