The ongoing regime change and reorganization at Xbox hasn't given much cause for confidence in the state of its studios—particularly Arkane Lyon, which has stayed almost entirely out of the public eye since announcing Marvel's Blade at the 2023 Game Awards. The studio was once again absent at this month's Xbox Games Showcase, and the subsequent reports that "several" Microsoft developers are at risk of closure stoked fears that both Arkane and Blade had been quietly put out to pasture.

Bethesda Softworks boss Todd Howard, however, says we needn't worry our silly little heads, because Arkane's work on Marvel's daywalker is proceeding swimmingly.

As part of an Entertainment Weekly report on the current state of Xbox (via Polygon), Howard offered a brief confirmation that work on Marvel's Blade remains underway, speaking favorably about the state of the project after seeing some of Arkane's latest work in May.

"I'm not at liberty to say when [we'll see more]," Howard said, "but I saw some stuff just yesterday [on May 21] and the folks at Arkane are doing a really, really great job."

Paired with an Arkane artist's request earlier this month that we let the studio cook, Howard's statement is a welcome sign of life. Unfortunately, when it's Microsoft we're talking about, a confirmation that Blade is still in development isn't the definitive proof of a healthy future for Arkane that we might be hoping for: Xbox was willing to announce a new Ninja Theory game at this month's Xbox Games Showcase even as it was planning to give the studio the axe.

Reportedly, the company's rationale is that announcing Senua would make the studio more attractive to other investors and potential owners after it parts ways with the developer. However, given Microsoft's ruthlessness in culling development staff and their projects in recent years—including Arkane's Austin studio, which Microsoft shuttered in 2024—that supposed altruism rings hollow.

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We've been going back through the PC Gamer vault looking for stories to revisit, reassess, or just have an honest "weren't we naive?" chuckle about, and few have ticked all three boxes as much as our February 2012 "Armchair Designer" column, "Ten things we want to see in Elder Scrolls 6."

It was a scant three months after the launch of Skyrim, and little did we know that we'd be waiting on TES 6 in the future year 2026, seven years after the setting of Blade Runner, and just one before Deus Ex: Human Revolution (also released in 2011).

By the way, I say "we," but I was still in high school when this article ran, and the unattributed author is likely no longer a member of our team⁠—though we do have plenty of decade-plus veterans on both sides of the Atlantic. I've shared images of the original article at the bottom of this story, but here's a summary of the wishlist:

• A 200+ year time skip, returning to the Iliac Bay region of Daggerfall. 2:1 odds
• Depart Tamriel entirely in favor of the oft-mentioned continent of Akavir. 50:1 odds
• Return to Morrowind's sensibility for NPC permadeath and reactivity. 100:1 odds
• Maintain, but do not expand map size while adding a greater variety of world-altering systems like Oblivion Gates or Dragon battles. 10:1 odds
• Expand companions and followers to something resembling the vaunted BioWare party. 18:1 odds
• Design larger-scale encounters with squad tactics systems. 14:1 odds
• Revamp stealth detection in favor of full-on immersive sim light and sound propagation. 14:1 odds
• Introduce Daedric pact magic a la D&D Warlocks, with permanent consequences. 70:1 odds
• Revamp movement in a Dishonored (they didn't have that yet, but still) or Mirror's Edge direction. 150:1 odds
• Introduce some kind of social-but-not-social media, blog/sharing mechanic. 4:1 odds

You crazy for that last one, anonymous PCG writer of yesteryear. Obviously some grace for them, though: It was a gentler time, years before platforms had fully consumed the internet. But the proposition does rhyme with the social sharing elements that have taken games by storm, like photomode. And the rest of the ideas? All pretty great, I think. A few have even come to fruition in Bethesda's other games.

BioWare-style companions? We got those in Fallout 4 and Starfield. The squad tactics not so much, but Bethesda has experimented with tacking on systems that feel like entirely new games, such as Fallout 4's settlement building and management. Also, shout out to reader jongreenall's submission of "SPACE." With Starfield, you kinda could argue we got Elder Scrolls in space.

As for my own favorites, Morrowind-style malleability would make me one happy camper, as would deeper stealth systems. Bethesda design director Emil Pagliarulo seems to have imported a lot of Bethesda's signature stealth gameplay from his formative time as a designer at the stealth GOAT, Looking Glass Studios.

I'd love to see the next step in that evolution. But we've also got 14 years of Bethesda not moving in either of those directions: Fallout 4 and Starfield both had essential NPCs and the crouch walky stealth we know and love.

The Akavir one was honestly the biggest curveball for me, but I really dig it as a potential shakeup. You could return to the very Dune-like approach to colonialism in genre fiction we saw in Morrowind. After a juicy timeskip post-Skyirim, pop us on the shores of a Thalmor or Imperial (or both) colonial project in Akavir, with contrasting architectures, populations, maybe even laws based on the zone of control⁠.

Make elf on non-elf crime essentially legal in Thalmor zones, or close off native Ka Po' Tun settlements to Tamrielic characters until they get enough faction reputation. Maybe the Imperial presence is a rump state, all that's left from Thalmor domination of the mainland. Have the Stormcloaks vs. Imperials equivalent for TES 6 be siding with the East East Empire Company, Thalmor, or native Akaviri like the Tsaesci and Tang Mo.

Basically, I want Pillars of Eternity 2 but in The Elder Scrolls. You'd still get that sweet hit of TES heartland nostalgia with the classic races and factions present, while the move would seriously shake up what risks becoming a stagnant fiction otherwise. A fella can dream, eh?

Starfield's recent Free Lanes update has brought changes large and small to Bethesda's somewhat-maligned space RPG, with one of the biggest being how the game's NG+ mode works. To talk about that we'll need to briefly cover the game's ending, so: spoilers ahead. Obviously.

The main story quest of Starfield involves collecting weird space artifacts from across the galaxy and, when you've collected them all, undertaking the game's final mission, which gives you the option of entering The Unity, a nexus for the multiverse. If you choose to do so, the game starts over in a new version of the universe where your character keeps all of their skills and powers, but loses everything else, while all character relationships are reset.

Oh and perhaps most importantly: some weird stuff might start happening, though unfortunately it's a bit of a roll of the dice on just how weird. In a game that felt a little unambitious, dare I even say drab, this was one of the best ideas, even if the implementation left something to be desired.

"I'm still used to saying this is a spoiler, but I don't think it is anymore," Starfield director and executive producer Todd Howard told our sister site GamesRadar+. "The Unity was our way of doing New Game+. It was us asking you this weird, deep question that I actually think got lost on a lot of people. It asks if you are just this power gamer who wants to get everything, or are you willing to leave this world behind?

"How do you feel about your own life choices? Would you leave that all behind and start over? Some of that pain—having to give up all of your stuff, Sarah Morgan not loving you anymore, and so on—is supposed to make you feel all of that."

Howard goes on to cite Edge of Tomorrow as an influence, a brilliant 2014 sci fi movie based on the novella All You Need is Kill in which Tom Cruise's character Major Cage gets locked in a timeloop during an overwhelming alien invasion of Earth.

"It's one of my favorite movies," says Howard, referencing the ending in particular (where Cage finds himself in a world he's saved, but with no-one aware of what's happened). "So we create this feeling of, 'hey, you have to leave everything you did behind', but as a gamer, you're like, 'I just want to go through the magic gate and get more power.'"

The strange thing is that this is what the Free Lanes update changes, thanks to the addition of a container that allows players to keep a selection of up to 50 items. "If you decide to enter the Unity now, you can do it in a way that you feel that you can still continue your character and have some of your stuff—it's stuff that you earned, after all," says Howard.

The about-turn is because Bethesda felt too many players were turning down the opportunity to explore the multiverse and NG+, and so were missing out on one of Starfield's big ideas. "The attachment that players felt to the things that they had gathered up to that point meant that they didn't want to part with their items," says creative producer Tim Lamb. "It was a bridge too far—a sacrifice too meaningful. There's so many exciting things that can happen in our New Game+ loop that we wanted to give a bit of encouragement."

Lamb says this is balanced-out by the addition of more upgrade opportunities for existing items. "Then we are introducing X-Tech to further upgrade your weapons and your gear," says Lamb. "We don't want to ask the player to put in a lot of work for a reward they are searching for, only to say, 'no, it's gone now.' So once these things started coming together, we knew we absolutely had to do something like this."

Still, it is a bit of an about-turn on a cool idea, and does seem to me to remove the sting in the tail that Bethesda was initially going for. Howard frames it in terms of making refinements to the "elder loop" of the game, pointing out that things like new quests might provide an additional few hours of entertainment whereas this change has a more profound impact.

"Take something like the Trackers Alliance, or other quests," says Howard. "You do them and then you're done. That's still rewarding, but for someone who jumps back in, they might play for a few hours—and then the update didn't serve them beyond those two or three hours. We want to be trying to do more things that update the game where it's going to change the next 100 hours. You can tell us if we've done our job right."

It's hard to imagine players complaining about being able to keep some of their most treasured gear, though I'm not sure that was ever the problem with Starfield's NG+. The issue is more that it can take four or five playthroughs to start seeing some of the truly weird stuff that can happen and, even if I had all the time in the universe, I can't quite imagine playing Starfield that many times.

Bethesda games certainly aren't lacking in launch issues—the presence of charming bugs and funny physics glitches are sort of the studio's maker's mark at this point, although with the lukewarm reception of Starfield, that reputation's also begun to tip over into subpar features, too.

That's not to say the devs aren't aware of the state these games launch in, though. In an interview with Dennis Mejillones from last year that's currently making the rounds (thanks, GamesRadar+), the retired artist, who worked on Skyrim, Fallout, and Starfield, explains:

"I have a ton of valid criticism of myself for Skyrim, Fallout, Fallout 76, Starfield—I have my own strong criticism, we all do … I can almost guarantee you that like, 95% of the stuff that players have brought up after a game was launched? Every single developer, just about, has brought [them] up as a concern in the meetings.

"We're gamers, we're going to play the game, we play and see the same things that the gamers do." That's all fair enough, honestly. I've never respected the idea that videogame developers are somehow 'lazy'—most are trying very hard to make a good game. Most issues stem from production, management, and the simple fact that videogames need to make money and have to come out, like, at some point.

Mejillones shares that Todd Howard expressed a very similar rub to him in those same meetings: "Todd used to say in meetings all the time: We can do anything, but we can't do everything."

That doesn't mean you've gotta give up, though—Mejillones uses Fallout 76 as an example which, to Bethesda's credit, is basically good nowadays: "They could've dropped the game, they could've just let it go—but they didn't, they kept pushing it and improving it … Starfield, same thing, they keep pushing it and trying to update it."

This is where my skepticism creeps in—admittedly with the unfair advantage of a year of hindsight, and statements that Howard himself has made in the interim. But when the head of your studio says that Starfield probably won't be getting a 2.0 overhaul, it's hard to imagine a 76-style revival.

When it comes to The Elder Scrolls 6, Todd Howard has one message for you: What even is that?

So says Todd in a recent chat with IGN, where he reflected that, yeah, since Bethesda announced it was working on a sixth Elder Scrolls all the way back in 2018, he's changed his attitude towards announcing things a little. But given he can't put that genie back in the bottle, he jokes that we should all "Just pretend we didn't announce it. Doesn't exist. No one's heard a word."

This is, just to reiterate, a gag, and Todd Howard has not suddenly forgotten he announced The Elder Scrolls 6, but it is emblematic of his Big Philosophy Of Game Announcements. "When you go and press play, you're about to play a game. What do you already know? What's in your head? What's your excitement level? What's your expectations? And I back up from there. I prefer not to talk about stuff until then."

That's a pretty different approach than the one which led Bethesda to show us that one goddamn image of TES 6—that I will probably have to use as an image in this article, for lack of alternatives—that we all know and love. "I like to compress that moment where you hear about a game to when you can play it," says Howard. "Those would be on top of each other if I had my way every time."

Howard's banged this gong before. After Oblivion Remastered's shadowdrop last year, he was out and about chatting about how much he loved the tactic of announcing and releasing a game at practically the same time, and even called that game's release a "test run" for things yet to come.

So I'd anticipate more of those, were I you, though probably not for TES6 itself. Announcing the next Elder Scrolls was, says Howard, "really about informing our audience, because when you're going to do something new, everyone's going to ask, 'What about Elder Scrolls 6? What about a singleplayer game?' And we did it that way, but it's not my preference."

When will the next Elder Scrolls come out? Wish I could tell you, but it sounds like Bethesda's spinning a lot of plates: "We're working on a lot of stuff. I think if you look at the scale of our studio, we could have 10 times the amount of people to do all this. We're doing so much and it's just finding the right times to tell everybody about it." Today, I suppose, is Starfield's turn. But tomorrow? Who knows?

So I'd anticipate more of those, were I you, though probably not for TES6 itself. Announcing the next Elder Scrolls was, says Howard, "really about informing our audience, because when you're going to do something new, everyone's going to ask, 'What about Elder Scrolls 6? What about a singleplayer game?' And we did it that way, but it's not my preference."

When will the next Elder Scrolls come out? Wish I could tell you, but it sounds like Bethesda's spinning a lot of plates: "We're working on a lot of stuff. I think if you look at the scale of our studio, we could have 10 times the amount of people to do all this. We're doing so much and it's just finding the right times to tell everybody about it." Today, I suppose, is Starfield's turn. But tomorrow? Who knows?

Starfield didn't quite land as the next big Bethesda game—I mean, it did about as well as you'd expect from any game from the studio, but critical and community response hasn't signposted the sort of longevity the developer might've come to expect from, say, Skyrim.

Last week, its composer Inon Zur said that despite this tepid landing, Starfield would become "legendary" and that people "were just not ready for it … this is a common thing for all the big visionaries.

"Sometimes people really don't understand them correctly, but they were strong enough to stay on-course, and Todd will stay on-course on Starfield. Starfield will eventually become something that will be legendary. I have no doubt. It's just a matter of time."

Mmn. Listen, I've played Starfield, and I cannot say I saw the seeds of greatness sown within—it was mostly, I felt, a somewhat clunky space RPG with kinda boring procgen elements and a deep misunderstanding of what makes science fiction compelling. But then again, maybe I'm just not seeing between the ones and zeroes.

Helping me feel less unenlightened, however, is the fact that Bethesda seems to be also hinting that Zur should hold his horses a little, replying directly to PC Gamer on X with the following: "We ran this by Todd and he said his only visionary power is seeing running lanes in EA College Football 26. He appreciates all the passionate feedback on Starfield and we’ll have more to share next week."

As to what that news could be? A Kinda Funny interview earlier this year suggests, from the mouth of Todd himself, that it'll be a lot of "updates and things that change the game, not in an isolated way, but sort of meta, using outer space and things in ways that we haven't." Space travel that isn't a loading screen? One can hope.

Anyway: To me, that seems like a cooling effect on Zur's words—and to give some credit to the guy, he does have a massive portfolio of work that might make me forgive him for getting all glossy-eyed and hopeful about a videogame I didn't like very much.

He's clearly worked hard on the game's soundtrack, which is far more impressive than I remember—clocking in at about five hours—and in an alternate universe where Starfield gripped me in the way that anyone at Bethesda intended, I could certainly see it gaining deeper acclaim.

Anyway, it's all in keeping with Howard's words on the game himself. The head honcho said back in February that the game's next update wasn't gonna be a 2.0 launch or anything: "[If] Starfield something that didn't connect with you right away, or you bounced off it or found it boring in places—I don't think this is going to change that fundamentally."

