When The Elder Scrolls Online gets Update 40 for the base game, not only will the Endless Archive dungeon be freely available to all, but there’s a new Hermaeus Mora Patron Deck for Tales of Tribute on the way.
26.09.2023 - 22:31 / gamesradar.com / Todd Howard / Ted Price / New / Howard / News For / Says It / Howard Says
Starfield was extensively playtested by Bethesda devs often working from home, and Todd Howard says this approach worked so well that the studio's going to apply the method to its future games, with the studio's next confirmed, albeit far-off project obviously being The Elder Scrolls 6.
Speaking with Insomniac Games CEO Ted Price in a recent interview, Howard reveals that a version of Starfield that was "basically done" was shared with the team in late 2022, with the general message being, "this should be the game you're playing over the holiday." This kicked off a wave of team-wide playtesting, and Howard reckons that, on top of the obvious benefits of having a huge chunk of time dedicated to polish, the work-from-home environment added a special little something.
Price asks if this style of take-home QA is normal for Bethesda, and Howard says that it isn't, but "that will be now."
"I think it was sort of a pandemic thing too, where people were at home, so how do we get builds at home?" Howard says. "But even if you're working at home you're usually on your PC. We knew given the scale of the game that's where we wanted to be, so we made it a goal for this project to have that much time to be playing it and polishing it.
"The 'go home' part I think is very interesting," he continues. "The things you notice. Even if you're working from home, you're on a PC, you're on a dev kit. When you say 'I'm gonna put it on your retail Xbox,' you're in your usual environment, you're on your sofa, your speaker setup is a certain way, you just came off playing Ratchet & Clank or Spider-Man or whatever. You're instantly comparing to the last thing you were playing, and the way you see even your own game changes.
"There's some delta there in how you look at it that we found, everybody in the team found, really impactful. Both positive, and then figuring out, 'Hey I think our 5.1 sound setup is a little off.' It could be anything. Or font sizes. Now you're sitting 10 feet away and you're used to sitting two feet away."
A Large Menu Fonts mode is one of the (few) features highlighted by Steve Saylor in our Starfield accessibility verdict, so it's interesting to hear that it was at least partly influenced by the at-home experience of Bethesda staff.
Elsewhere in the interview, Howard says that their own internal feedback was "brutal," even if it often led to ultimately beneficial decisions like nerfing "the hell" out of planetary hazards to make exploration more fun. Here again, Howard preaches the value of widespread playtesting.
"Our main rule for game development is: great games are played and not made. We play the game a lot. The internal feedback is brutal, in terms of us looking at our own game and then sifting
When The Elder Scrolls Online gets Update 40 for the base game, not only will the Endless Archive dungeon be freely available to all, but there’s a new Hermaeus Mora Patron Deck for Tales of Tribute on the way.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the start of a “new phase” for the plumber’s side-scrolling adventures, according to Nintendo staff.
Apple's transition to its custom M-series chips from Intel-based processors has proved to be quite a success for the company. The company is expected to release its third wave of upgrades for the chips next year, adopting TSMC's 3nm architecture for better CPU and GPU performance. However, Qualcomm is now working to directly compete against Apple with its new Snapdragon X series of chips which will offer enhanced computational and graphical performance.
It's almost time to step into the mysterious (and uniquely rewarding) Endless Archive instance for The Elder Scrolls Online. The ESO team is giving some tips to prepare for the experience and the challenges within.
RuneScape has announced that it's ditching its new battle pass system barely a month after it debuted, calling it «not reflective of a direction we're taking RuneScape in» following widespread player uproar.
The Endless Archive is on its way starting on October 30th when Update 40 arrives on PC/Mac. The Elder Scrolls Online team is kicking off some previews to enrich your experience with a new character introduction. Meet the archive’s custodian, Master Malkhest, one of the mortals in Apocrypha.
First there was Fallout Shelter, and now there’s The Elder Scrolls: Castles. This latest mobile entry by Bethesda takes the formula laid down by Shelter and applies it to The Elder Scrolls universe.
Bethesda has shadow dropped a new mobile game set in the Elder Scrolls universe.
Fans of 2015’s Fallout Shelter have likely wondered what’s next for the series. Well, it seems only natural that Bethesda would follow up with a new iteration. And it did, but this time for the studio’s other prominent RPG franchise. Today Bethesda apparently shadow-dropped The Elder Scrolls: Castles, a follow-up to Fallout Shelter, out now on Android.
Publisher Bethesda Softworks and developer Bethesda Game Studios have released simulation game The Elder Scrolls: Castles in Early Access for Android via Google Play. It is free-to-play.
Bethesda boss Todd Howard says Starfield was designed and built for longevity, even more so than RPGs like Skyrim or any of the modern Fallouts, with the studio already considering how the game will evolve for years and years to come.
Bethesda boss Todd Howard says Starfield was "basically done" by holiday 2022, and to help test the mammoth RPG, virtually everyone on the development team got a build to play on their own Xbox consoles and PCs at home.