We'd all like The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 to come out sooner rather than later. To be honest, I'd settle for proper acknowledgement of either at this point. But a former Bethesda developer believes if the RPGs were to come out too quick, fans would get tired of back-to-back releases.

In light of Xbox reportedly pushing the company for faster turnaround on its major releases, Bruce Nesmith, the lead designer on Skyrim and contributor to Starfield, Oblivion, and more, thinks Bethesda going too hard could "risk fan fatigue." In his mind, the dev team needs to find a middle-ground.

"There is an old adage in software development about the process having three corners: resources, time, and quality,” Nesmith says to FRVR. "The studio decides two of them, which determines the third. If you lock down the resources and the schedule, that decides the quality you will achieve. If you lock down the quality and the schedule, that determines the resources you will need to complete the project."

He hammers in that, "You can't dictate all three, only two," and "over-committing to any one of the corners increases friction and becomes less effective." Making the pipeline too long leads to less productivity, as well. "Allowing ten years for a project creates a cycle of endless reinvention and ultimate failure," Nesmith adds.

Having been involved in Bethesda games from Daggerfall through to Starfield, Nesmith considers the sweet spot for launch dates to be shy of half a decade between big games. "Three years felt like the right amount of time to meet fan expectations," he says, adding that actually figuring out what people want is a "moving target."

But in the case of The Elder Scrolls 6, it's been nearly 10 years since Todd Howard first mentioned it, and the status of Fallout 5 is anyone's guess, some 11 years removed from its predecessor. Other studios seem to have similar project timelines.

Naughty Dog is taking around five to seven years per release now, with The Last of Us 2 having come out six years ago. Santa Monica Studio, home of the God of War games, tends towards four years per release, but that could be getting longer; God of War Laufey doesn't yet have a launch window.

Then, of course, we have GTA 6. Triple-A games are starting to take more time, and the tech and manpower involved are becoming larger and larger. So when the next big sequel you're waiting for comes out, make sure to enjoy it, because it might be a while before you get another.

Analysts expect GTA 6 could sell up to 30 million copies at launch, but are unsure if it can "surpass the incredible longevity and massive sales of 5" in the long run.

Similar to GTA 6, the anticipation for The Elder Scrolls 6 is so astronomically high that any firsthand information about it, no matter how granular, is relevant in the overall conversation surrounding the project. That's even more true when it's coming from someone as integral to production as Todd Howard, executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios and game director on The Elder Scrolls 6. Full disclosure: this one's very granular. Like, if The Elder Scrolls 6 release date is Santa Monica State Beach, this is a single grain of sand on the docks.

Talking to EW, Howard repeated some stuff we already know about the game, like the fact that it's the "biggest project" in the studio's pipeline, and that "the majority of the studio" is working on it. That said, he did touch on arguably the biggest controversy BGS is facing at the moment: the fact that its games are taking a really freakin' long time to make these days.

It's now been eight years since The Elder Scrolls 6 was revealed, and Xbox's new CEO, Asha Sharma, is reportedly keen on shortening development cycles at BGS, so Howard's comment is particularly timely.

"We know we need to get it right and it's been a long time," Howard says.

Thanks, Todd. It really has been a long time, and I ain't getting any younger. Obviously, Howard simply acknowledging the lengthiness of the game's development cycle doesn't do anything to shorten it, but it's nice to know the guy at the top is aware that people are starting to lose their patience.

The Elder Scrolls 6 was a no-show at this year's Summer Game Fest, meaning it'll likely be months until we get an update, possibly during this year's Game Awards in December. Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty recently confirmed that he's seen the game in motion and said it looks "amazing" and is "coming along well," adding, "we'll make sure to announce it and really reveal it at the right time."

Elder Scrolls and Fallout developer Bethesda "will be fine" as "they make all the money," but layoffs for the rest of ZeniMax "have begun," Duke Nukem co-creator says

Eight years and 68 updates later, the wasteland has never looked better. It's funny to think that few thought that Fallout 76 had a chance of surviving, let alone thriving, back when Bethesda Game Studios first announced its shared-world RPG – assumed to be too vastly out of step with the foundational Fallout experience to succeed.

And yet here we are, with Fallout 76 hosting one of the loveliest communities in all of gaming and providing safe haven for Fallout show fans looking for continuing adventures out in the wilds. Bethesda released a major new Fallout 76 update on June 2, Infestations, so we caught up with creative director Jon Rush and production director Bill LaCoste to get an update from the frontlines of Appalachia.

Talk to me about the Infestations update, what does it bring to Fallout 76?

Jon Rush, creative director: The wasteland is a dangerous place, and sometimes us wastelanders need to be reminded of that. Each update to the game that we've made since launch has kind of been the next chapter, and a lot of the focus has been different groups moving into Appalachia and setting up shop there. But the Super Mutants, the Scorched, and all of those misprogrammed robots are kind of getting tired of that – they want some of these places back. So Infestations unlocks close to 40 unique locations in the game that were once abandoned and are now full of action. Areas that have been taken over by these nefarious groups, and it's up to us Wastelanders to take them back and reclaim the wasteland.

It's still early days yet, but are players already shaping the way you're thinking about this update moving forward?

Jon Rush: You know, Bill and I largely consider ourselves to be pretty good players of our game. When we were playtesting Infestations with our team before release, they were a pretty good challenge. Little did we know, once it went live, people would be mowing through it much quicker than we ever did [Laughter]. So that has given us the next steps forward for making the feature better. So Infestation quests will get harder – much harder. And we have plans to continue improving that feature and expanding on it for the next patch and the one after that, and so on. Player feedback is so important.

This time last year we were talking about Gone Fission, which introduced fishing to Fallout 76. How do you avoid whiplash shifting between such different concepts?

Jon Rush: In the past, I've used the phrase: 'thickening the experience of Fallout 76.' What I mean by that is that we're always looking for ways to enrich existing features and playspaces in the game. Fishing did exactly that. 'Anywhere you can swim, you can fish!' is something you probably heard us say last year – that tells me, as a player, that I should be exploring the whole map again, just to see what kind of stuff can be pulled out of the water. In many ways, that fishing feature inspired what future features will look like, in that they are designed to thicken and enrich that experience.

How does that focus apply forward to what you delivered with Infestations?

Jon Rush: Despite how obviously different Infestations may seem from Gone Fission, they actually aren't that different. Both have experiences that can take place across the entire map, perhaps in places that you haven't ever been to or haven't been to in a while. So really, the main difference here is that there's no water and that the fish fight back [laughter]. So yeah, it's about hitting those same hallmarks of us wanting to enrich the existing play experience in a new way.

To deliver Gone Fission and Infestations in the space of a year, it highlights something that's so core to Fallout – its capacity to be quite whimsical in an otherwise bleak world.

Bill LaCoste, production director: It's all about getting that Fallout feel right. We're looking for a balance between these darker, more serious tones and more levity, humorous moments. It's the balance of these aspects wrapped under a blanket of retro-futuristic Americana that makes Fallout – that's the Fallout sweet spot! It's echoed in the games and in the show, and that's where the stories are most effective. And so as we expand Fallout 76, making new features and crafting new stories, that's something we're always very mindful of.

Given the importance of that Americana vibe, does it rule Fallout 76 from taking wastelanders further afield in future updates?

Jon Rush: Americana provides such a unique timbre to the game and to the tone that, if you removed that, a big part of it may no longer feel like Fallout anymore. That's not to say that there aren't numerous other stories happening in the world outside of the United States that take place in the Fallout universe, but in the way that we present our stories, that Americana element is a crucial element to our world.

Bill LaCoste: There's also this sense of players being able to think about what's happening across other parts of the world on their own, there's some mystique there and we like that. I don't know if there will ever be an expansion beyond America, but I think there's a lot of importance in keeping it that way – so that players can think about what is happening around the world and create their own stories, which the modding community can take advantage of too!

Jon Rush: I mean, let me give a special shout-out to Fallout London! It's great to see people picturing what's happening in other parts of the world at the same time, I think it's fantastic. That's a strength of Fallout – that it can be a spark which ignites all these stories in people's heads, and it's great to explore those.

Bethesda Game Studios released two major Fallout 76 updates since Fallout Season 2 concluded earlier this year, I assume the show has been a motivating force?

Jon Rush: It's been great. It emboldens the team to continue telling great Fallout stories. A strength of the show is that its creators are such huge fans of the IP and of the world, so the stories they're telling are genuinely Fallout in every way. People watch it and they want more of it, so they come to Fallout 3, 4, New Vegas, and 76 to get more of that storytelling. So it emboldens the team to see that kind of reaction. And our community has been so great – so welcoming to all of these new players into the game. I know that's something you wouldn't really expect to see in a wasteland, people being charitable and giving things to each other, but it's been really great.

Bill LaCoste: I think that the big question of 'how do I get more of this' that Jon just noted, it's like 'hey, we have these games that do this!' And I think some of those people are actually surprised when they come into the games, that they are so much like the show – with the same humor and style. Kilter Films and Amazon have done an amazing job with the detail, and with the way that the stories being told are exactly like the Fallout games.

It must be pretty energizing to see so much enthusiasm around the franchise?

Bill LaCoste: I've watched both seasons multiple times now, with other friends and family, and I just never get bored of it. That's a great feeling for us and the team, because we don't ever come into work not wanting to do something with the Fallout universe, to make it better, and to do something new for our fans to keep this world going.

Jon Rush: The Fallout show has brought in new fans of Fallout. It's also brought in new gamers, who can also then go and experience all of the games that everybody else is making! It's funny, I was at a restaurant one time and my phone case says 'Fallout' on the back, and I just put it on the table not even thinking about it. The waiter comes by and he's like, 'oh yeah, you like Fallout too?' So I asked him which game was his favorite, hoping that he would say 76 [laughter]. And he goes 'Wait, there's a game? I just watched the show!' And I'm like, 'Dude, there are multiple games, get in there!' He said he was going to download [Fallout 76] when he got home, and I said, 'yeah, good for you!'

Looking for something else to play? Check out the upcoming Xbox Series X games, or our pick of the best MMOs to play in 2026.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Fallout: New Vegas rumors have been floating across the internet for longer than a tumbleweed takes to roll across the wasteland, but those previous reports are apparently credible, at least according to the prominent leaker who routinely reveals Nintendo news before Nintendo can get to it itself.

Leaker NateTheHate's been a big name within Nintendo circles for a while now. He first tipped everyone off on the exact random evening the Nintendo Switch 2 would be revealed. More recently, he also leaked the existence of the upcoming Star Fox revival and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's remake well before those games were formally announced.

And, now, he's thrown his hat into the ring of countless Fallout rumors. Asked about the credibility of whispers proclaiming a Fallout: New Vegas remake does in fact exist, the leaker simply says, "The previous reports have merit."

Hopes for a rebuilt Fallout: New Vegas first kicked off years ago when improperly redacted court documents from Microsoft and the FTC's court battles mentioned remasters for both Oblivion and Fallout 3 were in the works. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered eventually came to pass, but fans have since been hoping that New Vegas latches on to its older brother's unofficial remaster plans. The Fallout TV show's deep references to the fan favorite game didn't hurt, either.

Windows Central also this year reported that both Bethesda's Fallout 3 and Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas were getting the remake treatment, citing anonymous sources in the know. Recent toy listings related to New Vegas, a 16-year-old game, mind you, added more fuel to the fire.

It's still worth taking it with a pinch of salt, but given NateTheHate's recent track record, there's no doubt that some fans are now going to be feeling extra confident that a remake is going to surface eventually.

Fallout: New Vegas designer says don't hold your breath for an Oblivion-style remaster: "I don't think Bethesda has the engineering knowhow."

Today marks exactly eight years since Bethesda revealed the Elder Scrolls 6 teaser from 2018, and all this time later, we've seen virtually nothing else from the project. Bethesda and Xbox's silence on the long, long, long-awaited follow-up to Skyrim is remarkable, but Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty has broken his silence with the tiniest of updates on one of the biggest games on the release date calendar.

BGS executive producer and game director Todd Howard has gone on the record to say Elder Scrolls 6 was announced too early, which seems like a bit of an understatement as we approach 10 years from that infamously vague teaser, but Booty tells Variety that the decision to reveal such a massively anticipated project is one of the trickier parts of his job.

"I would say one of the more challenging balancing acts of someone in a job like mine is balancing that you want to go show the world all the cool stuff you're working on, and you want to get them excited early, but we also know that we want to wait till the right moment," says Booty. "And when you decide to show it, you want it to be the best you've got. And also that when you show the game, you're also giving them a promise of, hey, it's coming soon."

Booty seems to be directly acknowledging the aforementioned premature reveal of The Elder Scrolls 6 here. With every day that passes without a significant update on the game, the big green elephant in the room at Xbox gradually swells, as does frustration from the RPG community who's been waiting almost a decade. That said, Booty assures that what he's seen from gameplay footage will be worth the wait.

"I can tell you, having visited Bethesda and sat with Todd and seen 'Elder Scrolls' playing, it looks amazing, and it's coming along well," he says. "And we'll make sure to announce it and really reveal it at the right time."

"The majority of this building is working on The Elder Scrolls 6": Todd Howard says Bethesda's full focus is on the RPG it announced in 2018, and "it's so different than Starfield, so different than Fallout"

The end of Summer Game Fest 2026 is upon us, and Bethesda Game Studios was a no-show in most fans' minds as it (once again) gave us nothing about The Elder Scrolls 6.

Yes, that's – sadly – right. The Elder Scrolls 6 did not, in fact, make an appearance during last night's Xbox Games Showcase, despite many of us huffing on the hopium that it would.

It comes as no surprise that reactions to the event, which saw only evergreen Bethesda titles like Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online get some screen time, aren't exactly positive. Heck, it's been a whopping eight years since The Elder Scrolls 6 debuted at E3 in 2018... If you can call it "debuted," anyway, seeing as it was just a sub-minute teaser

Xbox showcase just wrapped up, still no TES VI from r/ElderScrolls

Over on Reddit, the conversation is taking off, with one person writing, "The one thing I was hoping for, even if it was just something small, was TES 6, and we still have nothing after eight years. I don't want to be negative, but at this point, I'm sick of waiting to hear nothing."

A comment jokes, "I can't wait to be a gaming grandpa to play this." I mean, I was a teenager when Bethesda unveiled its "trailer" myself, and now I'm 26… so, yeah.

Over on a separate thread, someone declared they"re "so depressed" after SGF. "It's been almost 15 years since the last Elder Scrolls game and nine years since the teaser for the new game. I'm so tired, man.... I'm at an all-time low." Replies see folks agree, with one reading, "I hate that I feel this way now, but I almost don’t care about it anymore."