Composer Inon Zur has worked on hundreds of games across nearly three decades in the industry, though is perhaps best-known for his Bethesda scores: He composed the main themes and scores for Fallout 3, 4 and New Vegas, and most recently Starfield. Zur has given a new interview to RPG Site in which he says, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Starfield is great actually: and maybe we all just weren't ready for Todd Howard's genius, hmm?

"Todd is one of, if not the, most creative and invigorating human beings in the industry," says Zur. "He just doesn't stop. He always has new ideas. He always knows what he wants. He is very persuasive and has a very strong character. He will also find ways to describe what he wants without really calling it a name.

"He knows how to allow freedom of creativity on one hand, but also how to steer it to his own vision. He is a visionary. He sees things that people will start to find out years later."

And one of those things is that, apparently, Starfield will one day achieve "legendary" status.

"When Starfield released, I believe people were just not ready for it," says Zur. "It's a different way of looking at it, but Todd is really strong, and he said very, very lightly, 'Look, if you don't like it, then you don't like it, but this is the new thing that we're doing, and we're sticking to it.' He believes in his way, and it just has proven time and time again that eventually people will understand his vision.

"It just takes time and this is a common thing for all the big visionaries. Sometimes people really don't understand them correctly, but they were strong enough to stay on-course, and Todd will stay on-course on Starfield. Starfield will eventually become something that will be legendary. I have no doubt. It's just a matter of time."

I mean… you do you buddy, but short of a total overhaul I don't see people changing their minds on Starfield anytime soon. The game released in 2023 but hasn't ever seemed to pick up the audience love or modding scene of Bethesda's other games, and over 83,000 Steam user reviews return the verdict of "mixed" (PC Gamer awarded it 75% at launch: a perfectly respectable score, but perhaps not what Bethesda was going for).

Not that critical reception is everything, of course. But I'm a massive sci-fi fan, and found Starfield as bland as it comes. Howard clearly is a visionary of some sort, you simply can't argue with Bethesda's track record under his creative leadership, but that doesn't mean everything he touches turns to gold.

Elsewhere in the interview, Zur discusses his score for Starfield, which was one of the things I enjoyed most about the game. Fair warning: this does all get a little high-falutin'.

"There was a lot of thinking that we did and I was basically taking back into this world that on one hand is huge, vast and standing still almost like a void," says Zur. "But then inside this space, there are lots of elements that are moving quickly and happening quickly and zooming in and out and everything. This was the first image I had when I started working on Starfield.

"The use of the orchestra is not completely traditional. For example, woodwinds are not playing melodies. They're almost always playing very fast patterns that are like everlasting fast movements and motions in space. The brass and strings are actually more stable and playing really slow, and try to capture the space by playing really low ambience and very high notes together. This is how I basically created this sort of round or huge shape of something that no matter where we are, it's just bigger than us."

Zur says the second element that's crucial to the score is the contrast of this void with "the person" standing amongst it.

"The relationship between something that is on the one hand really nothing compared to the size [of] space, but then it's us," says Zur. "It's you. It's me. We are important, so how can I create this relationship between a person and this huge thing around you? It's more philosophical, but this was what really drove my thinking when I composed the music for Starfield."

Bethesda CEO Todd Howard has circled back to the topic of AI, and he's still as hand-wavey as ever about Bethesda's use of the tech. He doesn't dismiss the tech in a new interview with Kinda Funny, but wants to be clear that Bethesda doesn't use it to generate content, or have any plans to.

"It's certainly not a fad," says Howard (timestamp). "I think the AI answer now becomes 'ask me in six months,' right? It changes so much of what you're seeing out there. For us, we're being incredibly cautious.

"You can't ignore it, in terms of it's coming, it's changing. Every few months there's a new model, particularly on the tech side with code or productivity or other things. [We're] kinda viewing it as a tool, like an analyst [to] look at the data in our games."

Presumably this is data such as: just how many pair of shoes did this random guy in Bath, UK, manage to stockpile in that Skyrim house? I actually quite like the idea of an AI tool being forced to do that. But Bethesda's man says that's where it ends.

"We're not fully ignoring it, because where it can help us get better at some big data tasks that just take us a lot of time, that we wish were done now… [AI helps us] move onto the creative stuff," says Howard. "That's kinda where our heads are but I think it's very very early days.

"We're not using it to generate anything. I think there's such an element of artistic intention that is essential to what we do and others do. And if you look across things outside of AI [...] go back a hundred years [to] this idea of craftsmen, I still think craftsmen, and that handcrafted human intention, is what makes things special, and that's where we want to be."

This is on similar lines to previous Howard comments on AI, where he bigs it up as a "tool" but emphasises "creative intention comes from human artists, number one." His caution is understandable: AI remains a controversial topic in games, even if the likes of Epic CEO Tim Sweeney reckons we all just need to get used to it. A more amusing take came from Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, who called AI the tech equivalent of mad cow disease being pushed by "a certain group of people, who maybe aren't fully-rounded humans."

One slight caveat is that the lines do blur with AI, in terms of what people are actually talking about. It's hard to see how you protect "human intention" with something like generative AI, which is trained on art without the permission of its creators. But that's obviously a different topic to machine learning and automation tech, which sounds like the kind of stuff Bethesda is using. There are big questions here without clear answers: as PCG's Wesley Fenlon noted, at what "point on that slippery slope do the tools that aid efficiency begin to cause erosion" of the human creativity they're supposedly assisting?

Todd Howard has received your emails, seen your comments, possibly even read my articles (sorry, Todd), but no: it sounds like he's not going to remake Morrowind, or Daggerfall, or Fallout 1 any time soon.

A remaster, though? Well, perhaps. In a recent chat with Kinda Funny, Howard says he's "softened on the whole remaster thing" in the wake of last year's Oblivion Remastered. No wonder: that game made Bethesda approximately a squillion dollars; I'd soften on the concept too.

Back in 2018, Howard was much more opposed even to remasters: "For something like Morrowind, my personal preference is not to remaster it. We [also] get asked a lot to remaster [1997’s] Fallout 1, and I usually say, if you have a PC, you can play Fallout the way it was. I think that’s how it should be," he said at the time. Now? "Given the success of [Oblivion's] remaster, we think about others, but we'll see what happens."

Which sounds to me like, well, what we all kind of know anyway: yeah, obviously Bethesda is going to put out more Oblivion-style remasters of its classics somewhere down the line, likely starting with Fallout 3. But a full-blown remake? Howard still says no.

"I'm sort of anti-remake," said Howard. "I respect the other ones out there, but I really think the age of a game is part of who and what it is, like its personality and what it represented when it came out." Ironing out those kinks? It just doesn't appeal to Howard and co.

Howard explains that this is how Bethesda settled on its approach for the Oblivion remaster: "I definitely wanted it to be a remaster, but kind of the absolute best version of that you can imagine. So it was important to us that the original game was running." Indeed, it was—if you check an install of Oblivion Remastered, you'll find the original game's files ensconced in there like a mosquito in amber.

I agree entirely with Howard, frankly. If Bethesda came out and announced a Morrowind remake tomorrow? I'd be sceptical. I just don't think Bethesda's modern sensibilities would do that game any favours. In fact, I think it would erase a lot of what made it special.

A remaster, though? Well, my ideal scenario is still for Bethesda to just canonise OpenMW as a modern version of the game, but I won't pretend for a second that I wouldn't be there on day one to see a properly gussied-up version of my favourite game.

I do have to pull him up on a couple of things, though. First of all, let's not pretend you left every part of Oblivion untouched, Todd. That abysmal scaled-levelling system from the original game is nowhere to be seen, so there are clearly some refurbishments Bethesda is okay with making. Second? Oblivion Remastered's last patch, its second, came out in July, and the game is still riddled with bugs and performance issues. I don't think you can call it the "absolute best version" of Oblivion just yet.

Bethesda game director Todd Howard recently emerged blinking into the light of day for an interview with Greg Miller on the Kinda Funny Gamescast. During that interview, he pointed out that Starfield's next update isn't going to change your mind on Starfield if you didn't already love it.

The topic of The Elder Scrolls 6 came up as well, with Howard reiterating that he didn't enjoy having to announce it so far in advance, but did so because otherwise people wouldn't stop bloody asking about it. It's our own fault, really. Howard was also careful to point out that Elder Scrolls 6 won't be anything like Starfield or Fallout 76.

"I think we've—if you look at our games—we've always evolved," Howard said. "We do have a certain style that we like and our fans like that we want to get better and better at. I think in some ways—in many ways, Fallout 76 and Starfield are a little bit of a creative detour from that classic Elder Scrolls, Fallout, you know, a Skyrim, or a Fallout 3, or a Fallout 4, Oblivion, where you're exploring a world in a certain way. And, as we come back to Elder Scrolls 6 that we're doing now, we're coming back to that classic style that we've missed, that we know really, really well."

But while we can hope The Elder Scrolls 6 returns to Bethesda's strengths as a developer, one thing that will be changing is the engine. "We spent the last several years bringing Creation Engine 2, which powers Starfield, up to Creation Engine 3. That's gonna power Elder Scrolls 6 and beyond," he said.

While Bethesda used Gamebryo for Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3, it switched to the Creation Engine for Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76, and then upgraded that to Creation Engine 2 for Starfield. While the assumption was that this upgrade would be enough to handle Elder Scrolls 6 as well, I guess not. Let's hope the upgrade means we get less loading screens in The Elder Scrolls 6, whenever it comes out.

The concept of 'Starfield 2.0,' essentially a major update/overhaul of Bethesda's less-than-stellar sci-fi RPG, has been kicking around for quite a while now. Fans have been huffing the copium since at least the middle of 2025, and started hitting the pipe extra hard at the end of last year when it came to light that Bethesda had given content creators a behind-closed-doors look at what's coming next. But you should probably dial back your expectations: In a new interview with Kinda Funny, Todd Howard said the next update "is not Starfield 2.0," and warned that if you don't like the game now, that's probably not going to change.

The good news is that the long wait for actual Starfield news is almost over: Howard said Fallout has been the focus over the past several months but with that now out of the way, Bethesda is going to start talking about what's next for Starfield "really soon."

"We're moving into a phase where we're ready to talk about Starfield, and really show that in the right way, and what's coming to the game," Howard said. "We've been doing a lot of work that we like a lot."

Ah, but then he dropped the hammer. "It is not Starfield 2.0. I've seen some of that—for expectation-setting, I think it's the kind of thing where, if you love Starfield, we think you're gonna love this. It's updates and things that change the game, not in an isolated way, but sort of meta, using outer space and things in ways that we haven't.

"But look, is Starfield something that didn't connect with you right away, or you bounced off it or found it boring in places—I don't think this is going to change that fundamentally."

It's a refreshingly frank statement if nothing else, although Bethesda might simply feel that there's no sense sacrificing any more credibility on this particular altar. Some diehard Starfield fans have been holding out hope for a turnaround akin to that of Cyberpunk 2077, which enjoyed a massive recovery campaign culminating in a 2.0 update in September 2023, three years after launch. Starfield is moving into a comparable window—it came out, coincidentally, in September 2023.

But the very big stumbling block for Bethesda is that while Cyberpunk 2077 was a phenomenal game that was broken as hell, Starfield just isn't all that great. It's not awful, but that middling reputation is pretty much carved in stone at this point, and players have long fallen away: SteamDB says there are currently four times as many people on Steam playing the 16-year-old Fallout: New Vegas than there are Starfield, and that's the sort of thing that's bound to give Bethesda leadership pause as it considers how long it wants to continue working on updates.

That said, Howard clarified that the release of not-Starfield2 2.0 will not signal the end of work on the game: "We're doing more Starfield stuff coming up. We've been laying that out. It's something we see continuing for a while."

Fallout season 2 is wrapped up and, no, we didn't get a surprise remaster dropping at the end. Instead, senior Bethesda types have been giving a bunch of retrospective interviews about the series, the latest of which is a mega-feature from GameInformer that dives into the creation of Fallout 3 and where the series went from there.

One thing I confess I'd forgotten about the game is the fact that, at launch, you could roll credits on it and then… the game would just end. I do remember being conscious of it at the time, and knowing not to start the final mission ("Take it Back", a blowout spectacle with the Liberty Prime robot that ends with the player making certain permanent, life-altering decisions), and then all of a sudden Bethesda announcing that the game's first expansion would 'fix' the issue.

Turns out that Bethesda was caught completely off-guard by the reaction to the game ending properly, rather than allowing you to continue to roam the Wasteland. Which to be fair to them is probably because… well, Fallout and Fallout 2 both ended when you completed the main quest.

"The one thing that we did, we ended up changing in Fallout 3, we were like, 'Well, like the other Fallouts, it has to end,'" recalls Todd Howard. "You know, 'We’re having this type of character system, these other perks are going to work, and then when you finish it, it’s going to end. You’re going to get this video and then the game ends.' And we thought, 'This is Fallout! It’s great!'"

Reader: it was not great.

"People hated it! They expected, like, 'Why would the game end?! The [Elder Scrolls] don’t end!'," says Howard. "And so we were like, 'Well, that was our commitment to that.' And we were sitting around talking about it as we got into DLC, we’re like, 'What if it didn’t end? How would we do that?'"

Bethesda's solution would arrive roughly six months after launch with the game's first expansion, Broken Steel. The studio went for that good old narrative classic whereby, as long as you activate the purifier, the player character will wake up two weeks later rather than dying, having been found unconscious. What can you say: It just works.

"We kind of went back to the drawing board and figured out a way, as gracefully as we could," says Howard, before adding with some commendable honesty: "I’ll give us an average grade on that, to make the story continue."

Narrative fudge it may have been but it was undoubtedly the right decision. Even if ending the game when the credits roll would've been faithful to the Black Isle originals, something about everything just stopping doesn't feel right in a Bethesda open world. You put so much time into these games, and there's so much to find, that it almost feels a tiny bit like punishing the player for completing the main quest. Needless to say Fallout 4 would not repeat the mistake, though New Vegas said screw you guys and did it old-school (though it did have the grace to create a last-ditch save players could return to for DLCs etcetera).

Elsewhere in the interview the game's leads go into VATS, which lead artist Istvan Pely recalls barely working before launch, and its origins in… Burnout 2's Crash mode?

With Fallout season 2 wrapped up, it feels like we've been deluged with everything except, y'know, a new Fallout game of some kind. Hopes were high that we might get a remaster at the show's end, or even two, but whoa there cowboy: that ain't how Bethesda rolls.

Instead, Bethesda's great and good have been conducting a bunch of retrospective interviews about the series, the latest of which is a mega-feature from GameInformer. In this, the key creatives behind Fallout 3 go a little deeper into the game's VATS system, the delicious slow-mo shooting feature that allowed players to more-or-less pause combat and pick a spot, before restarting and watching the gore fly. Well, when the camera let you.

The game's lead artist, Istvan Pely, has previously reminisced about how Bethesda barely got the feature working before the game shipped, but here we're going back to the origins of the system. Which were basically that, erm, Bethesda knew it didn't have the time or the expertise to compete with the best-in-genre shooters out there.

"Bethesda, as a studio, hadn’t done gun combat since they did the Terminator games back in the day," says lead designer Emil Pagliarulo. "So creating gun combat was a real challenge. And gun combat is a lot different from, you know, there are melee weapons in Fallout, but most of the combat in Oblivion is melee. It’s up-close, and most of the combat in Fallout is ranged.

"We knew we were never going to be able to, with the time and resources we had, create gun combat that was on par with Call of Duty or Battlefield. So, that led us to creating the VATS system—the Vault-Tec Automated Targeting System."

One of the happy accidents here is that the original Fallout games had turn-based combat, and there's a little echo of those roots in how VATS interrupts the real-time action to let players make a more calculated decision.

