Veteran Bethesda Artist on Starfield Having 1,000+ Planets: 'I Don't Think This is a Good idea' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 10 August 2026 / 1,633 Views
Former Bethesda Game Studios veteran environmental artist Nathan Purkeypile in an interview with The Examined Game said the decision for Starfield to have over 1,000 planets was the wrong move to have made.
"I would say it's very accurate that if I was in charge of Starfield, I would have not done it that way at all," said Purkeypile referring to the number of planets (via VideoGamesChronicle). "I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts.
"Even playing Starfield after it came out, during the main quest I was running into repeated locations on the main quest, and I was like 'well yeah, because you're only going to have time to make a certain number of dungeons,' and if you're going to have a thousand planets you're going to be repeating content."
He said the plan might have worked if Bethesda had procedurally generated the planets, however, a lot of the planets that weren't part of the main story had a lot of repeated content like dungeons and buildings.
"It's not actually a procedural game," said Purkeypile. "Those dungeons are built, they're not going the full No Man's Sky route or anything. So, even early on, I was drawing parallels to Mass Effect 1 and how those procedural planets with repeated dungeons played out. And I was like, ‘'I don’t think this is a good idea.'
"Because to me, if you're going to do the thousands of planets thing, you really need to go the full No Man's Sky route and have it actually be generating unique content all the time, not just stitching stuff together in slightly different ways. That's not procedural. I call it 'space quilts,' where it’s just chunks of things getting rearranged."
Purkeypile at Bethesda was also the world artist on Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, as well as the lead artist on Fallout 76 and Fallout 3 expansions The Pitt and Point Lookout.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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I played No Man's Sky, admittedly on like the 2nd year before alot of the improvements had come, but I did not like the procedural generation system any more than what Bethesda did with hand crafted planets with repeating building and dungeon designs and such. No Man's Sky's system made hideous randomized animals, glitchy ore deposits, and many other things I didn't like, just as much as I didn't like going through a budling with an identical layout for the 4th time in Starfield. I just don't think you can make a larger space game like these without a larger dev team and more years in development than either had. Maybe Star Citizen will pull it off, it sure has been in development much longer than Starfiield or No Man's Sky,.
100 Planets over 10 Star Systems would have made so much more sense
The idea of having over 1,000 planets seemed nice. But Bethesda as a AAA studio isn't really big enough to have enough variety to make that many planets interesting.
So yeah I agree on having ~10 star systems with ~100 planets / moons would have been better. Having 3 or 4 star systems that the main story takes place in so all those planets are fleshed out with more variety. Then the rest can be more with side content.
The scale of Starfield is on another level compared to Elder Scrolls and Fallout.
The planets were mostly fine. It was the repeated dungeons that slammed my immersion into the ground and stepped all over it. It was like someone jabbing you with a fork then yelling, "you're playing a video game!"
The planets were terrible. They were full of repeating content, and many planets were also very flat. They had some redeeming qualities too, but for the most part, it felt unbelievable that anyone approved such poor content (especially considering the amount of walking required in the game).
Yes, but it makes for terrible gameplay. Either the planets should be different or the game should be designed differently. Planets with life were less bad, but the scanner mechanic made it way too obvious how little variation each planet has.
My experience might have been hurt by the lack of vehicles. Vehicles were added only when I was almost done with the game (or completely done - I don't remember anymore), so I wouldn't know, but walking on all those planets got old fast.
I think the game gets flak more than it deserves, but all those planets and moons are definitely one of the game's weak points in my opinion.
