A Starfield player has started a debate about the cities in-game, and how they can end up feeling more like villages.
Starfield is a game with an enormous universe to get lost in. Bethesda’s rendition of space is vast and you can lose hours exploring various planets or the infinite itself. With entire planets to scour, you could theoretically be exploring forever.
That said, even with all that to explore, many have criticized the exploration as being shallow. While you can explore a lot of planets, the reasons to do so are pretty slim. You may be able to find some pirate hideouts or abandoned facilities, but the rewards for exploring them are likely to be light.
However, there are more curated areas like New Atlantis for you to poke around in that act as key story locations and social hubs for side quests in the game. These locations are easily the most fleshed out in the game and can be bustling places of activity.
That said, even in these key areas, the scale can end up feeling pretty small. So small in fact, some players aren’t even convinced these cities are cities at all.
Are the cities in Starfield too small?
In a Reddit post with over 3.2k upvotes, user sep2h1gh argues that none of the major settlements in the game feel like cities. They say, “What bothered me from the beginning was the incredibly minuscule scale of all the settlements.” They then linked to a Wikipedia page about settlement populations, saying that every location has minuscule density, more akin to a village. “Nothing in Starfield goes above that. Not even close.”
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Another argued that one of the major issues with cities and towns is how few there are for colonized space. “What bugs me is how every inhabited planet, even the key planets of the biggest galactic factions, only has like 1 or 2 settlements each.” They added, “None of the planets in Starfield are believable, least of all the inhabited ones.”
One player with a highly upvoted comment did challenge the idea saying that these spaces are meant to be a representation of a bigger area. “Like most Bethesda games, the cities are supposed to represent a scaled-down version of a much larger city. Or do you believe that Whiterun, the center of trade in all of Skyrim, is home to like 20 people?”
Another point of view is that the cities in Starfield feel smaller and that even games with smaller surface areas feel bigger through various tricks. One commenter said: “Is incredible that Mass Effect cities looked very huge and how limited you were to explore them but still felt huge.”
Whatever the reason, it seems most agree something feels a little off with the cities, either in their scale or perceived scale. If Bethesda ever returns to the property, hopefully, they can make these settlements feel a little more lived in.