"I remember pitching it and then talking to Emil about it, him coming with, 'This is how it could work,'" says Todd Howard. "It’s sort of like [Star Wars:] Knights of the Old Republic at the time, phase-based combat, you can set things up. And this game, Burnout, which was this racing game where you crash."

Howard here seems to be referring to Burnout 2: Point of Impact specifically, which had a "Crash" mode in which the goal was to accumulate points by causing as much damage as possible in a single crash. Essentially, you drove at a traffic-heavy intersection as fast as possible and, on impact, the game would switch into a slow-mo camera mode that lingered over all the beautiful destruction you'd just caused. And Todd liked that.

"So Crash mode in Burnout with body parts mixed with phase-based [outcomes]", says Howard. "We had this little presentation and, you know, 'but imagine the car parts are, like, eyeballs and guts!' That was part of the 'Okay, this needs to be kind of over the top,' but also, you could stop the game, and your character can make some decisions. And that’s where you felt the stats of your character more than the run-and-gun, which we did a number of things with your character stuff there."

Howard is realistic about where Fallout 3's combat eventually landed, even if VATS was a great saviour. "Frankly, it ended up where people will play it," says Howard. "It doesn’t feel great in your hands because, you know, it’s not the best first-person shooter, even for its time. It’s kind of handicapped as it comes to that, but it still came together really well."

Not everyone is so down on where they ended up with VATS which, for all the jank, is just tremendous fun to let loose in. "It’s my favourite system," says Pely. "I’ve never been great at first-person shooters, and I play exclusively using VATS. And any game now that doesn’t have it, I miss it—I wish I had it."

The cross I bear—probably the heaviest burden borne by a human being in history—is that I'm doomed to annoy basically all the loudest segments of the Fallout fan community. Do I love the direction Bethesda took the series in with FO3 and FO4? Not really. Do I think the studio—and especially FO3 and 4 director Todd Howard—harbours a secret hatred in his heart for the games Bethesda didn't make, or that he's some Johnny-come-lately who probably doesn't even like Fallout 1 and 2? Also no.

How do I know this? Because I feel it in my soul. Also, Howard pointed out he's been a Fallout fan since the first game in Game Informer's recent oral history of the series, so there's that too. "I was at Bethesda at the time when [Fallout 1] came out. It’s my brother who actually played it first. He’s like, 'Have you played Fallout?' And I said, 'I haven’t had the chance yet.' He said, 'You’ve gotta play it.'"

Never one to ignore a clearly marked quest objective, Howard got right on it by, ah, purloining his brother's copy. "I actually stole his disc and never gave it back to him," Howard recalls of his crime.

He loved it, of course. "I loved the vibe of that game," even moreso than other games—tabletop and otherwise—that went for something similar, like Gamma World and Wasteland. "The rules of the world and the vibe of the world, they were just brilliant and so unique."

It's a quirk of fate that Howard can now lavish praise on Fallout's rules for being unique. Originally, the plan for Fallout 1 was to base it on Steve Jackson's Generic Universal Roleplaying System, or GURPS. Alas, Jackson didn't gel with the game's ultraviolence and eventually pulled out, leading FO1's devs to develop the SPECIAL system in its stead.

Howard had the precise opposite reaction to Jackson, and now recalls that he particularly loved "the Vault Boy and the way it would wink at the player in certain ways." Jackson, meanwhile, disliked the juxtaposition of the breezy Vault Boy and the game's violent content. But it was part of the first game's potent admixture that meant Howard "played it to death."

That's a wrap on Amazon's Fallout season 2, folks. The final episode has now aired, tying up some loose ends. But not everything has an answer—there is a third season after all—and many fans of the series are still left wondering what exactly the events of the second season mean for the game's canon.

Major spoilers ahead for Fallout season 2 episode 8 and Fallout: New Vegas

"We talk about it a lot," Todd Howard says in an interview with GamesRadar. "Even when we do games, we talk about, 'Hey, what existed before, and how do you remain respectful to it?' I think what we try to do is tell the story from the perspective of the people in the world, and sometimes you're gonna get conflicting accounts."

One big complaint Fallout fans have levied against the second season is that it kind of messes with the lore and canon of Fallout: New Vegas. You see, in the game, there are four endings depending on which party you side with:

• Caesar's Legion: The Legion drives the NCR out of The Strip back to the Mojave Outpost, bringing a brutal civilisation to the Wasteland.
• New California Republic: The NCR celebrates a second victory at Hoover Dam and establishes control over the Mojave Wasteland and The Strip.
• Yes Man: The Courier drives the NCR and the Legion out of Hoover Dam and secures an independent New Vegas with the help of Yes Man and the securitrons.
• Mr. House: House takes control of the Hoover Dam and drives the NCR and Legion out of New Vegas, regaining control of the city he once ruled.

There's never been any confirmation as to which one of these endings is canon or even the right choice, although every fan holds their own answer in their hearts. But as the Fallout TV show is indeed canon to the wider game series, some believe they've been able to decipher what the true ending is.

At first, it appeared that Mr. House's ending must've been what happened on account of him still being present at the end of the season on his famous TV screen. But now I'm not so sure.

At the start of episode 8, he tells Cooper, "It's good to be alive again. Over the years, my body became something of a target for wandering travellers with something to prove. I've been poisoned, shot, and bludgeoned with a crowbar." Does this mean the Courier did end up putting a bullet in House's head, but he just had a failsafe in case that very thing happened? Perhaps, it certainly seems like something House would take into account and prep for.

The TV series showrunner, Geneva Roberson-Dworet, even mentions in the interview that she "doesn't see it that way" and instead of trying to confirm a single canon ending, they tried to "open the question up of whether they did and also introduce [the Enclave] as one of the most powerful entities in this universe."

"Oftentimes, it's intentional that things are up for interpretation, and we have our own view of things that, you know, this series is gonna go on for a while yet," Howard adds. "But I think it's good to open up those conversations, and you may get history, you may get conflicting reports on how some things went."

I'm sure everyone will come out of the last episode of season 2 with their own opinion as to what it all meant for New Vegas' canon. But in my eyes, I feel as if this confirms the Yes Man ending. Both NCR and the Legion are in a weakened state; neither seems to have control over the dam (although the Legion could've won and then lost strength when the civil war broke out), and The Strip seems to have descended into chaos as a family of Deathclaws has moved in, potentially meaning that the Courier didn't upgrade the securitrons, meaning they couldn't keep the order.

Who knows. It certainly seems that any canonisation of a single ending wasn't intentional. Anywho, we're about to see another fight for New Vegas, as the NCR, and the Legion are both seen converging on the city in the finale, and House is still alive, so I guess we'll figure out who the real winner is sometime next year when season 3 airs.

In a new interview with PressBoxPR, Bethesda veteran and Skyrim's lead designer Bruce Nesmith has gone over his time at the studio, addressing topics like why it wouldn't make sense to switch to Unreal Engine. One of the questions he's asked is about studio head Todd Howard, and how the public perception of him differs from the man he worked with for decades.

"Well, you'll have to tell me what you think the public perception of him is," says Nesmith. "I've known the man for a long time. For me to see the forest for the trees is a little difficult.

"I can tell you candidly that when working at Bethesda up through the Skyrim days, Todd is probably one of the best bosses I've ever had. I can also tell you he's keenly aware of the fact that he is a bottleneck and he works his ass off to not do that. Unfortunately, he doesn't succeed very well."

Nesmith is keen to emphasise that this isn't about mismanagement or "something where he is being an ogre about it. It's part of the culture of the studio and that is extremely difficult to get away from because it's baked into how things are done. Even though he tries desperately not to, he does what he calls seagulling where he swoops in and changes things. It still happens."

Nesmith says this has to be seen in the context of Bethesda’s games, which are obviously large-scale projects with tonnes of moving parts. "When you build games as big as Bethesda games, Todd was very good about saying I care about this and this and this and this, and he spends a lot of time and attention on those things," says Nesmith. "We were left to go our own way on it, not that he wouldn't come in and have to approve the work, but he would give a lot of leeway."

The example he offers is revamping Skyrim's magic system. "I felt it was very old and clichéd and it needed to be redone," says Nesmith. "We had talks about it. [Howard] approved the general idea and he was very involved in that. Then he let me have my head. Not that we didn't have discussions about this particular thing or that but I had a lot of freedom to create that. A lot of freedom.

"It was the same with a lot of the character systems. He was very involved in the perks because he had a vision for what he wanted for that. On the underlying stuff, I had a tremendous amount of freedom to do what I wanted to do.

"I would say that the reputation you just said is both earned and unearned because it's a big studio. It's a big project. We do big projects. We did big projects. You can have both of those things be true at the same time."

Nesmith was giving the interview to promote his Loki Redeemed books, a trilogy of novels he's released after leaving Bethesda. Elsewhere, he discusses his past work on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and speculates about where both series' could go next.

We're on week four of Fallout season 2, and what a ride it's been so far. We've seen classified locations, some old-school Fallout spots, and finally found out one of Fallout's oldest mysteries. But the episode brings something better: Deathclaws.

Fans of the games have been waiting to see a Deathclaw in the series since the first episode aired, and even though we didn't even get a whiff of one in the first season, there was a small teaser in the post-credits scene as we saw a Deathclaw skull on the road to New Vegas.

"We didn't do Deathclaws in season 1," Todd Howard tells me. "We wanted to make sure we'd spend the right amount of time to get them right. And really focus on them as a story element, not just another creature.

"But these beasts that are, you know, they're terrifying. And you know what Cooper Howard's experience with that was like, even before he became the Ghoul, with the Deathclaws. Really, really interesting combination." We do now know what Coop's experience with these monsters was like, and let me tell you, the wait was worth it because boy, was that first Deathclaw scene sick.

Fallout season 2 episode 4 starts with a flashback—not an unexpected occurrence—but instead of seeing good ol' Coop in a snazzy suit lurking around Vault Tec, he's in entirely different attire, power armor, and is patrolling the frozen night of Alaska.

We'd already heard bits and bobs about Coop's adventures fighting in the T-45 power armor, namely that its inefficiencies caused a lot of needless deaths during the Battle of Anchorage. But this time, we actually get to see his antics in a flashback.

After telling one of his friends to retreat, Coop decides to investigate a fiery wreckage where he can hear some mysterious and very ominous growls coming from. His investigations are rudely interrupted when three soldiers from the People's Liberation Army of China start shooting at him. During the gunfight, Coop's T-45 suit sparks out, leaving him defenceless on the floor.

The soldiers approach him, talking about how he looks like a sad, defenceless turtle stranded on its back, but before they can put a bullet between his eyes, the first Deathclaw we've seen in the show emerges out of the destroyed facility and comes to his rescue, or at least attacks the soldiers.

They may look like horrors that were created by the Wasteland and its radioactive atmosphere, but in actuality, these monsters are all American-made. Created in labs, Deathclaws were originally meant to be a super soldier that could carry out missions too difficult for soldiers or support the T-45 units. They only managed to get loose during the Great War as military labs were damaged beyond repair.

Unable to move, all Coop can do is lie there and watch as a Deathclaw attacks the Chinese soldiers. It does give him a sniff, but decides the juice isn't worth the squeeze with this one, so it leaves him be and wanders off into the forest, ready to plague future Fallout players.

There's a type of myth that survives not because there's any evidence for it, but because it flatters the preconceptions of a particular group of people. Take the notion that Todd Howard, head honcho over at Bethesda Game Studios, clearly seethes with resentment about how much Obsidian knocked Fallout: New Vegas out of the park. Is there evidence for this? Nope—quite the opposite, actually—but it endures because it jibes with the worldview of certain Fallout fans who see Bethesda as perverting the series.

Regardless, here's one more bit of evidence for the 'Howard doesn't hate Obsidian' pile: in a chat with Game Informer (via GamesRadar), Howard said that, when it came to a non-Bethesda studio making a Fallout game, it was Obsidian or bust.

"They were the only choice," said Howard. "They had done something similar with Knights of the Old Republic 2, and we knew them really well." In 2004, Obsidian put out Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2—a follow-up to BioWare's KOTOR 1 that more than a few people (myself included) came to regard as their favourite of the two games, and that despite the fact Obsidian had barely over a year to make the whole thing.

So Bethesda knew Obsidian had form for doing great work in other people's series, which was just why Howard wanted to nab the studio for New Vegas. After all, the alternative was Fallout lying fallow: "We knew we were going onto Skyrim, the franchise was back, but we knew there was going to be a long break until Fallout 4—how can we keep this going?"

You give it to Obsidian, of course, both because of all the factors already listed and because the studio had "Fallout DNA," in the words of New Vegas' lead creative designer John Gonzalez. "There were people who had worked on the original title, and then also the second game," who were able to create "a very Obsidian-focused experience" that was "all about allowing the player to have tremendous amounts of narrative impact, narrative control."

It really paid off quite well. New Vegas is a classic, having sold over 11 million copies by 2015 and, as a result, no doubt made quite a bit of money for Bethesda itself. If I were Howard, then not only would I not resent Obsidian for Fallout: New Vegas, I'd be trying to get it to make me another one.

I loved almost every aspect of Fallout's first season, but one element that topped all else was how the Wasteland was imagined. Opting for mostly practical sets meant that all the locations that the first season ventured through looked just as I had imagined they should, and with the second season venturing to New Vegas, it made me even more excited to see what was in store. So far, I haven't been disappointed.

We've seen numerous key locations in just the first couple of episodes, like Vault 24 and the Starlight Drive-In. And now, in the second episode, we've had a magnificent look at Area 51, as it was unveiled after the Brotherhood got its hands on cold fusion.

The showrunners again proved how dedicated they are to depicting the Wasteland with care, a fact that executive producer Todd Howard raised during my interview: "I always view the biggest character being the world. I think everybody involved with the show has taken such amazing care to treat locations with this obsessive authenticity. And I think that's what people like, and it's all practical, or most of it, right? More so than other shows or movies.

"They built so much of it. You walk on set, and it's just there, and all the little details, the journals, you can open them, and the writings are in there. They get the little bits right, and they get the large-scale things right. It's just really wonderful."

Area 51 isn't an exclusive Fallout location, obviously, but it is a place of interest. It was mentioned in the first game and was almost included as a location in Fallout 2. It's said to house alien technology, including a flying saucer, as well as a couple of Zetan aliens who would later escape the facility and retreat to Skull Canyon. We now also know that in the 2290s it was controlled by the Brotherhood of Steel, although it's not really clear how long this lasted.

Area 51 is just one example of a new impressive practical set this season—all the trailers have, of course, been teasing New Vegas.

Probably the biggest draw of the second season, New Vegas isn't just an iconic and much-loved game; it's also a brilliantly fun location that absolutely screams Fallout with its flashy lights and worn-down bright colours masking the rough underbelly of the city. But being so close to players' hearts meant that the stakes were higher here; the show needed to get this set in particular right.

"In season one, you're seeing vaults and stuff, but they weren't the particular ones that you personally walk through," Howard says. "New Vegas is such an iconic location in Fallout, and you've experienced it, right? The players have been there, so I think they just did, again, an incredible job. Howard Cummings, the production designer, and his whole team. I saw New Vegas as it was being built, and I saw it when it was done.

"There'd be a thing—and it's a pretty big set, like, real buildings—with a building, [Cummings] would say, 'I'm gonna move that building.' You're gonna move the buildings? 'Yeah, it's no problem.' It was as simple as: we're gonna move a building. We're gonna widen the shot. Like… okay."

It sounds like a lot of effort, because it is, but the results show on screen. There's a very thin line between flattery and coming off as gimmicky, but the TV show manages to nail it, and that's largely thanks to how seriously the actors, set designers, writers, and everyone else who works on the show take the source material.

