Bethesda is working on some big Starfield updates ahead of the space game’s bigger DLC expansions, including new ways to travel and, finally, add city maps. The news comes from a post Bethesda made on the Starfield Reddit, where the studio also promised mod support – a feature players have hoped for since Starfield launched in September 2023.
“We’re also hard at work on many of new features you asked for, from city maps, to mod support, to all new ways of traveling (stay tuned!),” Bethesda said. “These will be rolling out with a regular cadence of fixes and updates we expect to have roughly every six weeks. If something can be done in a smaller hotfix in between,, and we feel it’s safe, we’ll get one of those out as well. Safe is the key here. We do take a lot of time to test even the smallest change in a game this large and dynamic.”
Meanwhile, Bethesda’s studio design director Emil Pagliarulo took to Twitter to complain about players who were dissatisfied with Starfield and said they don’t understand how game development works.
Loooong🧵 (1/15) Funny how disconnected some players are from the realities of game development, and yet they speak with complete authority. I mean, I can guess what it takes to make a Hostess Twinkie, but I don't work in the factory, so what the hell do I really know? Not a lot.
“I don’t complain about games on social for two main reasons: 1.) I know how hard it is to make games, and have too much respect for my fellow devs,” Pagliarulo said. “2.) I work for a game studio, and it would be uncool and unprofessional for me to do so. But sometimes I want to. Oh boy.”
“Part of me really gets it. When you’re a consumer and spend money on things, that gives you the right to complain about those things. I spend a LOT of money on games every year, and sometimes it takes a lot for me not to scream into the internet’s collective consciousness.”
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.
‘Tis the season to seek out hot deals, and Amazon is getting started early with some sweet Black Friday Xbox deals on consoles and games alike. Whether you’re in the market for a starter bundle with one of 2023’s new releases or want to catch up on the hits of yesteryear with Halo Infinite, you’ll probably find at least one thing you’re looking for. Take a trip through space with Star Wars or Starfield, fight a zombie apocalypse, pull off daring heists, or trek through hell and bring order back to Sanctuary – all at a pretty good discount.
We’ll be updating this roundup as more deals go live. Bear in mind that most of these deals are for physical games, which are only compatible with Xbox Series X.
Bethesda released Starfield just two months ago, but Skyrim is already outranking it on Steam’s player charts after the space game’s stellar launch. While Starfield still has several thousand players at a given point each day, Skyrim is gaining a few thousand more across both of the Bethesda game’s editions (thanks, Eurogamer).
At the time of publication, SteamDB shows that Starfield has approximately 17,000 players in the game, while roughly 19,000 people are playing Skyrim Special Edition, and 2,000 are holding out in the base version of Skyrim. Starfield’s latest 24-hour peak is 23,920, and Skyrim’s is 22,368, but the general trend seems to show more interest in Skyrim as November progresses.
Starfield’s 24-hour peak went from 30,000 or more after Nov. 11, 2023, to 26,000 and lower from Nov. 13, 2023, to now. Skyrim, meanwhile, saw a small increase on Nov. 13, 2023, and has averaged between 22,000 and 25,000 each day for a week. The standard version of Skyrim, without the special edition or Skyrim anniversary upgrades, still gets about 3,000 people playing each day.
Starfield’s all-time peak is 330,720, though the most Skyrim managed is 287,411 – and that was the original version.
While it might seem like an odd situation, seeing a 12-year-old game start overtaking a new, hotly anticipated one, there’s probably a few good reasons behind it. The first burst of Starfield post-launch enthusiasm is likely waning a little, as players complete the existing questlines and explore most of what’s there to explore. Skyrim’s less drastic fluctuations and consistently high numbers suggest it’s probably a core of enthusiastic fans sticking to a game they love.
Plus there’s just more to do in Skyrim. Starfield companion quests are fewer, and there aren’t as many faction storylines to pursue. Still, that’s likely to change as Bethesda releases Starfield’s planned expansions in the coming months and years.
Geoff Keighley announced The Game Awards 2023 nominees, the Oscars for video games, and to the surprise of few, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Zelda Tears of the Kingdom show up quite a lot. Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Alan Wake 2, and Spider-Man 2 might have launched much later in the year, but they landed their fair share of nominations, along with Hi-Fi Rush.
Honkai Star Rail and Final Fantasy XIV pop up a few times, and Final Fantasy 16 even makes an appearance.
The 2023 Game Awards airs on Thursday, Dec. 7, 2023, and you can cast your vote on the TGA website for the community picks up until the show date.
Microsoft announced a partnership between Xbox and Inworld AI to create AI-driven development processes, and voice actors aren’t happy about it. Starfield’s Same Coe voice actor Elias Toufexis and Star Wars Jedi Survivor’s Shelby Young spoke out on Twitter about the negative effects this move could have on the acting industry (thanks, GamesRadar).
“I’ve said it for years now: If you want to start a voice-acting career, don’t bother,” Toufexis said.
“All those jobs of nameless background NPCs that gave us all our start in the industry …they’re all going away. I’m already bitter.”
I’ve said it for years now. If you want to start a voice-acting career, don’t bother.
All those jobs of nameless background NPCs that gave us all our start in the industry …they’re all going away.
