Fallout 4's cinematic dialogue system failed to shine despite Bethesda spending "forever" working on it says Todd Howard: "It really did not resonate"

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Fallout 4 director and Bethesda big dog Todd Howard says that he still loves the game's cinematic dialogue system even if players don't.

When asked about the best game he's worked on in an interview with GQ, Howard cryptically says, "I see all the things that either didn't resonate with fans, or fans may not have noticed" after revealing a string of favorites.

Fallout 3, Starfield, Fallout 76, and Skyrim all make his list of "best" games, but he also makes space for an unusual addition. While he initially refuses to elaborate on his vague statement, he eventually takes the time to talk about his love for the cinematic dialogue system from Fallout 4.

"We spent forever on the dialogue system in Fallout 4," Howard says of the effort Bethesda expended. "How do we do an interactive conversation in an interesting way? How do we make that gamey?" Despite how long the team put into creating cinematic dialogue, Howard thinks that it didn't excite players in the way he had hoped.

"It really did not resonate," Howard explains. "It was also hard on our designers to write that way. Players want to role-play more and we had a voiced protagonist. The actors were phenomenal, but a lot of players were like, 'That's not the voice I hear in my head.'"

It wasn't just the dialogue system that consumed his life during Fallout 4's development. Howard speaks about how working on the game absorbed all of his time. "You get to a point in life where you spend more time in the fantasy world than with real people," Howard explains.

Despite this, he can't promise that he won't make the same mistakes with Fallout 5. "Hopefully we get better with every project," Howard says. "We will still make some of the same mistakes in development, but that's not abnormal."

Todd Howard "hadn't had a break in 20 years" when Fallout 4 came out, so he took a 3-month sabbatical to "go touch some grass"