"I got to go on a number of sets," Howard continues. "It's really just, I can't explain to people how much goes into it when they're on location. So you're out in the desert, somewhere outside, beyond the hills of LA, and there's this dirt road, and there's this little security cabin, and then you come across this town that's just been built, right? Outside of the town are these trucks with all the power, the infrastructure for this new town. And then there's the trailers where people live, and where the food is done, and all these things. It all kind of homes in, and they have a camera in someone's face. This is a huge operation just to shoot this person at this moment. The care that goes into it is awesome."

The first episode of Fallout season 2 is out today, with the show releasing weekly episodes until early February (when we'll no doubt get a ridiculous cliffhanger before waiting another year for the next season). As part of the show's marketing various grandees have been doing the interview rounds, including Todd Howard, who's now served up the merest sliver of information about how the show will tie in to future games in the series.

But first, it's time to butter up executive producer Jonathan Nolan. Bethesda execs have previously spoken about how a Fallout adaptation could've come much sooner, except Howard didn't want the usual "videogame directors" to come in and make a hash of it. But Nolan, co-writer on the likes of Westworld, Interstellar, and the Dark Knight trilogy?

"It turned out he was a huge fan of Fallout," Howard told the BBC's Newsbeat, adding that the two have become "very close friends" working on the show. "Everyone involved is on the same page with how they want to treat it with authenticity."

That authenticity is what led to an early decision that the TV show would be "canon" within the Fallout universe. Bethesda vet Emil Pagliarulo says this simply means that "everything that happens in the show happened in the games, or will happen in the games." Erm… ignore that shack filled with hundreds of human skulls, mmkay?

"It's really about getting the tone right, but they were very respectful of where we wanted to take it," says Pagliarulo, mentioning the odd "late-night text" asking if something was "canonically right" before shooting. "It was always a back-and-forth. It's really fun."

The flipside of such an approach being that, outside of Bethesda's ongoing support and expansions for Fallout 76, there hasn't been a new Fallout game in 9 years, and Bethesda's current focus is The Elder Scrolls 6. Howard is asked whether the show will have an impact on Fallout 5.

"In short, yes," says Howard. "Fallout 5 will be existing in a world where the stories and events of the show happened or are happening.

"We are taking that into account."

Good thing or bad thing? It's hard to tell and depends on the approach. To be clear, I think the Fallout show is absolutely great. Oblique references and nods to what goes on in it seem like a good idea, but I'm not sure anyone really wants Lucy or the Ghoul turning up in Fallout 5 (others will feel differently). But the game feels like it's many years away, so we'll have to wait and see.

As for the show's impact on the games and attracting new players, our man says they're past that stage now.

"There's still so many people that won't play a game," says Howard. "I think that's getting better but there's still people who are intimidated.

"They still get to experience Fallout and I think that's really important because they're now equal fans of the world."

Fallout Season 2's first episode premieres December 17, and this time around focuses on New Vegas. The good news is, per PCG's Jody Macgregor, it's great so far.

Bethesda director and executive producer Todd Howard has said he won't be making a cameo in the Fallout TV show, despite plenty of opportunities to do so. The Toddster's appearance or otherwise has been speculated on ever since the show was announced, but Howard says he's more comfortable in the background.

The topic came up in a recent interview with IGN, and Howard was pretty clear it's a 'no' from him:

"They've offered me a whole bunch, even in Season 1," says Howard. "I was going to be in the sort of Dr. Strangelove Vault-Tec room, where they're talking [about] all the experiments, and some other things. I think I'm best behind the camera.”

Spoiler alert for Season 1, obviously. This scene is one of the revelations that occurs towards the end of that season, and is a flashback to how Vault-Tec executives and various other business big-hitters divide the various vault experiments between themselves before they agree to drop the bombs. Having Howard in there would've seemed like a pretty neat nod to me, but perhaps an executive from a company owned by Microsoft participating in a corporate carve-up to humanity's detriment would've been too on-the-nose.

The interviewer pushes Howard on whether he'd consider a more throwaway appearance, such as being one of the extras blasted away by Walton Goggins' The Ghoul.

"I said no to all of them so far," says Howard. "I don't want to distract. Everyone goes, 'oh, there's Todd!'"

Well maybe not everyone, but fair point. Asked if he fancied being Bethesda's Stan Lee, Howard simply says "not at this time."

This isn't brought out explicitly at any point, but a minor awkwardness here would be that Howard is not the creator of Fallout (nor has ever claimed such). Howard is obviously one of the most important figures in what Fallout has now become, and his role can hardly be diminished, but Fallout's co-creators are Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky.

To me that makes the Stan Lee comparison a little bit of a stretch, though your mileage may differ. Lee made a cameo in pretty much every Marvel film made until the latter years of his life, but in that case had co-created many of the characters and extended universe, as well as leading Marvel creatively for a lifetime before it hit cinematic gold. To put all controversies about credit to one side for a moment, it is indisputable that so much of what made Marvel Marvel was Lee's fizzing inventiveness and seemingly endless imagination.

So however Howard may rationalise it, I can't help but feel any unwillingness may have some of that beneath the surface: which honestly speaks well of him. Howard can't really avoid being presented as the 'face' of Bethesda's various mega-franchises, and deserves all the garlands and praise there is, but he can avoid unnecessary fan service.

Fallout Season 2's first episode premieres December 17, and this time around focuses on New Vegas, with one episode a week releasing until early February. The good news is, according to PCG's Jody Macgregor, it's pretty great so far.

Just a month after Bethesda creative honcho Todd Howard said The Elder Scrolls 6 "is the everyday thing" that developers at the studio are now working on, he's said it again in a chat with Game Informer. But this time, he added one very important note: It's goin' good.

"It’s progressing really well," Howard told GI. "The majority of the studio’s on [TES]6, but I’ll say this: We always overlap. So, we’re very used to overlapping development. And we have long pre-productions on things so that we feel good about them. And it’s a process. We all wish it went a little bit faster—or a lot faster—but it’s a process that we want to get right."

It's true: We all do wish that, not just for the next Elder Scrolls adventure but videogames in general. But Elder Scrolls 6 holds a special place in our hearts in that regard, because Bethesda announced it on June 10, 2018, which for the benefit of anyone without a calendar was seven goddamn years ago, and we've heard precisely zip about it since except occasional acknowledgement that yes, a new Elder Scrolls game will be released. Someday.

I mean, this is literally still all we know about it:

That's why people tend to leap at little tidbits like this. Tiny though they may be, it's something, and that's more than we've since the existence of The Elder Scrolls 6 was first confirmed. To put things in perspective, that happened at E3 (remember when that was a thing?) the year before Keanu Reeves made us all swoon with "You're breathtaking!"

But Howard wasn't the only Bethesda high-up to comment on the situation this time around. Studio designer director Emil Pagliarulo also chimed in to say "it's going," and to remind everyone that delayed is temporary, but suck is forever.

"What do fans really want? Do they want a game that comes out before it should and doesn’t meet their expectations? Or do they want the turkey that is in the oven for long enough to be delicious when it finally comes out of the oven?" Pagliarulo asked rhetorically. "That’s what I think people are going to want. So, we’re going to take our time and as long as it needs to be to be great."

Studio director Angela Browder also took a moment to crank up the hype machine: "The Elder Scrolls VI is this endless set of possibilities that is really, really exciting as a developer, but really, really exciting as someone who really likes to think about how far everything has come in our industry. It’s gonna be dope."

I certainly hope so and I'm absolutely looking forward to it, but TES6 has some hurdles to overcome. Personally, I was tired of the formula by the time of Skyrim (the first mainline Elder Scrolls game since Arena that I haven't finished), but the bigger issue is Bethesda's previous release, Starfield, a decent Elder-Scrolls-in-space style game that fell far short of expectations. That relative flop surely gave Bethesda an awful lot to think about, and may very well be playing a role in our long wait for what comes next.

The Fallout TV show returns for Season 2 next week, with the series opting for a weekly cadence that goes right into February (fine by me: I've still got Stranger Things to finish). Executive producer Jonathan Nolan has already confirmed season three will begin shooting next summer, which just shows you the kind of faith Amazon has in this as a long-term project, and when PCG spoke to some of Bethesda's most senior Fallout team Nolan was a name that popped up frequently.

PCG's Ted Litchfield recently spoke to a number of Bethesda worthies, including design director Emil Pagliarulo, and a common theme among all of them was admiration for the quality of the show. In most circumstances you'd put this down to company people saying the right thing about a company product, but the thing is that the Fallout TV show's first season was great. I ended up watching it with my partner, who isn't exactly into sprawling brown RPGs, and by the end she was enraptured by the depth and weirdness of this take on the post-apocalypse.

"It's really fascinating that the show is part of our lore," says Pagliarulo. "It's connected to the games, it's by having the show set, I think it's nine years after Fallout 4. There's enough time that has passed that there's some leeway, but it's definitely still the same universe. And the same wasteland, just nine years on.

"It's amazing to see my friend's mom, who's like, 75⁠—she loves the show. Someone who never played a video game in her life and has no interest in that, it's drawn in people that would never be associated with it or exposed to it. It's a really amazing thing. The real reason for that is because⁠, credit to Todd Howard, we could have made a Fallout movie or Fallout TV show a decade ago⁠—we had certainly been asked."

Here's where Nolan enters, who roughly a decade ago would have been working on the first (and best) season of Westworld, an inspired re-imagining of the Michael Crichton classic. I suspect the offers for Fallout adaptations would stretch back even further than that, but the issue was how the property was perceived by Hollywood, which has only very recently gotten its act together with videogame movies.

"Hollywood, at the time, they wanted to throw the 'videogame directors' at us," says Pagliarulo. "We don't want the guy who makes videogame movies. We want the best director, the best showrunner possible. And it wasn't until Jonathan Nolan and his company had their pitch. This is the guy who wrote the Batman movies. This is the guy who made Westworld. This is the guy we want. A lot of it was waiting to find the right partner, and not just doing it because you could."

I should say Nolan co-wrote both the Dark Knight Trilogy and Westworld (with Christopher Nolan and Lisa Joy respectively), and of course there are many more writers involved. But Pagliarulo's point stands: there's an alternate universe where someone like Uwe Boll ended up doing a Fallout movie in 2010, and one can only imagine how much that would've stunk out the joint.

During a recent event for the second season of the Fallout TV show that premiers later this month, Bethesda's Todd Howard joined the press junket fray to talk about the lasting influence of New Vegas, skipping the "war never changes" refrain, and—in an interview with Eurogamer—the use of AI in game development.

"I view it as a tool. Creative intention comes from human artists, number one," Howard said. "But I think we look at it as a tool for, is there a way we can use it to help us go through some iterations that we do ourselves faster?"

As most recently demonstrated by publisher Running With Scissors' thermonuclear 48-hour Postal flameout, AI remains a hotly contested topic in the games industry. Some think we'd better all just get used to it, like Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, who insists that "AI will be involved in nearly all future production." Others have a less enthusiastic view, like Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, who likened it to a tech equivalent of mad cow disease being pushed by "a certain group of people, who maybe aren't fully-rounded humans."

Howard, it seems, falls somewhere in the middle alongside figures like Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, who in October said he expected AI will "probably be able to create a bunch of efficiency," but won't ultimately "recreate or create genius."

Bethesda, Howard said, isn't using AI for "generating things." But the studio and publisher considers it as merely the latest addition to evolving development practices and standards.

"We are always working on our toolset for how we build worlds or check things. I think if you go back 10 years ago, that version of Photoshop, you wouldn't want to go back to that version of Photoshop," Howard said. "That's our view on it. But we want to protect the artistry. The human intention of it is what makes our stuff special."

It could be tempting to ask how generative AI could "protect the artistry" when it often relies on bodies of training data that incorporates—or "steals," depending on your inclination—art without the permission of its creators. But it's possible that Howard's referencing applications of machine learning and automation tech that are now being colloquially lumped in with LLM and gen-AI software, despite predating the recent AI boom.

The widespread muddying of what is and is not AI is one of the more maddening symptoms of generative AI's emergence, which drove our Wes Fenlon to ask back in October "at what point on that slippery slope do the tools that aid efficiency begin to cause erosion" of the creative workforce it's ostensibly assisting?

Still, even if Bethesda is somehow evading Microsoft's internal AI mandates, it's interesting that Howard compared non-AI workflows with choosing a 10-year old version of Photoshop, because opting for an outdated version of Photoshop is something that artists have been doing for over a decade. In 2013, Adobe transitioned its Creative Suite to a monthly subscription pricing model. It was a widely reviled decision, and Adobe's preexisting reputation for bloating Photoshop with features that often went ignored meant many users were more than happy to stick with their trusty Photoshop CS6.

Many never went on to upgrade, even after Adobe made CS6 unavailable for purchase in 2017 and ended ongoing support. Using CS6 now requires registry edits and compatibility fixes on current versions of Windows, so those numbers have dwindled as users grudgingly transitioned to a CC subscription or different art software. But you can still find CS6 being used and recommended by artists who are uninterested in the tools added to more recent iterations of Photoshop.

In short, Photoshop is maybe not the metaphor I'd choose for clear toolset improvement. Then again, if I had to name a piece of software I could confidently say has improved in the last decade, I'd have to think longer than I'd like. Is that good?

Fallout is a lot of things, but it is, at its core, satire—a long and exhaustive example of where cold war-era browbeating could've led us: A world blasted, irradiated, and filled with Deathclaws. The furries might be excited about that last bit, but I like my insides un-gouged out, thank you very much.

Speaking to PCG's own Elie Gould, executive producer at Bethesda, Todd Howard—who you might know as the guy responsible for The Elder Scrolls and later entrants in the Fallout series, sans New Vegas—says that the dystopic, serious elements are "key to how the world of Fallout became what it is."

He tells Elie that "it's a check back on our own world, a cautionary tale in some respects. I think the world of Fallout that really makes it special is that world before the bombs fall, right? And that's what separates it from other post-apocalyptic fiction."

That pre-nuke world being flooded with a lot of retro-futurism built on nuclear power: Power that whipped up the world governments into such a frenzy that they dropped a buncha bombs about it, though according to the original lead, China apparently started it.

The result? Man-made horrors beyond comprehension, ghouls with sloughing flesh, cockroaches the size of dogs, and a lot of really good music. Howard's right in asserting that the optimistic Stepford smile of a society perpetually on the brink of war is what makes Fallout so lively—since that wartime spirit endures like an echo in a world completely unsuited to it.

"You mentioned it being serious, and that's one thing that's really tricky that we talk a lot about, is tone. You have to have these serious, really hard moral choices and moments. And then the next scene, you're being goofy and blowing heads up."

Basically, balancing the comedic satire of the pre-war world with the bloody horrors of a post apocalypse: "Having that change, and having the actors be able to do both, really, is a trick that sort of makes the whole thing tick."

It's a balance so difficult, in fact, that for a moment Howard—and the folks making the Fallout TV show—weren't even sure if the iconic line "War, War Never Changes" was too goofy for the silver screen. Luckily, they erred on the side of leaning into the spirit of the thing.

I've built a solid 60% of my career on ribbing Todd Howard, but make no mistake, I quite like the guy. I think we have diametrically opposed tastes when it comes to "things we like in Bethesda games," but everything I've ever seen from him makes Howard seem generally pretty likeable and self-aware.

But that's all gone out the window now, because he's picked the objectively wrong Fallout faction to join.

In a chat with our Elie Gould ahead of the release of Fallout season 2, the conversation alighted on the topic of what faction Howard would sign up with if he happened to wake up in the Wasteland tomorrow. His answer? The Brotherhood of Steel.

