Todd Howard Interview: Future of Fallout, Starfield and Bethesda

Interesting About Fallout

1. Fallout has never been such a popular franchise. Fallout 76, among others, is at its peak.
2. Todd Howard neatly hints that the next numbered Fallout should remain a single-player game, but they won't rush it: "We want to do it right." He believes the Fallout series does a good job of covering the pause in the game portion of the franchise.
3. Bethesda employees have discussed whether they should look into remasters of older games like the first two Fallout games, but priorities are different now. However, the studio is making sure that the classics remain available and running on modern systems - at least on PC.
4. Todd Howard is not worried that Fallout 76 and the new Fallout will eat up each other's audience: if you release these games with a long enough gap, they will simply occupy their niches. For example, Skyrim remains popular to this day, but doesn't get in the way of The Elder Scrolls Online, and the wave of interest amid the Fallout series has lifted both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 up.

Interesting About Starfield

1. The active production phase of the Shattered Space add-on began after all work on the base game was completed - that is, in August-September 2023.
2. The biggest part of Shattered Space takes place on the same planet with its own city - apparently created by hand. Todd Howard compared the addition to Far Harbor for Fallout 4 - there, too, they added a solid chunk of new territory with its own quests.
3. According to Todd Howard, some brevity of Shattered Space can't be completely called a reaction to the community's criticism - many players said that Starfield was too big and empty. The developers felt that the scale of the game allowed them to build localized stories on individual planets - and wanted to make Shattered Space just that.
4. Bethesda plans to release big add-ons for Starfield roughly every year. The studio is already working on the next addon.
5. While Starfield was being developed, some things were done for The Elder Scrolls VI - for example, elements of pre-production and some technologies that will form the basis of the "six".
6. On average, players spend about 40 hours playing Starfield.
7. Bethesda Game Studios has a lot of things to do, so Starfield 2 is out of the question for now.

Interesting About Bethesda Studios

1. Despite criticism in the community, Bethesda is confident in its engine - it allows it to do many unique things, support layered mechanics and give players more presence in the world, as well as quickly create fresh content, says Todd Howard.
2. Bethesda Game Studios has five teams inside: for Starfield, The Elder Scrolls VI, Fallout 76, mobile development, and partner collaboration.
3. The previous month, Bethesda games (apparently, not publisher Bethesda Softworks, but Bethesda Game Studios) had 25 million players, the highest number in the company's history.

Interesting About Todd Howard

Here's what Todd Howard is currently playing: Bethesda games (new versions of Starfield with Shattered Space and Indiana Jones), as well as Diablo IV, Forza (Motorsport or Horizon, not specified), Red Dead Redemption 2, and Cyberpunk 2077.

In addition, Howard is looking forward to the new EA Sports College Football - he loves college American soccer, but he can not return to his youth, and the corresponding series of video games interrupted in 2013 and is revived only now, after 11 years.