Todd Howard, creative head of the space-based sandwich theft sim "Starfield," sat down with IGN in the aftermath of last Sunday's "Starfield Direct" ahead of the game's September 6 launch. Key Takeaways" Outer space is still a big part of "Starfield," and not only because of procedural generation.

Asked about the ratio of handcrafted to procedural content, Howard said that of Starfield's 1,000 planets, "The landscapes are almost all procedural. They're like big tiles the size of a kilometer that we generated," which "surround the planets," creating the game's 1000+ projen wonderlands.

But don't worry. Howard says that "Starfield" still has "more hand-crafted content ...... more than any other game we've worked on," he was quick to add. He did not reveal specific numbers, but apparently "Starfield" has more hand-crafted content "than 'Skyrim' and 'Fallout 4' combined in dialogue alone."

"If you include locations, art, and everything else," Howard continued, "it's the most we've ever done. That is encouraging. Some PCG staff, myself included, are concerned that Starfield's long, broad planets will be a bit boring; Procgen is a great way to add breadth, but it's hard to add depth. Anyway, that's my take on it. Some sickos don't think so.

So it should come as no surprise to hear that Bethesda is working hard to create handmade content, after all, it is a fairly well-funded studio.

Oh, and if this dialogue comparison sounds familiar, that's because Howard likes to make it; before "Fallout 4" was released, Howard said it had more dialogue than "Fallout 3" and "Skyrim" combined. In case you forgot, "Skyrim" had about 60,000 lines of dialogue in its basic version, while "Fallout 4" had 111,000.

Back in 2021, Howard said that "Starfield" had over 150,000 lines of dialogue, but it would rather have to surpass the more than 171,000 lines of dialogue of both games combined. Bethesda's writers must have been scribbling for the last few years.