A former Bethesda veteran says that all decisions at the studio “run through” director Todd Howard.
17.10.2023 - 19:49 / gamesradar.com / Todd Howard / Emil Pagliarulo / Pete Hines / Will Shen / Howard
As Starfield developers begin to depart Bethesda after the release of the studio's massive RPG, some fans are despondently casting their minds forward to the eventual departure of studio lead Todd Howard.
Earlier this week, Bethesda marketing exec Pete Hines announced that he was retiring from the studio after 24 years. Shortly after came the news of lead quest designer Will Shen departing to join a new open-world project.
This is far from cause for concern - both developers are Bethesda veterans who have been working on Starfield for many years, and it's relatively normal for devs to hold out at a studio just long enough to finish one big project before moving elsewhere to start work on another. But in spite of that, in the eyes of some Bethesda fans, these departures are merely foreshadowing of another: Todd Howard's.
On Reddit, the top comment under one news post for Hines' retirement reads: "I know they're only small pieces of a bigger whole but it's going to be so weird when both he and Todd are retired." That sentiment is echoed throughout the thread. "To many, Todd and Pete are what Bethesda is," observes one fan. "I can't even imagine what a Bethesda game would look like without Todd['s] influence," says another. "Todd is Bethesda and TES is Todd," an Elder Scrolls fan asserts.
That first comment is important, of course - any major video game is the result of years of work, often by hundreds of people, and the auteur-ization of some of the industry's biggest names isn't always helpful. But there's no doubting the presence that Todd Howard maintains at Bethesda, for better or worse. There are a few other names - design director Emil Pagliarulo and the now-departing Will Shen - who were pushed further into the spotlight by Starfield, but Howard has been the de facto face of the studio for well over a decade now. And Starfield, in particular, was repeatedly described as Howard's baby.
Many Starfield players have reacted similarly. "Only Todd Howard is more synonymous with Bethesda to me," one user says of Hines' retirement. "I just hope in the coming years even when Todd decides to retire, the torch is passed on to people equally as deserving and passionate," adds another.
Howard is likely to remain in his role for a good while longer. In the run up to Starfield, Howard, now 53, began discussing how long he's likely to keep working. Back in June, he suggested that The Elder Scrolls 6 might be his final game. He's also confirmed that Fallout 5 would follow the next Elder Scrolls game, and with the former still at least three years away and the latter likely to follow several years after that, there's every chance that in a decade's time, Howard is no longer at the helm.
Both The Elder Scrolls 6
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.
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."
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.
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.
Bethesda's former design director has revealed an internal debate around the number of planets in Starfield early on in the game's development.
Bethesda's former design director thinks The Elder Scrolls 6 will keep The Elder Scroll 5: Skyrim's levelling up and progression system.
Bethesda's former design director has said the developer thought it was infallible ahead of Fallout 76's disastrous launch.
Todd Howard reportedly told Bethesda executives that a multiplayer game would be "a bad idea" on several occasions - before pressure from fans eventually encouraged him to make Fallout 76.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be a mixture of new ideas and RPG systems that go all the way back to The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, according to Bethesda's former design director Bruce Nesmith, who was lead designer on The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and senior designer on Starfield. In particular, Nesmith reckons it will "absolutely" continue with Skyrim's approach to levelling and progression, whereby you improved skills by performing the associated actions. He also thinks the game will "probably" retain elements of the magic system he designed for Skyrim, which broke away from Oblivion and Morrowind in being simpler to understand and more immediately powerful, at the price of flexibility and inventiveness.
After nearly a quarter century of helping lead Bethesda Softworks, Pete Hines, the company's head of publishing and one of its most recognizable faces, has announced that he is leaving the company and retiring from the videogame industry.