Todd Howard has been working at Bethesda Game Studios for a quarter of a century, he is responsible for the development of all the main projects of the studio. At the Gamelab Barcelona conference, he was awarded an award as an industry Legend. We present an extract from Howard’s speech, in which he spoke about the studio’s projects, his design principles and vision of the mobile market.
Howard is attracted to the mobile market and cross-platform
One of the future releases of Bethesda is the free-to-play multiplatform game The Elder Scrolls: Blades. This is a dangen crawler in the style of early TES. It is produced primarily with an eye on mobile.
Howard likes the scenario when a person on the way home plays a game on a smartphone, and at home turns it on on the desktop or console. This is what the studio strives for when developing Blades.
Gameplay of The Elder Scrolls: Blades
Howard is also pleased with how Fallout: Shelter is showing itself on the mobile market.
But he emphasizes that Bethesda remains primarily the creator of ambitious premium projects with an open world.
The first session should be perfect
The opening scenes in the TES and Fallout games are remembered for a reason, and replicas from them have been quoted by players for years. Howard pays great attention to the first minutes of the game, everything that the player sees, hears and does in the prologue is important to him.
“When you play any game, your first hour goes like this: “Can I do this?”, “What if I do this? Or is it?”. The more often the game answers these questions positively, the more real the gameplay seems, the game is addictive. We think about it a lot.”
“Quiet, the guard is coming!” is a phrase from Morrowind that any Russian player remembers
Other things that Howard focuses on are the interface, the game world and what he calls the “tone” of the game, that is, the player’s feelings and atmosphere.
The main thing is to take risks
Any release is always a test for developers. Howard constantly motivates the team to make the project more ambitious.
“Even if it seems that nothing will work out at all, or we won’t finish the game, or it will be lousy, we need to break through this fear. Avoiding risk is, in my opinion, the worst thing to do.”
Howard cites Morrowind as an example. All resources were put into it – if the game did not become popular, Bethesda could simply go bankrupt. It was also the studio’s first release for Xbox, a technically very complex project.
Another example is the upcoming multiplayer Fallout 76. Howard warns that this will be something completely new for the franchise, and many players will not like such a move.
Gameplay of Fallout 76There are not enough hands for all projects
Howard admits that the strength of the team is limited, and not all games are supported equally. For example, Fallout Shelter is very popular with mobile players, but Bethesda does not give them enough new content. The studio’s most launched game is Fallout 4, but its support has to be limited due to new projects. It’s the same with Skyrim – the game has a version for the Nintendo Switch, there is a large community there, but it does not receive sufficient support.
“We are doing what we can,” says the director of Bethesda.
The studio does not have a permanent team of content developers for Fallout or TES, scriptwriters, artists and designers move from project to project if necessary.
VR is serious
Howard himself is a big fan of VR technologies, and he is very pleased that Skyrim and Fallout 4 have support for virtual reality. However, he is not sure that this technology will become mainstream.
“We are now witnessing the emergence of the second generation of VR, when the resolution becomes higher and you can get a really impressive experience from games. But historically, it turns out that only from the third generation the technology becomes popular, the quality increases, and the cost of the gadget falls.”
According to Howard, if VR becomes popular anywhere, it’s the mobile market, virtual reality has a lot of potential there. Therefore, TES: Blades will support VR.
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