This whole "1000 planets"-controversy is dumb, of course space is going to be full of negative space, that's half the charm of what makes space interesting.
However, a more legitimate concern I have is how small the cities look. In Mass Effect, when you're at the Citadel, you can only just go in a couple of small floors, but you can see how big the place looks and it feels real even if you can't go everywhere.
In Skyrim and Fallout games, I'm never surprised when cities are small, in Fallout because most people have died anyway, and you're only playing in a limited countryside, so you know that there are a lot more people outside the perimeter of the game. In Elder Scrolls, it's already a little less ideal (Whiterun is small, honestly) but again, you're playing on just one part of a massive land, so you know there is a lot more.
However, in Starfield, since you're supposed to be able to go everywhere, knowing that New Atlantis is supposed to be the biggest city in the universe, and seeing how small it actually is, means you'll never feel the way you feel when seeing the Citadel.
Like, I see the small gif from Neon City, and if all we have is one street, one docking room and a control room, the equivalent of the Groundbreaker in Outer Worlds, with no additional places outside our reach, it'll feel really small to me.
I get that not every game can have huge cities, but when looking at Novigrad, arguably one of the biggest cities in 3D RPGs, it felt grand, and since you're not playing on the entirety of the region, you feel like there might be other cities like that out of our reach and the world becomes big and coherent.
I feel like having small cities in Outer Worlds was more or less ok, first obviously because it's a small game, but also because, lore-wise, colonies haven't been built all that long ago. And you do have places like Byzantium where you're only playing in a limited space, but you can see that it's bigger than that. You know there is more.
That was always something that I felt Fable did best. You had small districts that were relatively easy to model, but by having to load other places you just felt like Bowerstone was big, like there were a lot of unseen space between locations. It made the cities feel gigantic.
It feels like in Starfield you can see and touch everything, and it feels like everything that has been colonized should be bigger. I wish New Atlantis was bigger than it's actual playable space.
I don't know what you all think about that.
