Todd Howard on His Career in Gaming; From Terminator to Starfield in 15 Minutes

WIRED has published an interesting video in which Bethesda head Todd Howard talks about his long career. Below we cite some highlights from the video.

Howard is proud of The Terminator: Future Shock, the first game he worked on at Bethesda. Today, the game is mostly forgotten, but in 1995 it was a truly groundbreaking FPS. Enemies were made in 3D instead of the then-popular sprites, and on top of that, the game was the first to offer mouse aiming as we know it from modern shooters (previously, mouse aiming control was offered by Cyclones, but in a heavily different form than what is standard today).

The designer also talked about the failure of The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, which almost sank the entire studio. The head of Bethesda still believes that it was a good game, but fans of the brand expected another great RPG like TES: Arena or Daggerfall, while Redguard was a much smaller item with heavy emphasis on adventure elements.

The breakthrough for the studio was 2002's Morrowind. It returned to the roots of The Elder Scrolls, while abandoning the procedurally generated world from Daggerfall in favor of hand-crafted locations. The game turned out to be a bestseller. The game was helped by an Xbox console release, which was second only to the first installment of Halo in terms of sales results on that platform.

A major challenge proved to be the creation of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The developers could not fit into the memory limits of the Xbox 360. The team was saved by the fact that Microsoft eventually decided to double the amount of memory in this console.

Completion of Oblivion took four years. Meanwhile, thanks to the technology developed for the game, work on Fallout 3 took only a little over two years. In the end, the game sold even better than Oblivion. The development of the studio itself is also interesting.:

1. 60 or so people worked on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, while the team working on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim already counted more than a hundred developers.
2. Starfield is the most ambitious project in the studio's output. The developers have taken many solutions from Fallout 4, but they also returned to the procedural generation from early installments of The Elder Scrolls. The team working on Starfield numbered about 250 people.
3. Currently, about 450 people work at Bethesda.

1. Starfield Review: A Stellar Masterpiece
2. Starfield - game guide
3. Starfield - official website

Starfield

September 6, 2023

Rate It!

• Overview
• Guide
• Maps
• Review

• Todd Howard
• games trivia
• Bethesda
• gaming history
• RPG games