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Starfield will be Bethesda's most ambitious project in terms of scope. Before Starfield, Bethesda games have chiefly focused on one self-contained hand-crafted setting. More specifically, it is limited to a few settlements in Fallout games and one individual province in the Elder Scrolls games.
Purely based on a technicality, Daggerfall features Bethesda's most expansive setting and one of gaming's biggest explorable areas, next only to Minecraft. But nearly all of its 200,000 square kilometers, i.e., roughly Great Britain's size, are procedurally generated like Minecraft.
In the proper hand-crafted settings that ensued, the explorable world has become bigger with every game since Morrowind. Starfield perhaps marks the pre-Elder Scrolls VI culmination, covering at least several planetary systems.
Bethesda has revealed three Starfield locations so far in the Settled Systems
While it may feel like it, Bethesda has never claimed Starfield to be an entirely explorable universe like No Man's Sky. From what has been teased thus far, Starfield will center around 'Settled Systems.' These are corners of the explored universe where civilization has taken seed.
A whole swath of 'wild' planets might potentially be uncharted by civilization, but the Settled Systems will undoubtedly be the epicenter of world-building. The following are the locations revealed to date:
1) Akila City
Of all Bethesda-designed settlements across all their games to date, Akila City comes closest to the unique charm and architecture of Vivec City from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
While Vivec City is the rich theocratic capital of Vvanderfell, Akila is more of a rag-tag commune of people who believe in the tenets of the Freestar Collective faction, a libertarian confederation of three star systems.
Placed on an unnamed hostile planet, walls seal away the city to fend off the lurking Ashta, a velociraptor-like hostile creature. From the concept arts, a good parallel for Akila City may be the quaint settlements from Kenshi.
2) New Atlantis
New Atlantis is currently the biggest cosmopolitan hub of diverse peoples and cultures. The featured artwork on Bethesda's mini-featurette only takes note of the air dome of an otherwise giant city.
There is no other frame of reference for what the rest of the capital city of the United Colonies looks like, but there is room for some assumptions. They call it a "true reflection of what our future will look like."
In a sense, the vague aesthetical similarity to Cyberpunk 2077 is in line with the general assumption of a techno-dystopia. In that case, it would likely have several districts that symbolically tower above one another like tiers, depending on the class of residents, as one would expect from a true futuristic cosmopolis.
3) Neon
Neon is a stately pleasure dome, the ultimate hub of hedonism in Bethesda's NASA-punk portrayal. Quite literally, the entire city is an artificial island wrapped in a geodesic dome, implying that the air of its home planet might not be breathable.
Likely a subscription-based holiday retreat manufactured by Xenofresh Corporation for the economic elite, its party life is central to the exclusive sale of Aurora.
Aurora, a psychedelic substance synthesized from piscine material, is Starfield's version of Moon Sugar, the Elesweyrean drug from The Elder Scrolls.