Give it up for year 9 from r/ElderScrolls

That's how long it's been – and, as one user puts it, "At this point, it is more likely we will get the announcement of Skyrim for PS6 before TES 6." A painful but increasingly possible reality, I'd say… We did just get Skyrim on the Nintendo Switch 2, after all.

Another tired Elder Scrolls fan sums the entire situation and vibe up perfectly in their own post: "Give it up for year nine." They then jest: "See you all next year."

Will we see anything next year? I'm not sure, honestly, and I'm losing hope. Even Todd Howard himself told us to "just pretend we didn't didn't announce it" – so, um, yeah. He also admitted The Elder Scrolls 6 is still "a while" off, shooting down our hopes and dreams.

It's rough out here as an Elder Scrolls fan, honestly, and I'm growing tired of browsing the best Skyrim mods in hopes of spicing up the fifth entry for the hundredth time.

Fingers crossed that we get something… anything… soon from Bethesda. I'm not sure that the community can hang on much longer without more Elder Scrolls 6.

Searching for something else to wishlist? Here are the best new games coming this year and beyond to look forward to.

As the wait for new games from Bethesda Game Studios like The Elder Scrolls 6 continues, talented fans of older RPGs like Fallout 4 are figuring out ways to, erm, make Skyrim run in them…? Yeah, you know what, that checks out.

In case you missed it – because there's a pretty big chance you have, as it's incredibly random – a Fallout 4 player known as "RPGKING" on YouTube has managed to play Skyrim in the 2015 post-apocalyptic gem after somehow getting it to run… albeit admittedly with "a few bugs definitely to work out" before releasing it as a mod to the public.

"Obviously, this won't be available" until everything is fixed, he notes in his aptly-dubbed "Beat Todd to it" video.

It's amusing to watch – I mean, how could Skyrim running on a Pip-Boy in Fallout 4 not be? The iconic "hey, you" opening scene in static-y black and white is truly a sight to behold, and even the mouse and movement controls seem to work.

It's still in rough shape for now, however, with "some lag to fix" and other issues, but RPGKING reports that "everything else works perfectly." Here's hoping it does, because I can't wait to see it up for download.

Although hilariously enough, the creator concludes his video saying he's "pretty happy with this" – only to then admit it "looks like I've got a lot of bugs to flush out still."

Regardless, fans (it's me, I'm fans) can't get enough of the chaotic idea as a whole, with folks unsurprisingly blaming the lengthy wait between Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls 6 for such Frankenstein-y mods. "This is what 15 years without a sequel does to a fanbase," one comment reads.

Another jokes, "It's a Bethesda game within a Bethesda game; I imagine bugs will be part of the experience every step of the way." My favorite reply of all, though, jests, "It's what Todd Howard would've wanted." It might just be, anon. It might just be.

Skyrim mod has you slay dragons "by debating them on the geopolitics of Tamriel," turning Bethesda's RPG into an absurd game of Civilization.

Somewhere in the ether, there's evidence of the Generic Universal Role Playing System, or GURPS, version of Interplay's Fallout, in which franchise co-creator Tim Cain dumped every adjective he's ever heard of before a botched licensing deal ultimately led the 1997 game to the SPECIAL ruleset current developer Bethesda still uses. Cain is missing most of that evidence – or he thought so, before unearthing a fat list of advantages, disadvantages, quirks, and skills he shares in a new YouTube video giving us a rare sniff of what Fallout development was like 30 years ago.

"I thought these were lost," Cain says in the video posted May 13. "Well, I found written notes of the final advantages, disadvantages, quirks, and skills had it been selected to be used in the GURPS version of Fallout."

Interplay had Cain destroy his archive of the project after he left the company, and the developer apparently misplaced the separate archive Cain handed over before shipping Fallout in 1997. But that's in the past – Cain finally has some proof of the elaborate wasteland GURPS Fallout, and he's eager to share each exhausting detail.

In terms of attributes, strength, health, IQ, and dexterity are a given. "We were of course using all four of those," says Cain, but then there was a whole separate spice cabinet of advantageous and disadvantageous characteristics players could use.

He lists ingredients in a large pot of soup: "Acute hearing, acute taste and smell, acute vision; alertness; [...] ambidexterity; animal empathy; appearance attractive, appearance handsome, and appearance very handsome.

"Charisma; combat reflexes, common sense, danger sense; eidetic memory, high pain threshold, intuition; literacy, luck; night vision, peripheral vision; rapid healing," and you could have good reputation in various Fallout factions, including, in your Vault, Shady Sands, Junktown, the Hub, Brotherhood of Steel, and so on.

"We also added strong will, toughness, and voice," says Cain. These advantages would have all cost character points to purchase, and, "in essence, made the game a little easier in some small aspect," Cain adds. The disadvantage list gleefully kicks up the seesaw and balances that out.

In addition to a number of bad or enemy-level reputations you could earn among all of Fallout's major groups, including your Vault, GURPS Fallout also let you develop "Alcoholism. Odious personal habit: Bad breath. Odious personal habit: Pick nose," says Cain. "Color blindness, hard of hearing, low pain threshold, no sense of smell or taste – it's also called anosmia. One eye; overweight, skinny – those are both disadvantages in GURPS. Stuttering."

GURPS Fallout would have also made you vulnerable to various addictions, including to "physical adders" that adjusted your strength, dex, and hardiness of your health, "mental adders" that boosted IQ, or combat-specific drugs Cain calls "berserk drugs."

These, of course, are all separate to the "bad temper, berserk, blood lust" you could incur, or "code of honor – it's called, 'You Never Break Your Word,' combat paralysis; compulsive lying, delusion: hears voices; gullibility, honesty; lecherousness; pacifism: cannot kill, pacifism: self-defense only; phobia of insects, phobia of monsters, phobia of reptiles, phobia of darkness; sense of duty to the Vault, truthfulness, unluckiness; weak will." Phew. These disadvantages are starting to sound like the reasons for my therapy bill.

Cain says there were additionally three levels of ugliness, from mildly unattractive to, "You're the most disgusting thing ever born in the Vault," Cain explains. "You're lucky they didn't kill you as a mutant." And because this is GURPS Fallout we're talking about, you could also have so many quirks, they might have eventually cast Zooey Deschanel to play you in a movie. Two of my favorite options Cain lists are "hates cows" and "boisterous walker," which would make your footsteps fall like anvils.

As for skills, some highlights GURPS Fallout would have launched with are "jumping," "sex appeal," and Cain says, "savoir-faire, one of my favorite ones, the skill of good manners and getting along in a social setting."

"We had all of those in the game at some level of implementation in early 1997," Cain concludes.

"Tim, not to be too dark," quickly replies one fan on YouTube. "Can you release the source code for Fallout as your last will and testament?"

Not missing a beat, Cain says, "I'd have to have it first."

Xbox studio accidentally gave away the RPG that led to OG Fallout for free, so now it's giving everyone a way to play it legitimately.

We might not have The Elder Scrolls 6 yet, but that's all right – a talented Elden Ring modder is working to get one of Bethesda Game Studios' classics to us instead, bringing Morrowind to FromSoftware's own fantasy RPG.

In case you've not heard of the big project yourself, legendary Halo and Elden Ring modder InfernoPlus has been working to port Morrowind to Elden Ring for quite some time now – heck, he first unveiled his plans in 2025, explaining that he was "about halfway done."

A good while has passed since then without much word from the creator, but a new update from InfernoPlus proves the mod is indeed still happening. Explaining the current state of the project in a YouTube video, he dubs it "the most complex mod ever created" – and, yeah, I can see why. Morrowind is 24 years old, and Elden Ring is, you know, a completely separate game.

"It's been some months since the last update, and we have made tremendous progress on the mod," InfernoPlus says. "Many things that I thought would be impossible have taken shape, and the game has entered a fairly playable state."

That's good news, to say the least – but that doesn't mean the mod is ready. "It's still got a ways to go before it's done, but what we have built here is actually really quite interesting," as InfernoPlus states.

He goes on to show it off, from the functional combat to spells and gear, and it's certainly a sight to behold. There's plenty to anticipate, but he does clarify that it's not been easy. Elden Ring doesn't provide too much to work with.

For example, crime and punishment are big in The Elder Scrolls. Guards will arrest you – a system that's not actually in Elden Ring itself. So, InfernoPlus and his team of modders have had to do everything from coding to scripting to bring the decades-old Bethesda RPG to life in the FromSoftware game, and they're still working on it.

He leaves a call for volunteers in the video, too, asking for artists and voice actors to hop on board the project.

That's not to say the mod isn't chugging along well, however – InfernoPlus reiterates that it's "progressing quite well," all things considered. So, we might just get to replay Morrowind in Elden Ring soon… sooner than The Elder Scrolls 6, I'd wager, anyway.

A new Elden Ring world record was set just 2 weeks ago, and like everyone else I keep rewatching the same part of the 52-minute speedrun.

Warhorse Studios co-founder Daniel Vávra once wrote a scathing article listing over 100 reasons why The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim sucks. Years later, the Bethesda RPG apparently went on to become a massive inspiration for Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

Asked about the open-world influences behind the two Kingdom Come: Deliverance games during a recent Reddit AMA, studio content director Ondřej Bittner says "that huge inspiration for Dan" was "Skyrim even though he wrote famous article where he listed 100 reasons that he hates about that game." Bittner's favorite game in the genre is Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, for what it's worth.

Vávra's Skyrim takedown is an absolutely brutal read (at least with the machine translated version I was looking at). His 116-point list rips apart small details, like the fact there aren't any toilets in Skyrim, or that most merchants don't stock lockpicks, to more sweeping complaints aimed at how the game looked and felt back in 2011.

Aside from the pokes at Todd Howard, the article is quite an enlightening look at what might have been going through Vávra's mind while working on the first Kingdom Come game. He seems particularly aggravated by the little things that don't add up in Skyrim: How do three-pound pieces of iron create a 12-pound sword? How does our character float in water wearing a suit of solid armor? Why does an imperial soldier simply go to bed when you're clearly trespassing in their home at night? That isn't to say you can't poke similar holes in Kingdom Come: Deliverance's internal logic, but it's a game that seems more fixated on the 'realism' of it all.

Most of all, Vávra's biggest lesson here is probably a crappy one. More toilets equals better game. Last month, he tweeted that Crimson Desert has usable toilets so it "must be a good game." It's an important metric, game devs, don't forget it.

Elsewhere in the AMA thread, design director Martin Ziegler says he's "always admired the philosophy of Fallout: New Vegas and both of the older Fallouts of just allowing everything to happen and taking whatever happens in stride." The team apparently wanted Kingdom Come: Deliverance "to be more restrictive in order to keep the quests more tightly on rails towards their key moments, but the freedom and responsivity of these games was certainly inspiring in a lot of ways."

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 devs won't confirm or deny making a Lord of the Rings game, but are definitely making an "immersive RPG rich with details" that's "hopefully not so buggy."

It seems Starfield could've been a watershed game for Bethesda beyond just being the studio's first new IP in decades. According to a former developer on the RPG, serious consideration was given to changing engines on the production, before it was decided the team should stay on the well-worn Creation Engine.

Heather Cerlan, now CEO and creative director at NEARstudios, but formerly an artist who worked on Starfield for several years, reveals as much in her recent conversation with Kiwi Talkz. "There was a lot of pressure internally to push to Unreal [Engine 5], especially when Nanite and Lumen and all these amazing features were coming out," she says.

"People were like, 'Why don't we just use Unreal?'," she recalls. Although development had been happening on Starfield for some years prior to Unreal Engine 5's preliminary launch in May 2021, it was still two years out from release, providing some runway for transition.

The upgrades and features were and are enticing, and this would've been before the performance inconsistencies came to light. Of course, Bethesda games aren't without their problems to begin with, so that's something of a moot point, and there are plenty of games that run just fine using the latest Unreal Engine.

But Bethesda had put years of iteration into its own framework by then, the Creation Engine. Used since Skyrim, it'd get an upgrade to the Creation Engine 2 for Starfield, and it was the versatility for the community surrounding Bethesda releases that settled the discussion.

"The real reason that Bethesda holds onto the Creation Engine is because of all the modding capabilities," Cerlan reveals. "The whole modding community that's built around those tools and those systems, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for Bethesda to switch over to any other engine, because they've already built up a whole community that sustains the success of their titles."

Truly, if ever there's an argument against changing engines for Bethesda, it would be potentially alienating modders. They're a huge part of the studio's longevity, breathing life into and sustaining Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallouts 3, 4, New Vegas, and beyond.

In a prior chat with us, Todd Howard mentioned that aspects of Unreal's tech have been incorporated into Bethesda's methodology. "There are workflows, and as we're hiring new people, we're often looking at those workflows, like, how does an Unreal Engine do this from an editor standpoint?" he told GamesRadar+. "So we are starting to borrow some workflows or things, but we're doing it in our own way, so that we're serving what we need for our games."

The Elder Scrolls 6 is confirmed to be using Creation Engine 3. We'll see what the future holds for Fallout 5, but I wouldn't expect any kind of rash pivot.

Starfield "was the best-selling video game of the week" in US for first time in nearly 3 years, reports analyst, despite Bethesda's rough PS5 port of the RPG

It seems like Todd Howard, executive producer and longtime developer at Bethesda, has a lot of admiration for Neil Druckmann, the head of Naughty Dog. According to a former dev from both studios, Howard was very inquisitive about Druckmann during their time at the home of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout.

Heather Cerlan, an artist who worked at Naughty Dog for a number of years before spending some time at Bethesda, speaks with Kiwi Talkz about socializing with Howard. "Me, my art director, our senior producer, and Todd, all went out to lunch after I'd been there for a week," she says.

"[Todd] actually was asking me a lot of questions about what it was like to work with Neil," she reveals. "I got the sense he either idolized Neil, or wanted to understand his process."

She says "it took her by surprise," because it "felt like he was a bit of a fanboy on Neil Druckmann, which was interesting." Indeed it is, Howard's an industry legend who's shipped several of the biggest games ever, and it's odd to think of him looking up to anyone, but then he didn't make Uncharted or The Last of Us, and if anyone will understand the kind of graft it takes for those kinds of productions to land, it's him.

Cerlan was at Bethesda from April 2018 through to April 2021, working on Starfield, following a tenure contributing to The Last of Us and a couple of Uncharted games at Naughty Dog. She muses about whether a little rivalry was going on over the Fallout and The Last of Us TV adaptations, though she's unsure where either side was up to for those while she was at Bethesda. "I think there was a little bit of competition, I don't know," she adds.

Adaptations for both properties were stop-start for much of the 2010s, probably feeding a little competitive spirit over which would get cameras rolling first. They were greenlit around the same time: The Last of Us was announced in March 2020, and Fallout the following July, but it'd take the latter an extra year to reach screens.

Either way, I hope Druckmann and Howard have since managed to have dinner together. It sounds like it's something Todd's wanted for quite some time.

