Starfield’s composer says the game will become ‘legendary’, Todd Howard’s a ‘visionary’, and maybe you ‘were just not ready for it’

Composer Inon Zur has worked on hundreds of games across nearly three decades in the industry, though is perhaps best-known for his Bethesda scores: He composed the main themes and scores for Fallout 3, 4 and New Vegas, and most recently Starfield. Zur has given a new interview to RPG Site in which he says, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Starfield is great actually: and maybe we all just weren’t ready for Todd Howard’s genius, hmm?

“Todd is one of, if not the, most creative and invigorating human beings in the industry,” says Zur. “He just doesn’t stop. He always has new ideas. He always knows what he wants. He is very persuasive and has a very strong character. He will also find ways to describe what he wants without really calling it a name.

“He knows how to allow freedom of creativity on one hand, but also how to steer it to his own vision. He is a visionary. He sees things that people will start to find out years later.”

And one of those things is that, apparently, Starfield will one day achieve “legendary” status.

“When Starfield released, I believe people were just not ready for it,” says Zur. “It’s a different way of looking at it, but Todd is really strong, and he said very, very lightly, ‘Look, if you don’t like it, then you don’t like it, but this is the new thing that we’re doing, and we’re sticking to it.’ He believes in his way, and it just has proven time and time again that eventually people will understand his vision.

“It just takes time and this is a common thing for all the big visionaries. Sometimes people really don’t understand them correctly, but they were strong enough to stay on-course, and Todd will stay on-course on Starfield. Starfield will eventually become something that will be legendary. I have no doubt. It’s just a matter of time.”

I mean… you do you buddy, but short of a total overhaul I don’t see people changing their minds on Starfield anytime soon. The game released in 2023 but hasn’t ever seemed to pick up the audience love or modding scene of Bethesda’s other games, and over 83,000 Steam user reviews return the verdict of “mixed” (PC Gamer awarded it 75% at launch: a perfectly respectable score, but perhaps not what Bethesda was going for).

Not that critical reception is everything, of course. But I’m a massive sci-fi fan, and found Starfield as bland as it comes. Howard clearly is a visionary of some sort, you simply can’t argue with Bethesda’s track record under his creative leadership, but that doesn’t mean everything he touches turns to gold.

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Elsewhere in the interview, Zur discusses his score for Starfield, which was one of the things I enjoyed most about the game. Fair warning: this does all get a little high-falutin’.

“There was a lot of thinking that we did and I was basically taking back into this world that on one hand is huge, vast and standing still almost like a void,” says Zur. “But then inside this space, there are lots of elements that are moving quickly and happening quickly and zooming in and out and everything. This was the first image I had when I started working on Starfield.

“The use of the orchestra is not completely traditional. For example, woodwinds are not playing melodies. They’re almost always playing very fast patterns that are like everlasting fast movements and motions in space. The brass and strings are actually more stable and playing really slow, and try to capture the space by playing really low ambience and very high notes together. This is how I basically created this sort of round or huge shape of something that no matter where we are, it’s just bigger than us.”

Zur says the second element that’s crucial to the score is the contrast of this void with “the person” standing amongst it.

“The relationship between something that is on the one hand really nothing compared to the size [of] space, but then it’s us,” says Zur. “It’s you. It’s me. We are important, so how can I create this relationship between a person and this huge thing around you? It’s more philosophical, but this was what really drove my thinking when I composed the music for Starfield.”

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