The main force behind Bethesda Game Studios, Todd Howard also talked about how much we have to wait for The Elder Scrolls VI.
Todd Howard told IGN that The Elder Scrolls VI hasn’t had a lot of work done yet, and he isn’t ruling out a fifteen-year gap between The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and TES VI. Howard added that he likes to have two years for pre-production work, followed by two years of full production, with Bethesda preferring to work on just one project at a time. As Starfield is launching in 2022, it’s easy to count that late 2026 could be a potential release window for The Elder Scrolls VI.
“Would you plan to have the kind of gap we’re having between Skyrim and the [Elder Scrolls] follow up? I can’t say that’s a good thing. I wish I could wave a wand, and the game that we want to make, and we haven’t — we’re starting things on — just came out. Absolutely, yeah, but there are other things we want to do, right? Fallout 4 was a huge success. We spent a lot of time on that. We wanted to into online with Fallout 76. We felt doing something like Starfield… we’ve wanted to do something else for a long time and play in a new universe. Well, if not now […] when? And it felt like the when, if we didn’t do it then, the when could be “never”. We felt pretty good about Elder Scrolls was as a franchise, particularly Elder Scrolls Online, that yeah, now is the time to do Starfield,” Todd Howard said.
What about Fallout? “Fallout’s part of our DNA here. We’ve worked with other people from time to time; I can’t say what’s going to happen. We have a one-pager [outline] on Fallout 5. Again, if I could wave my wand and have that out. I’d like to find a way to accelerate what we do, but I can’t say today or commit to what’s going to happen when other than… our cadence is Starfield then Elder Scrolls.” We’d add that Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky have done a non-Fallout game, The Outer Worlds, which will get a sequel, under Obsidian, another studio in Xbox Game Studios. So Howard can no longer deny the team if they want to work on another Fallout game.
What would Todd Howard improve in his games? “There are several parts of it [Skyrim] where we don’t go deep enough, where it’s a veneer in terms of its interactivity. Look, you can say that about anything, but when we think about games and what we want to do going forward, ok, whatever that system is, how deep can we make it? The other part is how the AI and NPCs react to you—I think we have a long way to go with [that]. Those are probably the main ones.”
Starfield will launch in a year, on November 11 2022, on Xbox Series and PC.
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