The Last of Us star Troy Baker says "we've not seen the last of Joel," teases more could come from Naughty Dog "or somebody else."

Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment ran into a spot of legal trouble over some real-world material folded into the parody-heavy RPG, according to studio and RPG veteran Chris Avellone.

Speaking with YouTuber TKs-Mantis, Avellone recalls butting heads with Bethesda over trademarked material which Obsidian evidently didn't fully account for at the time. This particular discussion begins with a mention of Wild Wasteland, a trait that introduces a range of content and encounters that generally reference other media, from films to older Fallout games.

"We got into trouble for some of those things because it wasn't passed along what some of the jokes were," Avellone says. "We had the Godzilla gecko that Bethesda didn't realize was in there. Holy crap, when they found out. 'Oh great, now we'll get in trouble for this.'"

This issue apparently began with the very beginning of the game, where you're examined by Doc Mitchell.

"We already got in trouble for the Rorschach test because we didn't get the trademark for that, so those folks came to Bethesda and said, 'We're gonna have a fun lawsuit on our hands, so pony up,'" Avellone recalls. "You could hear all the groans over at Bethesda. 'Oh my god, I don't think they realized they should check the trademark for that.' We certainly didn't realize it."

Avellone's comments, both here and elsewhere in the lengthy interview, frame a pretty clear pattern regarding Bethesda's feedback to the New Vegas team, with the studio allegedly giving a lecture about 30 FPS issues and presenting a whole powerpoint about "all the things Obsidian did wrong".

Fallout: New Vegas designer says don't hold your breath for an Oblivion-style remaster: "I don't think Bethesda has the engineering knowhow."

Warm beignets and cold Nuka-Cola – these simple pleasures could be yours if Fallout 5 rumors are true and the upcoming Bethesda game is set in swamp city New Orleans. Or, they could be yours if you go back in time and kiss Todd Howard's feet 900 times, convincing him to release the Fallout game Obsidian veteran Chris Avellone hoped to set in the Louisiana wasteland.

Avellone, who served as a senior designer on New Vegas in 2010, reminisced to YouTuber TKs-Mantis in a chunky new interview about the time "we still thought we'd be able to do New Vegas 2, or whatever the title would be" at Obsidian, along with vague plans for a Fallout New Orleans. Avellone now says, with a little bitterness, that those thoughts about New Vegas 2 "quickly evaporated," and he doubts Obsidian would return to the project any time "in the next six years, at least – if ever." But he still has hope for New Orleans.

"One of the designers-slash-producers on our other projects suggested New Orleans as a location, and I was so stoked for that. It's going to be a weird reference, but there is an old comic franchise started by this author-slash-artist Matt Wagner called Grendel, and a lot of the Grendel stories are very post-apocalyptic," says Avellone about a noir series first published in 1983, whose antihero explores his vengefulness in stories often painted in only black, white, and red. It shares a cyanide sense of humor with the Fallout series in how it discusses power and those who wield it, so I'm not surprised Avellone found it magnetic.

"There was one that was written in New Orleans. It was called, like, 'Four Devils, One Hell,' and it's a fantastic story," he continues to say about the 1993 Grendel Tales run whose first issue synopsis could easily be mistaken for a Fallout TV show episode logline: "Montovani is hired by Batiaque to find his brother's murderer and tangles with a Dulac. Batiaque is also murdered. Bixby kills vampires, thinking himself a king's knight, but he is really Grendel's accountant. Gloria preserves art in England and goes on treasure hunt."

"As soon as I read it – while I was doing Fallout research, ironically enough – I'm like, 'Man, this makes me want to do a Fallout New Orleans so bad,'" Avellone says.

He continues, "The vibe was so cool. The flavor was so cool, and it's still Fallout, but it's in a different area that felt different. Yeah, there's still a lot of potential there." Avellone isn't alone in dreaming about Louisiana's heat meeting Fallout's fire – plenty of people are enthusiastic about Fallout 5 in New Orleans, including Fallout 76 lead artist and ex-Bethesda dev Nate Purkeypile, who said earlier this year, "Fallout 5 in New Orleans? I mean, that would get my vote for sure." I just wonder what Todd Howard thinks about crawfish.

Bethesda "lectured" Fallout New Vegas designer for saying the RPG would run at 30 FPS: "'Why do you have a f***ing engine that can't run 30 frames per second?'"

Starfield has suffered a rough couple of weeks following its so-called "unplayable" PS5 port and subsequent disappointing fixes from Bethesda Game Studios, but it's not all doom and gloom for the space RPG – in fact, things might be a lot better than they seem.

Veteran analyst and Circana games lead Mat Piscatella reveals as much in a new online post, explaining that Starfield was actually "the best-selling video game of the week in tracked physical and digital US full game dollar sales during the week ending April 11th" – the same week Bethesda launched its divisive space game on PlayStation 5 and released its Free Lanes update, as well as the Terran Armada DLC.

Starfield was the best-selling video game of the week in tracked physical & digital US full game dollar sales during the week ending April 11th.It's the first time Starfield has led the weekly US best-selling titles chart since week ending Sept 2, 2023.Source: Circana Retail Tracking Service

— @matpiscatella.bsky.social (@matpiscatella.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-04-20T16:32:49.248Z

Furthermore, though, this is apparently the first time this has happened since September of 2023 – nearly three years. As Piscatella writes, "It's the first time Starfield has led the weekly US best-selling titles chart since week ending Sept 2, 2023."

That's no small feat, especially when we've got other analysts saying Crimson Desert is "on track to overtake Starfield's total lifetime copies sold by the end of the year" thanks to the "not fantastic" PS5 port.

Rhys Elliott, head of market analysis at Alinea Analytics, for example, stated, "In the context of a Bethesda budget and a decade-long development cycle, Starfield has likely barely broken even."

It's hard to take a stance here, but I do personally wonder how things will continue to change – particularly now that it appears Starfield is coming to Switch 2 at some point. I'm not sure it'll go smoothly after the PS5 port, but its sales might similarly prove otherwise.

Only time will tell, I suppose. For now, at least, it's good to see that Bethesda managed to hit some sort of high the week ending April 11, considering everything that preceded the stellar sales numbers Piscatella reports.

Todd Howard says that Starfield's New Game Plus was "us asking you this weird, deep question that I actually think got lost on a lot of people."

Fallout: New Vegas has aged into a beloved RPG, but when it first launched it faced widespread complaints about performance, and specifically its choppy frame rates. To this day, it's generally recommended that you download stability mods if you're playing on PC, as the game was developed on the notoriously buggy, and even by 2010 standards, outdated, Gamebryo engine. According to a new anecdote shared by original Fallout: New Vegas senior designer Chris Avellone, there were some folks at publisher Bethesda that had an inkling the game wasn't going to run at a steady frame rate even before it launched.

"I had done an interview about the Gamebryo engine, and someone had asked me, 'hey, is New Vegas gonna run 30 frames per second?'" says Avellone during an interview with TKs-Mantis. "In my mind, it's inexcusable that a game would not run 30 frames per second, so I said, 'yes, it will.' And to my surprise, I'm in this Bethesda meeting, this tech director starts lecturing me about 'you shouldn't have said that.'

"And I'm sitting there taking it, and all I'm thinking back of my head is like, 'Why do you have a fucking engine that can't run 30 frames per second, and then call that your claim to fame and you're the director of technology?' It was so offensive to me. I sat there and I smiled and I took it, but overall that in itself was one fundamental flaw of the technology there."

To Bethesda's credit, it definitely took feedback about New Vegas's performance on board and officially switched to its proprietary Creation engine for The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, a decision that likely avoided certain disaster. I can't imagine a game as big and complex as Skyrim running on Gamebryo, and I don't think I want to.

"I've known programmers that worked at Bethesda. They say the engine is all sorts of messes under the hood," adds Avellone. "But that 30 frames per second thing, like, that's on Bethesda, and I'm like, 'Wow I shouldn't be being lectured about that. You are the ones that should be lectured about it."

Avellone doesn't elaborate any further on that situation in the interview, but I can only imagine he felt a sense of profound vindication when he saw the response to New Vegas's unstable frame rates. Although, I suppose it would be a fairly dubious vindication considering he was one of the lead designers on the game and presumably felt a sense of ownership over the final product.

Fallout 2 and New Vegas designer still hates the series' Amazon TV show: "I had to shut it off within a minute"

Fallout 2 and New Vegas designer Chris Avellone has never hesitated to share how much he despises Amazon's Fallout TV show adaptation, but he still has another 15 or 40 minutes of complaining to do about its second season, which he apparently sat down to watch despite hating it and wanting it to get hit by a car.

In this way, Avellone was just like 83 million other viewers who tuned in for Fallout season 2, Amazon's second-most-watched returning show: flies flocking to a molding chicken dinner. We weren't especially amazed by season 2 either, describing in our Fallout season 2 review how it's "a little overcrowded and at times convoluted," – but we at least had more patience than Avellone, who sometimes got so irritated, he tells YouTuber TKs-Mantis in a hefty new interview, "I had to shut it off within a minute."

"I got right up to the beginning of episode 3" in season 2, Avellone says, "and I honestly just couldn't go on any longer. But it doesn't mean, like, it was absolutely terrible." He repeats a few times that he found season 2's first episodes "just not well-crafted," and overall, "I don't think the scripts are very good."

He gives an example of where Vault Dweller Lucy has to choose between protecting a Legion slave and her uneasy ally, the near-immortal Ghoul. But since Avellone knows the Ghoul will survive nearly anything that happens to him, he says "all the tension got evaporated" while he was watching a scene that was supposed to turn his stomach into a smoothie.

"There were so many things like that where, I would have to watch it for 10 minutes, I'd get frustrated, take a long break, I'd forget why I was frustrated, then I'd start watching it again. Another 10 minutes would go by, if that," Avellone says.

There's a particular moment where he felt like Brotherhood of Steel soldier Maximus was meant to look forlorn about his love interest Lucy, "but the framing and the camera work in that scene is so fucking bad that, like, it was hard for me not to laugh out loud, and I had to shut it off, like, within a minute. And I'm like, 'These are basic cinematography techniques for conveying emotion, for framing a scene, and you guys are just being clowns about it.' Like, grow some skills."

So, yeah, I don't think Avellone's opinion of the Fallout show has changed much from season 1's release in 2024, when he posted a negative two-part review on his Medium blog page and summarized it in a Twitter post saying, "The lore in this series is a hot mess."

"If you like the show and you're enjoying it, fantastic," Avellone disclaims in his YouTube interview. And, "I am very proud of Bethesda for being able to bring it to a TV series, which is something that Interplay could never have done. And the fact that Amazon picked it up, and the show is getting a lot of views, it's getting a lot of attention, a lot of great ratings – that's just great for the franchise." But it's not great for Chris Avellone.

Fallout TV show almost went to New Vegas in season 1, until Todd Howard said "there’s a million ways to f**k that up" as "it can be a bit of a minefield."

The Elder Scrolls fans believe they may have just uncovered one of the best-kept secrets in the franchise after 28 years, and all it took was giving into their inner pervert. Thanks to their sacrifices, we now know that anyone who tries stealing a glance up a lady's skirt in The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard will be immediately thunderstruck by developer Bethesda's all-knowing smiley face.

The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP) encyclopedia shares the discovery on its Twitter in an April 16 post. It begins, I imagine, with a trembling whisper, "This may be one of the longest running secrets in the history of The Elder Scrolls we are about to reveal, this has seemingly stayed hidden for 28 years from general knowledge."

"Thanks to the ongoing work on the Redguard Unity project," the site continues, with a nod to the open-source project attempting to bring 1998 game Redguard to modern engine Unity, "we have learned that if you were to try to look up the skirt of a female character in that game, you will find a smiley face emoji."

UESP shares proof in the form of a knee-high creepshot angled up toward a Redguard character's crotch. Except, instead of human anatomy, the photo reveals a black abyss starting at the woman's thighs. In between her legs, there's a yellow smiley face whose square eyes feel reproachful in their largeness, as if they can look into your heart and see whatever it is that makes you want to witness 32-bit underwear.

I'm impressed – Bethesda was installing anti-creep guardrails in 1998 while other developers, even now, sometimes encourage the behavior with upskirt achievements. At least these achievements are often paired with justified retaliation from the character they're associated with. I appreciate that despite Nier: Automata's What Are You Doing? achievement for its protagonist 2B, unlocking her collaboration outfit in Stellar Blade causes her to kick you in the face with an unforgiving high heel.

But because upskirts have now spent decades as a gross, alienating video game convention, I'm also certain UESP isn't the first to discover The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard secret smiley. It might be the only one willing to admit it – for the sake of its archeological efforts, you know – but I've seen too many unholy 4chan threads to think no one else has tried it.

Then we come back to the question – why does anyone want to see 32-bit underwear? To answer this, I travel through horny human history, and I doth quote Shakespeare: "Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese."

Resident Evil director's new AAA studio is "joining forces" with Stellar Blade developer Shift Up "to create a masterpiece of a game" – and no, this isn't an April Fool's joke.

What if, instead of using magic and primitive weapons like axes and swords, we fought dragons using our words and intellect? Such a proposition roughs out a new mod for Skyrim from streamer and YouTuber Blurbs.

Essentially, the modification makes it so that your battles against the winged menaces of Tamriel are actually in-depth discussions about the geopolitical issues of the day. That's right, no shields or bows and arrows, just pure discourse to decide who wins and who loses. The marketplace of ideas in full flow.

As you can see in his footage playing through his own bizarre creation, fights are now debates, with you and your adversary both expected to stand at the podium and deliver your stance on a particular topic. It could be whether public shouting counts as free speech, or if medication is causing a rise in vampirism across the land, or the morality of Daedra worship.

It's all on the table, with actual voice lines from your winged-and-scaled opponent. It's goofy and haphazard, but fairly convincing, and you can watch Blurbs put the whole thing together in the above video, starting at 6:30.

Blurbs is an active modder and software developer who occasionally takes ideas on Twitch for ways to modify and break Skyrim. Someone had the bright idea for this, leading us here, and to be real, I don't hate it. I've got a soft spot for just the right amount of text-driven choices in RPGs, and this hits that in its own absurd way.

Or maybe I've just always wanted to challenge a dragon on the legitimacy of the sitting monarch. Who knows. Either way, this is probably a win for intellectualism, right?

New Skyrim mod turns Bethesda's RPG into the "ultimate" MMO I've always wanted by transforming NPCs into real players

Starfield fans have been saying the RPG is "unplayable" on PS5 following the port's launch on Sony's platform, prompting Bethesda Game Studios to promise hotfixes after finding "a small number of causes" behind the bugs and crashes. Now, one of those hotfixes is here, specifically targeting the PS5 Pro version of the game – but, uh, it's not exactly delivering… or so fans say.

