How Much Bigger Is Starfield than Skyrim?

Massive open-world games are what a lot of gamers like myself love. Most likely you (the one reading this) and I had our open-world itch scratched well while playing Skyrim. Now we hear that Starfield will be even more massive than Skyrim and would like information that will help us visualize a size comparison.

I will say that in some areas it’s unfair to compare the size of Skyrim to Starfield since Skyrim came out in 2011. Open-world games have become larger and technology has improved. However, there is some information that will help visualize the scale in your mind. Let’s talk about some of the comparison points between Starfield and Skyrim.

File size of Starfield and Skyrim

You may hear some people try to compare Skyrim to Starfield via file size, but this is one of those “unfair” areas that I mentioned. According to sources online, Skyrim’s file size sits around 22.75GB while Starfield is looking to be around 125 GB. Again, since Skyrim’s launch, new technology has been released, game quality has improved and worlds have become larger.

Starfield has more hand-crafted content than any other Bethesda game

Todd said this during an interview with IGN. So think about all the hand-crafted content in Skyrim and know that Starfield will have more. As to how much more, it’s impossible to answer that until the game releases but the file size comparison mentioned above may give some indication. Also, there are a few more points that we’ll talk about below that should provide more insight.

Starfield has way more lines of dialog than Skyrim

Skyrim has 60,000 lines of dialog. Starfield has over 200,000 according to Todd. So, we can assume there are way much more missions, side content, character interactions, etc.

Starfield map v.s Skyrim map size

I’m sure you’ve noticed the trend by now of Starfield being larger than Skyrim in every way. This includes map size. One is exploring the galaxy while the other is just an area.

Not to mention, a planet in Starfield might be larger than the map of Skyrim. I want to be careful in saying this, but it looks as though full planets in Starfield are “explorable”. Some people mentioned that Todd said all planets are explorable. If that’s so then I wonder if he meant “You can land on it” or “The whole planet is explorable”. I’d keep my expectations in check here.

But regardless of this, the map of Skyrim is only 15 miles (source). Numerous other games have been released with much larger map sizes. Even Fallout. It’s safe to assume Starfield will be much larger (maybe even 100 times).

Conclusion

This information should give a good depiction of Starfield size compared to Skyrim pre-release. Comparing the size of Skyrim to Starfield is like comparing the size of a golf ball to a basketball. If you got lost exploring Skyrim you’ll get even more lost in Starfield.

Starfield’s release date is September 6, 2023. I plan to have Starfield content when it releases. I am hoping you’ll consider subscribing as I would like to notify you when I release new posts!