"I usually say the Brotherhood," Howard mused, "because they have the best toys. I feel like I could use some power armour." Which, alright, fair enough. Being ensconced inside a bipedal tank probably would be quite useful in the grim, post-apocalyptic future.

However, I'm afraid it's still the wrong answer. The Brotherhood is a bunch of ren faire nerds with guns. You know who's really cool? The Kings—New Vegas' cabal of Elvis impersonators who are also kind of an armed gang. If the posters are anything to go by, it looks like they've all become ghouls and will put in an appearance in Fallout season 2.

I think Howard could pull it off perfectly. Picture him in full Jailhouse Rock mode, practising his stage gyrations while continuing to sometimes say the words "The Elder Scrolls 6." It all just makes sense. Alas, apparently he's going with the laser rifle guys.

Howard isn't uncritical of Fallout's metallic monks, mind you. "Like all factions, they have their issues with how they see the world, but they have the best hardware. So yeah, I would go that route."

Pretty mercenary of you, Todd. You know who doesn't have issues with how they see the world? The Elvis guys.

Everyone loves a good rivalry; Rocky vs Apollo, Mr Krabs vs Plankton. But sometimes fans can get a little over the top when imagining such competition, as is apparently the case with Bethesda and Obsidian.

For the longest time, some fans held the idea that Bethesda wasn't a huge fan of Obsidian or its work on Fallout: New Vegas, because of how many Fallout fans hold New Vegas up to be the best game in the series. But Bethesda executive producerTodd Howard wants to assure everyone that there's no bad blood between the studios.

"When we went to do [New Vegas], we were coming off of Fallout 3," Howard tells me. "We knew we were going to do Skyrim. We know the folks at Obsidian well, love their work, and so we reached out to them and said, 'Hey, would you like to do this? We see something else coming off of Fallout 3'."

And they were right, between Bethesda releasing Fallout 3 and 4, Obsidian snuck in New Vegas, one of the greatest Fallout games—and really just games—around. But it was also something of a one-and-done. While people still talk about New Vegas, its story and locations haven't really been revisited, until now.

Following on from a successful opening season, the Fallout TV Show's second season takes the main characters to the iconic casinos and Deathclaw-ridden deserts of New Vegas. Characters also visit numerous places of interest that players will recognise from the game, many of which Bethesda pointed the showmakers towards.

Howard recalled visiting the New Vegas set and just how impressive it all was, but also mentioned to me that Bethesda devs weren't the only ones to enjoy seeing New Vegas in the flesh: "Huge respect to the folks at Obsidian. Had them out to the set to see this, and they've had just an incredible year, if you look at the year they've had."

Bethesda isn't upset that some of you like New Vegas more than the other games; it did invite Obsidian to make it after all. "This is what we asked them to do, right? And they just did an incredible job on New Vegas."

At the end of the day, Obsidian's win is Bethesda's win when it comes to New Vegas, as all it did was work to strengthen the series of games and beef out the lore of the Wasteland. But Howard does admit that he kind of understands where fans are coming from.

"I think fans debate what their favourite one is, which is understandable," Howard says. "I think it's great that you can have a lot of factions and the fans say, 'Oh, I like one or two or three or four, or Vegas or 76' now, and so I think that's really healthy for a franchise where people can say which one is their favourite."

The most iconic line in Fallout, the line that has kicked off every single Fallout game, usually spoken in the dulcet tones of the narrator Ron Perlman, almost didn't make the cut for the Fallout TV show.

This wasn't for any insidious reason or because the showrunners didn't like the sound of it—it was actually to preserve its reputation. "We talked about it and decided we weren't sure we were even going to have it, because it can feel a little forced," Todd Howard tells me. "So we're like, well, let's see if there's an earned moment."

Thankfully, there was certainly an earned moment. Barb Howard is the first person in the series to utter the line 'War never changes' while sat in Vault Tec during a meeting with other high-powered and money-hungry execs. Then Cooper, who is secretly listening in to his wife's conversation, repeats this line 200 years later at the end of the first season.

It's not only a poignant moment for fans of the games who know just how important this line is to the core of Fallout's narrative, but it's made all the more meaningful by Cooper's own past experiences.

It's the line that broke his marriage apart, completely changing how he looked at and thought of his wife, very likely being the reason why he finds himself separated from his family for 200 years. But Cooper also knows that war never changes, he's experienced it first hand. He fought in Alaska pre-bombs dropping—something that is also explored more in the second season—and has continued to fight in the Wasteland for two centuries. So the line was certainly earned.

"It wasn't like we had to have it, to be honest," Howard continues. "You might think, Oh, you have to have this. Well, only if it makes sense, because it can sound cliché. And if you ask the actors who had to say it, we didn't tell them it was an iconic line. Walton didn't know when he said it. To keep it authentic."

Walton Goggins, who plays Cooper Howard and The Ghoul, has already admitted that he had no prior knowledge of the line 'War never changes' or how integral it is to the DNA of Fallout. But did admit that he was all the better for it as it ensured there wasn't any pressure around delivering the line.

"I thought Graham and Geneva had written one of the best lines of dialogue I've been given the opportunity to say over the course of my career," Goggins explained. "Alas, I was wrong. I didn’t ask, and they didn’t tell me. And I'm glad I didn’t."

I'm sure Goggins could have pulled it off even if he did know the weight of the line, but all I'm really thankful for is that it was not only included in the show, but it was properly executed. This kind of respect for the source material is one of the reasons why the Fallout TV adaptation works so well.

I love stealth games, and I love playing a sneaky guy in bigger RPGs: Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Cyberpunk. You best believe that, when given the option, I'm crouch walking for 80 hours straight. I'm not alone in that preference either: The Stealth Archer in Skyrim, which plays exactly how it sounds, is a memetic, fan-favorite playstyle in Bethesda's smash hit RPG, with guides, analysis, and love letters galore on YouTube and Reddit.

Being obsessed with stealth in games, particularly Bethesda RPGs, I've always wondered about the Pagliarulo Connection: Bethesda's design director, who has contributed to all of the studio's games since Oblivion, got his development start at Looking Glass Studios, the legendary '90s developer of Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

Pagliarulo in particular designed two of Thief 2: The Metal Age's most fun levels: Life of the Party, a swanky gala infiltration that begins on the open rooftops of the surrounding district, and Precious Cargo, a pirate's cove hiding a steampunk submarine you have to stow away on. I got the chance to talk to Pagliarulo for an upcoming PC Gamer print retrospective about Bethesda's work on the Fallout series, and I just had to ask about how Looking Glass influenced his work.

"The two years I spent at Looking Glass were amazing, it was incredible," said Pagliarulo. "It was almost like grad school for me. I call it my Good Will Hunting phase. I didn't look like Matt Damon, but I was the kid from South Boston with all the MIT nerds thrown into the deep end, and it was just such an education.

"They were the best people, and they were so patient, and just so in love with what they were doing, so incredibly creative."

The Boston-based Looking Glass (initially Blue Sky Productions) was founded by Origin Systems (Ultima, Wing Commander) developer Paul Neurath, and drew on MIT graduates for its first staff members⁠—something that helps explain its games' cerebral sensibilities and exacting simulations. In another timeline, id cofounder John Romero might have helped start Looking Glass, while Pagliarulo, before becoming a developer, was editor of gaming website Adrenaline Vault.

"Thief was the first game that I played with headphones on in a dark room. I love that game so much, and so it was impossible for me not to bring that stuff over," Pagliarulo said. "In fact, one of the first things I did when I was hired here, Todd asked me, 'Hey, what do you think about the stealth in our games and stuff? Can you write something up?'

"So I did an analysis. I wrote up a big document of stealth in 20 different games, how they compared, and what we could do for stealth in Oblivion."

Speaking as a massive loser, I would love to read that stealth games analysis, which Pagliarulo said might still be tucked away in his office somewhere. One of the 20 games in question, according to Pagliarulo, was Hidden and Dangerous, a 1999 tactical shooter where you parachute behind German lines in 1941 to get up to assorted military hijinks and criminal mischief. It's actually still available for purchase on both Steam and GOG.

While Skyrim is where the Stealth Archer blew up, and Morrowind and Daggerfall had stealth systems, Oblivion is where the playstyle started being fun. The 2006 RPG had consistent sound and line of sight rules the player could account for, clear indication of whether you were hidden or not, as well as stealth-focused Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood quests that took advantage of the new system.

"The thing is, Thief is a deep [game], a lot of depth, not a lot of width. It focuses on one thing: It's a stealth simulation." Pagliarulo said of the distinction between Thief and The Elder Scrolls. "Bethesda's games have been accused of being 'an inch deep and a mile wide'⁠—which I think is an insult, honestly, because I think there's a lot of depth there⁠—but we do provide a lot of different systems.

"Because we're a simulation, we do offer crime and stealth, and a lot of games don't offer that, so we were like, how do we get it as good as it can be, but still have time to do all these other systems and stuff. So it's that balancing act."

That does get at the heart of what makes sneaking in Bethesda games special, even compared to more intricate stealth sims: It's fun to have a choice, and to define the identity of your Orc or Dark Elf or whoever in opposition to the dozens of other characters they could have been. And it's a balm to my soul to see the DNA of the long-departed and never financially successful Looking Glass end up in some of the most popular videogames of all time.

"I'm really happy with where we've landed on [stealth gameplay] over the years," Pagliarulo concluded. "And I mean, look at the Stealth Archer⁠—the Stealth Archer in Skyrim is proof of that. I think it's just so rewarding to see those characters. So, yeah, the lessons I learned [at Looking Glass] have been with me my whole life, 100%."

It's been a whole dang decade since Fallout 4 launched, so long that the world has slipped significantly closer to nuclear Armageddon than was the case when Bethesda's post-apocalyptic RPG stepped out from Vault 111. The anniversary has got Bethesda creative chief Todd Howard in a reflective mood, and he's revealed some interesting details about the creation of the game and what the RPG maestros learned from it.

One of the main things Bethesda learned is that cinematic, Mass Effect-style dialogue systems are a bad fit for Bethesda games. In an interview with GQ, Howard was asked what he thought the best game he'd worked on is. Responding diplomatically, Howard pointed to several features of multiple games, while also mentioning that some things "didn't resonate" with players. After a bit of coaxing, Howard revealed that Fallout 4's dialogue system was one of them.

"We spent forever on the dialogue system in Fallout 4," Howard said. "'How do we do an interactive conversation in an interesting way? How do we make that gamey? But it really did not resonate. It was also hard on our designers to write that way."

Elaborating on why the dialogue system didn't resonate, Howard explained that it conflicted with players' imaginations. "Players want to role-play more and we had a voiced protagonist. The actors were phenomenal, but a lot of players were like: 'That's not the voice I hear in my head'".

This was something PCG alumnus Andy Kelly noticed at the time. Shortly after Fallout 4 launched, Kelly noted that Fallout 4 was a good game but a bad RPG, highlighting the limitations of the dialogue system in particular. "The restrictions of the new dialogue wheel and the addition of a voiced protagonist have stripped away any chance to give your character a distinct personality," he wrote back in 2015. "The single voice on offer is so obviously tailored to fit a generic-looking white guy—like the one they used in the E3 demo—that it sounds weird coming out of anyone else."

This is likely why Bethesda swapped back to a more traditional dialogue system for Starfield, though as has been discussed frequently, Bethesda's latest RPG has its own array of issues. Hopefully Bethesda has learned as many lessons from that development as it works on its next game—The Elder Scrolls 6—which Howard mentioned that Bethesda "did a big play test" for only yesterday in the same interview.

Bethesda has all sorts of irons in the fire right now. There's the second season of the Fallout TV show on the horizon, a 10th-anniversary version of Fallout 4, whatever's happening with Starfield, and Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online MMO stuff bubbling away contentedly in the background.

But more likely than not, all you want to know is what's going on with The Elder Scrolls 6. Well, great news: in a recent chat with GQ, Bethesda big boss Todd Howard said that "The Elder Scrolls 6 is the everyday thing" that its devs are working on right now.

Howard says likes to have a "break" between Elder Scrolls games—to avoid them becoming rote and predictable—but admits that while "It’s also good for an audience to have a break—The Elder Scrolls has been too long." Boy, has it—it has been, for those not keeping track, a full 14 years since Skyrim first released, which was itself a mere five years after Oblivion.

Howard says he recently oversaw a "three-hour play test of The Elder Scrolls 6" for fans who raised money for the Make-A-Wish foundation to get a character made (that'd be the UESP editors who recently visited Bethesda to create a memorial character for community member Loranna Pyrel). "We spent an hour-and-a-half or so for them to tell us about their character, talk about the game, about why they love The Elder Scrolls, what they want to see from a new one," said Howard. "I think we’re aligned."

Does that mean, then, that TES 6 is right around the corner? Ah, well, no. Howard cautions us that the game is "still a long way off," but he does say something a little tantalising.

"I like to just announce stuff and release it. My perfect version—and I’m not saying this is going to happen—is that it's going to be a while and then, one day, the game will just appear." You know, a bit like Bethesda did with Oblivion Remastered earlier this year. "You might say that was a test run," says Howard. "It worked out well."

Now, I don't believe for one second that Microsoft would let a brand new TES game release without a massive marketing blitz beforehand, but maybe Howard's preferences will make that period a little shorter than it usually is. Maybe, when we find ourselves in the thick of the run-up to a sixth Elder Scrolls, we'll be shocked to find that era only lasts months, not years.

In the build-up to Skyblivion's release Bethesda has been rather normal. It's not only let the modders carry on with their competing Oblivion remaster without any legal qualms, but has also been quite supportive—handing over Oblivion remaster keys and inviting them over to Bethesda HQ for tea and sweet rolls.

The trip actually started as something rather impromptu with the project lead for Skyblivion giving Bethesda a call just because he was in the area. "I was gonna go to Boston for Pax East," Skyblivion lead Rebelzize tells PCG's Joshua Wolens in an interview. "When I go there for work, I also take a few days of vacation, and this year, I was going to go to Washington and New York. Washington is kind of close to Bethesda, so I just asked, like, 'Hey, I'm going to be in the area. Could we come and say hello?'" And that was all that was needed for the Skyblivion team to be invited over to Bethesda for the day.

"They invited me to the office," Rebelzize continues. "They were fantastic. I didn't see a single person that didn't look like they absolutely loved being there. I spoke to a lot of people that worked on Oblivion, that worked on Skyrim, and that worked on Fallout. People that have been there for years and years and years."

But it wasn't just a facade or a PR stunt, at least it didn't feel that way to Rebelzize. They ended up chatting about all things Oblivion and modding for hours: "We arrived at 11 am and we didn't leave until 6 pm. People had been going home for a while, and we just kept geeking out.

"It's so fun to be able to talk with people that have used the tools that are on your level, like you use all these terms that no one ever understands, but these people understood, and they had so many interesting questions that no one ever asks."

The aspect that the devs at Bethesda were most interested in was how the Skyblivion modders got on with the tools they had, and whether things could be improved in any way. "Bethesda is a company that has a really strong connection to mods and modding, and the folks there were really interested in hearing our perspective," Rebelzize says. "How we experienced using those tools, what kind of issues we run into, and what we'd like to see in terms of documentation."

A wish that Rebelzize did share was how he missed the video series that would accompany the release of a creation kit, as they did with Skyrim: "They had one of the designers make a dungeon with us, stuff like that is something I would love to see for every game that they make."

But a day at Bethesda wouldn't be complete without an appearance from Todd Howard. It's clear that Howard is no stranger to talking someone's ear off or just wanting to be really involved. Nevertheless, Rebelzize was still surprised by just how enthusiastic he was.