Bethesda reveals its new patch in an online post, explaining it's "pushing live a quick hotfix for Starfield players on PlayStation 5 Pro that resolves crashing when using Enhanced settings." While this obviously doesn't include folks using the base PlayStation 5 console, there's another hotfix to come.

As Bethesda describes, "The team is preparing an additional hotfix for other PlayStation 5 crashes and freezes, targeting next week. Thank you to everyone who has reached out to our support team, it's been incredibly helpful."

Comments show annoyed players, with the top one reading, "Your hotfix broke the base PS5 version… Can't say I'm surprised, just disappointed again." Oof. Other replies read similarly, too, sadly.

Even the PS5 Pro players aren't having a good time with the hotfix, apparently. "My PS5 Pro crashed in 10 mins after the update," exclaims one. Another writes, "I've just updated, and now it crashes every time I launch the game. How do I fix this, please?"

More folks report that they're still experiencing "freezing," as well as various bugs and crashes – including the very one on PS5 Pro that Bethesda claims to have addressed with this patch.

One disgruntled fan says, "Patch did absolutely nothing. Two minutes after starting the game, it crashed again."

Over on Reddit, things are looking just as rough. A commenter details how Starfield "crashes on Performance mode" now, with another chiming in, "I have a PS5 Pro, and it crashes on me in both Enhanced and Performance."

Overall, both the port and its first subsequent hotfix feel like a bit of a disaster for Bethesda so far.

It makes the prospect of Starfield on Switch 2 – which apparently could be underway – seem all the more impossible, honestly. Did Bethesda learn nothing from the awful Skyrim launch on Nintendo's console? I'd argue that, no, it probably didn't.

Crimson Desert "on track to overtake Starfield's total lifetime copies sold by the end of the year," analyst says, as PS5 sales "not fantastic for a port of the biggest Bethesda RPG in a decade."

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain has stressed the importance of not assuming what the players are going to do if your game is non-linear.

"Rule one, our game is nonlinear – don't assume that players will go somewhere first or talk to someone first," Cain explains in a new YouTube video titled Eight Level Design Guidelines. "I wanted to remind level designers that just because you put a guard outside the town, don't assume that everybody will stop and talk to that guard."

He adds that "if you want to force that, you can put a gate in the town that doesn't open until you talk to the guard, or worse, force the guard to go into conversation with the player."

But when it comes to that guard, if a player is given the ability to take them out from a distance, Cain notes: "I'm gonna go into that town without talking to the guard. And you may think, well, at that point, it's OK because everyone in the town will attack you."

However, he explains, "In general, I just like to remind level designers, don't assume anything the player is going to do in a particular order. Your job is to provide a nice map for them to play on and not make such assumptions."

Nonlinearity in games is definitely something that is an acquired skill. It will never not impress me when a game like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild comes along that will allow you to go and get into a scrap with the final boss the second you finish the tutorial. It's also one of the things that frustrates me most about GTA and Red Dead Redemption maker Rockstar Games, where the studio will produce one of the most expansive and deep open worlds ever made, but then have missions that don't allow you to walk 2ft off the main path. These sort of restrictions are clearly something Cain is keen to avoid, and you need only look at the likes of Fallout 1 and 2 to see that in action.

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain is "looking forward" to generative AI for games, TV, and his doctor appointments in dire predictions: "Like a game and you want more content? It'll just generate it."

Every time a Bethesda RPG launches, even the studio's most stalwart fans know to prepare themselves for an array of bugs ranging from the amusing to the infuriating. But that's not a modern problem, as the bugs have been around ever since the first Elder Scrolls title launched way back in 1994. Series co-creator Vijay Lakshman figured these issues were more or less inevitable when you built RPGs of this scale.

"The Elder Scrolls was (and continues to be) a very complex system of statistical generation of appropriate events," Lakshman, who served as lead designer on The Elder Scrolls: Arena, said in an interview for the January 2014 issue of GamesTM. "This kind of game is difficult to test because you simply cannot duplicate every test instance. That being said, this system gives you an open-ended world and allows a player to play infinitely. I think the trade-off has proven to be acceptable by the fans."

Arguably, the glitches were a lot worse in the '90s, when players weren't guaranteed to have internet access and you didn't get patches automatically distributed through a launcher like Steam. Bethesda did issue some patches, and those were rolled into the later Deluxe Edition release, but many of the players who bought the buggier launch version of the game were simply out of luck.

Still, Bethesda might've earned a little slack because of how small it was at the time. "Back then we had small testing budgets and most of the testing was done by me and a small team of high school interns," Lakshman explained. "It was both crazy and inspiring that such a small team could've gotten so much done in a relatively short space of time."

In fact, the company was so small at the time of Arena's launch that the devs packaged and shipped the RPG themselves, another anecdote that Lakshman shared in the same interview. Bethesda has obviously grown enormously in the years since Arena launched, and so has The Elder Scrolls itself, moving from procedurally generated expanses to the massive, hand-crafted worlds of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim.

But by now, we've been waiting for The Elder Scrolls 6 for well over a decade. Bethesda's clearly no longer under the same time crunch that Lakshman and the rest of the original team were, and maybe that means TES6 will be a little more polished than its predecessors at launch. I wouldn't hold my breath for a truly bug-free experience, though.

Here are all the upcoming Bethesda games you need to know about.

Starfield on Switch 2 might actually be happening after all, it appears – despite the, erm, very rough start on PlayStation 5 that the RPG has had… and, you know, the Skyrim port debacle.

In case you missed it, Starfield is "unplayable" on PS5 – or so fans say – thanks to a slew of bugs and crashes. Bethesda Game Studios is on the case, however, unveiling earlier this week that it's "narrowed" the problems "down to a small number of causes" and is working to fix the RPG for folks using Sony's console to play it.

Still, it's not a good look – and it begs the question, how would a Switch 2 port even be possible?

Well, we're probably going to find out. As reported by Universo Nintendo, Starfield now has an official rating for the Switch 2 via the Taiwan Entertainment Software Rating Information Board. That would certainly imply that the port is set to happen at some point, anyway, if not in the near future – and I'm scratching my head trying to figure out how it'll all unfold.

Heck, just look at how Skyrim's launch on the Switch 2 went.

So is skyrim switch 2 just a worse performing version of skyrim switch 1? is that the upgrade? from r/skyrim

That's a game from 2011, folks, and while Bethesda turned the disastrous release around with fixes, it's a rough beginning that I (and many others) won't soon forget. From the input lag to the framerate that was stuck at a whopping 30 frames per second, Skyrim ran – as other fans so eloquently put it – like "wet ass" on the Switch 2 at first.

The whole launch, coupled with Starfield's own recent rocky start on the PS5, has me worried.

I'm not alone, either. Over on Reddit, the community is discussing Starfield on the Switch 2 – and lots of people are understandably concerned. "Hopefully it's a good port," writes one person, stating that games that already don't run well on Nintendo's handheld aren't "nearly" as "graphics intense as Starfield." Another comments, "Hoo boy, that'll be interesting."

My favorite reply, though? "This bitch won't play at 60fps on my PS5, are you kidding me?"

It's amusing at first glance, but really, how the heck is Starfield going to run on the Switch 2? I suppose we'll have to wait and find out once (and if) Bethesda truly makes it happen.

Crimson Desert "on track to overtake Starfield's total lifetime copies sold by the end of the year," analyst says, as PS5 sales "not fantastic for a port of the biggest Bethesda RPG in a decade."

Starfield, a previously PC and Xbox exclusive title, recently made its way onto PlayStation 5 – but the new, apparently "unplayable," port on Sony's console hasn't exactly impressed fans.

Bethesda Game Studios is aware of the issues, promising fixes this week, but it might not be enough to push Starfield on PS5 up to a very successful launch. Rhys Elliott, head of market analysis at Alinea Analytics, seems to think so anyway.

In a new online post, he writes, "Starfield has sold 140K copies on PS5 a week after launch (Alinea Analytics estimates)." While that sounds like a solid number, it's not the kind of figure Bethesda is used to pulling - Fallout 4 shipped five million copies in its first week, and even if you were to divide that up by platform, the number still dwarfs Starfield's first week on PS5.

"While these would be decent numbers for many ports," as Elliott says, "it's not fantastic for a port of the biggest Bethesda RPG in a decade (although launch-aligned, it's selling faster than other Xbox games that came to Xbox in the past six months, minus CoD)."

The "lukewarm PS5 sales" might not be enough – especially as "the Venn diagram of Starfield prospects on Xbox and those subscribed to Game Pass is almost a big fat circle."

Sure, the Xbox version sold over a million copies, but eight million more went to Game Pass subscribers. As the analyst puts it, "that's lost revenue." Meanwhile, Steam saw 3.7 million sales before the PS5 port. "All in, Starfield has cleared over $300M in revenue across all platforms. That's hugely successful in a vacuum," but "in the context of a Bethesda budget and a decade-long development cycle, Starfield has likely barely broken even."

It's not all down to Xbox and Game Pass, of course, with Elliott noting, "Part of Starfield’s lower-than-expected performance is because it did more of the same and didn't really build on the schools of design brought in by Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring and even other spacefaring games" that players "loved."

The analyst writes Starfield's formula "might have cut it 10 years ago, but many players have moved on."

Data reflects as much – and also suggests that "Crimson Desert, which builds on some of the more experimental things Breath of the Wild did, is on track to overtake Starfield's total lifetime copies sold by the end of the year. Ironically, this wouldn't be true if Starfield had launched day-and-date on PS5 and had not been on Game Pass on Xbox and PC."

I'd agree with Elliott here, as numbers so far certainly show Crimson Desert's success.

Heck, Pearl Abyss just celebrated "selling over five million copies worldwide" less than four weeks after launch, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon, with Steam player peaks still holding strong at around 100,000 active users a day.

Meanwhile, considering the Starfield numbers thus far and its current reputation on PS5, things aren't exactly looking too great for Bethesda's space RPG any longer – as much as some enjoy it.

Here's hoping Bethesda opts for a different approach with new games like The Elder Scrolls 6 and sees more success – I know I'll be keeping an eye on its launches, anyway.

Todd Howard agrees Starfield is "creatively different" than Bethesda's usual RPGs – but says The Elder Scrolls and Fallout were also divisive early on

It's no secret that games like Starfield and Fallout 76 stand out among past Bethesda Game Studios greats, shaking up the developer's usual formula for something new – and Todd Howard knows it, too.

The Bethesda boss himself admits as much during a recent roundtable interview. Our own Josh West posited that Starfield and Fallout 76 are more divisive than RPG gems like Skyrim, and Howard agrees to an extent – but that's not unique to them, as series like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls came across similarly different at first.

"If you look back at the beginning of Elder Scrolls, beginning of Fallout, they're a little bit the same," as Howard puts it.

"And then, you find an audience that loves that," he continues. "So, I think it's true that Fallout 76 and Starfield clearly – they're creatively different than what we had done [before]. And we really wanted to do that. When you're doing a certain type of thing for, in my case, 20 years, we want to try some other things and learn from that. We have ideas that we want to get out there."

That's more than understandable, I'd say – even as a Skyrim stan myself.

Sure, I've been waiting what feels like a century for The Elder Scrolls 6 now – but I respect that Bethesda opted to take a bit of a fresh direction with a space RPG like Starfield, even if it's not my own jam. It's got its niche now, after all.

As Howard says, "we're fortunate those games have found, in the scheme of things, giant audiences that let us keep doing things in them." Bethesda's community is all the more diverse as a result.

He concludes on games like Starfield and Fallout 76 that, "even though they're a bit off the core path of the single-player games that we have been doing, we're just fortunate to have the success that we've had with them." I'd argue that's a valid stance to take.

While I do hope Bethesda's back on its ol' Elder Scrolls grind now – which it sounds as though it is, as Howard previously admitted "the majority" of devs are on TES 6 – I get it.

It's never bad to try something new, and I'd be lying if I said I don't ever want Bethesda to give future ideas that aren't their usual Fallout or Elder Scrolls entries a go. Better than yet another Skyrim port, right?

As Starfield fans dub PS5 port "unplayable," Bethesda says it's "narrowed" the problems "down to a small number of causes" and is working to fix the RPG

It's safe to say that the recent Starfield launch on PS5 hasn't exactly gone well from a performance perspective – but Bethesda Game Studios is quickly working to remedy our reported issues with the port.

The studio reveals as much in a new online post, finally acknowledging all of the circulating reports that Starfield is "unplayable" on PS5 in its current state and complaints regarding crashes, bugs, and more.

"Thanks for sharing your adventures across the Settled Systems this weekend – we've loved reading them," exclaims the studio. "We're aware of some reported PS5 crashing issues and have narrowed them down to a small number of causes."

Bethesda then concludes, "We're addressing these in a hotfix we're aiming to release this week. Thanks for flagging, and we'll keep you posted." Obviously, that doesn't exactly give us a solid patch date to look forward to – but it's good news nonetheless, especially when so many folks are struggling to play the PS5 release.

Heck, just take a look at the Starfield subreddit yourself to see as much. Players are warning others to "beware" of the port.

Comments under Bethesda's post aren't all negative, though. There are plenty of people who apparently aren't having issues with the PS5 version – so it seems those of us who are aren't very lucky.

In fact, some players are even claiming their PS5 port is running better than Starfield did on the Xbox Series X|S. As one pleased fan writes, "I just want to say that my game is running perfectly on my Pro."

He continues, explaining that he's not skimping out on high graphical settings either: "Targeting 60, priority set to enhanced, film grain intensity at full, motion blur and depth of field on, and has been for 40+ hours. That is something I could never say about this game running on my Series X." So, there's that, I guess.

For the majority of us, though, I'd say the PS5 (and Pro, for that matter) launch hasn't gone well.

It's all been a bit too reminiscent of Skyrim on the Switch 2 and how rough its launch was initially – before Bethesda turned it all around, that is. Here's hoping the developer does the same for Starfield on PS5 now. It certainly looks like they will, anyway.

Todd Howard says that Starfield's New Game Plus was "us asking you this weird, deep question that I actually think got lost on a lot of people."

Of all the various ways to enjoy Skyrim out there, from a heavily modded PC experience to one on the go via Switch 2, I've always wanted the ability to play it with other Elder Scrolls fans – and, now, it seems I've got one thanks to Keizaal Online.

Sure, we've got Skyrim Together already – but I've been yearning for an online multiplayer experience that feels more akin to something like The Elder Scrolls Online… an MMO, but not quite as big or large-scale. That's what Keizaal Online, as spotted by TheGamer, appears to offer, allowing players to step into the shoes of iconic NPCs.

A mind-boggling trailer lets us take a look at the mod, and impressed would be an understatement on my part.