“Recording NPC’s is how many voice actors cut their teeth in this industry,” Young said on Twitter. “This will make it even harder for new talent to break into video games (which tbh can already be pretty difficult to begin with). I’m worried for game devs and writers as well.”
An AI design copilot that assists and empowers game designers to explore more creative ideas, turning prompts into detailed scripts, dialogue trees, quests and more.
An AI character runtime engine that can be integrated into the game client, enabling entirely new narratives with dynamically-generated stories, quests, and dialogue for players to experience.
While the description makes no mention of voice acting, that kind of spontaneous dialogue probably won’t include human voices unless the developers record dozens of lines and feed them into the procedural generation tool. Maybe that’ll happen, but since most studios want to use AI to reduce costs, it seems unlikely.
One of the most unusual Starfield ships is actually an official creation in the space game, and despite how impractical it looks, it’s a pretty clever design. Reddit user Morfalath posted an image of their… well, it’s technically a ship, but it doesn’t really look like one, and called it the “Unbeatable Ship” (thanks, GamesRadar).
Morfalath created a giant, hollow cube using what looks like storage modules for most of thebody, along with engines placed in strategic locations and a cockpit in the upper right corner. It looks pretty small, but they said it actually ended up maxing out the allotted length, height, and width in the ship builder. The unorthodox design means Morfalath never has to worry about ship combat, as the enemy AI only ever targets a ship’s center.
It turns out Bethesda built something similar, and we even unknowingly got a glimpse of it during one of the Starfield showcases. Reddit user DoragonHunter posted a picture from the showcase where the developers are saying what kind of ships they built. If you zoom in, you can see a ship that’s somewhat similar to Morfalath’s, with room modules forming a broad outline around a more traditional ship-like shape.
The center is still open, though, despite there being a more recognizable cockpit. One Redditer commented that they built an L-shaped ship with a tower and achieved a similar effect, where the enemy just targeted empty air where the center should’ve been.
Evidently, Starfield’s AI takes size into consideration when deciding where the middle is. Size matters if you want to avoid a fight, though you certainly wouldn’t find any of these in our roundup of Starfield ships with the most rizz.
A new Starfield mod turns every ship in the space game into Thomas the Tank, a long-running tradition in Bethesda games that might’ve gone too far this time. The “Really Useful Starfield” mod comes from Trainwiz, who took inspiration from Guardly’s “Really Useful Dragons” mod that turns Skyrim dragons into Thomas the Tank (thanks, VG 24/7).
Seeing the dead-eyed Thomas lurking around Tamriel is a bit unsettling, though watching it spew fire does offset the creepy factor a little. It’s just so ridiculous. Starfield Thomas just sort of looms over you menacingly and floats through space as if he’s pondering what crimes to commit next.
“They say that the Tank Engine has been banished to wander the stars forever, unable to satiate his bloodlust and unable to find peace in his heart,” Trainwiz said in the mod description, tapping into the Thomas internet lore that casts the friendly hero of classic children’s stories as some kind of eldritch horror.
“But hey he’s your spaceship now so that’s pretty funny.”
Ships in Starfield include multiple parts, with a reactor at the core. Trainwiz turned every reactor into Thomas and expanded the model so it engulfs the rest of the ship. Parts of the actual ship might clip through, but the game still recognizes the Thomas dimensions as solid objects. Starfield was made for sleek spacecraft, not gigantic trains, so flying these things isn’t the easiest. They give your foes a great big monster train-sized hitbox to aim for in dogfights as well, though since they’re also Thomas-sized, the disadvantage goes both ways.
Trainwiz says it’s the price you have to pay, though.
“This mod’s more of a novelty to begin with, so it’s something you have to deal with. Life isn’t always fair.”
I could do a Starfield factions ranked list the normal way – based on how fun the missions are, for instance, or how good the loot is that you get at the end of the space game‘s quests. But there’s so much less room for variation that way. Ryujin and the Crimson Fleet are always going to win, just because that’s how they’re designed in the space game. The Vanguard is fine, and all the other little factions you can’t join just get lost in the shuffle. So I decided on an unorthodox approach and thought about how easy it is to start a fight and beat up the different factions and ranked them from easiest to hardest, because why not.
A new Starfield glitch popped up recently, and it’s yanking up rocks and even a whole city – and having them follow you around in Bethesda’s space game. Depending on what latches itself to you initially, it seems like a harmless glitch at first, like you just have a really big pet rock trailing you around the galaxy (thanks, PC Gamer).
Or a pet cave, in some cases.
Posts started showing up on Reddit of rocks, caves, comets, and in one instance, an entire forest slowly moving along in space behind the player. Innocuous as it seems, the glitch could actually cause a very big problem.
Some players started noticing the entire city of new Atlantis floating ominously behind them. When they tried landing at the actual city – you can’t land on or interact with the tagalong version, apparently – they found chunks of it missing and much of the ground transparent. Their character fell through the ground, and nothing they did fixed the issue.
It’s unclear what causes the problem, but one common thread in some of the Reddit comments is that the players tried registering one of their Starfield ships at The Key, headquarters of the Crimson Fleet faction. The screen turned bright, and then when they boarded their ship again, the unwanted follower appeared.
You can use the console commands menu to delete the unwanted item, but that’s hardly a good idea when the item is a plot-important city. If seems like your best bet for now is just keeping multiple, up-to-date saves just in case something disastrous happens.