"He could have stopped by for 10 minutes, shook some hands and then walked off," Rebelzize says. "He's in a position to do that, but he was genuinely so interested in talking to every single person that was there and about what they do in real life, and what they do in the project. It was just a really fantastic culture all around. There's a lot of lot of passion and love in that company."

With Oblivion Remastered sucking up everyone's time, there's a whole new generation of people getting to enjoy Cyrodiil's weird NPCs—and for us Oblivion vets, it's a chance to reconnect with some old pals. There was so much to love about Bethesda's gargantuan RPG back in 2006, but the vast array of eccentric characters wandering around the world, doing their own thing, really set it apart from the previous Elder Scrolls.

This was down to Radiant AI, which Bethesda has continued to use in all of its RPGs since. And when it came to figuring out how to evolve the system for Skyrim, it all started with a sketch on a napkin.

"The Radiant AI system was developed from a napkin drawing that Todd [Howard] gave us," says Bruce Nesmith, Skyrim's lead designer. Bethesda understandably doesn't want to give away too much about its secret sauce, but Howard and Bethesda have given Nesmith, who left the company in 2021, approval to talk about Radiant AI and its development. "So it's actually a napkin story. You don't hear many of those in real life, but this is a real one."

Howard started by drawing a hero in the centre of the napkin, "and then he drew various little icons to represent things like houses and monsters and whatnot around it and drew a line to them. And he said, 'The player interacts with these things, but they don't interact back with them. That was Morrowind. For Oblivion, we started having them interact with each other a little bit. But now for Skyrim, we want the world to point back to the player as well as interact with itself. So how can you do that?'"

Nesmith sat down with senior designer Kurt Kuhlmann and tried to figure out how to make this work. It was "very freeing", Nesmith recalls. "We went off on our own, and we came back with proposals. Probably some of the most creative moments I've had in the videogame industry, to be honest. And the idea was to be able to have events and objects in the world that the player interacts with and that the code is watching."

One of the early examples they showed Howard connected NPCs, quests and players together. "So you kill a person, and the game knows that NPC has relationships to other NPCs. That's data that we attach to the player. And this is all in the editor. You can see it all. And so it spins up a quest that picks one of the relatives who comes back and tries to kill you. So it created a quest to do that. And Todd really liked that idea."

But Howard wanted to see how this could be employed in a scenario that didn't involve killing. "It's at the heart of all these games," says Nesmith. "They were developed largely by men for the first 30 years. And our more violent tendencies come out in that." It was time for a change.

So he went back and came up with a list of around 30 different actions that the programming could potentially monitor. "Things like, you pick up an item, you steal an item, you change a location, all these other actions that could be taken. We said, 'OK, here's our list.' And Todd said, 'Now that I like, there's all kinds of good stuff in there'."

This led to "large amounts of data" being attached to objects, which was new for Bethesda. "An NPC actor would know the location it belonged to; the location would know the actors that belonged to it. It would know the objects. And we had an event system where, when something happens, it goes through a list of potential quests that could get spun up, that all have conditions on them. If the conditions are met, a quest is spun up. If no conditions are met, no quest is spun up."

It could create interesting conflicts, as different NPCs each had a reason to try to get their hands on a specific object, and the system would draw the closest NPCs to the object, who the player could then encounter, beginning a quest.

This "felt very unique to us", says Nesmith. "The world sees the player. Think of how many games you play where the world doesn't see the player. You kill that monster over there, and the rest of the world doesn't know. You solve this person's problem over here, and the rest of the world is not paying attention."

Nesmith is talking about more meaningful reactions, not simply someone reacting to you killing a dragon by saying, "Oh, I heard you killed the dragon," though Skyrim does have that, too. Rather, his vision for the system was one that could conjure new quests out of your interactions with the world.

"You feel like you're actually part of something that's living and breathing, and like what you do makes a difference. The world sees you. And I'm not going to sit here and say that Bethesda was the first game company to do that, because I don't know that for a fact, but we were one of the early ones. And we were definitely one of the biggest, that got the most notoriety and attention for it."

Of the list of 30 possible actions that the programming could monitor, "virtually all of them" made it into Skyrim. "Most of them made it in, and we didn't actually add very many [afterwards] either, because Kurt and I both have programming backgrounds, so we had a pretty good sense for what would be good and what would not be good for the programming side of it."

The wackiest version of Radiant AI, the version that's present in Oblivion, is the one that's always going to stick with me the most—it was weird and janky and hit me at a formative time. But that doesn't make Skyrim's version any less impressive. Even now, well over a decade later, it's striking how it manages to craft a seemingly infinite number of bespoke quests and adventures every time you cluelessly wander into a dank cave or saunter through a new village.

So thanks, Todd, for doodling on a napkin.

The team behind Skywind, the massive project to remake/reimagine The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind in The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, has just unveiled 20 minutes of new gameplay on YouTube, as well as a development progress update.

The video shows off the Imperial Legion quest, Rescue Joncis Dalomax, as well as how the west-central, Bitter Coast region is shaping up. The most impressive changes coming to Skywind might be in the audio department: The mod boasts a new interpretation and recording of the original game's score, something the official Oblivion Remaster didn't even attempt. Skyblivion, for its part, is expanding the original soundtrack with new additions.

What's truly ambitious is the team's effort to fully voice Morrowind's previously quiet cast. Aside from combat barks and greetings, it was all walls of text in the '02 original.

A truly wonderful, unexpected joy from this is hearing the poor VOs having to say Vvardenfell place names like "Ashurnibibi." Do any Morrowind NPCs directly mention the nearby "Ashalmimikala," or, even better, "Addadshashanammu?" God, I hope so.

I also dig the way Skywind is blending both games' mechanics and user interfaces. The dialogue screen is a great combo of Skyrim and Morrowind, while I was chuffed to see the player whip out the Mark and Recall spells through Skyrim's favorites menu, dual wielded with a silver longsword. No fast travel here, only magic or taking the Bug Bus.

Ashurnibibi itself really impressed me visually: It felt like a culmination, a perfecting of the visual identity in Morrowind's original Daedric ruins, one of the strangest dungeon types Bethesda's ever made.

They're all purple stone, spikes, and weird angles—mostly alien, but also evoking something familiar and impossibly ancient. The new details and lighting of Skywind make Ashurnibibi come alive.

Skywind looks like it's coming along nicely, but it's still far away from release⁠—based on the progress breakdown the team provided at the end of the video compared to similar progress updates from Skyblivion, I'd guess 2027 at the earliest.

If you'd like to pitch in, Skywind is looking for 3D artists and localizers, as well as less-specialized, beginner-friendly roles like navmesh builders and audio QA.

The Elder Scrolls 6: We Still Don't Know Where This One's Set likely won't be gracing our PCs until the 2030s, but it still feels like a weirdly good time to be an Elder Scrolls fan right now.

We just got Oblivion Remastered, Micky D and Bacon_ are uploading videos again, Skyblivion is on its way, and even The Elder Scrolls 1: Arena is getting a mod-friendly engine port to finally free it from DOS hell.

Back in 2006, Bethesda Softworks made a documentary about the making of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, capturing the scale of the effort behind what was then the studio's biggest and most ambitious game. And now, to celebrate the recent (and tremendously successful) release of Oblivion Remastered, Bethesda got a whole bunch of the original team back together and made them all watch it.

"Made them" is a bit of a comedic overstatement, but Todd Howard clearly has some feelings in that regard. "How awesome is it to see this group together?" he says to the assembled audience. "I'm more moved than I thought. It's been a long road, everybody."

And then, his deeper feelings stand exposed: "This is going to be really fucking awkward, watching this."

Hey, it's a fair prediction. Many of us are not fortunate enough to be in a position where we can look back on what we were doing 20 years ago and think, yeah, cool. And the vast majority of us don't have it committed to film for all time, which makes it exponentially worse than hazy memories you can just try not to think too much about.

But the truth is that the video, or at least the little bits we see of it, aren't cringey at all, but earnest and sincere; Howard's "who's laughing now" crack in particular stands out for me as a throwaway joke that probably comes off better now than it did in 2006. And not because he's become the face of one of the most successful videogame studios of all time, but because this was a point at which Bethesda still wasn't quite over that hump, and the "look at me now" attitude, while clearly thrown out as a joke, is something a lot of us can relate to, particularly in hindsight: We're doing this weird thing, and it's working.

It also highlights what Bethesda was able to accomplish with a relatively small team. "It felt like a really small, tight team," former head of publishing and public face Pete Hines says. "I mean, it wasn't a whole lot more than the number of folks sitting here now. That was the whole company."

I don't know how many people are in the audience, but credit listings on Mobygames tell the tale: 285 people have credits on the original Oblivion, a number that climbs to 810 for Skyrim and 4,038 for Starfield. Those latter credits include numerous external studios that also worked on the game, so it's not just Bethesda, but even so those numbers really illustrate how the scale of these projects have grown over the past two decades.

And how does Howard feel when the show is all over? "It was as awkward as I thought," he says. But, he adds, "In so many ways, when I see it and look in the room, it feels the same." That has to be a pretty good feeling.

The original Making of Oblivion documentary was included with The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Collectors Edition—if you don't happen to have a copy of that lying around (or an optical drive in your PC), you can still catch the whole thing on YouTube.

One of the delightful discoveries of Oblivion Remastered is that while some things have changed, like the characters' faces, almost everything else has stayed the same, like an old door glitch that lets you finish the game in under 15 minutes. It's great that even under the shiny new overhaul you'll find most of the same exploits and bugs and charming quirks of the original Oblivion from 19 years ago.

That includes the appearance of a character voiced by none other than Todd Howard himself.

Unfortunately you won't run into Todd walking the streets or lurking in a dungeon. He voices a character that was used for testing during the original development of Oblivion and is hidden away in the game files, so you need to use a console command to visit him. Along with all of the other oddities of the original game, this character is still there in the remaster, and not only can you talk to Todd, but you can get him to fall in love with you. Or call you names.

How to find Todd Howard in Oblivion Remastered

First, save your game if you haven't done it in a while, then open the console by pressing the ~ key.

Then type:

coc toddtest

And press enter. The screen will slowly fade out and you'll find yourself in a small house. This is a test cell, one of dozens in the RPG where developers of the original game would place characters or items from the game they wanted to test out.

In this small house you'll find a man named Alban Corinis wearing a full set of Elven armor. Talk to him and he'll say something a little unusual:

"I knew one day someone with unyielding virtue would heed my words and speed my release. You risked much to perform such a selfless act."

That isn't Todd Howard's voice—I believe it's Wes Johnson, reciting lines from an Oblivion quest called The Forlorn Watchman—but after this line you'll get a choice of conversational topics that are emotional in nature: Angry, Fear, Happy, Neutral, Sad, and Surprise.

Click any of these discussion topics and you'll hear Todd Howard's voice saying lines that match those emotions, like "Oh no! What do we do? I'm so scared!" and "What? That really pisses me off!"

Here's a clip, and you'll need to click the volume icon below to turn the sound on:

Well. There's nothing like a great acting performance… and this is nothing like a great acting performance. But cut the guy a break, he wasn't auditioning for Hamlet, he was recording some test dialogue.

As you click these options you're not just making Todd say stuff for your own amusement, you're changing his character's disposition, bypassing the Oblivion persuasion minigame. You can see the results when you choose the "Neutral" option.

So, if you make Todd happy by choosing "Happy" enough times to boost his disposition over 90, and then you choose "Neutral" again, he'll profess his love:

"I can't recall ever loving moments, like this moment, with you," says Todd Howard.

Aw, that's sweet. And extremely cringe. I regret teleporting into Todd Howard's weird little house and seducing him by clicking on his happy button.

It works the other way, too. Ever wanted to hear Todd Howard call you a bastard? Make him angry by clicking "Angry" until his disposition is below 20, then choose "Neutral" again, and you can. "You are indeed a bastard," Todd Howard will tell you. He's right. You are.

There are other characters around this test cell, including more outside the house that Todd Howard's electronic clone has been cruelly trapped in for the past two decades. Another version of Alban Corinis standing outside has Todd's voice lines, the other two do not.

There's also a horse (it doesn't talk), an imposing Dremora, and a character named "Lynda Carter," named after Oblivion voice actor and Wonder Woman star Lynda Carter. The whole weird gang is still there, just waiting around, after nearly 20 years. Why not drop by and pay them a visit?

In terms of complexity, anxiety, and sheer turbidity, launching a videogame seems roughly equivalent to planning a land war on Mars. It's a constant, 5D chess game with thousands of players and no clear ruleset, where definite victories become humiliating defeats—and vice versa—according to no obvious laws. But at least one thing is clear: you're better off not launching your plucky little indie thing against GTA 6 or some other Vredefort-impact scale release.

So you can imagine a lot of devs' disappointment when Bethesda popped up last week to announce it was releasing Oblivion Remastered, suddenly dropping a humongous launch in the middle of what had been, previously, a relatively uncluttered release period.

"From the perspective of indies and indie publishers, this is the problem with these sort of massive shadow drops," said Raw Fury boss Jónas Antonsson (via GamesRadar) on X. "Everything more or [less] gets buried." Raw Fury is the publisher of puzzle-horror game Post Trauma, which released last week on, um, April 22. That's the same day Oblivion Remastered hit.

Antonsson says a whole lot of strategy goes into release timings, and something like Oblivion popping up can pretty much capsize everything. "We don’t have the cash nor muscle to throw around, so everything is carefully planned. Including when to release, based on other releases etc—to try to maximize the chances of getting attention.

"Love the game that dropped but feel the pain for our team," said Antonsson. Which, hey, seems fair to me. It's not just Raw Fury that was blindsided by Bethesda, either. Mike Rose—dev on strategy deckbuilder Starless Abyss—put out a call for publicity on X after the game released in "the exact week that Oblivion was shadow-dropped" and noted that the coincidence had been "not fantastic for our launch."

Even devs whose launches didn't happen alongside Bethesda's can't help but be affected when such a big fish makes a splash in the pond. "I'm pretty sure Oblivion releasing gave us like a 10-20% haircut on daily revenue" posted Caves of Qud's Brian Bucklew on Bluesky. "I noticed a complete stop in game sales from about 2 pm onward on Oblivion day," added Francisco González, dev on adventure game Rosewater.

This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, even in the last couple of months. In March, the (not surprise) release of Monster Hunter Wilds led devs to lament a lack of sales.

So I'm not really sure if this kind of thing can truly be solved. Sure, not surprise-dropping massive games would help, but even when you announce a release date for a huge game well in advance, devs will still end up outweighed. It's a rough one, although it's worth remembering that the Oblivion remaster was pretty much an open secret even before it dropped last week. So much so that Bethesda's refusal to just come out and finally announce the thing drove fans to the brink of madness, so it didn't come completely out of the blue. Still, I can't help but feel a bit sorry for the devs caught under Bethesda's forward march.

I think, with the appropriate amount of hindsight, we can all agree that Starfield didn't take off as the multi-year industry titan that Bethesda was hoping it would be. While I, and plenty of other players, got a reasonable amount of enjoyment out of it, it wasn't quite in line with the studio's other heavy-hitters. The post-launch support hasn't been (inter)stellar either, and its first DLC, according to our Shattered Space review, hasn't done enough to bring it back to life.

There are about a dozen reasons you can cite as to why this was the case, but one that appears to be a reoccurring theme between former developers is the studio—or, rather, the studio's head honcho, Todd Howard—suffering from success. So sayeth Dennis Mejillones, a character artist who worked at Bethesda for over 12 years, including work on Starfield itself, during an interview with Kiwi Talkz.