The capacity for immersive roleplaying – whether around the fire in The Bannered Mare or in battle with the Imperials – seems to be off the charts. It's like a hilariously chaotic, almost surreal mashup of Red Dead Online and Skyrim… something I never thought I'd say.

As per the official Keizaal Online website, everything unfolds in a "synchronized, persistent Tamriel" – a Tamriel that currently boasts over 600 active players, too.

Keizaal Online's creators dub it "the ultimate Skyrim multiplayer roleplaying experience," and I'm honestly inclined to believe them. Once again, there are no NPCs – everything is run by the players themselves, something I've never experienced in "official" MMOs like The Elder Scrolls Online (as fun as I may find them).

Trading happens between players as well, so no, we can't just keep running back and forth to Belethor.

Perhaps most excitingly, we can sign up to play now (just make sure you own the Special or Anniversary Edition of the game) – and the full release is also coming soon. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a public playtest to participate in… and many spells to cast.

Skyrim lead says Bethesda is "going to feel it" when Todd Howard leaves because he's always touched everything during the development process

Although Bethesda Game Studios had Starfield fans excited for its big PlayStation 5 release, its launch isn't going well for some from a performance point of view – players have spent the last few days reporting various bugs and crashes while trying to enjoy Starfield on PS5, and they're not happy.

Look, I'll be the first to admit that Bethesda is no stranger to rough releases – heck, Skyrim on Switch 2 is just one recent example, with plenty before it. I love the studio's RPGs, but it doesn't have the best track record regarding game and platform launches… and Starfield on the PS5 (and Pro, for that matter) sadly offers no exception.

Folks have taken to forums like Reddit to report as much, dubbing the new port "unplayable" currently.

Base PS5 crashing getting out of hand, its unplayable from r/Starfield

"I'm getting crashes every two minutes," one player admits. "Tried everything. Deleted saves. Tried performance 30 and 60 FPS. Deleted the game and redownloaded it. And it's still happening. Every other game is working fine, and I never had any crashes. It's just Starfield. This is not acceptable. They should refund us!"

Commenters see others agree, disappointedly writing, "Classic Bethesda" – including people on the PS5 Pro.

"Saving is completely broken too; it'll just randomly come up and say 'unable to create save game,'" one person adds. Another says they're "getting tired of this." It's understandable, honestly. I play on PC myself, but it's evident the PS5 version – an edition many were looking forward to as Starfield was previously only available on Xbox and PC – isn't, erm, great. And that's an understatement.

Players are even saying it's crashing literal minutes after loading.

"I heard Starfield was having problems on PS5, and I wanted to test it for myself," as a fan reports. "The game crashed on me six minutes into the tutorial."

Elsewhere in another post, a game developer interviewer argues, "This right here is why the Switch 2 version of Starfield will probably be canceled. The game doesn't even run properly on a PS5 Pro." I can't see a Switch 2 port going any better, either, personally… especially after the mess that was Skyrim.

I mean, sure, Bethesda technically remedied that, and I've been playing the 2011 RPG on the Switch 2 myself since, but it's far less demanding of a game… and Starfield is already clearly not doing well on a more capable console. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Todd Howard says that Starfield's New Game Plus was "us asking you this weird, deep question that I actually think got lost on a lot of people"

A lot of changes came to Starfield as part of the Free Lanes update. Some are small, like refinements to customization and exploration, while others are far larger – such as the introduction of deep-space travel between planets in a star system. But no change is perhaps quite as profound as the one that's happened to Starfield's New Game+ progression system.

"I'm still used to saying this is a spoiler, but I don't think it is anymore," laughs Todd Howard, game director and executive producer. Let's err on the side of caution here and say for those of you who didn't finish Starfield (or are perhaps coming to the game for the very first time on PS5) you may want to turn away now. For the rest of you, let's dig into the Starfield ending.

When you complete the final Starfield story mission, One Giant Leap, you are presented with the option of going through the Unity. If you do this, your character will become Starborn and spawn into a brand new universe. You keep all of your powers, skills, level progression, and experience – and have the opportunity to become substantially more powerful through subsequent playthroughs. This comes at the cost of all of your mission progression, outposts, relationships with characters, ships, map data, and yes, all of your hard earned weapons, outfits, and items. It's a big decision to make.

"The Unity was our way of doing New Game+," says Howard. "It was us asking you this weird, deep question that I actually think got lost on a lot of people. It asks if you are just this power gamer who wants to get everything, or are you willing to leave this world behind? How do you feel about your own life choices – would you leave that all behind and start over? Some of that pain – having to give up all of your stuff, Sarah Morgan not loving you anymore, and so on – is supposed to make you feel all of that."

Tim Lamb, lead creative producer of Starfield, tells me that Bethesda knew early on that it wanted a compelling New Game Plus loop in place for this cosmic adventure. He points back to the disappointment many fans had at the conclusion of Fallout 3 being instructive here. "The game just ended. The feedback we got at the time was that fans were surprised – they wanted to keep going. So we put this system into Starfield; we wanted it to be a meaningful choice, but it wasn't meant to be suffering."

Reach for the Stars

Howard was clearly inspired by Edge of Tomorrow for the endgame progression loop Starfield launched with. "It's one of my favorite movies," he says, recalling the ending of the 2014 sci-fi film (directed by Doug Liman; starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt) with an almost gleeful melancholy. I'm with Howard on this one: if you're interested in an action film with an excellent time loop concept, it's well worth your time. Still, Howard says that the weight of these decisions may have been lost on players. "So we create this feeling of 'hey, you have to leave everything you did behind', but as a gamer, you're like, 'I just want to go through the magic gate and get more power.'"

Howard says the team ultimately decided, as it began thinking about what to include in the Free Lanes update, to make some alterations. "If you decide to enter the Unity now, you can do it in a way that you feel that you can still continue your character and have some of your stuff – it's stuff that you earned, after all."

Lamb reflects further on the challenge it inadvertently put on players: "The attachment that players felt to the things that they had gathered up to that point meant that they didn't want to part with their items. It was a bridge too far – a sacrifice too meaningful. There's so many exciting things that can happen in our New Game Plus loop that we wanted to give a bit of encouragement."

So in an effort to compel players into the unknown, Bethesda will now let you build a Quantum Entanglement Device. "This will allow you to take most inventory items through the Unity and into the Lodge when you arrive on the other side," says Lamb, noting that the 50 capacity device will accept most (but not all) items, letting you keep hold of your favorite weapons and suits, as well as key resources. The decision to make this change, he tells me, was spurred on by the decision to introduce more robust weapon and suit upgrade opportunities through the Free Lanes update.

"Then we are introducing X-Tech to further upgrade your weapons and your gear; well, we don't want to ask the player to put in a lot of work for a reward they are searching for, only to say, 'no, it's gone now.' So once these things started coming together, we knew we absolutely had to do something like this," he says.

Bethesda has also taken steps to better bring "Quantum Essence into the economy, to give it more power and make it more meaningful." This rare item could be accrued by defeating Starborn enemies, but didn't have all that much value beyond power regeneration. Not only will you now be able to get Quantum Essence from destroying Starborn Ships, you can also use it to upgrade Starborn powers, taking the sting out of going through the Unity and reclaiming the associated artifacts each time.

I get the sense that Howard is a little disappointed that Bethesda had to make this sort of change to Starfield, that it almost interrupts the romanticism of the story and final decision. Still, Howard is clear that making refinements to what he calls the 'elder loop' of the game (i.e. the way Starfield plays over extended durations) were essential, and will be moving forward.

"Take something like the Trackers Alliance, or other quests. You do them and then you're done. That's still rewarding, but for someone who jumps back in, they might play for a few hours – and then the update didn't serve them beyond those two or three hours. We want to be trying to do more things that update the game where it's going to change the next 100 hours," says Howard. "You can tell us if we're done our job right."

• Everything Todd Howard told us about The Elder Scrolls 6
• How Starfield inspired the next iteration of Bethesda's Creation Engine
• Todd Howard says there's "no rush" to get The Elder Scrolls 6 out

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24 years at Bethesda taught former head of publishing Pete Hines what a great game looks like and who's capable of making one. According to the now-retired executive, it's Todd Howard.

Bethesda's current director and lord of its brand-defining franchises – Howard led Skyrim in 2011, directed Fallout 4 in 2015, among other accolades to chisel on a stone tablet – is not amazing at the technical aspects of his job. Hines tells Kirk McKeand in a new installment of the journalist's Firezide Chat series matter-of-factly, "He is not the best programmer in the world. He might not be the best designer in the world. But there is nobody that is better at all of that shit than Todd, in my opinion."

"I mean, I'm biased," Hines admits, "he's one of my best friends." Regardless, he thinks Howard is a natural at understanding "how all of that shit fits together and impacts each other in a way I just haven't quite seen the same anywhere else in the industry, internal or external."

And, you know, it's hard to argue with him. When it comes to making mass appeal, player-first games that lend themselves to Amazon TV adaptations – Amazon's cultural reputation makes that sound bad, but I'm stating it as a very lucrative fact – Todd Howard is the undefeated champ.

There are plenty of other studio leaders who have been important in the industry for as long as Howard, but, in comparison, Hideo Kojima makes games for a more idiosyncratic crowd. FromSoftware's Hidetaka Miyazaki puts masochists in medieval torture devices, Yoko Taro probably puts himself in medieval torture devices, and their fanbases are all a more discerning, limited crew. But Howard lets anyone make anything of his fantasy realms, post-apocalyptic waste, trips to outer space, and no one else has been quite as successful at minimizing their role as an author that way.

"Look around the industry. Who else?" Hines says. There's no one.

"Go try that s*** in Red Dead Redemption 2": Nobody makes games like Bethesda, says studio veteran Pete Hines, so "put some respect" on Todd Howard and the Creation Engine team.

Bethesda rolled out a substantial Starfield update recently, in the form of the hefty Free Lanes. Between the advertised additional mechanics, features, and surprise qualify-of-life tweaks, fans of the space RPG truly believe it's become something more people should play.

The update's namesake mechanic alone is something to rave about, because it allows players to fly through particular star systems without needing fast travel. This creates the opportunity to relax and play at a different speed when it comes to moving around the universe.

"It's much less of a chore and more engaging," says one Redditor. "The random encounters are cool. You can set the auto pilot and walk away from the helm and talk to your crew, do game stuff, do dad stuff or do dishes." They go on to say it's "starting to feel like a solid Bethesda title and it's good to be back."

Another Reddit user calls it "such a game changer," noting they did the Old Neighbourhood quest as part of a new save, and "didn't open a single menu." For a game that involves so much flying around on starships, getting the travel to the point someone can complete missions without utilizing a menu is impressive work.

Other players are enjoying how the point-of-interests have been altered as part of the patch. "Cruise mode really isn't that special nor game changing to me, but the fact that POI repetition is practically gone has actually made exploring fun and worthwhile," another fan on Reddit states.

"It's honestly both things combined," argues someone in the replies. "With the cruise mode and increased POIs you can finally do the Bethesda games thing of pick a direction and do stuff you find on the way." On that note, à Reddit user says it now "feels a bit like Elder Scrolls where I want to do A, but suddenly get distracted by B, C and D around the corner."

It only took Starfield almost three years to get there, but the fact it's giving that vibe of pure exploration is a definite plus. Now, provided Bethesda can maintain this momentum, the stars truly are the limit.

Starfield's Free Lanes update comes with a quality-of-life feature fans have spent months begging Bethesda for, and many more: "One less mod in the LO!"

Today, Bethesda is one of the biggest game studios in the world, responsible for some of the most notable franchises in the industry, but things were much different back in the '90s. Then, Bethesda was a much smaller studio not far off from today's indie outfits, but unlike modern indie devs, they didn't have the benefit of digital distribution. No, the folks who made The Elder Scrolls: Arena had to go straight from making the game to packaging and shipping the thing themselves.

"We had a great team of hardworking developers who truly put in their best effort," according to Vijay Lakshman, lead designer of that first Elder Scrolls title. As he explained in an interview for the January 2014 issue of GamesTM, "No one wore only one hat, and we were all familiar with what everyone did."

That extended to the process of actually shipping the RPG to stores. "We even spent time shrink-wrapping the games ourselves, as Bethesda was the publisher and developer," Lakshman explained. "We were in the loading dock and we learned how to assemble boxes, inserts and use the heat gun. Talk about seeing a product through from concept to box wrap! We did it all."

Famously, The Elder Scrolls: Arena was not meant to be a traditional RPG, but rather a combat-focused game where you would lead a team of gladiators to fame and fortune. That plan changed mid-development, and it seems that change might've been a factor in dramatically limiting the game's initial sales.

"At the end of development, we missed our Christmas deadline, which is really serious for a small developer/publisher like Bethesda Softworks," Arena writer and designer Ted Peterson said in a 2001 interview. "We released in the doldrums of March, which is disastrous. That, coupled with the fact that the distributors discovered we had essentially not made the arena combat game we said we were making, meant we initially shipped something like 3,000 units of the game."

Well, hey, I guess that meant lighter work for the devs shipping out those initial copies, but it doesn't seem that the studio took it so lightly. While studios in the '90s didn't hold the same inflated expectations for game sales as modern publishers, 3,000 units was still bad. "We were sure we had screwed the company and we'd go out of business," Peterson said.

Yet once players started to get their hands on Arena, things started to change. "Month by month, though, people kept buying it, hearing about it word of mouth, and after a while, it turned out we had a minor 'cult' hit," Peterson explained. Ultimately, sales estimates for Arena suggested it sold around 120,000 copies, and its sequels would obviously prove to be much, much bigger.

Lakshman left Bethesda after the release of Arena – which, coincidentally, happened to be about the time Todd Howard joined the studio. Under Howard's leadership, titles like Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim would become breakout hits, and Lakshman had nothing but effusive things to say about the modern era of Elder Scrolls titles.

"I love them," Lakshman said. "The folks at Bethesda kept the franchise alive, poured their resources into it and turned it into a winner. They deserve it. I’m proud that my team could’ve done so much with so little, but I’m really awed at how much more complex the storylines, technology and adventures have grown, and how artfully woven the franchise has become. I take my hat off to the entire team at Bethesda today."

The Elder Scrolls 6 could still be years away, but with Bethesda's history in making some of the best RPGs of all time, here's hoping it's worth the wait.

These days, the vast majority of games ship with bugs that are later patched out, but Bethesda games in particular have earned themselves a somewhat dubious reputation for the sheer amount of glitches and performance issues they usually have at launch. To this day, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim has bugs that have persisted for 15 years, and a former Bethesda artist who worked on the game has shared a design philosophy held by executive producer Todd Howard that may have contributed to that association.

In a recently resurfaced clip from a 2025 interview with Kiwi Talkz, former Bethesda senior artist Dennis Mejillones estimates 95% of the issues players report when Bethesda games launch were already flagged internally.

