Starfield’s map said to be Bethesda’s biggest yet, according to Todd Howard

Starfield’s map said to be Bethesda’s biggest yet, according to Todd Howard
Ben Borthwick Updated on by

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Bethesda's upcoming space RPG Starfield is still quite a ways off in every sense, but director Todd Howard has dropped some tiny nuggets of information that seems to indicate the game will be a big one, offering the developer's biggest RPG map to date.

The information came as part of an interview published yesterday as part of the Develop: Brighton Digital conference (and helpfully summarized by the Starfield Reddit community) in which Howard mentioned that the development team were working with a procedural generation tool when working on the map for both The Elder Scrolls VI and Starfield, that would allow them to more easily create larger worlds. This in turn means that Starfield's map will be bigger than even Fallout 76's, which itself was already four times the size of Skyrim.

Howard also spoke of other improvements including a substantial overhaul to the studio's Creation Engine that it's used in all of its RPGs, including better rendering, animation, AI and pathing and more, saying "When people see the results, hopefully they'd be as happy as we are". There's a lot of people working on the game too, saying the team is about 4-5 times larger than Skyrim when the studio worked on that.

As was indicated during the announcement of the currently-ongoing purchase of Bethesda by Xbox, Howard also confirmed that Starfield will be on Xbox Game Pass from Day 1, as well as The Elder Scrolls VI. But don't expect to see much any time soon, with Howard also noting that "It's going to be a while" before we see anything from Starfield, with the inherent unpredictable nature of development meaning he didn't feel comfortable talking too much about it just yet. 

You can check out the full one-hour-and-a-bit interview with Todd Howard for yourself below.