It’s pretty well known that Bethesda nearly had a voiced protagonist in Starfield. The developer decided against it in the end. However, did you know that one of those actors could well have been the voice behind Adam Jensen?
24.10.2023 - 20:19 / pcgamer.com / Todd Howard / Bruce Nesmith / Howard
It's been five years since Todd Howard revealed the startling news that yes, Bethesda is going to make The Elder Scrolls 6, and it will be years yet before it actually arrives. It's a virtually unprecedented gap between a game's «announcement» (such as it was) and tangible evidence that something's being done to make it happen, and Howard himself said not too long ago that he regrets handling the reveal the way he did. The obvious question then is, why announce it at all? According to longtime Bethesda designer Bruce Nesmith, the fans basically bullied him into it.
«The company took years of hits for not talking about Elder Scrolls 6,» Nesmith said in a MinnMax interview. «I mean, years of hits. Because Todd's opinion—one which I share, by the way—is that the videogame industry has short memories. Those companies that start touting their games years ahead of time, actually, they screw themselves. The best time to start talking about it is six months before release.
»Only the fact that everybody was, you know, the pitchforks and torches were out, was what got Todd to say yes, we're going to do Elder Scrolls 6, I promise you, it's for real, it'll happen. But I'm betting you won't hear much in the way of details until a good six months before release."
That's exactly how Bethesda handled the release of Fallout 4 back in 2015: Bethesda officially announced the game in June 2015, and it launched in November of that same year. That brief window no doubt contributed to the expectation that when Elder Scrolls 6 was confirmed in 2018, it wouldn't be that far off—an expectation we now know was way off-base.
Nesmith left Bethesda in 2021 after a total of 20 years at the studio, during which time he earned credits on games including Daggerfall, Oblivion, Skyrim—on which he was the lead designer—and all of Bethesda's Fallout games. Prior to his departure, he also served as a systems designer on Starfield. It's fair to say he has a pretty good grasp on the studio's approach to making games, in other words, and he predicted that the runaway success of Baldur's Gate 3—which has been among Steam's top sellers since August—won't really have much influence on the Elder Scrolls 6 because Bethesda has such a distinct approach to making games.
Nesmith said Baldur's Gate 3 «is a triumph of trying to make the tabletop experience actually happen right there in the computer,» in large part because just about every decision has meaningful consequences: Following one particular course of action will exclude you from pursuing others, and thus lock you out of potentially significant chunks of the game. At Bethesda, on the other hand, «the games we're making were so big, we had to take the approach of, 'Well, everybody's got to be
It’s pretty well known that Bethesda nearly had a voiced protagonist in Starfield. The developer decided against it in the end. However, did you know that one of those actors could well have been the voice behind Adam Jensen?
A former Bethesda veteran says that all decisions at the studio “run through” director Todd Howard.
The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, released way back in 1996, was the second installment in what went on to become Bethesda’s beloved, genre-defining RPG series, but it sounds like it was a particularly tricky one to get off the launchpad - and that if it hadn’t come together it could have meant the end of the studio itself.
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."
The lead designer of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim has discussed the difference in design philosophy between Bethesda games and Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3.
Former Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith left Bethesda, and his updated role as senior systems designer, partway through Starfield's development, so he was as surprised as the rest of us when the massive space RPG was released in remarkably good condition.
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.
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.
In Starfield,there's a quest where you get to betray a major player. I'm going to keep the details vague to avoid spoilers, but in a lot of other RPGs this would be a massive story moment. If you walk down this path, you'll never be able to interact with that faction again. You're signing up for this life over that one.
At this point, it’s safe to say that people are ready for The Elder Scrolls 6. While we’re likely still years away from playing it, it feels as though Bethesda will start putting more stock into the Skyrim follow-up now that Starfield is out.