Bethesda showed off a bit of the Amazon Fallout TV show in a Vanity Fair exclusive, and while it tells a new story in the post-apocalyptic world, it’s got some big Fallout 3 vibes going on. The plot rundown from Vanity Fair even loosely mirrors Bethesda’s first steps into the wasteland.
The Fallout TV show starts with the end of the world, as you’d expect from the series. Nuclear bombs rain down across the globe in 2077 before switching to protagonist Lucy, 200 years after the atomic catastrophe. Lucy is a lot like you at the start of Fallout 3. She’s lived her life underground in a Vault-Tec vault and has no idea what life is like on the surface or how things got the way they are.
Lucy eventually heads up on a rescue mission and faces the blighted wasteland and its manifold horrors – monsters, giant bugs, and worst of all, people. Vanity Fair says that Lucy is kind and naive, which is a pretty dangerous combination in the wasteland, but something that gives the writers plenty to to work with.
Lucy’s journey eventually puts her in a situation where she has to question the values her Vault Overseer father instilled in her, as she clashes with the wasteland’s myriad people groups.
“The games are about the culture of division and haves and have-nots that, unfortunately, have only gotten more and more acute in this country and around the world over the last decades,” writer Jonathan Nolan, who also created Westworld, told Vanity Fair. “We get to talk about that [social satire] in a wonderful, speculative-fiction way. I think we’re all looking at the world and going, ‘God, things seem to be heading in a very, very frightening direction.’”
One of those other groups is the Brotherhood of Steel, a robot-loving militant group that’s home to one of the show’s other leads, a soldier named Maximus.
The third star is a ghoul called, well, The Ghoul. He’s a canny bounty hunter whose intelligence and keen wit helped him survive centuries of hardship. Nolan says The Ghoul is similar to Virgil in The Inferno, someone who’s been around the block before and is here to lend a hand to these youngsters he takes a liking to.
What kind of broader plot all this leads to is still a bit of a mystery, but Bethesda will likely share more in the near future. The Fallout TV show airs on Amazon starting April 12, 2024.
GLHF speaks with award-winning composer Inon Zur about the making of Starfield’s soundtrack and creating a new kind of sci-fi sound
When you think of space, your mind probably goes to something John Williams composed – maybe the theme from E.T. or one of Star Wars’ big pieces. Films and TV have filled the soundless void with specific styles that shaped the genre, from sweeping orchestral arrangements for epic tales and synth-fueled punk in harder sci-fi stories. Starfield composer Inon Zur wanted something different for Bethesda’s space game, however, and he tasked himself with creating a new kind of soundscape representative of a future that’s not so out of reach. The journey took him on a space odyssey of his own that lasted the better part of a decade and produced one of the more ambitious soundtracks of 2023, and Zur spoke with GLHF about the process of bringing it all to life.
Zur tells GLHF that Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard approached him in 2016 during Starfield’s earliest stages and had just a single idea in mind: He wanted to make a space game that tried answering some of life’s big questions, or failing that, to at least explore them in some meaningful way. That was all Howard had for Zur at the time, but it was enough.
“It was really infatuating,” Zur says. “I was so excited that I went back home, and the next day, I just started writing music. I didn’t know for what yet. He just gave me very general details, and of course, there was no game, so no pictures, no videos – just the idea. I composed about 20 minutes of music, and that actually ended up in the game.”
Starfield’s promise of a more thoughtful take on the genre appealed to Zur, but so did the idea of returning to space in general. Howard’s offer came nearly 20 years after Zur’s last extraterrestrial composition – 2000’s Star Trek: Starfleet Command – and while he composed for blockbuster hits including Dragon Age: Origins, Crysis, and Prince of Persia and received several awards for his work, he says working with space opened exciting new avenues for creation.
“The unknown, the vastness, the mystery, all the emotions space stirs up – it offers such a great opportunity for a composer to treat it in a very cinematic way,” Zur says. “In shooters or even in fantasy RPGs, we’re grounded and walking on Earth, and here, we’re thrown into space and flying out there. It just allows such an amazing opportunity to create new harmonies and soundscapes.”