"We're gamers. We play the game. We play and see the same things that the gamers do," Mejillones says. "We're like, 'ah this is not fun, or as fun, or we need to do this differently."

Mejillones adds that Howard had a saying with regards to bug-fixing that he would tell developers frequently.

"Todd used to say in meetings all the time, 'we can do anything, but we can't do everything.' And that's a very true statement. It's just the reality of it."

Of course, Bethesda deserves credit for giving its games the love they deserve post-launch, with the overall reception tending to improve in the months after release thanks to updates based on player feedback. Mejillones gives Bethesda its flowers for that, citing Fallout 76's redemptive arc from launch specifically.

"Look at [Fallout] 76. Look at how far they pushed it. They could've dropped the game, they could've just let it go and whatever, but they didn't," he says. "They kept pushing it and improving it, and my understanding is that 76 is really fun now."

It's worth distinguishing post-launch performance patches from free DLC like Fallout 76's Burning Springs and Gone Fission updates. With the former, you could argue those improvements should've been implemented before release, but Mejillones is valid in giving Bethesda credit for handing players free updates with large amounts of new content. That definitely goes a long way in fostering goodwill in a community frequently let down by the janky state of Bethesda games at launch.

Skyrim and Fallout 4 artist says Bethesda's Todd Howard has too many yes men: "A lot of people were afraid to say no to Todd and that hurt him"

The Free Lanes update is now live in Starfield, Bethesda's biggest yet in the spacefaring RPG. But besides the namesake ability to fly between planets in a star system and some other features, it brings a load of quality-of-life changes the community has been waiting for.

An immediate highlight in the patch notes is the Always Show Landing Camera option, for people who want to be able to see their ship land each and every time it does. This might seem small, but it makes for greater immersion as it makes it seem like you're legitimately planet-hopping.

Then there's a new method of placing objects in outposts, to complement the existing rotation mode, and made workbenches for weapons easier to place. You should now find better loot for Expert and Master level locked chests, helping to justify the effort needed to seek them out.

A few missions have been fixed, including Refurbished Goods, where all the weapons needed can definitely be found, and Guilty Parties not starting if you'd done Background Checks. These aren't all built for your convenience: Legendary enemies now have some new, unspecified modifiers, to make them a little tougher, and a toggle for their activation.

There's a lot to go through; it's a substantial list, but it certainly gives the impression that Bethesda's paying attention to the community, and in particular, what people have been fixing themselves using mods. "One less mod in the LO!," exclaims one commenter on Reddit. "One less bug fix mod to keep!" another says, on the Refurbished Goods changes.

People are still using hundreds of mods to make Starfield play just how they'd like, so Bethesda definitely isn't going to follow those trends for every change. But this shows positive alterations are happening, and the amount of mods you use overall may continue to decrease in the months ahead if updates like this continue.

Achievements for Starfield's Terran Armada DLC seemingly tease whole new locations and features Bethesda's remained quiet about

Six days into NASA's Artemis II mission, four astronauts made history. The crew of the Orion spacecraft surpassed the record for human spaceflight's farthest distance from Earth, which was previously set by the Apollo 13 mission over 50 years ago. 252,756 miles travelled. Unseen regions of the lunar surface uncovered. The promise of what's to come from all of this is staggering: lunar outposts, deep-space excursions, missions to Mars. It's been inspiring to watch this unfold in real-time.

Unlike in the 1970s, when citizens of Earth followed the final crewed mission of NASA's Apollo program from a small rotation of television and radio stations, we are now afforded endless ways to satiate our curiosity of the grand tapestry of the galaxy. Some of the best modern sci-fi movies, the likes of Ad Astra and The Martian, are readily available on streaming platforms. Project Hail Mary is in cinemas and utterly delightful. Arthur C. Clarke classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama can be read on Kindle for less than the cost of a coffee. No Man's Sky is readily accessible, standing as one of the best space games alongside Elite Dangerous, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. It's been a wonderful week to be a fan of science-fiction and/or endlessly fascinated by space travel.

And today, as the crew of the Orion make their way back to Earth, Bethesda Game Studios prepares to launch Starfield onto PS5. It's a serendipitous turn of events, and one you should grasp with both hands if you can afford the opportunity.

Should you play Starfield on PS5?

Bethesda Game Studios is best known as the creators of some of the best RPGs of all-time. You have probably sunk hundreds of hours into at least one of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion or The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, and been enticed into returning to Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 following the success of the Amazon Prime Video show. Starfield is the studio's latest effort, having first landed on PC and Xbox Series X in 2023.

Starfield has proven to be a divisive experience, and I don't necessarily see that changing anytime soon – if ever. The Free Lanes update and premium Terran Armada expansion also arrive today across all platforms, introducing a smattering of quality-of-life improvements, interstellar travel, and plenty more besides. These changes further the role-play fantasy that the core game provides, but they don't fundamentally overhaul it.

I traveled to Bethesda Game Studios last month, and learned that the studio is uninterested in launching a 'Starfield 2.0' overhaul as some players had hoped it might – Bethesda is proud of the game it made, and sees no need to change it. Lead creative producer Tim Lamb told me that players should expect "the best version of Starfield" to exist from April 7 onwards: an "irresponsibly large Bethesda Game" that exists with "multiple years of additional support, systems, and content."

This is all true: The best version of Starfield is the one that's available from today. It's also true that this RPG still isn't for everybody. If you lock into its vibe, you'll no doubt find that Starfield creates a vacuum that just consumes time. Over 1,000 planets and more than 100 star systems to explore; the opportunity to live life in a galaxy far, far away with some classic Bethesda questlines, strong base building foundations, deep progression/customisation systems for your character, companions, and ship.

If you don't lock into its vibe, well, you're going to find that Starfield never quite reckons with this friction at the core of its design ethos: outer space can be kinda boring, and Bethesda has simulated that accurately. Bethesda buries a lot of great ideas and moments throughout this RPG, but the studio doesn't do a fantastic job of leading you between them. The game really is, for better or for worse, "irresponsibly large".

That's because, like Skyrim before it, Starfield is ostensibly about freewheeling exploration and stumbling into trouble. The problem here is that the barren space between those moments is at an astronomical scale in Starfield. There are large stretches of time where very little of interest happens to or around you. This needn't be the end of the world, but it is something you need to be aware of coming in.

Starfield carried a lot of baggage back in 2023, and it was burdened by the weight of expectation. Coming back to the game a few years later, this time with a new character, I must say that I'm finding myself enjoying its rhythms a little more this time around, as uneven as they can be. I'm having a nice time exploring new worlds, shooting up space bandits, building out the spaceship of my dreams, rattling through faction quests.

Starfield is by no means my favorite Bethesda game, but I'm having a perfectly enjoyable time being afforded the freedom to traipse around space. The Artemis II mission captivated me for a week, drawing my gaze away from Earth and towards the stars. Starfield on PS5 has transformed my imagination into a virtual reality, letting me experience the fantasy of being beyond Earth.

I can't tell you if you're going to like Starfield – what I can say is that if you're willing to give it a chance, it might just surprise you.

Related:

• The five biggest changes in the Starfield Free Lanes update
• Starfield interview: Tim Lamb on the PS5 release
• There's still more to come from Starfield in the future

Bethesda's Todd Howard is no ordinary game developer. Having risen to the top of the ranks at Bethesda Game Studios over his 32-year tenure, he's a household name even among people who don't write about video games for a living.

He's been instrumental in the development of some of the most beloved games of all time, including The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4, and so you'd assume he's probably made some really brilliant executive decisions over the course of his long career. And yet still, he's bound to be wrong about stuff occasionally too, and according to a longtime friend and former colleague of his, everyone he works with is too afraid to tell him that.

In a recently unearthed clip from a 2025 interview with Kiwi Talkz, former Bethesda senior artist Dennis Mejillones said Howard was surrounded by too many 'yes man' when the two worked together. Mejillones worked at Bethesda from 2009 to 2021, so he spent a long time with Howard and presumably understands a lot about the innerworkings at Bethesda, at least up until five years ago.

"[Howard] is a phenomenal person, and is he perfect? No. Does he call all the shots perfectly? No," said Mejillones. "I can't tell you how many times I told Todd, like, 'hey man, that's not a good idea. That's bad. That's not good.' Or, that I kinda kept my mouth shut, like, 'oh, I don't think that's so great.' Typically though, I would communicate if I felt really strongly about it."

Of course, Mejillones doesn't have the same inside knowledge as he did when he was with Bethesda, so the communication system could've changed since he left, but when Mejillones was working with Howard, "a lot of people were afraid to say no to Todd," and Mejillones reckons "that hurt him."

This is an interesting insight even in isolation, but when presented in contrast with Skyrim co-lead designer Kurt Kuhlmann's recent assertion that Starfield's main problem was Howard being "pulled away" too often during development, a fascinating contrast emerges. On one hand, Mejillones is arguing that Howard needs to be challenged more, but on the other Kuhlmann seems to think Todd Howard games need more Todd Howard in their DNA. It should be interesting to see how that push-and-pull shakes out when The Elder Scrolls 6 launches hopefully sometime while we're all still alive.

Everything Todd Howard told us about The Elder Scrolls 6, Creation Engine 3, and the future of Bethesda RPGs: "Everyone at the studio has a responsibility to make sure our games are as good as they can be"

As the (seemingly) eternal wait for Bethesda Game Studios' hotly anticipated RPG The Elder Scrolls 6 continues, fans are finding creative new ways to challenge themselves in the series' previous entries – including completing all of them while taking no damage whatsoever.

GinoMachino, a content creator and streamer known best for his impressive Dark Souls and Elden Ring challenge runs, has gone and boggled all of our minds again by *checks notes* tackling every single mainline Elder Scrolls game – all the way from Arena to Skyrim – in one go… while taking 0 damage to boot.

It took over 11 hours to ace his run, judging by his recent live streams on YouTube, but he's truly done it.

"After months of preparation and practice," GinoMachino writes in a post on the amazing feat, "I've managed to beat all Elder Scrolls games 1 through 5 in a row without taking a single point of damage. A run many thought would be impossible."

And, as he amusingly adds, "If Elder Scrolls 6 comes out in my lifetime (surely), I look forward to doing this again with it included." Aha, yeah… fingers crossed it does.

I'd recommend giving the full stream combo a watch – the moment that GinoMachino takes Alduin down and exclaims he's done it "first try as well" is one to not miss, at least, and as fans point out, the whole not taking any damage thing is seriously awesome.

"There are always bones or items stepped on that fling themselves at your leg for physics reasons that don't make sense," after all, proving that GinoMachino is better than all of us.

And, you know, a lot luckier, too – compared to me anyway, as I sit here with thousands upon thousands of hours in Skyrim alone across various platforms and not even one single run with 0 damage. Above all, though, his breeze through Arena has me perplexed.

I think it took me ages to survive the Imperial Dungeons and actually, uh, get into the meat of the game… but then again, I'm no GinoMachino, that's for certain.

"It makes me sick": Skyrim modder with 475,000 downloads, fed up with "daily harassment," abandons modding after "thousands of hours" of work on what she calls "the most advanced follower to ever exist."

The Elder Scrolls Online is going to look a whole lot different soon, with the 2026 roadmap finally coming to fruition – smaller updates, the new seasonal model, and all – and between an unexplored region of Skyrim coming and Sea of Thieves vibes underway, I can't wait.

It's no secret that The Elder Scrolls Online is about to look a whole lot different – but it's not just because of animation changes to werewolves or a revamped Glenumbra.

We've already had a taste of what's to come with the recent Update 49, a massive patch that saw the (now admittedly a bit broken in PvP) Dragonknight class reworked, as tweaks for all roles are underway, much to my not-subclassing delight.

There's plenty more in the works, too, though. After attending an early preview of the 2026 Seasons Direct, I'm thrilled to report that the MMO – an MMO that's arguably held a bit of a shaky reputation in Elder Scrolls fans' hearts since its 2014 release – is taking years of player feedback into account in Season Zero, Season One, and beyond.

With Season Zero, dubbed Dawn and Dusk, comes the first big limited-time Event Zone: The Night Market.

Set in the surreal Daedric realm of Fargrave, The Night Market will be available for seven weeks, starting April 29. Although we can group up with our friends to tackle its challenging PvE content, ZeniMax Online Studios tells us solo players shouldn't be afraid to join in on the fun – it's a worthy experience with rewards for all flavors of audiences.

These do, however, depend on our choice of one of three unique factions to team up with.

There's The Glittering Goad, The Ruckus, and The Thousand Eyes – each with their own respective cosmetics, titles, dyes, banners, and monster sets to score… so we'll need to pick wisely.

The way ZeniMax presents it, it also sounds like a sort of PvEvP situation in a way, as every faction will be competing (but not in a direct, Cyrodiil manner). I'm personally drawn to The Glittering Goad and its alluring horned dremora leader.

The Night Market is only the tip of the iceberg, though. We can look forward to Challenge Difficulty – an optional (ZeniMax stresses this bit) overland difficulty system as well come June 8, with four tiers to choose from and increased rewards to gain through them.

Season Zero boasts a plethora of changes geared toward PvP fans, too, like the new Veterancy PvP progression system. Lone players haven't been forgotten, either.

Solo Dungeons – a system that has me especially intrigued as a fan of the Trust feature in Final Fantasy 14 – are set to arrive and reimagine existing dungeons for folks preferring to take them on alone. No more queues and fake tanks? Sounds like a win to me.

For anyone who does enjoy group-based content, especially more hardcore experiences, there's the first base game trial in 12 years (yes, over a decade) to anticipate.

The Crimson Veldt, as ZeniMax is calling its new 12-player trial, is set in Hircine's Hunting Grounds – but it's shaking up the usual lush forest we'd expect with canyons and savannas.

Then, there's also the High Seas of Tamriel Event coming… because pirates never fall out of fashion. From undersea exploration and swashbuckling to naval combat reminiscent of Sea of Thieves, it's a throwback to The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (except, erm, good).

Finally, ZeniMax hints toward a brand-new zone. "We still want to do new zones, we still want to do content," after all – the team simply wants "to get away from" just "sticking to the same formula" it's used for over a decade now.

And, that brand-new zone… is located in what might just be the setting of Bethesda's most legendary game to date: Skyrim. "There's definitely something very iconic about the area we're going to that you'll notice."

What is that? ZeniMax doesn't say. Is it Whiterun? "We're not going to answer." There's no telling just where in Skyrim we'll be going come this mysterious new zone, but I'll be keeping my own fingers crossed for Winterhold. Until we find out, however, there's plenty of content to enjoy in Season Zero, One, and beyond.

The annual Anniversary Jubilee is right around the corner on April 2, with the Night Market following close behind.

If you're excited for future Bethesda Game Studios gems, here's everything we know as of now about The Elder Scrolls 6 – whenever it may come.

