One detail-oriented Starfield fan has recently unearthed evidence that suggests Bethesda's upcoming RPG will feature accurately scaled planet depictions, contrary to some previously shared fan theories. They subsequently took online to share their discovery, having done so just as one leaked image reconfirmed that Starfield will feature a familiar-looking weapon.
Although a significant portion of Starfield's many planets will be procedurally generated, not all celestial bodies that players will be able to visit will be entirely fictitious. Bethesda has so far confirmed a few dozen such locations inspired by real astronomical objects, including Mars, Jupiter, Mercury, and Pluto, as well as numerous known moons and asteroids beyond the Solar System.
One minor player concern that occasionally cropped up after the June 11 Starfield Direct was that many in-game depictions of real planets look unrealistically large when viewed from the surfaces of nearby moons or other celestial objects in their vicinity. While researching those claims, Reddit user nimbulan managed to procure some evidence implying Bethesda hasn't necessarily gone overboard with the depicted scale of such planets. More specifically, the tenacious fan used NASA's Solar System Simulator in order to generate an estimate of how large Jupiter should look when viewed from Io, one of its many moons that's already confirmed to be visitable in Starfield.
While the 90-degree field of view used for the simulation was slightly less angled than the previously seen Jupiter imagery from Starfield, the perceived size of the planet calculated with NASA's tool appears to be largely in line with the in-game footage captured on Io. As a result, the author of this experiment concluded that Starfield planets won't necessarily be unrealistically scaled when viewed from afar.
The actually explorable maps inspired by celestial objects will plausibly be much smaller compared to their real-life counterparts, as Bethesda never claimed that Starfield will feature a compelling universe with hundreds of realistically sized planets. But as far the perceived size of these astronomical bodies goes, it would seem that the developer will at least sometimes lean into realism. And while it remains to be seen how often will that be the case, Starfield's planets already look incredibly diverse, which should bode well for its ability to deliver varied worlds which are interesting to explore, no matter how large.
Realism—or lack thereof—aside, the incredibly ambitious scope of Bethesda's space-fairing RPG is also raising some concerns among the fandom. This was most recently underlined by an influx of online complaints from gamers who aren't happy with Starfield's promise of 1000+ planets.
Starfield launches September 6 on PC and Xbox Series X/S.