Skyrim and Fallout artist says Todd Howard would tell devs "we can do anything but we can't do everything," and 95% of player-reported issues were flagged internally before launch

Headshot of Todd Howard, executive producer and game director of Bethesda Game Studios. Image supplied to GamesRadar by BGS.

These days, the vast majority of games ship with bugs that are later patched out, but Bethesda games in particular have earned themselves a somewhat dubious reputation for the sheer amount of glitches and performance issues they usually have at launch. To this day, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim has bugs that have persisted for 15 years, and a former Bethesda artist who worked on the game has shared a design philosophy held by executive producer Todd Howard that may have contributed to that association.

In a recently resurfaced clip from a 2025 interview with Kiwi Talkz, former Bethesda senior artist Dennis Mejillones estimates 95% of the issues players report when Bethesda games launch were already flagged internally.