ENTREVISTA IGN-TODD HOWARD-12-JUNIO-2023

01🚀Ryan McCaffrey - ...do you kinda feel any extra pressure compared to any of the other games you've made, or do you just kinda focus on what you do? Is the sort of stuff that gets talked about in the gaming community something that goes through your head, or gets talked about in the office at all?

Todd Howard - Well clearly I'm aware of everything you said, and compared to our previous games... there's always a lot of attention on what we do. We're very fortunate. But for us, we've put so much into this game, and it is as you said our first new IP in over twenty-five years. It's our first major release in about eight years. So, for us, we've just put so much into it, we're just doing everything we can to to make the best game that we can. [We] hope that everybody loves it. We feel we're on the right track, and we're really fortunate, I think... to get the attention... We know there's a lot of people out there looking forward to it. We just view our job as, you know, just do the best job we can to put everything we can into the game and I hope everyone loves it.

02🚀RM - I think the last time we talked, or maybe the time before, I gave you a little grief for you, Babe Ruth-ian, you called your shot for 11-11-22, really far in advance. And I think we were having a little fun about that before the delay, so, I mean it's good; we want a better game. We don't want you just to make the date for the sake of making the date. So just out of curiousity: how has the extra time been spent specifically with Starfield?

TH - Well look, it's just such a big game, and as you do these things you do your best as it comes to release dates and projections, but given the scale of it, if one thing is off by a percentage, that can escalate quickly to more time. And we've really spent it most this year playing the game a ton, over and over, and making sure that it's balanced, it's as fun as possible, honing systems and interface. Obvious bugfixing and all those things. Performance. And really getting it where we're really, really sure and solid on what we're putting out there for everybody.

03🚀RM - Well speaking of performance, Xbox gamers went through a little unpleasant surprise with the last big Bethesda exclusive not too long ago with Redfall and that maybe not performing on console, on the Series X, how we'd hoped. I think what we're looking for is not necessarily 'everything's gotta be 4k 60 or 120 frames,' but nobody likes surprises when it comes to the game that they're going to buy; how it performs, how it feels. Now your games have always been these boudary-pushing and envelope pushing huge open, detailed worlds. They've been thirty frames per second on console traditionally. I'm just gonna turn it over for you for a second to just lay out, so that nobody's surprised come September 6th. What are we looking at if I'm gonna play this on a Series X or, even if you wanna mention Series S as well, what's the experience gonna be technically speaking?

TH - I'm glad you asked. I think it'll come as no surprise, given our previous games, we go for always these huge open worlds, fully dynamic, hyper-detailed, where anything can happen. And we do wanna do that- it's 4k on the X, it's 1440 on the S- we do lock it at 30. We do want that fidelity. We want all that stuff. We don't want to sacrifice any of it. Fortunately in this one, we've got it running great. It's often running way above that, sometimes sixty. But on the consoles we do lock it, because we prefer the consistency, where you're not even thinking about it. We don't ever want to sacrifice that experience that makes our games really, really special. It feels great, we're really happy with how it feels even in the heat of battle, and we need that headroom because in our games really anything can happen.

04🚀RM - Speaking of tweaking and optimizing, there were some rumors going around that Id Software was helping you guys out with the combat, with tuning combat. I'm just curious, was there any truth to that at all?

TH - They did not help us with the com- well, first of all, I'll say, being in the company, knowing the folks at Id Software for a long time- I'm a huge Doom fan- they're the absolute best. Doom Eternal is one of my favorite games. And so, with Fallout 4 they did give us a few tips on how to handle the combat, but in Starfield, we redid the combat ourselves. And it's really feeling great. But Id has helped us really more on the graphics side. So we get into motion blur, it's how the game feels smooth, some other things they do in IdTech that we wanted to bring over into Creation Engine 2, and they helped us do that. It's great.

05🚀RM - Awesome, that's a nice neighbor to have down the street.

TH - It is, and I love it, and I'm such a fan of what they do, so being able to get an early look at what they're doing next- not here to talk about that-

06🚀RM - I mean feel free to talk about that if you want!

TH - [Looking off-camera] No? Alright.

07🚀RM - You mentioned it's going to be just shy of eight years between shipping Fallout 4 and shipping Starfield, which to my knowledge, is the longest that you've ever gone between shipping games that you've directed.

TH - Well obviously we had 76 in-between, but as something that I've directed, yes.

08🚀RM - So, I'm just curious about what was your initial vision for Starfield, and how that's either stayed true and borne out, or evolved over the course of eight years?

