Saved by Morrowind, striving for Starfield: Todd Howard and the story of Bethesda The director of Elder Scrolls and Fallout discusses the past, present and future of both series in his Develop:Brighton keynote
The story of Todd Howard is largely the story of Bethesda -- if not the Softworks publishing side, then certainly the Game Studios development team behind the company's biggest games.
Today's keynote fireside chat as part of the Develop:Brighton online conference -- hosted by myself on behalf of GamesIndustry.biz -- explored Howard's career and the challenges of the games he has worked on.
We already spoke to him last week, where he told us the
next generation is all about access , and now we present the highlights from today's keynote.
The Elder Scrolls
Howard's first experience with Bethesda's flagship series was assisting with the CD-ROM version of its first entry Arena, having already launched on floppy disks (remember those?). He then moved onto Daggerfall full-time, where the team refined the Elder Scrolls formula still used today. While Arena established the world of Tamriel, Daggerfall introduced the 'use skills to improve them' progression system.
Todd Howard, Bethesda Game Studios
While neither title seems as accomplished as the likes of Morrowind or Skyrim by today's standards, Todd says they were ambitious for their time and started an ethos he and his team still follow today.
"Certain things can seem primitive through the lens of time and technology but we were doing similar things to what we're doing now, believe it or not," he says. "Even though the scale has increased, what we were doing in comparison to other games really hasn't."
He points to old reviews for Arena and Daggerfall, which would praise the sense of freedom and the breadth of the game world -- sentiments Bethesda continues to target with each new Elder Scrolls. But it was Morrowind that was "the beginning of the Bethesda people know today" -- and essentially saved the company.
"We'd made some bad games, we made some mistakes and the development team probably went down to six people," he says. "That's the game where we had no fear. We felt the company was going to go out of business, so when we had a chance to make Morrowind, we were like 'What's the worst that's going to happen?' We took a few more risks and if it hadn't worked out, I don't know that we'd be here. It worked out better than we could have imagined."
Crucially, Morrowind introduced Bethesda games to console owners via the Xbox version and demonstrated there was demand for those experiences on such platforms. Its success allowed the company to invest more into Oblivion, branching out with a PS3 version as well, and even helped it acquire the Fallout licence (more on that later).
Morrowind was a gamble for Bethesda, but Oblivion was a big bet in its own way. While most publishers would immediately leap onto a sequel, Howard says his team was given the luxury of a four-year development cycle in order to take advantage of the then-next-gen hardware. And while he disagrees there was more pressure on the sequel to Morrowind, he does admit the team took "more calculated risks with Oblivion."
"We felt the company was going to go out of business, so when we had a chance to make Morrowind, we were like 'What's the worst that's going to happen?'"
"We did not expect the success that one had either -- Oblivion just became this lightning rod for next-generation gaming at the time," he says.
Spoiler (Move your mouse to the spoiler area to reveal the content)
Show Spoiler
Hide Spoiler
Fallout has to defeat the dragons.The Future
Click to expand...