“Cinematic” gets thrown around a lot as a general descriptor, but Zur said that to him, making something cinematic means imbuing it with emotions that make it “bigger than life.”After the initial rush that produced tracks such as Planetrise and Peaks and Valleys, he started thinking about what it might be like to live in the time and universe Howard described and eventually settled on three overarching emotions for Starfield.
“The first one is the awe, this reality that’s so unbelievable that you cannot really grasp it,” he says. “The second emotion is fear and anxiety, that worry of what’s out there and how you’re going to survive. The fear of the unknown is huge. Along with it comes excitement, though, the opportunity to discover a new world, to see a bright future, and to create a new future for you and for the human race.”
Zur could have drawn on plenty of existing material from films and even novels for inspiration, but he says he wanted to create Starfield’s sound without consciously mirroring any inspiration or aiming for a specific, known style. Bethesda had a few guidelines and collaborated with Zur to refine and tweak what he came up with over the seven years they worked on the soundtrack. However, Zur tells me that Howard gave him the freedom to head in any direction he thought might work.
“I believe that, throughout the years, we hear so much music, and it’s instilled in a composer’s brain,” Zur says. “The difference between a composer and somebody that doesn’t compose music is we know how to take this data that is there, meld it together, and create something out of it. I think that if I had done a lot of research before Starfield, it would limit my creativity a little bit, because then I’d try and get close to this sound or mimic that style.”
“That is, by the way, one of the problems sometimes with films,” he adds. “They are being tagged by the editor, and then the composer feels that they must follow only this.”
Zur says he and the sound team focused on a few central, sometimes conflicting themes to guide these emotions along. The first is traditional orchestrated scores, inspired in part by the so-called space composers – John Williams and A Space Odyssey composer Richard Strauss, for example – but Zur tells me he also looked to synthetic sounds to create different textures. These helped give Starfield a different identity and gave him the tools to tackle what he called one of Starfield’s biggest challenges: making it feel believable.
Most sci-fi stories put you outside the familiar, whether it’s Star Wars and its magic sword wizards and outlandish creatures from distant planets or even E.T., which puts the otherwordly firmly in the center with its star character. Starfield tries something different. It aims to blend the futuristic with the everyday in a bid to make players feel like humans reaching space is a natural next step for the species, and not something out of, well, a sci-fi story. Zur says that since he wanted players to feel grounded in reality, he opted for steady beats and familiar rhythms and thought outside the box for instrumentation.
“Starfield has plenty of combinations when you mash the synthetic elements with the orchestra that creates a very different soundscape, but you hear a third element, a kind of unknown, harsh element that I integrated into the score,” Zur says. “My aim was to create something alien and primitive, so I used a lot of organic instruments for this, rather than synthetic, and processed them in a way that made the sound seem unfamiliar.”
One example Zur gave was recording a traditional bar of cello music, then breaking it down by feeding it into a synthesizer and rebuilding it with another synthesizer that emulated the cello’s sound. He wove these sounds into your routine tasks in Starfield – landing and taking off in your ship, for example, or even just the music that plays as time passes on planets like Jemison – and tells me he thinks these combinations are what give Starfield a unique identity.
Creating these soundscapes was far from the only challenge Zur encountered over his seven-year journey with Starfield. Another core part of the game’s personality is the freedom to do whatever you want with whomever you want. You can be a space pirate and, simultaneously, join the Marines tasked with eradicating those same hives of villainy. There’s no judgment and no blocked path, which meant Zur had to approach the score for each faction in a careful manner that supported your particular fantasy.
“There are no bad guys or good guys in Starfield,” he says. “Each faction thinks in a different way, and sometimes these philosophies collide and create tension. Obviously, if you play one role, then you will have to eventually fight your opposite, but it’s not making them bad or you good. It’s just different, and the music is trying to tell you that story.”
Balance is what Zur says he’s most proud of with Starfield, and not just with the factions.
“Starfield has a good balance between accessibility for the listener, so the listener could hear the music and feel drawn into it right away, and originality in the harmonies and soundscapes. Overall, I think that we – Mark Lampert, the legendary head of audio at Bethesda, and Todd Howard – really achieved the best balance, and I think this is what makes the score for Starfield special. Somebody could like it, somebody maybe wouldn’t care for it so much, but inside the game, it drives you to the right place. It just works.”
