Todd Howard says "leaks don't help" Bethesda or players, especially when it comes to Oblivion: "Everyone is gonna have a different version"

Bethesda Game Studios' boss man Todd Howard is unsurprisingly not a big fan of leaks because, according to the The Elder Scrolls and Fallout lead, leakage leads to players getting "a little anxious" over what they're getting into.

The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered was definitely not the first Bethesda RPG to leak ahead of its reveal, but it is one that fans were somewhat aware of for literal years thanks to Microsoft's leaked legal documents. So, when we sat down with Todd Howard to talk about The Elder Scrolls 6 and Creation Engine 3, we also picked his brain about game leaks.

"They never help us," he says outright. "They don't help the audience either, for all of you who are, like, hearing things leaking. You know you're getting sort of misinformation on what it is, and so the audience can get a little anxious. Like, is it a remake? I hear this, and I hear this."

Howard continues to say it was particularly an issue with Oblivion, with fans unsure on whether it would get a full-blown remake or a simple upscale rather than the handsome facelift we ended up with . "If you hear we're remastering it, the game you have in your head, everyone is gonna have a different version of what that is," he adds. "And I think it creates some anxiety for our players."

Those widespread leaks are partly what inspired Bethesda to all but shadow drop the remaster last year. Howard says the company "wanted that time from 'here's what it is' to 'you can touch it' to be zero." That way, no one gets mixed messages or is confused about where the game sits on the remake-remaster spectrum - it's already in your hands by the time the question pops up in your head.

"So that's everything around that, but it was incredibly successful. So it obviously makes us think about, are there going to be remasters in the future of our games? What would they be? How would we approach it? We're thinking about all that," he says.

There's no rush on The Elder Scrolls 6, Todd Howard says, because Bethesda has the "benefit of having so many millions of people playing our other games"