Starfield has undoubtedly been one of the names of the year because it has gone from being on everyone’s lips given the possibility that it would arrive throughout 2022, to being the protagonist of one of the most painful delays for Microsoft and its Xbox. , since it was destined to be that key exclusive release capable of demonstrating that purchases like those of Bethesda made sense in the crusade of those of Phil Spencer to beat Sony.
A gigantic game, like space
That being the case, and once we have all assimilated that Starfield ‘s delay is a fact, it’s time to try to get excited knowing some of the characteristics that are going to make it a unique game, and one of them has to do with the infinity of tasks that we can do once we venture into the confines of space. It is about something that the North Americans have called random encounters , but do you know exactly what they will consist of?
It is evident that one of the keys to Starfield will not be so much in the story and everything that surrounds it as in the system that it has to accompany that main mission. In other words, the entire engine that makes the universe through which we will move credible and that will offer the player a series of challenges that, curiously, will not remain in the hands of the Bethesda designers, but will have a random component, pure chance.
It has been through a development diary published on YouTube that we have learned more details of these random encounters , thanks to the main designer of Starfield missions Will Shen, who has not hesitated to boast of what they consider a new procedural technology capable of taking own decisions and put together new quests within the game in a practically infinite way.
Too many planets to populate
Keep in mind that Starfield has so many planets and systems that we can visit that devising, planning and developing a whole network of missions on each one of them could take an enormous amount of time for the game team, so Bethesda has had to create a way to generate small missions that will acquire the secondary category, automatically and without the intervention of a specific designer.
According to Will Shen “we have entire planets to populate, so we ‘ve actually developed new technology capable of building entire scenarios and placing them on planets. […] Now you could say you go to an outpost and find out there’s a whole group of people with a particular problem. Whereas before you could only put a character who comes up to you on the way, now it is a whole location” in which a global objective that appears even scripted makes sense.
In other words, imagine that this problem is that one of the members of that outpost has been kidnapped by pirates and the NPCs tell us where they think he is being held to carry out the mission. In reality, according to Will Shen, it would be “a dynamically placed settlement that takes you into a dynamically placed dungeon as you walk the planet.”
In this way, the missions that Stafield will allow us to complete are virtually endless.