Former Bethesda developer Nate Purkeypile, who participated in the creation of Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and the early stages of Starfield's development, stated that if he were leading the project, he would have taken a completely different path.
According to Purkeypile, he would not have built Starfield around the idea of a thousand planets. The developer believes that an approach with a small number of carefully crafted worlds would have been more suitable for the game.
Instead of 1000 planets, Purkeypile would have focused on "a few planets with unique layouts", filled with a large amount of original, hand-crafted content by developers.
However, he noted that the concept of thousands of planets could work, but then Bethesda should have relied much more heavily on procedural generation.
If you're going to do thousands of planets, you really need to go the No Man's Sky route and constantly generate unique content.
Separately, the developer criticized the feeling of emptiness in some Starfield locations. In his opinion, the problem is especially noticeable outside large cities: a player can enter a huge metropolis, but as soon as they leave it, the surrounding area is almost devoid of interesting objects.
You come to a major city in Starfield, and it's huge, but then you go outside the city — and there's nothing there.
Thus, Purkeypile believes that Starfield would have benefited from a smaller scale but a higher density of unique content. At the same time, he does not deny the idea of a procedurally generated universe itself, but believes that with such an approach, the game should have much more actively created new content, as happens in No Man's Sky.