Newly unearthed evidence, courtesy of a Starfield fan, suggests Bethesda’s upcoming RPG will feature accurately scaled planet depictions, which many fan theories suggested wouldn’t be the case.
Bethesda has confirmed that while a significant portion of Starfield’s many planets will be procedurally generated, some locations are inspired by real astronomical objects, including Mars, Jupiter, Mercury, and Pluto.
One concern that fans have raised over this is that during the Starfield Direct in June, many of the in-game depictions of real planets looked unrealistically large when viewed from the surfaces of nearby moons or other celestial objects.
Of course, Reddit wouldn’t let this go uninvestigated, and one Reddit user found evidence suggesting that Bethesda hasn’t gone overboard with the depicted scale of these planets.
The Redditor in question used NASA’s Solar System Simulator to estimate how large Jupiter should look when viewed from lo, one of its many moons that’s already confirmed to be visitable in Starfield.
While the field of view used for the simulation was slightly less angled than what was used in the Starfield presentation, the planet’s size using NASA’s tool appears to align with the game footage from lo.
Regarding these planets’ size, Bethesda has chosen to stick very closely to what they should be. From what we’ve seen, these astronomical bodies seem diverse, making for exciting and fun planets to explore, no matter the map size.
Starfield is set to launch on the 6th of September for PC and Xbox Series X/S.