You can purchase the Starfield soundtrack on Steam and the Apple Music Store. Inon Zur will also be giving a talk about bringing Starfield’s sounds to life during L.A. Comic Con on Dec. 2, 2023.
Microsoft accidentally leaked several unredacted documents from Xbox’s antitrust hearing over the Xbox Activision acquisition. The FTC released some redacted versions of some documents during the hearings, though Bloomberg reports that a Microsoft official uploaded unredacted versions to a government court website.
Included in the materials (thanks, The Verge) were Microsoft’s plans for a new Xbox Series X console, emails between Xbox and Microsoft executives about acquisitions, and even a list of upcoming Bethesda games, such as a Ghostwire Tokyo sequel and even a Fallout 3 remake.
Microsoft originally submitted these and dozens of other documents pertaining to the company’s business model and plans at the FTC’s request in a bit to convince the agency that Xbox acquiring Activision Blizzard wouldn’t harm competition in the games space.
One of the more significant pieces of information in the leaked documents is Microsoft’s plan to launch a digital-only Xbox Series X in 2024, though if the leaked details are true, it’s not quite the mid-gen refresh we saw with the Xbox One. The new Xbox Series X, codenamed Brooklin, features a cylindrical design and some improvements to power consumption, along with an improved wireless controller.
Bethesda’s lineup consists of known quantities, such as The Elder Scrolls 6, and some surprises. Ghostwire Tokyo is apparently getting a sequel, and ZeniMax is working on an Elder Scrolls Oblivion remaster. Doom Year Zero, DLC for that game, a Fallout 3 remake, and Dishonored 3 also showed up in the list.
It’s worth noting that these plans may have changed. The documents were from 2019 and have the Doom game listed for Microsoft’s 2023 fiscal year. That fiscal year ended in July 2023, though some of the leaked emails suggested that shifting schedules and game delays were a common problem in the time after Xbox drew up that tentative release schedule.
Putting together a Starfield companions ranked list runs the gamut from deep and insightful allies to unbelievably obnoxious men with terrible hair, and nearly everything in between. They all have a common desire for one thing, though: your money. Constellation companions are the only ones you get for free, while any others have a steep signing fee of 12,000 credits or more, unless you’re ruthless enough to undercut them. Most of the others are worth paying for, though, either thanks to the unique skills they bring to your ship and outposts or their thoughtful backstories and the situations that pushed them to join you in the first place.
If you’re looking for more Starfield rankings, check out our list of the best Starfield weapons to weigh yourself down with in the early game.
Bethesda producer Todd Howard says the team decided against giving you Starfield vehicles to make the space game more fun. Howard made the comment in a recent interview with Bloomberg, where he said the team wanted to keep the focus on space travel and making interesting planets with different levels of gravity.
“It’s something we considered,” Howard said. “We’re gonna do outer space and planets. Once you add vehicles, it changes the gameplay.”
“Once you land in your ship and you’re on foot, it lets us make an experience where we know how fast [the players] are seeing things.”
You could say that sounds a bit more like Bethesda needed to keep players from moving too fast and causing loading problems, where they reached areas before assets loaded in, rather than considering what makes a fun experience. However, Howard also said that the enjoyable part about space travel in Starfield is using your ship and upgrading your jetpack, the latter of which lets you take advantage of each planet’s unique gravity and ground conditions.
Two Starfield expansions are planned for launch at some point in the future, so it’s possible we may see additional ways to get around then. If you’re looking for more Bethesda adventures to hold you over until then, check out our list of the best Bethesda games.
Ranking the best Bethesda games is kind of a tough ask, as the studio earned its reputation as makers of some of the best RPGs around. After a checkered decade of making and publishing poorly received games such as Home Alone and Terminator 2029, Bethesda settled into a groove with its Fallout and Elder Scrolls franchises. Staying in a groove usually means creative decay for most studios, but Bethesda found a way to innovate and even push the RPG genre forward in some cases – despite stripping it back in others. Most modern Bethesda games hold up surprisingly well, and even the ones that launched in a terrible state are better now.