TH - That's a great question. I will say this: that the game sticks to the original vision. That took longer than I wanted... but I'd say about halfway through the project you realize this is why nobody tries to make this game. So it's been... you know, when you do these things, you take some risks and you're really ambitious, that can be a very windy path sometimes, is how I'd say it. But it is true to the vision we had. For our type of role-playing game, set in space. And where your mind goes, we want to as much as possible say "yes" to the player. "Can I do this? Can I do this?" Yes, yes, yes, yes. Space is big, so the amount of content that we ended up making to have that really feel authentic to that, that did grow, and grow, from where we originally started.

09🚀RM - So neither one of us is getting younger. We've both been doing our respective things for a while. Are you okay with things taking eight years again?

TH - [That's] not my plan. I don't think you would ever, ever plan for that. Sometimes that's how it ends up, so that you know that what you're putting on the screen is what you want, but you're right. I'm not getting younger. Sort of start, you know...

10🚀RM - ... "how many games have you got left in you?"

TH - ... yeah, "more games behind than ahead?" That does start to enter your head.

11🚀RM - Would you point to any other games as inspiration for Starfield along the way? Not in the literal sense of "I wanna do what they did," but in terms of giving the player a feeling, that a game you played that you really wanted to convey? When you first showed me this game awhile back, I was certainly reminded of Elder Scrolls and Fallout. The DNA is there. But the other two non-Bethesda games that I got little vibes from were No Man's Sky and Mass Effect.

TH - Clearly those other games that are science-fiction I think you might look at and say, "Okay, this is science fiction, it's like that." I think the minute-to-minute on the ground has similarities to Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and the things that we've made. How it feels in your hands. There's some certain mechanics. But believe it or not, it's the games that put you in a world, that transport you to a place. I think it probably as a flow has more of a feeling of a Red Dead 2. Like, I'm living a western fantasy. So in this, you are living this science-fiction explorer fantasy, and sometimes that's being on barren planet and nothing is going on.

12🚀RM - Or an old west town, like we saw in the direct.

TH - ... And all that. So, for me, it's games where I feel I am rooted in the reality of this universe, of the game, and everything else kinda disappears.

13🚀RM - As people have now seen, there was a lot in the direct, in the forty-five minutes that were covered. A big takeaway for me was that for everything that we saw, there was just sort of these hints of Constellation and that seems to be who the main story is gonna revolve around. But separate from that, or adjacent to that, it seems like there's so much to do in this game that... are you are gonna be okay if players just don't end up really paying much attention to the main story, and just end up doing their own thing out there? Or are you taking greater pains to make sure that people wanna get through that main path before they get back out to the wild space frontier?

TH - That's a good question. I view our job as giving people the menu: here are the things you could do. It's a very large game, obviously there's a lot to it. It can be complicated at times. We have found, though, that the gaming audince, in particular our fans, they want to have all those options. And I do think, more than anything we've done- I really believe this- that the more you give to Starfield, the more it gives back. That was one of our goals. I do hope people play the main quest, I do hope people do this, but most of all I want them ultimately to do whatever they want to do.

14🚀RM - I know you don't want to give away a lot about the main storyline certainly, and people don't want to have that spoiled for 'em, but what I would be curious of, given, again, the scale and scope of this that the direct conveyed- and that I barely scratched the surface of when I was playing a little while ago- of these thousand planets, of all the stuff you've got going on. How much of it will the main story lead you towards? Cause you probably wanna show as much of the diversity and as many of the cool places that your team worked really hard on over the course of the campaign. But you can't show everything, you can't lead up to a thousand different planets, right?

TH - We wanna keep it sort of, you know, managable- that's what I would say- in the main quest. So we obviously hit some high points, but it's still a small fraction, like you'res saying, of what's in the game. For us, with a main quest, we want it to sort of pay off. There are people that do want to come to a game, do the main story, and feel that, okay, I've won. I can now do something else. And I think that's okay, too. But we've also learned, look, we're sitting here, it's 12 years after Skyrim, we're looking at a game that has over 60 million copies, and all these people playing it, and they're still playing it. So we have learned: we need to build in, from the beginning, a game that has this long-term play thought of. Hopefully, people are playing Starfield a long time from now.

15🚀RM - On that note, you guys have always done post-release content. You've had major, paid, bigger expansions, smaller-scale stuff. I can't imagine that you'd even want to necessarily expand this game geographically, moving foward, cause there's already a ton there. I know you're not here to just announce your post-release plan, but conceptually how're you thinking about it, given that this a giant universe rather than a continent like Cyrodiil in an Elder Scrolls game?

