Bethesda announced Starfield back in 2018 and have been tight lipped since then. That all changed when Todd Howard spoke for over an hour during the Develop: Brighton 2020 conference. You don't have to listen to the hour+ long interview for yourself to get the new details as Reddit has kindly done that for us!
First off, we know that there will be a major overhaul to the Creation Engine, which itself is still based on Gamebryo. Todd Howard says that the jump in the engine will be a larger jump than when they went from Morrowind to Oblivion. He goes on to confirm that the game will be completely single player with no multiplayer component.
Howard says that the team working on Starfield is about 4 to 5 times larger than the teams that worked on Skyrim and Fallout 4. Development includes Bethesda's Dallas, Maryland, and Montreal studios. Bethesda Games Austin is continuing to work on content for Fallout 76.
The team utilized procedural generation to create the massive landmass for Starfield. This does not mean that the game is procedurally generated, only that they generated it for in-development work. From there they are manually placing cities, caves, and other places to explore without having to manually create things like forests or mountain ranges. Howard says that the Starfield playable area(s) will be larger than Fallout 76's map, which itself is already four times larger than Skyrim's map.
Mod support will be included. The game will also be available on Day 1 through Xbox Game Pass, just as The Elder Scrolls VI will be. We also learned that NPCs will "play a large role" in the game and that "cities will be expansive and large compared to past games."
You can still check out the entire interview with Todd Howard in the video posted below.
Starfield's release is still a long ways away. A release date has not yet been mentioned but I would maybe expect a 2022 release at the earliest.