Starfield traits task you with setting your life story out before it even begins. Maybe you’ll be an Enlightened introvert who can’t stand setting foot on solid ground or a snake-loving softie with a big bounty on their head. Some of them are cooler than they seem, like the parasocial relationship trait where you get free presents. It’s not as bad as it sounds! Well, maybe it is.
Anyway, there’s a surprising number of traits that have very little effect on how you play the game and some that even punish you for playing a certain way.
If you’re after more Starfield goodness, check out our Starfield companion ranking list for a totally accurate, completely subjective list of the best friends you can surround yourself with.
You’ve got a nearly endless choice of Starfield weapons to take into combat with you. Pistols, laser beams, electric generators – it might not be the wild stuff of sci-fi fantasy, but there’s more than enough to shake up how you approach battles with civilization-devouring monsters and average mercs. Some of them are great and get even better when you mod them with in-game changes. And some of them are just kind of… there… and really shouldn’t use up your time or modding resources.
This is a list of my favorites that I kept nearby for the first half of the game or so, including some underrated gems and a few mid choices that I just think are pretty cool.
A handful of new Fallout TV leaks emerged on Reddit, and they show what looks like an expanded role for the nefarious Vault-Tech corporation
A handful of new Fallout TV leaks emerged on Reddit, and they show what looks like an expanded role for the RPG‘s corrupt Vault-Tec corporation. The images, which Reddit user PrinceDaCat posted, seem to depict a confrontation of some kind in a dilapidated parking lot with the Vault-Tech logo emblazoned outside a building (thanks, PC Gamer).
Vault-Tech plays a key role in the Fallout universe thanks to building, well, vaults – the things that mostly kept some of humanity alive during the nuclear war that reshaped the planet in Fallout history. They also had a bad habit of botching their designs and embezzling government funds, so the company wasn’t exactly excelling at positive brand building.
That role is relegated primarily to lore and materials outside the actual games, though, in supplementary materials such as the Fallout Bible.
If the leaked images are any indication, it looks like the Fallout series might be bringing some of that lore to life, if only in a limited, The Last of Us prologue-style fashion. Whatever’s going on at Vault-Tech HQ, it doesn’t look good. There’s a man with a makeshift gun and some vans parked out front, which usually doesn’t indicate anything good about to happen.
As some commenters pointed out, none of the set looks particularly Fallout, though. The vans are modern, the surroundings are in comparatively good condition. Maybe the world hasn’t ended yet, or perhaps Amazon just plans on doing a lot of editing and adding to give it that radiation-blasted, end-of-the-world pizazz.
While prevailing rumors suggest filming already wrapped on the Fallout series, there’s no word from Amazon about when it might air. Meanwhile, Bethesda is preparing to release Starfield, its first new IP in over a decade, on Sep. 6, 2023, with plans for a new Fallout game on hold until well in the future.
One dedicated fan spent hundreds of hours puzzling out all of Starfield’s skills and upgrades based on the space game’s pre-release footage
One dedicated fan spent hundreds of hours puzzling out all of Starfield’s skills and upgrades based on the space game’s pre-release footage, including skill branches and even what Starfield’s level cap probably is (thanks, GamesRadar). Redditer asd8dhd posted a series of images showing what looks like the full set of skills, along with a lengthy document that includes descriptions and categories.
If asd8dhd’s reckoning is accurate, it looks like Starfield has about 60 skills split into five categories:
Physical
Social
Tech
Science
Combat
These range from standard boosts such as increasing the amount of health you restore to skills that seemingly affect what kind of character you build, including some that make your robots more powerful or increase the damage that certain weapons deal.
It also looks like these tone down the deep personal customization options we saw in Fallout 3 in exchange for something more streamlined.
Asd8dhd’s deductions led them to conclude that each skill has four ranks – Novice, Advanced, Expert, and Master – each of which takes increasingly more skill points to unlock. They believe you’ll need 16 points to unlock a skill’s Master level, and assuming you get one skill point each time you level up, that should put the level cap somewhere around 326, at least at launch.
Whether their work ends up being fully accurate, it’s an impressive bit of deduction and synthesis, all the more so considering Bethesda and Xbox haven’t released all that much Starfield footage in the past few years.
Starfield launches for Xbox Series X|S and PC on Sep. 6, 2023.
