„The great Todd Howard says that great games are played, not made.” There is a surprising philosophy behind RPG classics
Pete Hines complained about Bethesda's turn-of-the-century turmoil and revealed Todd Howard's approach to video game development.
Pete Hines, along with Todd Howard, hated it when all Bethesda games were associated with "Todd Howard's team". He also explained what the company's philosophy was about and what problems it caused for the developers.
The former vice president of Bethesda, who left the company in 2023, had a lot to say about his career at the studio in an interview with Kirk McKeand from DBLtap. The studio is known for delivering, e.g. the world-renowned The Elder Scrolls series. In that interview, Hines complained about the studio-related issue (but not only about that).
Bethesda = Todd Howard
Hines was mainly involved in matters related to the publishing process at Bethesda Softworks. The company specifically separated this entity from the studio that created TES - at that time the series was consisting of two games.
The catch is that until that time, Bethesda Game Studios was usually just called "Bethesda". This, in turn, led to numerous misunderstandings - titles released under the Bethesda Softworks brand were attributed to Todd Howard, much to his and Hines' irritation, even after the studio's name was changed to Bethesda Game Studios:
I hated the confusion around Bethesda making a new game, and everybody thinking, ‘Oh, it's Todd Howard's team. And he was very much sick of it. ‘Why do people keep assuming I'm the guy who made Sea Dogs, or whatever?’ And so we created a different name for the studio and the publisher, and guess what? It still didn't f***ing work. Nobody ever got past Bethesda, and they just went 'Bethesda this, Bethesda that, Bethesda, Bethesda, Bethesda'.
It's possible that those times are long past for the company. Mainly because you can count on one hand the titles from the last decade created by Bethesda Game Studios. Yes, we are still waiting for information about The Elder Scrolls 6 - over 7 years after the project's existence was confirmed.
"Great games are played, not made"
That's what Todd Howard thinks, or at least that's what Pete Hines claims.
The great Todd Howard says that great games are played, not made. Meaning, every idea you have about what's good or not only matters if somebody starts playing it and then that's what's going to define whether it's good or not.
In practice, this meant that no element of the game is final until it has been tested in practice. For example, the combat system in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which was changed three times and the team didn't even want to discuss it until the final version was approved.
Oblivion changed combat systems three times during development. So we were careful not to talk about how combat works, because we don't even know if the version we've got is final. So we're trying to place our bets on what parts of the game we feel confident are going to resonate with people.
Such a philosophy sometimes had unexpected consequences - like the case of a tester of the first Dishonored who accidentally managed to possess a fish. The developers didn't envision that, but ultimately such an option made it into the full game. However, this meant additional work for the team, because - as Hines put it - suddenly "water started to matter" and the developers had to consider how such a fish possession would affect the gameplay (or even the story).
We encourage you to read the full interview with Pete Hines at DBLtap.
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Author: Jacob Blazewicz
Graduated with a master's degree in Polish Studies from the University of Warsaw with a thesis dedicated to this very subject. Started his adventure with gamepressure.com in 2015, writing in the Newsroom and later also in the film and technology sections (also contributed to the Encyclopedia). Interested in video games (and not only video games) for years. He began with platform games and, to this day, remains a big fan of them (including Metroidvania). Also shows interest in card games (including paper), fighting games, soulslikes, and basically everything about games as such. Marvels at pixelated characters from games dating back to the time of the Game Boy (if not older).
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