Starfield's open world 'thousands of times larger than Skyrim', oh god

Bethesda’s next big title, Starfield, is just weeks away from launch, and fans can’t stop talking about the explorable planets.

From its initial announcement to last month's gameplay reveal, the hype around Starfield continues to grow. It promises to be Bethesda’s biggest world yet, with over 1,000 explorable planets that’ll be bigger open-worlds than The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Take a look at one of the trailers shown during the showcase!

While not every will support sentient life, planetary exploration will be a big part of the game, as it’s where players will gather new items, crafting materials, and do some general sightseeing in their shiny new spaceship they’ll get to build from scratch. While it's been reported that the main story takes around 30-40 hours to beat, it’s safe to say the majority of people’s time with the game will involve seeing what each planet has to offer.

The size of each planet recently became the topic of discussion in a Reddit thread by SussyHoward321, who said: “I've seen some people saying it will be impossible for every planet to be bigger than Skyrim's map. But surely, every planet will be multiple times larger than Skyrim's map, and still be fully explorable … Although planet sizes will vary, we can definitely expect tons of planets in Starfield to be much, much larger than Skyrim’s. Right?”

SussyHowared321 drew comparisons to No Man’s Sky, another space-exploration title that uses procedural generation to spawn millions of planets, albeit in less detail than Starfield plans on including.

Commenters chimed into the discussion, saying all evidence points to large open-worlds for each planet, all of which beat Skyrim in terms of scale and proportions.

“Looking at the trailer disproves the notion that the planets won’t be bigger than Skyrim. Very clearly they will be. It would actually be really bizarre to use procedural generation for entire planets, yet only have them be so small … The total playable area in Starfield will be thousands of times larger than Skyrim.”

“First of all I think you're right about the size of the planets. They will be bigger then skyrim's map. Second of all I can't believe how much people in the comments and on the entire internet are comparing this game to Skyrim. A game that came out in 2011.”

“Technically. However, I don't know that they'll feel nearly as large. Skyrim's world feels huge because it's vast in terms of content. It has caves, forts, cities, towns, swamps, forests, plains, etc all brimming with factions and their occasional interplay. “

As the hype train for Starfield continues to steam forward, fans are patiently counting down the days to its release, many of which are planning to take some cheeky sick days to have more time with the game. If you’re an Xbox or PC user, you can actually experience everything Starfield has to offer for as little as £1 with a new offer…

Starfield will launch in September this year, exclusively for Xbox Series X/S and PC.