It's no secret that games like Starfield and Fallout 76 stand out among past Bethesda Game Studios greats, shaking up the developer's usual formula for something new – and Todd Howard knows it, too.
The Bethesda boss himself admits as much during a recent roundtable interview. Our own Josh West posited that Starfield and Fallout 76 are more divisive than RPG gems like Skyrim, and Howard agrees to an extent – but that's not unique to them, as series like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls came across similarly different at first.
"If you look back at the beginning of Elder Scrolls, beginning of Fallout, they're a little bit the same," as Howard puts it.
"And then, you find an audience that loves that," he continues. "So, I think it's true that Fallout 76 and Starfield clearly – they're creatively different than what we had done [before]. And we really wanted to do that. When you're doing a certain type of thing for, in my case, 20 years, we want to try some other things and learn from that. We have ideas that we want to get out there."
That's more than understandable, I'd say – even as a Skyrim stan myself.
Sure, I've been waiting what feels like a century for The Elder Scrolls 6 now – but I respect that Bethesda opted to take a bit of a fresh direction with a space RPG like Starfield, even if it's not my own jam. It's got its niche now, after all.
As Howard says, "we're fortunate those games have found, in the scheme of things, giant audiences that let us keep doing things in them." Bethesda's community is all the more diverse as a result.
He concludes on games like Starfield and Fallout 76 that, "even though they're a bit off the core path of the single-player games that we have been doing, we're just fortunate to have the success that we've had with them." I'd argue that's a valid stance to take.
While I do hope Bethesda's back on its ol' Elder Scrolls grind now – which it sounds as though it is, as Howard previously admitted "the majority" of devs are on TES 6 – I get it.
It's never bad to try something new, and I'd be lying if I said I don't ever want Bethesda to give future ideas that aren't their usual Fallout or Elder Scrolls entries a go. Better than yet another Skyrim port, right?
