'It was a bad idea': Todd Howard admits a thousand planets in Starfield is an unnecessary waste of Bethesda's time, effort and resources

By: Anton Kratiuk | 28.09.2024, 22:11

During the advertising campaign of the Starfield role-playing game Bethesda's head Todd Howard made a loud statement that alerted many gamers. He said that players will be offered "a thousand unique and exciting planets" to visit.

Here's What We Know

On release it turned out that most of the planets exist solely for the feeling of the huge scale of the game and are not involved in the quests in any way: they are empty, monotonous and uninteresting. Largely because of this, the game received mixed reviews and is still heavily criticised.

To Todd Howard's credit, he did not prove the validity of his idea and admitted that the thousand planets in Starfield was a mistake.

On the YouTube channel of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts BAFTA, the head of Bethesda and creative director of Starfield said that the creation of so many worlds took a lot of time and resources, which, as he now realises, could have been used more efficiently.

Todd Howard noted that even at the time of development not everyone in the team was sure in the expediency of generating a thousand planets and, as time has shown, this point of view was correct.

On the 30th of September the story add-on Shattered Space will be released, which shows that Bethesda has made conclusions from the mistake and its events will unfold on one planet - Vaʼruunʼkai.

This allows us to hope that players can expect an exciting and unique story with excellent elaboration of every detail and without unnecessary gigantomania.

Source: BAFTA YouTube channel