TH - That's a great question. We're gonna be doing a lot of add-on content for Starfield. We love doing it, our fans love it, we will have announced the first one that's gonna... we're gonna do a story expansion pack, that's gonna be coming. Our plan is to do things of varying sizes. And we've done a lot of that in our previous games. It's something we really like doing and our fans like. Despite the size of the game, there's still things you wanna add as far as features in the future, or stories and things like that. We think this is... hopefully continue a long time that way.

16🚀RM - At the end of the direct, we heard from a bunch of folks on your team about their favorite moments that they've had while playing. Can you paint me a specific picture of a memorable moment for a character that you've rolled, that you've been playing in recent months? Some memorably cool scenario.

TH - Let's see. Just a few weeks ago, I landed on one of the early planets, and this sandstorm blew through, and I went to run away from it, and ships can randomly land, like, enemy ships. So I'm going through the sandstorm, and I get in this firefight, and I got on the ship and while I'm shooting the guys on the surface of the planet, the ship took off into space. So now I'm in outer space on the ship, and I was just like, "... Can that happen? I guess that can happen."

17🚀RM - One of my favorite moments from Oblivion, which I've told you many times is my favorite game of yours- that's the one that I have the most positive memories with- was randomly finding a unicorn in the forest. So are there, like, fifty of those kind of things in this game?...

TH - There's a good number. There's a lot.

18🚀RM - ...that's not a quest? That you'll just randomly happen upon this memorable, special...

TH - I don't wanna spoil what they are, but yeah, of course. We love that stuff. I'm very curious to see how long after the game is out that people discover it.

19🚀RM - You mentioned Skyrim and tens and tens of millions of copies of that, and the historic runaway train that that thing's been. You probably can't count on that level of success again necessarily. What does success look like, for you with this game?

TH - That's a good question, because with Game Pass, we're obviously gonna be bringing in probably the biggest audience that we've had for a launch. It just makes you really fortunate to know that you can take these kind of risks, with a game like this, and be ambitious but still know that it's gonna get in a lot of people's hands. I think for us, [success] is that people say they love the game. All games go through a couple phases. They have this phase, where the game isn't out yet, what do you people think of it? Then there's like, what do they think of it the first week it comes out? But then you gotta think about, what do they think after a year? What do they think after year two? I hope that it sort of stands the test of time, like our other games. I don't focus the number of users in that way.

20🚀RM - But I guess you can't really design for a game that will stand the test of time, right? You just have to do your best and hope that it works out? [laughs]

TH - That is very true. You do the absolute best that you can do. Again, the whole team- we have really poured ourselves into this one over a lotta years. You cross your fingers, you do everything you can. There are systems you can design that say, this system is going to work over a long-term play, with hundreds of hours, like a character system versus, "yeah after thirty you've burned through everything." That's certainly not the case here.

21🚀RM - Clearly not based on what I've seen so far. The thousand planets number is the big one that you've throwing out. What's the ratio of procedurally generated stuff, to the handcrafted stuff?

TH - Well, the planets themselve, the landscapes are pretty much all procedural. We kinda make these large, think like kilometer-sized tiles we've generated. And those get kinda wrapped around the planet. As far as hand-crafted content- more than any game we've done. I've stopped giving out numbers. [laughs] But just in the dialogue, it's more than Skyrim and Fallout 4 combined, just in dialogue, right? As we get into locations and art and everything, we've done more of it than we've ever done.

22🚀RM - Wow. Is it reasonable to suggest that if Starfield is as awesome and successful as we all hope it is as gamers, is it reasonable to think that a Starfield 2 is ten plus years away? Because the reason I bring this up- not to bring it back to how much time do we all have left- but you have always kept...

TH - Is this gonna get depressing?

23🚀RM - ...I hope not. But you've always kept your team, clearly on purpose, as one team. Bethesda Game Studios, your team, and you had been alternating between Elder Scrolls and then once you acquired it, Fallout. You've gone back and forth. And now you've had this eight year Starfield thing in here. You've already committed to Elder Scrolls 6 as the next thing, you've said it's pre-production. And then last year, when we talked, you said, yep, Fallout 5, I wanna do that, that'll be next.

TH - That was more of a general, it will clearly be after Elder Scrolls 6 at some point. Let me clarify that. [Laughs] At some point in the future. Elder Scrolls 6 is the next one, yeah.

24🚀RM - So if Starfield is awesome, and you wanna do another one, and the team wants to do another one, and the company wants another one... it sounds like it's probably be a while.

TH - I don't have a great answer for you there. It's an astute observation.