As a longtime Warrior of Light, I've clocked over 5,000 hours in Final Fantasy 14 – and, yes, I'd benefit from touching grass. Hundreds of those hours have gone into hardcore raiding, while hundreds more have been spent tending to my cozy virtual home in the Lavender Beds. Since the ill-received Dawntrail expansion dropped, though, I've felt myself losing interest in Eorzea and all its previously enthralling charms.

With "Mostly Negative" reviews nearly two years post-launch, the DLC failed to pull me in (and apparently, many others) the same way its predecessors did – but my MMO fatigue may have found a cure in another genre gem: The Elder Scrolls Online. Although it never quite managed to lock me in for years at a time like Final Fantasy 14, it's a game I've come back to sporadically since first playing it as an Elder Scrolls-obsessed teen back in 2014.

I've timed my recent comeback perfectly, it seems. ZeniMax Online Studios' big 2026 roadmap is finally beginning to come to fruition – smaller updates, the new seasonal model, and all – and I'm afraid I've found myself properly "locked in," so to speak… the very way I was with Square Enix's own MMO for so, so long. I'm logging in daily without fail, finishing zones to 100% completion, and most importantly, looking forward to the future.

I used to be an adventurer like you

The Elder Scrolls Online is beginning to feel like an entirely new MMO, following Update 49 and the ever-exciting Season Zero: Dawn and Dusk commencing April 2. After attending an early preview of the 2026 Seasons Direct, I'm all the more certain of this – heck, I've spent the last few weeks grinding out my dailies in anticipation of the new Night Market event, set in the surreal Daedric realm of Fargrave.

Finally, there's something new to look forward to. As ZeniMax says, the studio wants "to get away from" just "sticking to the same formula" it's used for over a decade now. It's not simply another paid zone-themed expansion with some quests and side dungeons thrown in anymore; there's real incentive to do PvE content with events like the Night Market – one inclusive of all players with rewards dependent on choice – and PvP, too.

I'm not a Cyrodiil frequenter myself, but my more combative pals can't wait for the new Veterancy PvP progression gimmick. Meanwhile, Season Zero is keeping me on the edge of my own seat with more than just the Night Market. I'm hungry to explore Solo Dungeons, a coming system that has me especially intrigued as a fan of the Trust feature in Final Fantasy 14, and the first Elder Scrolls Online trial to grace the base game in 12 years.

I fight… because I must

Yes, 12 years. The Crimson Veldt, as ZeniMax is dubbing its new 12-player trial, is set in Hircine's Hunting Grounds. It's shaking up the usual lush forest we'd expect with canyons and savannas, though, further carving out The Elder Scrolls Online's future content as something unique – something even longtime fans of the RPG series (like myself) wouldn't expect. Best of all, much like the Night Market, it's accessible to every base game player.

Part of my move away from The Elder Scrolls Online came down to my inability to enjoy harder or more "late game" content with friends who didn't have ESO Plus memberships or every expansion ever unlocked. ZeniMax says it wants to make the MMO a game for all, and that's evident through the coming updates. Not only is much of the seasonal content open to the community in its entirety, but it also caters to every flavor of fan.

Take the High Seas of Tamriel event, for example – it offers something entirely new, a pirate experience of sorts with undersea exploration, swashbuckling, and naval combat reminiscent of Sea of Thieves. It's a delightful throwback to The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (except, you know, hopefully fun), with a modern twist that leaves me wanting more out of areas like The Ruby Sea in Final Fantasy 14.

Wait, I know you

The reveal that most has me in an Elder Scrolls Online-shaped chokehold now, however, is its new zone – because, yes, ZeniMax states developers "still want to do new zones" and "still want to do content" akin to past great releases despite the seasonal update system. It's a return to Skyrim, and I couldn't be more thrilled. "There's definitely something very iconic about the area we're going to that you'll notice," the studio teases

What is that? ZeniMax doesn't say. Is it Whiterun? "We're not going to answer." There's no telling just where in Skyrim we'll be going in this mysterious new zone, and that's a big reason I'm so excited. Thoughts of a potential Second Era Winterhold, Mage's College and all, have filled my mind for days now, and I can't get enough of speculating.

I'm enjoying myself in The Elder Scrolls Online, and there's more to look forward to than only a zone this time around. This is different because it's not just Skryim – it's the Night Market, it's the Solo Dungeons, it's The Crimson Veldt, it's the High Seas of Tamriel event, and it's the mystery of what the new zone might harbor amid all of this other content. I might return to Eorzea someday, but for now, I'm happy being the Vestige again.

If you're excited for future Bethesda Game Studios gems, here's everything we know as of now about The Elder Scrolls 6 – whenever it may come.

Just over six years from when the game became playable, The Elder Scrolls: Blades is closing for good. As a result, every reward in the free-to-play spinoff from Bethesda's RPG series has been heavily reduced in order to maximize people enjoying the game for the limited time it's still available.

Bethesda made the announcement through an in-game message. "The Elder Scrolls: Blades servers will permanently shut down on June 30, 2026," reads the post, screenshotted by The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages. "From now until June 30, 2026, all items in the store will be available for 1 Gem or 1 Sigil each. All players receive a free bundle of Gems and Sigils, so you can enjoy all content Blades has to offer."

It's made clear that on June 30, "servers will be shut down and the game will be inaccessible." The publisher concludes with gratitude to the Blades community. "Thank you for playing and we hope you have enjoyed your time in Blades," the message states.

Although I'm sure more than a few people reading this had forgotten about Blades, the project thrived early on. Coming out in May 2020, there was genuine excitement for a free, combat-focused slice of The Elder Scrolls you can play on your phone or the Switch. More linear than the mainline games, Blades was fun for a quickfire bit of sword-swinging as you pushed through various challenges and encounters.

I do recall getting bored of it eventually, then forgetting about it, and I daresay more than a few others felt the same, given this course of events. That said, the fact that the game will disappear is drastic and sad, and there's already a push within the community for an offline mode.

Sadly, it seems unlikely, as demands for such were already going unanswered, and Bethesda probably isn't keen on putting any more resource into this release whatsoever. But never say never. Until then, get involved while you can, if you're at all curious.

"Pretend we kept patching Oblivion. What would we have done if we kept supporting it?" – Todd Howard explains the "thought exercise" Bethesda went through for its remaster

Bethesda boss Todd Howard has explained the studio's approach to updates when it came to creating Oblivion Remastered.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, Howard notes that remastering any of its titles is risky as "the chances of messing it up are way higher than not. So how do we do everything we can to make sure we're enhancing what Oblivion was for people who played it, and then reintroduce it." This led to the team taking a specific route when it came to the remaster, based on what the original game would look like now.

Howard explains that the approach revolved around "what are the modern things you want to do?" He recalls, "I did this thought exercise with the team. Pretend we kept patching Oblivion. What would we have done if we kept supporting it? And that's where you get a good list: We probably would have added sprinting, we probably would have adjusted the skill systems – because they are kind of punishing here. And that's where we sort of ended up, like 'this is what it's going to be.'"

However, Howard is aware that any changes for such a popular game – that players have been immersed in for what is approaching 20 years – will be heavily scrutinized, even if they end up being a net positive. He adds: "We felt really, really good about that, but you never know how the audience is going to react to it. It's also why we compressed the time from announcement to release."

So if you're expecting the rumored Fallout 3 Remaster to arrive in the near future, this will give you a better idea of the kinds of things Bethesda will be looking at when updating its 2008 RPG.

As Fallout 3 and New Vegas remake hopes and rumors persist, Bethesda's Todd Howard says he's actually "anti-remake" and prefers remasters like Oblivion's instead.

For many Fallout fans, New Vegas represents the upper echelon of the series. Obsidian's take on the wasteland is nuanced, grounded and a little darker than Bethesda's modern mainline entries. Former devs on 3 and 4 respect how Obsidian tackled the property, but they feel the comparisons can be a little unfair to what Bethesda achieved.

"I initially felt a little touchy about it," Jonah Lobe, a character artist on Fallout 3 and 4, says of fans constantly talking up New Vegas on the Kiwi Talkz podcast. "We made 90% of the art, we built the engine, we did it in a very limited window of time, and we put in all this effort, and they got to just work on the stories."

As such, he found it "a little unfair" because players were basing so much of their opinion on the writing, rather than the technical aspects. But time has tempered his perspective. "As time has gone on, Obsidian killed it," Lobe proclaims. "It did make me feel a little bit sad that our design team could not implement the same scale of really ambitious, multi-arc hug choices, kind of thing."

Nate Purkeypile, a world artist on Fallouts 3 and 4, concurs. "It would've been cool to see more of that versus the completely separate faction thing, which didn't really have the same sort of ramifications in Fallout 4," he adds. "I do think [New Vegas] is a really good game, but it also does some things worse. I think its dungeons and world design are not as good."

The conversation then shifts to acknowledging the hard conditions Obsidian was working in, with a compressed production schedule, and how the consensus has shifted over time. New Vegas launched in a messy state, recovering over years thanks to patches and community mods. All my completed playthroughs are on modded versions of New Vegas, rather than the version Obsidian put on shelves.

"Honestly, I applaud them, I think they did a great job of shepherding the Fallout spirit," Lobe says. "In some ways better than we did."

Todd Howard defends "VO line flub" in Oblivion Remastered since "it's part of the game’s character," but some bugs only stick around because they're "so complicated"

One of the great joys about playing last year's Oblivion Remastered was seeing and hearing all the mid-2000s Bethesda jank and voice-over mistakes still intact. It's a glitchy, messy game at times, and that's very distinctly part of the appeal. Todd Howard agrees, and leaving in these bugs and errors was a specific decision for the remaster.

"I think there's a lot of fuzzy judgment calls," he explains during a roundtable attended by GamesRadar+. "Like, which ones are players gonna go try to do - take that one where you can stand on things – fixing that is so complicated."

There are a couple of potential candidates for what he's referring to, but the most likely is the glitch where you suddenly become significantly taller in first-person. Figuring out how and why these happen can be laborious, and for a project like a remaster, teasing out a solution might not be worth it.

"So, you know what, it's fine. I love the VO line flub," he continues. "Stuff like that? Yeah, just leave it. It's fine. It's part of the game's character."

This one's more famous: Tandilwe, in the Temple of the One, contains a double line-reading where you can hear the performer go twice. "Wait a minute, let me do that one again," they exclaim, before going back over the dialogue.

It's hilarious, and still listenable in the remaster, just as it is in the 2006 version. I'd very much be in Howard's camp on this, that's something unique to Oblivion that should be preserved. It's an eccentricity and part of the overall charm.

Bugs are more case-by-case, depending on how they impact gameplay, but a side character's lines being slightly off? An accidental treasure, for fans to discover. Honestly, we'll have to see what emerges from The Elder Scrolls 6.

Todd Howard wanted Bethesda's original RPGs to be playable before worrying about remasters: "You can play Morrowind, you can play Fallout 3."

Given the noise that has existed around Starfield since it launched on PC and Xbox Series X in 2023, it can be all too easy to gravitate towards the divisive reaction it stirred and overlook the players who have been quietly exploring the Settled Systems all along. "You know, I think we're still in the top 10 hours played on Game Pass," says Tim Lamb, lead creative producer.

It's no secret that Bethesda Game Studios RPGs attract massive audiences – there's a reason why 2011's Skyrim continues to be ported to every platform under the sun, and why Fallout 4 has such a thriving Creations community still expanding the Commonwealth a decade later. But Starfield seemed to split opinion like no Bethesda game before it, with every player (regardless of their playtime) seemingly having a list of changes, additions, or suggestions equipped in their action slot at all times.

It made me wonder how Bethesda filters through the reaction to find actionable next steps, and whether the studio is leaning on the community to help shape Starfield's ongoing evolution or holding firm on refining its original vision for the game in relative seclusion.

"We have our own opinions as far as things we would like to see," says Emil Pagliarulo, studio design director. "After we release the game, we keep on playing it – we say, 'oh, I wish this had more of X or more of Y as well.' And then as we play more, we are also seeing what is connecting with players and what isn't – where our thoughts align with player feedback, which reinforces our beliefs."

Pagliarulo uses exploration as an example, pointing towards feedback where players were invested in diving beyond the critical path but wanting for more variation and distractions. "So then we make a list of priorities: Let's flesh out the POIs, the dungeons, the things you can find, and even all of the systems we have which manage and distribute all of that stuff across the galaxy." You'll find a lot of these refinements arriving in a big way as part of the Free Lanes update on April 7, 2026, although Lamb is quick to note that it's not like Bethesda has been sitting on its hands for the last three years.

"It still amazes me how different Starfield is now compared to launch. We were doing an update every six to eight weeks for the first year, addressing all of these little things. But with all of those smaller things that we did, they are big and meaningful to the person who was waiting for that one thing."

Lamb acknowledges that the cadence of updates slowed, that the studio went quieter. "I feel like we held back a little while we were working on all of this stuff. Based on everything you've seen in Free Lanes, would that feel different if it had been spread out over six or eight weeks? I think there's a certain punch to it, when you get it all together in one day."

Community Engagement

"We try to lean in on the things where our vision, and our idea of what Starfield should be, aligns with the feedback that's coming in from folks who get the game and understand it," says Pagliarulo, "but there's always a ton of obstacles."

One of those obstacles is undoubtedly the volume and velocity of feedback that Bethesda receives. "What the community or internet is experiencing is not always what we're experiencing," says Istvan Pely, studio art director. "You might have a streamer who is very popular and they have an issue, a thought, or maybe they want some very specific thing which is isolated to that person, but then it gets a voice and gets a lot of people around it. Then it comes back to us and we're like, oh, we have a laundry list of stuff we need to do before we can get to that."

How does Bethesda filter through it all, and prioritize where it wants to make changes? "We have several vectors of intake for information, whether that's Reddit, Discord," says Lamb. "I will also say that I sit in on a call every week, and have since launch, where we look through all of the things that are bubbling up throughout the community. We're always looking at how we're doing with certain problems and how we are funnelling that up to the team, and that's been consistent for us for the three years. So we're always checking in on what's on the list, and looking for things that bubble up to the threshold where something becomes really important to address."

Bethesda has the added challenge (or benefit, depending on your perspective) of a robust community of modders invested in making changes to the games it makes. Creations, whether they are free or paid, see invested players making refinements or overhauling entire systems. It's something the studio keeps a close eye on. "It really is interesting, having such a robust creation system," says Pely.

"Sometimes we have ideas and then a creator will make something that satisfies that need for the community. We didn't plan for it and we never knew it was coming, but are players happy with that? So are we going to do the same thing? Yeah, no." There are some areas where Bethesda will naturally push beyond what the community has already introduced through the Creations system; as Pagliarulo mentioned earlier Free Lanes introduces more variation to exploration and POI cooldown systems, though mods have certainly tried to tackle this ground in recent years.

