Bethesda Softworks - Todd Howard Interview

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Todd Howard has been interviewed by Gamestar. A translation was provided on Reddit by DRocMusic.

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Q: Based on your new experience with multiplayer games, would multiplayer be something for Elder Scrolls 6 or Fallout 5?

A: For those games we want to keep them as single player games. That is what our focus is going to be. If they have some social aspect we haven't designed yet, we'll see. But we treat them each as their own thing.

Q: There are 3 studios working on Fallout 76. How do you keep them connected and working together in a way that Bethesda Games Studios keeps it's own identity?

A: It's tricky. You are right, there are 3 studios. And then there are other developers under Zenimax and id software helping us out. To answer your question: The studio in Montreal has been around a long time. Since Fallout 4.

The studio in Austin, the old Battlecry Studio, started working with us right when we finished Fallout 4. So we've been working with them for three years now. We had some issues in the beginning in how we handle communication and I'll admit it was hard at first, but now we are in a good place. Everybody has worked together for a while. The way we communicate, each studio is still slightly different, each have their own vibe but everyone is pushing in the same direction.

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Q: You've been using more or less the same engine for years. What about Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6?

A: I think a lot of people, who are not making games don't understand what the word "engine" stands for.

They think the engine is this one thing, we view it as technology. There's a lot of different pieces and for every game, parts of that change. For example the renderer, the AI, the animations, the script language and so on.

Some people talk about Gamebryo but we haven't used that in a decade. A lot of our engine contains a lot of middleware like Havoc. For Fallout 76 we have changed a lot. The game uses a new renderer, a new lighting system and a new system for the landscape generation. For Starfield even more of it changes. And for Elder Scrolls 6, out there on the horizon even more.

We like our editor. It allows us to create worlds really fast and the modders know it really well. There are some elementary ways we create our games and that will continue because that lets us be efficient and we think it works best.