Bethesda fan adds up the 'unique' points of interest in Starfield and Skyrim, reigniting debate over encounter quality and quantity in RPGs

A Bethesda fan has added up the 'unique' points of interest in Starfield and Skyrim, reigniting the age-old debate over encounter quality and quantity in RPGs.

That fan is _Denizen_, and according to their calculations on the Starfield subreddit, alongside the much talked about 1,000 planets, there are 82 unique places, 150 different POI designs, and 120 star systems in Bethesda's epic space-based RPG. In comparison, Skyrim has a total of 343 locations that _Denizen_ argues include a lot of "fairly similar" areas such as mines and caves.

"I consider a planet to be a place," they explain, "so even though Starfield has fewer building types, it has a lot more variation in the places you can go to." Speaking from their own experience with both games, they say that after 80 hours, they had, by and large, seen all the sights Skyrim had to offer, but that's not the case with Starfield. 

"I'm 120 hours in Starfield but haven't even been to half the non-radiant and radiant locations. Almost every play session, I find a new location design." They add that the game's "high number of unique location designs" and their placement on planets results in "a fairly insane amount of places that both feel and look different."

While _Denizen_ makes some interesting points, some players are sticking to their guns, including kandid99, who says that while there are more points to visit, it "feels like less" because of the game's immense size. "Starfield should have had two to three times as many unique locations," they add, "and the radiant POI locations are too similar that you feel the repetition fairly quickly."

Also unconvinced is eagle-bearer who, while satisfied with the number of handcrafted POIs, laments at the fact that "when you land on a planet it's always the 4 or 5 [of the] most common ones," which they say "gives the player the feeling that there are fewer, and also kills any motivation to explore them."

Similarly, MartyrKomplx-Prime argues, "There might technically be a lot of them, but when you factor in the RNG and each location's specific 'appearance probability', it sure feels repetitive. And that's what matters, how it feels."

Forget ships, Starfield's coolest community is building incredible RPG outposts, and the highlight is a sci-fi villain lair set inside a volcano.