Mary Sue Leigh
Erudite
I guess it depends on the kind of sci fi one likes. If one's more a fan of say, Star Wars, you might expect every planet to be liveable and inhabited by some kind of aliens of varying intelligence and technological progress.
Then again Star Wars and such is more fantasy than science fiction but I feel not everyone knows that, at least not SW fans.
Others like me, might be more into hard sci fi. This means 99% of planets would be uninhabitable hellholes that are barren, scorched, frozen, tidally locked, constantly blasted with cosmic radiation, have lower or higher gravity, volcanic activity, catastrophic atmospherical conditions, or no atmosphere at all, or a combination of all those. To make it more interesting could still be done with an interesting take on the Fermi paradox, for example aliens existed but died out eons ago and ruined structures could be found hidden on planets e.g. orbiting a dying sun etc.
But this is Bethesda. People expect Skyrim in space. Skyrim is fantasy, so we're expecting more Star Wars than 2001 A Space Odyssey.
And whether it's 4 or 400 cities, I don't think any of these will be overly interesting.
The Daggerfall comparison might end up being real accurate, because the selling point of DF was scale, but it was empty and randomly generated. Not even different each time you play, just randomly generated once to achieve this unprecedented scale. It's actually impressive how it is saved though, which explains why the huge world requires relatively little disk space. Apparently once you get to a place, variables that use little storage generate the area from scratch according to a blueprint.
Then again Star Wars and such is more fantasy than science fiction but I feel not everyone knows that, at least not SW fans.
Others like me, might be more into hard sci fi. This means 99% of planets would be uninhabitable hellholes that are barren, scorched, frozen, tidally locked, constantly blasted with cosmic radiation, have lower or higher gravity, volcanic activity, catastrophic atmospherical conditions, or no atmosphere at all, or a combination of all those. To make it more interesting could still be done with an interesting take on the Fermi paradox, for example aliens existed but died out eons ago and ruined structures could be found hidden on planets e.g. orbiting a dying sun etc.
But this is Bethesda. People expect Skyrim in space. Skyrim is fantasy, so we're expecting more Star Wars than 2001 A Space Odyssey.
And whether it's 4 or 400 cities, I don't think any of these will be overly interesting.
The Daggerfall comparison might end up being real accurate, because the selling point of DF was scale, but it was empty and randomly generated. Not even different each time you play, just randomly generated once to achieve this unprecedented scale. It's actually impressive how it is saved though, which explains why the huge world requires relatively little disk space. Apparently once you get to a place, variables that use little storage generate the area from scratch according to a blueprint.