Bethesda Game Studios' senior quest and level designer Will Shen, known for creating Diamond City and Little Lamplight in Fallout titles and Neon in Starfield, has said he believes Starfield's vast galaxy of explorable planets was ultimately too ambitious a scope for the game. Speaking about his approach to design, he suggested that a smaller number of planets with carefully crafted, bespoke layouts would have served the game better than the huge, more procedurally generated universe Bethesda delivered, a comment that speaks to wider criticism of Starfield's exploration feeling repetitive and empty compared to the studio's more hand-crafted worlds.

Shen contrasted this with his own celebrated location designs, such as Diamond City and Little Lamplight from the Fallout series and Neon from Starfield itself, which are prized for their dense, deliberately constructed detail. He indicated he would have preferred to concentrate development effort on a handful of planets built with the same bespoke care, rather than spreading resources across the game's enormous roster of planetary destinations, many of which were criticised at launch for feeling sparse and samey.