Todd Howard says Starfield's barren planets are boring on purpose

Starfield's barren planets are intentionally boring, reveals Bethesda.

In an interview with the New York Times (via VG247), Bethesda's managing director, Ashley Cheng, and Starfield game director Todd Howard, discussed the new game's vast universe and its occasionally boring planets. "The point of the vastness of space is you should feel small. It should feel overwhelming," Cheng explains. 

"Everyone’s concerned that empty planets are going to be boring. But when the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored," Cheng adds, pointing out that not every planet in Starfield is "supposed to be Disney World." We already know that Starfield has 100 systems and "over 1,000 planets" so it's fair that not every single one of them is going to have something interesting happening on them. 

"All of us, I think, at some point look to the sky and say, 'man, I wonder what it would be like to blast off and land on the moon?'" Howard says. "We needed the scale [of Starfield] to have that feeling." 

The director continues: "We could have made a game where there are four cities and four planets but that would not have the same feeling of being this explorer." Howard then goes on to reveal that the team working on Starfield made sure that some planets really are empty so that players "get some periods of loneliness."

Since Starfield is officially in its early access period, it hasn't taken long for fans to get an idea of just how big this game is. For example, one player recently discovered that you can fly to Starfield's planets without loading - if you've got seven hours spare.

The highly anticipated RPG is set to release in full tomorrow on September 6, and you can get familiar with its universe via our Starfield planets guide.