"You venture, discover, return": How the music in Starfield complements the Bethesda gameplay loop

Starfield is one of the most anticipated games of 2022 right now.

Part of the reason is its sheer novelty. Starfield is Bethesda's first new intellectual property in 25 years, whereas its followers are only used to long-standing franchises and established worlds in Fallout and in The Elder Scrolls.

As Bethesda continues to keep Starfield's gameplay behind closed doors, their monthly dev diary updates convey different aspects of the game. The most recently released episode, 'The Sound of Adventure', touches upon the subject of music and audio design.

While much of the diary is about how the music was composed, the featurette revolves around how the music relates to a diegetic part of the gameplay experience. The way in which audio director Mark Lampert and composer Inon Zur describe it also re-affirms the familiar Bethesda gameplay design.

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New Starfield dev diary suggests that discovery will take precedence over combat

Bethesda has been making role-playing games since an era where chiptune music was the norm, as well as the technical cap, for their soundtrack. The first two Elder Scrolls games, with music composed by Eric Heberling, can double as a demonstration of how music in adventure games has changed over the years.

What crystalized Bethesda's leanings towards idyllic Zen music that sink into the tapestry of the in-game world was Jeremy Soule's epic orchestral compositions in Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim.

The Fallout games were different in their music by miles, but very similar in how they were implemented. Composed by Inon Zur, the star behind the soundtracks of Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate, Pathfinder, and many other major RPG franchises, the music of Fallout is tailored to accentuate its wasteland atmosphere.

If Fallout's music spells out the utter desolation of an atom-punk nightmare, Starfield's music is a hopeful note of awe.

The primary idea behind it, as sound designer Mark Lampert highlights, is to reflect the scale of the vast world of Starfield, which will be much bigger than anything Bethesda has previously created.

"Our sense of scale had to be totally readjusted in making a game on a planetary surfaces as we have done before, and now where you have these very vast distances against the black starry background."

Lampert then continues, shedding a sharper light on the gameplay design,

"It is a black canvas, and a massive playground, and all the pieces are there to write your own story."

Bethesda games - be it Skyrim or Fallout 4 - have increasingly put the focus on giving players the opportunity to create their own story. One could even argue that Fallout 76, initially bereft of story content unless one sought it out, was the extreme expression of that design.

The general way in which these 'emergent gameplay' stories are stitched together is now famously known as the 'Bethesda gameplay loop'. Simply put, it is the routine of combating, pillaging, and exploring further that any Elder Scrolls or Fallout player will be familiar with.

This ebb and flow naturally reflects the 'sanctified triplet' of Starfield's music, as Inon Zur so aptly describes. But most importantly, what he notes next carries more interesting revelations:

"We will find something, we will discover something, we will take it with us, and we will go back home with it."

If these words are to be interpreted literally, Starfield will have a greater focus over astronomical and xenoarchaeological research. The possibility of what a sparsely populated star system might bring is endless - similar to scanning resources in No Man's Sky.

This might also stretch to artifact reclamation, as we see in the function of the archeological findings added by the Skyrim mod, Legacy of The Dragonborn.