25🚀RM - I'm not tryin' to get you to unveil the roadmap, because again, you've kept your team smaller. You've, to date, not grown a second team within the studio unless you have...

TH - Well, we have what I would call a full-size group/team on 76 still, updating that game, it's doing great. Very fortunate. But you're right in that- we have gotten bigger. We have four studios. The one in Rockville, we have Montreal, we have Austin, we have Dallas. So we have gotten bigger to handle all this. We work with a lot of partners on stuff. But that doesn't speed things up necessarily, right? You need a certain size- we're relatively small comparatively- to do these things. I think if we look at Skyrim- again, not the plan to have an Elder Scrolls 6 this far after Skyrim- but in today's day, people are playing these games for longer. So our ability, like we talked about, to support Starfield- whereas maybe in the old days, you'd put it out and then you'd go on to a sequel- now we can support that game for a much longer period of time, which is what our plan is. And then as we look to like an Elder Scrolls 6, that is one where, like... I probably shouldn't say this... but if I do the math, I'm not getting younger. How do people play an Elder Scrolls for? That may be the last one I do. I don't know.

26🚀RM - The last Elder Scroll?

TH - The last Elder Scrolls. I don't know.

27🚀RM - I mean, I do the math, and as a gamer, am I even gonna be playing Elder Scrolls 6 on the Series X? Or am I gonna be playing that on the next thing? 'Cause it's crazy how long the games that you make they... they take a long time!

TH - I wish they didn't, I wanted to be faster. But speed isn't the goal. The goal is, what's the product? What's the vision? How do we do this? And how do we continue to support the ones that we currently have? Because we have millions of people playing Fallout 4. Millions playing 76. Skyrim. So it's about- hopefully we'll have that with Starfield.

28🚀RM - You had told me last year that you wanna direct Fallout 5. That you want that to be your game at some point down the road. But now, with the Microsoft, Bethesda, Xbox Games Studios family getting a lot bigger... you did work with Obsidian years ago, with New Vegas... could any of the games that you and your team have created- any of these three franchises- would you want to work with any of them potentially on something in the future?

TH - I mean, there's always- I can't say "never" to any of that. For us, it is: what's gonna get us the best product? How do we stay focused? I think there's a lot of times where you can get unfocused and try to too many things at once, and then they don't end up necessarily the way you want. So if I look at other franchises, or I look at entertainment in general, I haven't noticed the time gap between things being a negative, right? They can be a negative when you think about it and you make a calendar: "Oh when's Starfield 2?"

29🚀RM - Look at Grand Theft Auto!

TH - Exactly. You know, the gaps between- I think Half-Life 3 will do fine. Even though, in the moment- how do I bring that closer to reality today, cause I wanna play it?- those gaps- these are still evergreen franchises. I think when they come, it's about just doing it right.

30🚀RM - That's what we as gamers want, here too, certainly. So, Starfield. I played an hour; it felt like three minutes. And you were hustling me along through different save files, like, oh look at this, go look at this. What's the character you're playing now? Cause you've got the traits, you've got the background; what are you 'maining' right now?

TH - Well I try to do it all. Right now, I'm digging deep on spaceships. You could say, in some respects, this is five or six games in one, right? It's a spaceship game, it's a on-the-ground game, it's a dialogue-game, it's an outpost game, it's a crafting game. It does all of these things. It always is tricky for us to get a good game flow, where those things don't feel like they're separate games. That they can weave in and out of each other in a way that holistically creates something greater than the sum of its parts.

31🚀RM - To help contextualize Starfield for players, before they get a chance to play it themselves: what's the feeling that you try to give people with Elder Scrolls, what's the feeling that you try to give people with Fallout, and what's the feeling that you try to give players with this?

TH - That's a good question. I would say, if you think about Elder Scrolls as a fantasy world, who would you wanna be and what would you wanna do? We wanna provide that. And then Fallout, the same thing in a post-apocalyptic environment. How does that factor into the things you find? Crafting is very unique in Fallout when it comes to that, or, what's the vibe of the people? What are they sacrificing to stay alive? And then when you get to Starfield and science-fiction, same sort of thing where, if you were to open it up and you could do anything, how are we providing that experience? And we love exploration, so when you get into a game like this, that's what people say: "Why do you have a thousand planets?" Cause we'd rather give you the option to do that than say "no." So I think if people drift toward fantasy, they're gonna stick with Elder Scrolls. If they like post apocalypse to go to Fallout; if they like science-fiction, Starfield fulfils that desire to play with that kind of thing.

🚀 Fuente