Starfield and the upcoming Elder Scrolls 6 will both feature a procedurally-generated map, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s games will be different.
When a game developer says something like "procedurally-generated map," we're immediately going to think of games like
Diablo 3 or
No Man's Sky, where every time you play the game you'll see something new and different. In procedural generation, computers use an algorithm to randomly create something. It might be a creature in Spore, a planet in Deep Rock Galactic, or an entire galaxy in
Stellaris.
Starfield will also feature procedural generation, but it won’t be quite the same. Whereas the games mentioned above generate a random map every time you play, Bethesda’s Creation Engine uses it to help make a hand-crafted map a little easier. Those games are Starfield and
The Elder Scrolls 6. Along with many other enhancements to the Creation Engine, both Starfield and TES:6 will use procedural generation to create their maps before developers get them “massaged” into shape.
