By design was using procedural generation to build out the planets and to place points of interest into the world.
But what’s wild is that they had such repetitive and uninteresting “points of interest.”
They aren’t interesting at all. The name is a lie.
So yeah, if you wander the procedurally generated planet you can come across a cave. But it’s effectively the same cave you have gone through a half dozen times already.
My suspicion is that the creation engine isn’t very well equipped for complex procedural generation, so the point of interest areas are also broken up onto reused tiles that get repetitive quickly, as opposed to more modern engines that allow for procedurally generating levels and assets with enough entropy that even if it looks familiar it isn’t that it looks exactly the same.
Like, just look at the demoed features of UE5’s procedural generation, and how much less repetitive it looks when filling in areas than Starfield.
I expected more from Bethesda given Todd Howard has been focused on procedural generation for decades now, but I think they really shot themselves in the foot with not sending creation engine to a farm upstate.
Yes, they were able to reuse a lot from past development, but the core of what they were trying to deliver completely fell apart ultimately and his decades old dream project is going to be forgotten within a few years.