Several new details for Bethesda’s Starfield were revealed by director Todd Howard in at Develop:Brighton Digital 2020. Not much is known about the space-faring role-playing title, which is Bethesda’s newest IP in years and years, but Howard did confirm that it was single-player only. No multiplayer to be found here.
Furthermore, the development team is using procedural generation to create worlds in both Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6. You shouldn’t expect real-time world generation in-game – Howard spoke about how the team likes to touch things up with hand-crafting if procedural generated lands aren’t working. But with its upcoming titles, Bethesda is pushing procedural generation “much further” than it has before.
Howard has spoke before about how the Creation Engine has been overhauled for Starfield. In this interview, he specified that the rendering, animation, procedural generation, AI and pathing and much more have seen fairly big overhauls. It should be interesting to see the results, especially if this is indeed a bigger jump for the engine than that of Morrowind to Oblivion.
Starfield doesn’t currently have a release window or specified platforms, though Microsoft has been hinting about it – and other Bethesda titles – being exclusive to Xbox consoles in the future.