Todd Howard believes that online multiplayer isn’t Bethesda‘s future.
GamesIndustry interviewed Todd Howard, the executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, who is neck deep into developing The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, as well as a new IP, Starfield, at the moment. When asked whether online multiplayer is Bethesda‘s future, he responded with the following:
„It doesn’t mark the future. We’ve done a mix — people forget sometimes. Elder Scrolls Online is one of the biggest online games in the world, we have Fallout Shelter which we keep updating, and Elder Scrolls: Legends. Anyone who has ever said ‘This is the future and this part of gaming is dead’ has been proven wrong every single time. We like to try it all. For a long time, we wanted to try a multiplayer game, and we had this idea. We shouldn’t be afraid. We should try it.”
It means the traditional, offline, single-player Bethesda RPGs will be mixed with mobile and live service titles. Live services-wise, Howard also talked about monetisation, which he considered to be a „light touch:” „It’s a lighter touch, which surprisingly worked very well for us in Fallout Shelter. I was forced to meet with a lot of ‘monetisation experts’ during Fallout Shelter that didn’t work for us. […] I said, ‘That’s nice’ and then it came out, and the first week it was above Candy Crush on the charts with a very light touch. We did learn a lot though.”
At Gamelab, where he received a lifetime award, also held a speech, which was published by VentureBeat. He talked about the post-launch plans for Fallout 76, as well as their fears before its launch, as it’s their first online game: „We’re definitely going to create our stuff. We have a cadence in mind. We’ll see how it goes. If everything works out perfectly with the launch, which won’t be the case, we’ll be able to make a lot of content, but we know our priorities. It’s a big new thing for us. We’re scared. How well can we make this work? We look at some other big online games, and even the people who’ve done it a lot, there are always problems. We’re not naïve enough to think it’s going to be perfect.
We want to focus when the game comes out, the first however many months, that we’re making sure it can be as good as it can be for what it is, and then we’ll have new content rolling out. The good news is that, again, our team has done this for a long time. Our ability to know our tools and make content is one of the things—we have a lot of experience there.”
Fallout 76 will launch on November 14 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
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