Todd Howard likes to go back to the drawing board every time Bethesda makes a new Elder Scrolls game. That fact is laughably obvious given the long, long wait for The Elder Scrolls 6 – we're hitting Skyrim's 15th anniversary this year – but it's an important part of the studio's philosophy about revisiting its most notable franchises.
"When we go to do an Elder Scrolls game," Howard tells Game Informer in a tangent during a Fallout interview, "I do kind of like to start over, so you look back across the franchise and say, 'Okay, what's important? How do you sort of file away the age? Like, okay, what's underneath that? Why do certain game mechanics… how do they make you feel, as opposed to the actual mechanic? What are the unique things about the world?'"
Bethesda's willingness to dramatically reinvent core parts of the series is apparent if you look back at its history. Morrowind killed the procedural generation of Arena and Daggerfall in favor of a fully handcrafted world. Skyrim ditched the hardcore number crunching of its predecessors in favor of a more intuitive stat system.
And it's true of Fallout, too, which is the actual subject of Howard's statement. But instead of referring to its own games to figure out the basic core of the identity, the team looks back at the 1997 Interplay classic that started it all. "Fallout 1, like, the tone of that game and the world of it became our boilerplate in terms of whenever you go to do something new," Howard explains.
The original Fallout's grim tone carried into Bethesda's series debut on Fallout 3, and the devs wanted to explore a different space for Fallout 4. "We're coming off of Skyrim, so it's our follow up to Skyrim," Howard explains. "There was an idea of not having it as visually and tonally bleak as Fallout 3 was, and we want each game to have its own kind of identity. We do it with Elder Scrolls, we do it with Fallout. That was one of the main goals as we went out and did research and took photos of areas that had decayed or buildings that have been destroyed or other things, there's an interesting colorfulness or beauty to some of that."
