Todd Howard wants you to know something straight off the bat: The Elder Scrolls 6 is “still a long way off”. The game’s director is sitting in his home office, in Rockville, Maryland, flanked by shelves decorated with game and movie memorabilia. “I’m preaching patience,” he tells me. “I don’t want fans to feel anxious.”
Rather than Skyrim’s long-awaited sequel, he’s here to talk about Fallout 4, which turns ten years old this month. The post-apocalyptic RPG was a Game of the Year when it first released in 2015 – amassing $750 million in its first 24 hours on sale – and remains one of Bethesda’s most influential titles a decade later. “We were looking at it the other day,” Howard says. “We’ve had over 12 million players in the last year.” It’s a game that changed much of how the team at Bethesda Game Studios works, and its popularity spawned the Jonathan Nolan-helmed TV adaptation, the second season of which drops next month.
Over our hour-long conversation, Howard talks about his lasting memories of creating his most successful Fallout game, what makes the series’ best quests, and a little about what Bethesda Game Studios is working on right now…
We last saw you two years ago, at the end of making Starfield. That’s all you were playing then; what are you playing now?
I’m playing our own games – there are so many. In between that, I do play College Football. It sounds ludicrous coming from me, but when someone doesn’t make a sequel to a game you want, you really miss it. I missed that game dearly.
What are you working on right now?
We have hundreds of people on Fallout right now, with 76 and some other things we’re doing, but The Elder Scrolls 6 is the everyday thing.
How does it feel to be making The Elder Scrolls game again?
I do like to have a break between them, where it isn’t like a “plus one” sequel. I think it’s also good for an audience to have a break – The Elder Scrolls has been too long, let’s be clear. But we wanted to do something new with Starfield. We needed a creative reset.
Has making games changed in the ten years since Fallout 4?
Hopefully we get better with every project. We will still make some of the same mistakes in development, but that’s not abnormal. I usually say to the team, “If there’s some level of anxiety for how we are going to pull this off, that’s not bad.” We won’t always get there, but I’d rather push.
It took about seven years to make Fallout 4. I’m guessing those long development times heighten anticipation and anxiety?
I think there’s an optimal point. At times, we’ve been way past that.
Is there anything you look back on most fondly about making Fallout 4?
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