Todd Howard recently elaborated on the claims about the size of Starfield, confirming some suspicions everyone had but also providing relief with other info.
Starfield having 1000 planets sounded a lot like one of those promises Bethesda made previously, such as the infinite quests in Skyrim. Technically, they delivered on those promises but what was left out in the marketing campaign was whether that content would actually be fun to go through. Skyrim's radiant quests certainly got old quickly, which is why people were curious about the massive number of planets Starfield will have.
The primary question on everyone's mind was - are all these planets procedurally generated? The answer is yes for the most part and Todd Howard confirmed as much in an interview with IGN .
He stated that the studio was fine with players not finding all of these planets to be fun - just being able to land there, survey and grab the materials available was enough, even if it meant a player would spend just a few minutes there before heading back to the more interesting, handcrafted content.
Howard spoke about that part as well, which is basically all the cool things that make Bethesda's worlds interesting. Apparently, Starfield will have more handcrafted content than any previous Bethesda game so Starfield should reign supreme in that department as well.
This is coupled with the statement that the main quest, creme de la creme of content, is also about 20 per cent bigger than in previous Bethesda games.