It's an interesting lesson in game design scope, though. Especially when you compare it to TES1: Arena and it's procedurally generated thousands of dungeons as opposed to the (apparently) 50 or so of Starfield. TES4: Oblivion had some 20 handcrafted dungeons* and procedural content for the rest. TES5: Skyrim had 300 dungeons, with an 8-man team doing them. I don't think Starfield could ever fulfill its ambitious scope, but their team has done more previously, than they did this time around. Especially as a huge company, I think if you approach game design as a multi-year effort, you could spend one or several years just making "pieces", or rooms to assemble in your editor, tag them appropriately, churn them through your procedural generator, and then spend enough time to create little touches that make them "seem" unique, or unique enough, you could produce a staggering amount of content. Perhaps BGS had those people working on another title, because this is something they've done before.
* Oblivion's "handcrafted" dungeons were procedurally generated and then gone over with a human touch, they weren't pure manpower. They were also created only in the final two weeks before release - this is a pace of over one a day. Again, game design being a multi-year effort, considering Starfield's creation time of 7 years or whatever Howard is bragging about - imagine 1000 "handcrafted" dungeons at this pace - by one person. There was time to create the illusion of "unlimited", they just chose not to do that.
Very interesting. Were Skyrim's dungeons hand crafted? They felt generated. It seems like Oblivion's solution is the best. procedurally generate the dungeon, then touch it up manually. The time frame they did it in seems insane though.
As the world's leading Outer Wilds™ shill, I try to inject mention of this game into basically every conversation I have. I recommend it in every breath I exhale, but I specifically want to bring it up in this thread because it sounds like it's exactly the hypothetical game you're talking about. You explore a painstakingly handcrafted open world solar system, exploration is seamless, there's a fairly meaty amount of content, and best of all: unlike Starfield, it's actually good.
When they were released I got Outer Wilds and Outer Worlds mixed up and I missed Outer Wilds. I'll have to check it out.