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Todd Howard knows fans are waiting to hear more about The Elder Scrolls 6, though part of the admittedly nice-to-have problem is that Bethesda has to balance making the new RPG while ensuring fans of other properties like Fallout and Starfield remain fed.
Remember the days when Skyrim came out less than a year after its official reveal? How about when Fallout 4's entire marketing campaign was shoved into a nice, concise six-month window? Good times, but now, Howard has explained why the gap between reveal and release has been stretched out longer for Bethesda Game Studios.
To put things into perspective, Starfield took about five years between its first trailer and its final release date, while The Elder Scrolls 6's announcement trailer dropped a full eight years ago and its release date is nowhere in sight. Speaking during a roundtable interview attended by GamesRadar+, game director Todd Howard offers a couple of reasons for the larger and larger gaps.
"I don't want to count The Elder Scrolls 6," he laughs. "Starfield was long. But other than that, they're usually pretty short." Howard attributes Starfield's protracted development to the fact that it was an original idea rather than a sequel, that most of its production occurred during a global pandemic, and that Bethesda, as a whole, changed ownership to Microsoft.
Howard also says Bethesda is in perhaps a better position than other studios because people are still playing Fallout and Skyrim en masse. "We also, again, have that benefit of having so many millions of people playing our other games that we're actually trying to figure out how to serve those other audiences while we make a new one." There's not as huge a rush to crank out The Elder Scrolls 6, then, and it means things like Starfield's big new update are possible.
In terms of how big Bethesda Game Studios has gotten, Howard says the studio hasn't seen "these big jumps" like other big-name developers out there have. "We sort of top out with partners, four or 500 people. That's kind of like our peak," he explains. "We're seeing that growth is slow for us, to be honest, compared to, I think maybe the rest of the industry, where we still want to be who we are and making a game."
That apparently means Bethesda has "longer pre-production with smaller teams" before it puts an entire studio's worth of developers on to a project. "We really want to get a good kernel of a game that we're ready to then put more people on and start moving faster," he says. "To your larger question... it's something a lot of people are struggling with. Which is really, how much time and money can you invest... just pick a game that you have in mind. The industry is in a difficult spot, where can you, you know, what's your confidence in that making any money, right? Because the expenses are high. So I think every studio's dealing with that in their own way."