While the comparison in the headline might not seem flattering at first blush, In the interest of fairness I want to highlight that Meijilones is, broadly speaking, very positive on his relationship with Howard: "I love Todd, I do. He's one of the greatest influences on my life … This man has been a mentor, a guide, he's been patient with me. So a lot of what I am, he's helped shape that.

"Is he perfect? No, does he call all the shots perfectly? No." Meijilones recounts a couple of times where he disagreed with Howard on key issues, and while he says he felt comfortable bringing them up if he "felt strongly", he does admit that "a lot of people were afraid to say no to Todd, and I think that hurt him."

Here's where the George Lucas comparison comes in. "It's like George Lucas—George Lucas, I think, is a genius. I think geniuses come up with terrible ideas, too, they're not gonna be hits. But if you don't have somebody to help you filter through these things, and give you an honest assessment, because they're afraid to tell you what they really think, it actually does hurt you."

For context, one often-cited reason for why the original Star Wars movies are considered space opera classics, while the prequels are considered, uh, not that, is that Lucas was given more and more direct power over them as time went on. For example, episodes four to six were extensively edited by his then-wife Marcia Lucas, who divorced George Lucas after episode six's release, and had little part in the following films.

Mind, George Lucas is sometimes described as stubborn—just ask, well, George Lucas, who said "I’m a stubborn guy and I didn’t want people to tell me how to make my movies." Whereas Howard, if the developers working under him are to be believed, is more a victim of circumstance. Back in October 2023, former lead designer on Skyrim Bruce Nesmith said that "he has tried really really hard to not be the 'last say' guy, [but] it hasn't worked out that way. That's not something he wants intellectually, I think it ends up being that way because he's somebody who has opinions and whose opinions are valuable."

Another interesting parallel here is how Meijilones says: "One of the reasons I kind of 'retired' is—I was like, I miss Todd, I miss working with him, he's running this big business [that] grew tremendously … His attention was very scattered. Some of the people who took his place, they're not Todd, it takes a lot to be Todd."

Nesmith also mirrored this back in October 2023, where he stated: "when you're running six different studios and you've got a dozen projects—although usually only one really big one—going on at a time, you know, he's only one man, he doesn't have the facetime to do that anymore!"

All of this paints the picture of a former auteur designer struggling to adjust to a studio ballooning in size and scope. Not that it's all been bad, mind. Bethesda's Indiana Jones game has been a downright smashing success, with our own Ted Litchfield scoring it a 86 in his Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review. PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon also chose it for his personal Game of the Year pick back in December. When it comes to RPGs, though? If Starfield's the future, then it looks like Bethesda has some work to do informing its employees that you can, in fact, disagree with your boss.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle seems to've been whipped into good shape by Bethesda, a much-needed win for the studio—capturing for fans (including our own Ted Litchfield, who gave it an 86 in his review) the pure distilled essence of the action adventure classic, like a modern Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay for the beloved franchise. Part of that's due to the dulcet tones of Troy Baker, who played the leading man.

While poor ol' Baker gets thrown in the Nolan North bag of instantly recognisable voice actors who get cast in everything, I think it's easy to forget that the guy's got range. I remember him doing a downright solid impression of Mark Hamil's Joker for some of the Arkham games, and it's much the same here, his chords striking an eau de Harrison Ford just fine.

Still, he's been on the record as saying that Todd Howard didn't want him cast because he's in every game—revealing a little more what the slow whittling down of Todd's presumptions looked like in a recent interview with BBC's Newsbeat. Baker states that, eventually, the audition process came down to him and another actor, leaving the deciding vote to test audiences.

"Todd Howard said 'they picked you every time'," Baker reveals, which gives me a very funny—though probably inaccurate—image of Todd Howard with his head in his hands, staring at a results sheet that's 100% Troy, a landslide victory for his least likely pick. Baker tells the BBC he was relieved, thinking "that was a compliment … he was like 'no, it's a challenge. That's the standard'." Our Howard is ever so quick to humble his subjects.

Baker didn't know peace immediately after getting the part, alas—telling the BBC he thought he'd get fired in the first days of production. It wasn't until then that Howard had mercy on the poor blighter via email: "He said: 'You're doing a hell of a job', and I was like: 'You have no idea how much I needed to hear that right now'."

That's a little self-deprecating for one of the industry's most ubiquitous voice talents, but, hey—insecurity can crop up anywhere, and I think if Todd Howard himself looked me in the eyes and brought his powerful judgement to bear, I'd probably wobble a bit myself. Not to mention stepping into the shoes of such a beloved character. Baker says, simply: "If you get to the end of the game and you feel like 'I was Indiana Jones', then I've done my job."

Fallout 3 is not, in fact, the third Fallout game. That would be Fallout Tactics, a squad-based Brotherhood of Steel tactical RPG developed by Micro Forté, which appeared a few years after Fallout 2, in 2001. Despite being pretty well-liked by critics at the time, the way it deviated from its predecessor meant that it caught a lot of flak from the fans. 

Lead designer Ed Orman, who we recently chatted to about his time in the Wasteland, remembers things getting pretty heated. "There was a minority I remember seeing on there who were like, 'Hey, it's a pretty good game. I like what they've done to improve these things about Fallout.' But the vast majority were like, 'This isn't a Fallout game. This is not Fallout 3. You screwed up the lore here, here and here. You put hairy deathclaws in, you’re not using charisma properly and all of those things.' And so there was a huge amount of negativity within the fanbase." 

Bethesda faced a similar backlash from the diehards when it took on the challenge of creating Fallout 3. So you might have imagined that the studio would see Micro Forté as a kindred spirit, another developer who went through a similar trial. That was unfortunately not evident when, in 2007, Todd Howard essentially gave Tactics, along with the 2004 ARPG Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, the boot. 

"For our purposes," he said, "neither Fallout Tactics nor Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel happened." 

"It sucked," says Orman. "You don't want to be told that what you've done is non-canon. By the time he said that I had a lot of distance from this, so it wasn't heartbreaking or gut-wrenching—it was just like, 'Oh man. You didn't have to officially say it, we could have existed in this weird quantum state where it was kind of part of things.' But the way things go now, with the reinterpretation of IPs and the retelling of stories—and especially with the creation of the TV show, where it's existing in the universe, but they're taking liberties and they may have to make adjustments to make that world work for TV—lots of ideas are going to get shuffled around. There have been little bits and pieces of Tactics which you can see kind of are canon now, just through the back door over time. And that's good enough for me. I don't need anything more than that."

One of those things that slipped through the back door was the Prydwen, the Brotherhood of Steel's airship as seen in Fallout 4 and the Fallout TV series. While the Prydwen is a Bethesda creation, it's hard not to look at its zeppelin-like design and see it as directly inspired by the Brotherhood zeppelin of Fallout Tactics.

"They are a logical thing to introduce in the universe, especially for the Brotherhood," says Orman. "If they're not just flying vertibirds, it makes sense they have a kind of aircraft carrier thing, and you can't really travel on the roads. So I think an airship makes a lot of logical sense for the universe. So maybe that's why they came up with it. But I'll just sit here quietly and think, ‘Yes, it's because we had them in Fallout Tactics', and I'll be happy."

A Fallout Tactics sequel was initially planned, but poor sales scuppered its future. Orman would love to see the original gain a new lease on life, though. "I'd love to see a retelling of it. If somebody did a remake of Tactics in Fallout 4's engine, you could just adjust a few things and fix some of the lore problems, I would be fine with that. It's not sacrosanct to me, if that brought it in line." But he's content knowing that some of Fallout Tactics is still living on, in a way. "Every time these things make that leap, it's nice to know that they are at least still drawing on that background. And that Tactics is just holding on, being interpreted usefully in some way."

Keep an eye out for our full interview with Orman, where we dig into the making of Fallout Tactics.

The Elder Scrolls Online—an MMO that's approaching its first decade—has always charmed me because of how it's able to represent, in a way, miniature versions of the setting's different continents and stylings. Especially since it can do that at a more rapid pace than the mainline series, which had its last proper entry 13 years ago.

When I sat down with the game's creative director Rich Lambert, as well as Zenimax's studio director, Matt Frior, we got into talking about the process of negotiating Todd Howard—and the process of adding to the series' lore without breaking it for future entries (whenever they may come).

When asked if they were worried with (as I put it) running out of road, Frior noted that issue is something the devs have kept in mind day one: "When I initially set up the project, I sat with Todd Howard for about three months, to figure out how to best not run into that situation. So we made the decision to put the game 700 to 1,000 years before the other mainline Elder Scrolls games.

"That was the least known part of lore—there wasn't a lot of lore there. And Todd wanted us to have a lot of freedom to tell the stories that we wanted to tell, without encroaching too much on stuff that had already been done, because he thought that would be boring."

As Lambert then puts it, "we also get a lot of latitude, right? Over the years, we've developed this really awesome working relationship with [Bethesda], and they understand what we're doing, and they trust what we're doing … we get to go and revisit old places, put our own spin on that, we get to create new lore."

New lore like, say, a whole new Daedric prince in the form of Ithelia, an addition to perhaps the most beloved part of the game's canon. Ithelia was first introduced to the MMO in the Necrom expansion last year—and will be getting some more development in The Gold Road: "We liked the idea of an antithesis to Hermaeus Mora—they're all about stability, and Ithelia is chaos … the team had a lot of fun coming up with her."

Lambert also shares an anecdote about working on the Dark Brotherhood quest lines with Bethesda's Emil Pagliarulo—who worked on the famous quests back in Oblivion: "I worked on Oblivion as well, so it was really easy to go like hey, Emil, can you read this? We sent him like a three page doc, and I sat down with him and went over it, and he was like 'let me think about this for a bit.'

"He sent me seven pages of information back—like here's what you got right, here's what you got wrong, here's the nuance behind all this stuff. So that's kind of the relationship we have, we can pitch ideas."

I'm honestly just glad to know that the series has stewards keeping its world alive while Bethesda takes its time—ESO is downright successful and has an invested community, despite coming out at a time where a bunch of would-be WoW killers tried and failed to make their MMO the next big thing. It's carved out its own place in a very competitive ecosystem, receiving its 43rd major update August 19.

Gamescom Opening Night Live saw Bethesda announce the release date of Starfield's first expansion, Shattered Space, alongside a brief trailer and the surprise early launch of the game's new vehicle. The Rev-8 is now available in-game for all players (talk to your ship technician) and has big Mako energy, with shock absorbers working overtime on the rocky ground (and yes, it has a gun, too).

Ever since launch vehicles have been the most-requested feature for Starfield, for the obvious reason that this is a game chock-full of gigantic planets that you have to traverse on foot. It's probably one of the reasons that exploration ends up feeling a bit dull, and it just feels a bit odd that, in a galaxy full of spaceships and super tech, no-one seemed to think that a car of some kind might be useful.

"In one sense, you do have a vehicle, which is you obviously have your spaceship, you can go around in space," said Bethesda chief Todd Howard at the time. "But then on the surface you do have a jetpack which you can upgrade, which is a super fun, new experience for us."

That justification satisfied practically no-one, and it turns out Xbox head Phil Spencer was among the unconvinced. Spencer dropped in on Xbox's Gamescom stream to say all the usual things about how great Xbox's lineup is looking, before noting that his presence at Gamescom has stopped him trying out the Rev-8 (timestamp, first spotted by GamesRadar+), and he's been bugging Todd Howard to make it happen.

"Oh and I'm here so I'm not doing it: my buggy in Starfield," said Spencer. "I've been asking Todd for vehicles. 'Come on, Todd, I want vehicles in this game. I'm tired of walking around this planet.' I thought the trailer for that looked really good last night, so I can't wait to drive around planets in Starfield."

Bear with me: There's an animated series called Llamas in Hats, where one of the most amusing things is how Carl the llama will explain he's done something terrible, and Paul the llama will go "Caaaa-rrrllll!" I like to imagine Phil Spencer sitting in his Redmond office, surrounded by neatly folded and ironed gamer t-shirts, using his personal hotline to get straight through to Todd Howard and moan about space buggies: "Come onnn Todddddd!"

You can tootle around in Starfield's Rev-8 now, while Shattered Space will arrive on September 30. The expansion will explore the House Va’ruun, a "weird space cult" who "believe in an eternal space snake," and looks to have some sort of creepy cosmic horror tilt to it. The Rev-8 crops up several times in the trailer, so expect the expansion's campaign to be giving its wheels a good workout.

There is at least one Xbox achievement that you will never have, and the reason is simple: It was custom made for Bethesda creative chief Todd Howard, and nobody can have it except him. But after years of secrecy, thanks to a discovery by achievement tracker site TrueAchievements (via GamesRadar), we can now at least see what it is.

The story begins in 2016, when Howard was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at GDC. During his acceptance speech, which he reminisced about in a blog post he put up after Microsoft announced its acquisition of Bethesda in 2020, he jokingly wondered how many achievement points a Lifetime Achievement Award was worth.

"At the end of the ceremony, some good friends from Microsoft congratulated me and said they’d find out," Howard wrote. "A few months later I was given a code to a game they had created, named after me and locked to my account. When ran, it unlocks a single achievement—'Lifetime - 1000pts.' It still sits in my list when I check, and I smile every time."

That game can actually be seen at Xbox.com, although of course it's not available for purchase or download. But the achievement text had remained secret until TrueAchievement's recent discovery. "Lifetime," as the achievement is known, "Reflects on the amazing craft of Todd Howard and his team in making worlds as real as any on Earth."

I was a little baffled when I first looked at the achievement, because it was still showing as "secret," and without the reported description. This, a TrueAchievements rep helpfully explained, is the nature of the site. By default, the site does not show unlocked achievement descriptions to people who haven't earned them—and since no one but Todd Howard has earned this one, no one but Todd Howard gets to see it. 

To get around this cheevo secrecy layer, go into your account settings (and yes, you'll need a TrueAchievements account to do this) and select "site settings," then enable the "always show unlocked achievement descriptions" setting. And just like that, there it is.

That's a nice gesture, isn't it? The response to the newly-revealed achievement is quite positive, and naturally—because this is the internet—it has inspired a few users to post guides explaining how to unlock the achievement. Some are quite in-depth, such as one from Cpl Kane ZA, which requires facial reconstruction surgery, a time machine, and a possible murder; others, like paramoreRyan's submission, are more to the point: "Be Todd Howard."

Well, we can't all be Todd Howard, but we can acknowledge that if anyone deserves their own custom cheevo, it's probably him. Howard's list of credits is enviable to say the least, beginning with The Terminator: Future Shock in 1995 and running through Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield. He's currently serving as executive producer on the much-anticipated Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and we also maintain hope that he's squeezing some time with The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 in there, too.

This story contains spoilers for Starfield's main plot.

Last month, Bethesda revealed it plans to release more expansions for Starfield after the upcoming Shattered Space DLC. Now, it's been discovered that the developer has registered a trademark for the term 'Starborn', prompting speculation that this could be the name for the next addition to the sci-fi RPG.

As reported by VGC, the trademark registration was spotted by Twitter user Timur222. The trademark, which was filed with the US Patent and Trademark office earlier this month, covers an array of categories for physical and digital media, including "recorded computer game software" and "downloadable computer game software".

The term 'Starborn' is particular to Starfield, referring to the interdimensional, superhuman travelers who the player encounters roughly a third of the way into the RPG's main story. This connection has led to speculation that 'Starborn' will form the title of the RPG's next expansion after Shattered Space.

Bethesda certainly plans to release further expansions for Starfield. Speaking to YouTuber MrMattyPlays last month, game director Todd Howard was asked whether Bethesda plans to release annual DLC packs for Starfield, to which he answered "I would say more or less, yeah." Howard specified that Bethesda wants this to continue "hopefully [for] a very long time, but we're planning for the one after this, so there will be another one."

