Former Starfield dev says all decisions on Bethesda RPGs "run through" Todd Howard: "He would hate, hate, hate me for saying that"

Update:

Fallout 76 landed with all the grace of an atom bomb. Back when it first released, PC Gamer's Christopher Livingston called it a «A beautifully crafted but ultimately repetitive world», giving it a 60 in his Fallout 76 review. 

Todd Howard went up on a new video with Wired to talk about his career, game by game.

Todd Howard is feeling nostalgic, and in a new video he's outlining the history of his work at Bethesda and how it's informing the next era of the studio's RPGs, including Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6.

is a massive game, touting over 100 different star systems and 1,000 planets in its enormous scope. Sadly, since the game launched, many have complained that while expansive, the Settled Systems in feel empty, making its thousand planets far less appealing and impressive. Recently, however, it's been revealed by an ex-Bethesda employee that early in the game's development, conversations took place that may have resulted in a completely different game.

Bethesda Game Studio's latest RPG, , carries on the developer's long tradition of highly customizable character creation systems. As one of the main draws of Bethesda games, these systems are all but expected to include detailed face and body sliders, a decent variety of hair, beard, and accessory options, and variable background choices. certainly delivers in this area, and although some complaints have been aired regarding the quality of the character graphics in, there's no doubt that Bethesda has at least allowed players to create the character they really want, even if those characters may not look as stellar as some might hope.

Bruce Nesmith, a former Bethesda veteran who was lead designer on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, has said that he “probably played Skyrim for 1,000 hours" and that for "950 of those hours, it was broken”. 

Stop for a second and picture your favorite video game developer or publisher. It doesn’t matter their “scale” as long as they’re prominent. More than likely, you can name-drop at least one or two people who are the “faces” of that company. For example, Nintendo has Eiji Aonuma, Shigeru Miyamoto, Doug Bowser, etc. Microsoft has Phil Spencer, Sony has/had Jim Ryan, and on it goes. For Bethesda, they have/had many people who have helped define them over the years for one reason or another. Easily, the one that most people know is Todd Howard. He’s the guy who honestly makes the biggest announcements for the company and helps crank out their best games.

If Todd Howard up and left Bethesda, it would "leave a big hole," says Skyrim's lead designer, insisting that the Starfield director has "an attribute that none of the rest of us did."

A former Bethesda developer who served as Skyrim's lead designer predicts The Elder Scrolls 6's full reveal will mirror Fallout 4's, in the sense that we probably won't hear much else about the RPG until about six months before launch.

One of Starfield's senior developers has been reflecting on the game after launch, revealing in a new interview that they reckon the space RPG could have benefited from going into greater detail on fewer planets. One of the reasons is that "some of the exploration stuff didn't come through as well as it could've."

Liked Starfield? Hated Starfield? You probably have Todd Howard to thank. A recent chat between MinnMax and Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith shed some light on Bethesda's structure and organisation, and it sure sounds like pretty much every choice the company makes needs Howard's stamp of approval before it can go ahead, even as it's grown bigger over the years. To be fair to Howard, though, it seems like that's in spite of his own wishes.