Summary
- There are over 1,000 planets and thousands of miles of square footage to explore in Starfield.
- Starfield has the biggest map in any Bethesda game ever, and procedural generation makes the explorable area even larger.
- Starfield offers over 250,000 lines of dialogue, countless handcrafted environments, fun side missions, immersive worlds, and many hours of gameplay.
1,000 planets touted in Starfield.
However, perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer isn't so straightforward. The prevalence of procedural generation in video games, combined with the existence of other titles in the space-exploration genre, has made the question of whether Starfield's map is the biggest open-world game ever created a hard one to answer in any real, measurable sense. However, that's not to say it's impossible to do; it is just a herculean task that would likely take innumerable hours to calculate.
How Big Is Starfield's Map?
Starfield's map is made up of over 1,000 planets in over a hundred different star systems. Most planets have pre-rendered cities and outposts with different side quests and activities, limiting the available explorable spaces for these handcrafted environments. However, that doesn't tell the entire story, as the entirety of each planet can be explored, each with thousands of miles of square footage to traverse or build on. By placing down beacons, players can land their ships to examine procedurally generated plots of land around the pre-rendered ones, which makes the amount of walkable area in Starfield virtually infinite, as innumerable beacons can be set on each planet.
Each star system in Starfield also varies in size, with a different amount of planets in each system. For example, the United Colonies Alpha Centauri star system only has four planets, while a star system like the Freestar Collective's Cheyenne contains nine. Many planets also have orbiting moons for players to explore, further adding the amount of explorable space in the game. That being said, there may only be a couple of pre-rendered places of interest on any given planet, depending on which world is explored. Additionally, some planets can't even be landed on, while others have extreme weather conditions or little to no interactive content at all.
Is Starfield The Biggest Open-World Game Ever?
Unsurprisingly, when comparing Starfield to other open-world games in of size, the task is actually quite hard, as other games in the space genre also fundamentally rely on procedural generation to create their worlds. Two examples of this are the games Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky. Both of those games are also set in space and boast massive open worlds.
In the case of Elite Dangerous, it's claimed the game has over 400 billion star systems, with procedurally generated worlds boasting complex faction and economic systems. In No Man's Sky, it's claimed that based on the technology used to generate the randomly generated elements, there are over 18 quintillion worlds to explore. Ultimately, because of these other games, Starfield does not have the biggest map in an open-world game, but it is massive and the biggest map in any Bethesda game ever.
While these other space titles boast more planets to explore than contained in Starfield's 1,000+ planet game, that's not revealing the whole picture. Because of the procedural generation outside of the pre-rendered environments in the game, Starfield could theoretically have thousands of points placed on each planet. Much like other space games, calculating square footage in Starfield is difficult for this reason. While it is true that each landing zone has a border around it, actually reaching that border by foot takes an incredible amount of time and doesn't make much sense in of gameplay.
Starfield's Star Systems Explained
To better understand the playable area in Starfield, one must understand how star systems and planets work in the game. In Starfield, much like in real life, star systems have a star, each with a variable number of planets and moons. Some of these planets are uninhabitable and, in extreme cases, can't even be landed on, while other locations will have more points of handcrafted interest in the form of Outposts or cities. These locations typically have characters and creatures to interact with as well as locations and loot to explore.
In between these points of interest are walkable areas that players can land down on to build Outposts or explore. Some of these areas, if inhabitable, will also contain procedurally-generated creatures that drop crafting materials. For instance, Gas Giant planets can't be landed on, which reduces the overall number of environments that can be explored on foot. While these planets can still be scanned and documented, they shouldn't necessarily be taken into consideration when talking about Starfield's map size.
However, the ability to traverse the entirety of planets that are inhabitable adds to the enormous size of Starfield's map, making it nearly incalculable, though much of this procedurally generated land is barren, and there is nothing to really do there other than build outposts and take out dangerous creatures that spawn there.
Focus Should Be On Quality, Not Quantity
Ultimately, the focus should perhaps not be on what game has the biggest map ever but instead on which game has the most interesting content. In that category, Starfield is certainly up for the running. In a Starfield Constellation Questions segment, Todd Howard revealed that there were over 250,000 lines of dialogue recorded for Starfield, a massive amount. While this number isn't the most for any game - that award goes to Red Dead Redemption 2's over a half-million lines of dialogue, it is among the top for games with the most in-game dialogue ever recorded for a single release.
In addition, there are literally thousands of handcrafted environments in Starfield that contain unique personalities, fun side missions, and memorable immersive worlds. Along with faction politics, unique creatures, and different mineable resources, there's a ton to do and accomplish, with hundreds of hours of gameplay to enjoy within the title. While it is true that some planets or moons may have little to no interesting content to explore due to climate conditions, it doesn't remove the fact that there is plenty of rich and immersive gameplay opportunities within the title.
Source: Bethesda Softworks/YouTube