As for whether the expansion will specifically be called Starborn, it's undoubtedly possible. But Bethesda could also simply be safeguarding the term, which is central to Starfield's story, as part of its IP. In May, Zenimax Media trademarked the Doom cheat 'IDKFA' ahead of the reveal of Doom: The Dark Ages. But Doom: The Dark Ages wasn't called 'Doom: IDKFA' It was called…well, you've just read it twice, so I won't type it again.

Admittedly, Starborn is a better fit for an expansion title than a bunch of letters Doom fans still debate the true meaning of, and the Starborn are a logical faction to frame a DLC story around. Either way, there's probably a long way to go before we find out for certain. Shattered Space itself doesn't release until this autumn, whereupon it'll shed greater light on the mysterious House Va'ruun cult, who worship a big snake god called the Great Serpent.

Shattered Space will also include the usual things you'd expect from a Bethesda DLC. New locations, new gear such as space suits, new bounties, and new structures for your base, such as an observatory module. As someone who drifted away from Starfield last year, allured by the more innovative shores of Baldur's Gate 3, the impending DLC has led me to consider returning to Bethesda's latest free-roaming adventure.

Bethesda CEO Todd Howard recently granted an interview to YouTuber MrMattyPlays, in which among other things he addresses the controversy over Starfield's DLC pricing and some of Bethesda's future projects. But there's also room for some chatter about the past and, with the TV series putting the post-apocalypse back on everyone's minds, the original Fallout games, developed by Black Isle Studios but now owned by Bethesda. 

The big takeaway is that Bethesda has no plans to return to the first games in the series (Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout: Tactics) and remake them. "A main priority for us is to make sure they're available and you can still play them on the PC," says Howard of the early isometric games. "And making sure that they run OK. As far as beyond that, we've talked about it, but our priorities in terms of 'Hey let's go do dev work and make certain things work', they haven't been in those areas, so again priority is 'can people load it up and play it?'"

"And I do think we want [the games] to load up and run well," says Howard. "The rest of it… I could argue that some of the charm of games from that era and the original Fallout is a little bit of that age. I would never want to sort of paste over some of that with, 'Well we changed how this works so it's more modern.'"

Perspectives will differ, but if you ask me this is a good Todd Howard opinion: these games are still fantastic, and I don't really see how you'd remake them without losing most of what makes them great. Are they of their time? Sure, these are isometric turn-based strategy titles from the late 90s, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

"As long as you can download it," ends Howard, "as long as it loads up and runs, I think I'd like people to experience it the way it was."

MrMattyPlays ends this line of questioning by invoking Wasteland, a Fallout spiritual successor, and pointing out that this is available on consoles. Any prospect of that with the original Fallouts?

"Anything is possible," says Todd, in a manner that makes clear this is not going to happen. "But that's gonna be a longer dev throw, and you have to ask yourself is that where we wanna put our time right now… or is it best played the way it was on a PC? And if you ask me right now the best way to play it is with a mouse & keyboard on PC."

Not everything needs remade, and for my money the original Fallouts are fine as they are. These days there are a whole host of mods to smooth out some of the elements that haven't aged so well, anyway, but after the first few minutes you just get lost in this detail-packed world and can feel the majesty of 1997 in PC gaming wash over you. OK, fine, I'm old. Look: if you really want a first-person Fallout 2? Bethesda isn't doing one, but a dedicated group of modders is.

As we near the release of Starfield's upcoming story expansion, Shattered Space, players are beginning to wonder what, if anything, comes next. But instead of just opting for regular updates, Todd Howard confirms that not only is another DLC planned for after Shattered Space, but that expansions could become a yearly occurrence. 

In response to a question during an interview with YouTuber MrMattyPlays about whether players can expect to see new story expansions every year, Howard just says, "I would say more or less, how long that continues? Hopefully, a very long time. But we're already planning for one after this [Shattered Space], so there will be another one." 

This is excellent news for those who felt like Starfield still hadn't answered their burning questions. While Shattered Space looks like it'll shed some light on one of the more mysterious factions, the House Va'ruun cult, there's still more to be discovered. It seems like everyone has their own niche questions that they've fixated on since playing. "Finding the center of the multiverse and never seeing an intelligent alien is kind of weird, maybe for DLC, or are future humans blocking that too," one player says on Reddit. "And if so, why do they allow the whole unity thing to be run like Lord of the Flies or at least very Darwinian?" 

There's definitely plenty of canon fodder for future story expansions when it comes to all the mysteries and questions present in Starfield, but answering all of them isn't a massive priority. "I don't know that our goal is to answer every question," Howard says. "We sort of look at it and say, 'Hey, what's a good angle? What do we want to add to the game as far as an experience or tone?" 

Howard also revealed that development on Shattered Space has been ongoing for almost 10 months now, as it began almost immediately after Bethesda ended work on Starfield's base game. "We are doing a lot," Howard says. "But Shattered Space is something we had planned for. And one of the things that we always liked about it from the get-go, is that Shattered Space, the bulk of that expansion pack, pretty much once you get to the city and the planet, it takes place there. It allows us to build a landscape that we would traditionally do." 

Comparably, Howard says that this expansion is similar to Fallout 4's Far Harbor DLC content-wise. "This is a scope that works for our development and doing this kind of annual story expansion. So we're really excited about that, and it really lets us do something the way we would in previous games." 

Toward the end of the interview, Howard also addresses the community backlash over Starfield's $7 mission, saying that he "hears the feedback" and will "take a look at that and how we deliver content like that" in the future. It's a pretty vapid response, considering just how many players were upset about it, but a change of course for the future is still better than nothing. 

In the wake of a controversial release of a single Starfield mission costing $7 as part of the game's new Creations program, Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard says the studio "hears that feedback" from unhappy players and will "take a look at that and how we deliver content like that" in future releases.

A recent update heralding the release of the Starfield Creation Kit included a new mission that enables players to become bounty hunters for the Trackers Alliance faction, with the promise of future Trackers Alliance missions coming in subsequent updates. But the second Trackers Alliance mission, The Vulture, is only available as a paid add-on costing 700 Starfield Creation Credits—the equivalent of $7, which in reality is $10 because that's the smallest amount of credits you can purchase to cover the cost.

The move was not well received. Unhappy players immediately recalled Bethesda's disastrous attempt to launch paid mods for Skyrim in 2015, and of course the infamous Oblivion Horse Armor DLC from 2006. The mission also received unfavorable comparisons to the Starfield premium edition upgrade, which includes the full Shattered Space expansion, the Constellation skin pack, digital art book, soundtrack, and 1,000 Creation Credits for $35: "Is Shattered Space actually just two quests in a trenchcoat?" one redditor rhetorically asked. Steam user reviews, predictably, took a nosedive.

All of this has not gone unnoticed at Bethesda. "We're always trying to be kind of looking at what else is out there, really make sure we're giving value to everybody," Howard said in a recent MrMattyPlays interview. "And where we're not, hey, you know, we definitely will adjust."

Bethesda's intention with The Vulture, according to Howard, was to "go the extra mile" by adding the Trackers Alliance outfit and weapon in a quest, the idea presumably being that it would be more interesting that simply throwing some new cosmetics and hardware into the game. What happened instead, said Howard, is that players got the impression they were "chopping up" a faction and selling it for "700 credits at a time." That's "not what we want at all," said Howard.

"And so I do think we're going to take a look at that and how we deliver content like that, and whether we're changing pricing or breaking it up, or what we should do there. So, great feedback from the community."

"We hear the feedback," Howard responded when asked whether Bethesda will change how it releases content like The Vulture in the future. "We need to evaluate both pricing, what we put out for free, how we communicate what's in something, and really hear from the community there."

That "feedback" continues to be reflected in Steam reviews, which are now down to "mostly negative" over the past 30 days thanks primarily to the paid mission—which some players find especially egregious given the sense that Starfield itself was a disappointment.

But while adjustments may be in order, Howard emphasized the importance of enabling content creators to monetize their work, which he said was a big part of ensuring the long-term health of the community—and for the most part, he said players dig it.

"Our view is that a lot of [modders] have gone from hobbyists to professional, and it's part of our job to make sure they can do that, and that they do get paid, and they see the monetary rewards from if they make awesome content. And so we had a great experience with Creation Club with our creators, and then the version we're doing now that first launched in Skyrim, everyone's just responded to really really well. I think it's important for us, that part of it gives a really healthy modding community where you do have professionals, and we've seen their content kind of 'rise all boats' in it."

And, he added, the release of the Creation Kit means there's a huge, growing pile of free Starfield mods for players to choose from, regardless of how they feel about the ones that cost money. 

"It's super important to us that all of that stays really really healthy," he said. "We think it's a big fabric of who we are as a studio, how we talk about modding, what our community is there, and just make sure that we're active and making sure it's as good as it possibly can be for really everybody involved."

While there's obviously some real unhappiness with the way Bethesda has handled The Vulture, I'm not sure I'd expect any big changes anytime soon. Much like the notorious Horse Armor DLC, people are complaining but they also appear to be buying it: The Starfield Creations page says the mission has more than 1.2 million "plays" across PC and Xbox, and it currently ranks among the top-10 most popular of the more than 600 Starfield Creations released so far.

I'm told war never changes, but its popularity certainly fluctuates—and sometimes it spikes, if you can leverage the power of Walton Goggins. In an interview with Variety, Todd Howard said the Fallout games are enjoying a swell of player attention thanks to the Amazon TV series.

"Depending on the Fallout game, you're looking at a 4-6x increase in daily players," Howard said, "which is beyond anything I've ever seen in my 30 years of doing this."

According to Variety, daily player counts for the Fallout games have been skyrocketing to over 5 million players since the premiere of the Amazon series in April. Fallout 76, in particular, is seeing a sharp player increase as millions of fresh vault dweller faces emerge to walk the country roads. While Howard says it's "kind of been sneaky popular for a while," Variety says Fallout 76 now has more than 20 million players, up from 17 million in December.

Fallout's the latest sign that we're firmly in a new era for games adaptations, echoing the well-documented phenomenon of the Netflix bump. The Cyberpunk anime brought higher Cyberpunk 2077 player counts in 2022, Arcane caused an almost 50% increase in League of Legends players in 2021, and the Witcher show helped the Witcher 3 break 100,000 concurrent players on Steam—more than were playing at its release.

The joke used to be that film and TV adaptations of games were almost always going to be dreck. Now it feels just as likely that a videogame series will be so popular that it'll reach beyond existing fans and ignite new passion for the games. It only makes sense: If people get hooked on your fictional world, they're going to want to spend more time there once they run out of show to watch.

Still, it seems like the scale of Fallout's popularity surge was unexpected, even at Bethesda. "Having an event that brings that many people into games that you have and who have never played your games before, that's a big thing," Howard said. "It's a really, really unique moment."

If, like the folks who've been flooding my timelines since April, you're wondering which Fallout is worth picking back up in 2024, we've got plenty of suggestions. Our Chris Livingston named Fallout 4 as top contender for current-day fallout, but if you'd prefer an online post-apocalypse, we've got tips for how to have the most fun with Fallout 76. Fancy a mosey in the mojave? We've got a New Vegas new player's guide to get you up and running.

It's been a decade since Fallout 4, and 13 years since The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. Since then Bethesda hasn't been sitting on its hands, with Fallout 76 releasing in 2018 and of course the studio's main focus for several years being Starfield. But fans could occasionally be forgiven for wondering just how long these things take, more from a stance of thinking about how much more time one has on this ball of dust than mere entitlement. I was young when Skyrim came out, for god's sake.

We know The Elder Scrolls 6 is in development, so while there's no details beyond a teaser image there's at least reason to be cheerful. But there's nothing on Fallout 5 whatsoever, beyond a confirmation it exists, with Bethesda's Emil Pagliarulo recently warning players "it takes time to make great stuff."

Todd Howard recently gave an interview to Kinda Funny Games discussing all sorts around Bethesda's games, with the focus understandably more on the Fallout side after the Amazon show, and offered players some succour in this regard: he thinks the studio needs to speed things up, too. 

"If I didn't make these games," said Howard, "I would just be playing them all the time. Even this weekend I was jumping between Starfield and Fallout 76 and Fallout 4; that's how I spent my weekend playing games.

"And they do take a long time, and so I think one of the things that we're focused on here is obviously making sure they're of the highest quality, but also finding ways to increase our output, because we don't want to wait that long either. That's never our plan, but we want to make sure we get it right."

Seriously though: even the most optimistic aren't expecting The Elder Scrolls 6 before 2026, and that's going to mark 15 years between entries. If that kind of form continued, I'm genuinely going to be near retirement before Elder Scrolls 7 is even a twinkle in Todd's eye, and six feet under before Elder Scrolls 8. It's one hell of an illustration of how complex and protracted development cycles for these huge games have become, even if Bethesda has its fingers in many pies.

This is one of many minor revelations from Howard's interview, where he also mentioned warning his dear old mum about the racier elements of the Fallout TV show, and wearily confirmed one more time that, no, Bethesda doesn't hate New Vegas at all. This is probably my biggest takeaway though: if I'm really, really lucky, I might get to play two more mainline Fallout games before I'm off to that great Vault in the sky.

Starfield came out seven months ago and many of us are yet to heal from the discourse. Bethesda's "dream game" was a polarising thing, earning plaudits from some quarters and a more ambivalent response from others (including, ah, us). But seven months is a lot of time for reflection, and Bethesda boss Todd Howard reckons he knows why the spacey RPG was so divisive: It just wasn't traditionally Bethesda enough for some people.

Chatting with Kinda Funny, Howard said that many people have a very specific set of expectations when it comes to Bethesda's games: "We see a lot of players saying 'This is what I want out of a Bethesda game, which is to explore a world in a certain way, and Starfield didn't give me that. I prefer the way it's done in Fallout or Elder Scrolls.'"

And although Howard thinks that's "perfectly understandable," he says it's just not the experience Starfield sets out to provide. "I do think for us—particularly me—going into a science-fiction game, I want to be able to land on all the planets. I want the game to say 'Yes' to us, knowing that that content is gonna be different than you've seen from us in the past."

Which, hm, sure. I don't necessarily think Howard is wrong about that. I don't doubt that many players came to the next big Bethesda game expecting a kind of big, contiguous world they'd be able to explore just like they did the Wasteland and Tamriel, and were put out to find a bunch of relatively small levels siloed off from one another by loading screens.

But let's be honest, I don't think it's the fact that Starfield wasn't like Skyrim or Fallout 4 that has it sitting at a 61% "Mixed" user review score over on Steam right now. As far as I saw, it wasn't really Starfield's structure that rubbed some players the wrong way, but rather that its structure didn't have much of interest within it. Just a lot of very similar planets and some very anodyne writing (the latter, in particular, was my chief complaint about the game).

Anyway, if your problem with Starfield was just that it wasn't really Elder Scrolls-y or Fallout-y enough for you, Howard doesn't seem likely to change it up. "That's some of the trade-offs we'll make to do what we think makes a science-fiction game like this… to make it what it should be." Although he does kind of concede that the complaints about Starfield's maps might have held some water.

Overall, though, Howard seems pretty happy with Starfield, and in particular with the fact that it's probably one of Bethesda's most technically proficient launches ever. "We were over the moon with… the actual data we were getting back and how the game was performing on a technical level," even as Starfield "set a record for how many players we had in a game." 

Hey, fair enough. For all my gripes about Starfield, I don't think it ever crashed on me. Given that I spent last Sunday modding Fallout: New Vegas into something actually playable, I don't think we should underestimate how valuable just working is for games like these.