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The latest Starfield developer diary focuses on music but also delivers a bunch of tantalizing shots of concept art and some potential gameplay details.
"The way I looked at Starfield, always, is what I called the sanctified triplet," says composer Inon Zur. "Everything is streaming, everything is changing, and everything is returning back."
Audio director Mark Lampert expands on this theme and seems to tie it into the flow of the game: "You go out, you venture, discover, return," he says.
"You strive to go back home," Zur continues. "That's what feels so complete for us. We want to complete the mission for us. We want to complete our journey. We will find something, we will discover something, we will take it with us, and we will go back home with it."
Bethesda has previously described Starfield as "Skyrim in space" and "the Han Solo simulator," and Zur and Lampert's comments appear to tie into some of the moment-to-moment gameplay beats of those ideas.
"What can I do with that on the sound design side?" Lampert asks. "Not just to weave the main theme in different key points in the game – leveling up, discovering new places – but could we use that as straight-up sound design … I'll take any of that music and turn it into ambiance somewhere."
Lampert also relates Starfield's audio production to the overall work on the game and how it compares to Bethesda's usual projects.
"We don't have control over how the player chooses to experience the game," he says. "Our sense of scale had to be totally adjusted. Making a game on a planetary surface is what we've always done before. Now we have these very vast distances against this black starry background. It's a blank canvas and a massive playground, and all the pieces are there for you to write your own story, whether you jump right in and wish to follow the main quest and the main story to go to the obvious 'one point leads to another, leads to another.'
"The music has a funny way of playing the right chord change at the right time," Lampert adds. "A lot of that just happens at random. You look over the valley at just the right moment and there are times like that that feel scripted and they're not. I like that each player has that experience for themselves, and they're not."
These details are broken up by some lovely concept art sprinkled throughout the video. Here are some of our favorite shots:
The first official Starfield character is a robot named Vasco, and it must be protected.