Ultimately, Pely says, it's about making the most of the time that Bethesda has to push the most meaningful updates it can. There are so many parts to Starfield – you mention a space game to 20 people and you're going to get 20 different answers. The game has a very unique fiction with a lot of unanswered questions, so how do we deal with those for the people who want that? How do we deal with Outpost improvements for the people who want those, and so on. It really takes a lot of time to do this stuff, so we have to make smart choices and what we target and how we address things."

In terms of where Bethesda may take Starfield next, is any one change impossible to consider should enough people request it? "I don't think the word 'impossible' is a thing we would ever say," Lamb laughs. He points to the fact that Bethesda launched Starfield without ground vehicles, and had no intention of including them to retain a certain element of the game's fantasy, before the community made it clear it wanted them. "Credit to Istvan, he pushed hard to get the REV-8 out there. That was something that seemed impossible."

"You could say the same about traveling between planets in a system," Lamb continues, touching on deep-space travel arriving in the Free Lanes update. "And listen, I'm not going to undersell what it took to get that right, but we wanted to deliver that. There's always a balance. We have finite time, right? We always want to say yes to our players if it aligns with the things that we agree with, or if they have played the game so much and now really want to poke into this corner or explore that thing next. That's what helps us to decide what to work on next"

Related News:

• Everything Todd Howard told us about The Elder Scrolls 6
• How Starfield inspired the next iteration of Bethesda's Creation Engine
• Todd Howard says there's "no rush" to get The Elder Scrolls 6 out

Fallout 3 artist Istvan Pely says the game's awkward DLC integration was something Bethesda wanted to make sure it got right when it came to expanding Starfield.

If you've played Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas after purchasing the Game of the Year edition of either, you'll be familiar with the DLC wave. In New Vegas, once you leave Doc Mitchell's hut and gaze upon Goodsprings – and by extension, the wasteland – for the first time, it's an impactful moment. Or rather, it would be, but instead you're treated to a number of pop-up notices informing you of the DLC content you own and the various radio signals you can follow to find them. The same went for Fallout 3, and while not the end of the world, it may have taken you out of the role-playing a bit.

Pely, in an interview with GamesRadar+, explains, "One of the things we learned, more than a decade ago, when you look at the Game of the Year Edition of Fallout 3 – we would make these DLCs, and then we put out a Game of the Year Edition – and the Game of the Year Edition would start with all of these messages [telling you] the DLCs had unlocked. We've gotten better at that."

So over a decade and a half later, with Starfield, "The beginning of Terran Armada is much more organically woven into the world." Pely explains, "You'll stumble upon that content. So it's entirely possible that you'll start the game, you'll learn about this, it tells you you probably shouldn't do that now, but there's nothing stopping you from trying."

How returning to The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion reshaped Todd Howard's stance on remastering Bethesda's RPGs

While Skyrim might be the meme in Bethesda's catalog due to how often it's been ported, to me, Oblivion is the bigger landmark. It brought The Elder Scrolls to consoles and modernized a lot of the mechanics and design principles behind the series. A dev at the studio agrees, pointing to your quest against the Mystic Dawn as a pillar of what the team does creatively.

Now a lead creative producer at Bethesda, Tim Lamb was a QA lead on Oblivion, and he remembers how the game felt revolutionary in development. "When we were developing that it felt like it had never been done before. It was like we were breaking all the rules, and we were doing something special, and impossible," he tells GamesRadar+.

"I think the core of the DNA of what Bethesda Game Studios games are, is in there," he continues, "and in there in their rawest form." When you look at the amount of exploration, the options for combat, and just the absolute scope of what you can do and get up to in the fantasy RPG, it does feel now like the blueprint for everything that's come since.

"As we moved from Oblivion to Fallout 3 to Skyrim to Fallout 4," Lamb says, "it's like the next game was, 'What was the better version of [Oblivion]? What were the improvements? What were our desires?' And then 'Okay, now you do that.'"

Given the reception to Oblivion - glowing critically with huge sales across all platforms - it's safe to say it was wise to follow down that path. Fallouts 3 and 4 and Skyrim have each left big marks on the games landscape, and it's all because of what The Elder Scrolls 4 taught everyone.

"It's all of the lessons that we learned from all of those different games to land where we are now," Lamb states. "There's so many systems that I think I would look at and go 'I can see the pathway, I can see where we detoured'. It's a special game."

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."

Can you believe that it's been almost a year since the gates to Cyrodiil were swung back open? The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered was undoubtedly a triumph, a carefully crafted refresh of one of the most iconic RPGs of the last two decades. It was also quite unlike anything we've ever seen from Bethesda Game Studios.

The studio's executive producer Todd Howard (who is also responsible for directing Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Oblivion, Skyrim, and Starfield) hasn't shied away from his dislike of remakes and remasters in the past. Not only that, but Oblivion Remastered was also a shadow-drop – the timeline from reveal to release was just a few minutes, rather than the few years we often have to endure with Bethesda games. Why this, and why now?

"There are projects over the history of Bethesda where we'll start stuff, and question whether it's going to be worth all of the time and investment," says Howard. "But I've warmed up to remasters. For a long time, that was a no, no, no. I'd say, 'That was a game of its age, let's just make sure it still runs.'"

"And I'll give Xbox a shoutout here: They did an incredible job with backwards compatibility [on Xbox Series X]. Right now, you can go and play Morrowind, you can go and play the original Oblivion, and you can go and play Fallout 3. They are all backwards compatible, [upscaled] to 4K, and that's great. So to me, that was always job number one: Can you play these games as they were?"

The problem, Howard says, is that the question of remasters of iconic Bethesda games kept coming up from corners of the community. It meant the studio had to start thinking: "Okay, so if we did do a remaster, what would we want to do about it?" With the original rendition of Oblivion set to explore its 20th anniversary on March 20, 2026, was that the reason this RPG was selected over all the others? Howard says there was another intention behind the drive.

"We looked at Oblivion and we started there. We felt like this served the Elder Scrolls audience. This is good for that audience of having a single-player game in this pocket of time. But there's a million ways that it could have gone wrong."

Remastering a Classic RPG

Howard is very attuned to all of the ways that Oblivion Remastered could have misfired. He speaks about bringing out the 'dartboard of outcomes' once it became a real consideration. "It's something that means a lot to me, to the studio, and to the fans – you could screw up that legacy. The chances of messing it up are way higher than not."

Reflecting on how Bethesda approached the remaster in collaboration with external studio Virtuos, Howard says that the big question was: "How do we do everything we can to make sure we're enhancing what Oblivion was for people who played it [at release], and then reintroduce it? Our approach there was twofold: One, make it look like it's new, but it's the artstyle of what it used to be – it looks like a modern game with that [original] artstyle. The other thing is that the original game is running."

With these two priorities in place, Howard says the teams then had to figure out an approach to modernization. "I did this thought exercise with the team: pretend we kept patching Oblivion, what would we have done if we kept supporting it? And that's where you get a good list," he says. "We probably would have added sprinting. We probably would have adjusted the skill systems, because they are kind of punishing [in places]. That's where we ended up. We felt really good about it, but you never know how the audience is going to react."

That concern about audience reaction helped steer Bethesda in the direction of launching the game as soon as it was done showing it off for the first time. "That's why we compressed the time from announcement to release," he says, pointing to feeling this need to manage audience expectations. "That's where the leaks don't help us. They never help us," he chuckles, "and they don't help the audience either. You're sort of getting misinformation on what it is, and so the audience can get a little anxious. 'Wait, so is it a remake? I hear this and I hear this.'"

"And this was a game in particular, with Oblivion, where if you hear we're remastering it, the game you have in your head, well, everyone is going to have a different version of what that is. I think that creates some anxiety for our players," he says. "So we wanted that time from 'here's what it is' to 'you can touch it' to be zero."

With all of this said and done, does Howard see a world in which Bethesda is prepared to release other remasters into the world? "It was incredibly successful, so it obviously makes us think: 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."

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When the Free Lanes update lands in Starfield on April 7, you'll be able to traverse more of deep-space without needing to navigate as many menus. It's a big win for Bethesda's RPG, given that the prevalence of loading screens across the experience could so easily disrupt the fantasy of role-playing as an interplanetary space captain.

Still, for all of the biggest changes coming to Starfield alongside its launch of PS5 this April, you should still expect to encounter loading screens and the like as you navigate between key points of interest at a ground level. Tim Lamb, lead creative producer at Bethesda, tells me that it's unlikely this will ever change. "We're always listening, but it's really about what's achievable technically. I think the version of Starfield we wanted to make, those loads are necessary."

In this exclusive GamesRadar+ interview, we speak with the Bethesda veteran about the key refinements and changes arriving through the Free Lanes update and Terran Armada DLC, what PS5 players should expect, whether there's more to come from Starfield, and more besides.

GamesRadar+: Bethesda revealed that a significant amount of content is coming to Starfield through the Free Lanes update and Terran Armada DLC – but there's a hesitation to call this 'Starfield 2.0'. The vibe I'm getting is that, for players who like the game, these improvements are designed to make their time in the Settled Systems even better. And for those who didn't get Starfield to begin with, then Bethesda doesn't really care, because it's proud of the game it made…

Tim Lamb: I wouldn't say that we don't care. With the passion that we have internally, there's this euphoria that comes with everybody liking your game. But we've had our heads down and have been focused on making a better version of Starfield. We have several vectors of intake for information, whether that's Reddit, Discord, or wherever, and we have several things that we know we want to add.

I think what we're putting out there with Free Lanes and Terran Armada brings a lot of that stuff together. I really feel like we have hit a good milestone of making a better version of Starfield. And this isn't the end for me, but a good point to jump off to what's next for the game.

GR+: It's less of a reinvention then, and more of an advancement of so many of the key mechanics and systems. What steps did you take to identify the key areas of focus for the Free Lanes update?

Tim Lamb: Players want to get where they want to go, right? We heard the feedback that people want to really live that space fantasy, and exist in this place. So how do we achieve that became the challenge, because we have all of this content that we made for the launch of Starfield – all of these great encounters and moments that can appear around our worlds – so for us it was about starting to fill in that space in between them.

It's a big undertaking. It's not just adding interplanetary travel and having that system. We also need to indicate to the player that there's something that they might find interesting over here, so there's all of the audio and visual work that goes into achieving that. There was an iteration that I'm particularly proud of:

There's a moment where you're traveling to something on the far side of a planet, flying at super speed, and then as you get into its gravity well it sort of slows you down and it just moves past you. And then, when you do arrive at the far side, there's something special about the arrival at the planet. How those transitions feel, it captures the spirit of things you have seen in films before. It captures what this type of travel could feel like. I think we got to a really good place with that. It's a great addition.

GR+: Why is it that something like deep-space travel can be introduced into Starfield, with all the technical complexities that must have been for your team, but the number of loading screens can't be reduced as players transition between key points of interest?

Tim Lamb: I think they are two different things. We're always listening, but it's really about what's achievable technically. I think the version of Starfield we wanted to make, those loads are necessary. We could do the mental exercise of going, okay, what would this place look like without them? Would it feel barren, would it feel empty? How much does that stress the CPU because of all of the things that would need to happen? So I think those [load screens] are very necessary. So they are two different things.

In space, there's not a lot to load. So the transition between existing on your ship – that's what's there, and between here and that planet, there's really nothing. So you can move between those two sort of existences easier than you could put a whole city somewhere. So they're different, but both are important in achieving the best version of the game.

GR+: With Shattered Space, it really felt you were trying to bring a more authored location to life. The incoming Terran Armada DLC feels a lot wider in scope. What are you trying to achieve with this expansion?

Tim Lamb: When it comes to Shattered Space, some of the feedback we heard was that players wanted a more traditional or classic Bethesda experience. 'I want to go to one place, I don't want to have to leave, and I want to experience everything here.' So we asked ourselves where it made sense to do that, and we knew there were some things we really wanted to explore with the Va'ruun, so those ideas aligned.

But we had also gotten feedback asking for something that has more impact on the broader scope of the galaxy, and players want to be able to cruise to places between planets. So it was like, okay, let's really focus on what happens in space. The Terran Armada have this technology that can prevent you from grav-jumping, okay, so now this new tool that you have in being able to cruise makes it interesting to get to the Terran incursions. So all of these things start to marinate, simmer together and develop.

GR+: One of the bigger changes coming on April 7 are the changes to New Game+ where Starfield will change up the trade-offs inherent to using the Unity. What compelled you to make that change?

Tim Lamb: I think back to Fallout 3, where the game just ended. The feedback we got at the time was that fans were surprised – they wanted to keep going. So we put this system into Starfield; we wanted it to be a meaningful choice, it wasn't meant to be suffering. But I think the attachment that players felt to the things that they had gathered up to that point meant that they didn't want to part with their items. It was a bridge too far – a sacrifice too meaningful. There's so many exciting things that can happen in our New Game+ loop that we wanted to give a little bit of encouragement.

We knew we wanted to do something, but it had to make sense, right? We love the Starborn, and the idea of Quantum Essence – so we've given that more meaning in the economy of the game. Then we are introducing X-Tech to further upgrade your weapons and your gear; well, we don't want to ask the player to put in a lot of work for a reward they are searching for, only to say, 'no, it's gone now.' So once these things started coming together, we knew we absolutely had to do something like this if we were going to do the other things.

GR+: Starfield is the first all-new, single-player Bethesda RPG to arrive on a PlayStation platform in over a decade. What should PS5 players expect coming into it?

Tim Lamb: I think it's the best version of Starfield. One of our goals is to always be improving it. We have our veteran players who have sort of guided us to these improvements.. I don't want to say they forced our hand, but they have been very clear with saying 'this would be the experience that I want.' So to have all of these new additions in the game, I'm a bit jealous of first-time players as they come in.

They get to have one of the biggest Bethesda games ever made – I think it has been said that it was irresponsibly large… so you get to have this irresponsibly large Bethesda Game that was one of our biggest launches, one of our cleanest launches. And then you get to have it with multiple years of additional support, systems, and content. It is a very complete milestone package to start fresh with.

GR+: Do you see a future for Starfield beyond these updates, even with the majority of Bethesda Game Studios working on The Elder Scrolls 6?

Tim Lamb: I think there's a future for it. We have plans, but I won't get into the specifics today. When we launch a game, it's always our plan to support it long-term. To what level that happens, or the significance of that, of how that manifests, is open to interpretation. But there's more to come for Starfield. There's still things that excite the team. There's still lore and places that we're excited to explore. Those would be the sorts of things we're chasing after.

Dive deeper into the upcoming Starfield changes with our look at the five biggest changes coming on April 7.

Capcom's series of Resident Evil remakes, built from the ground-up in the studio's proprietary RE Engine, are universally acclaimed for modernizing visuals and systems without compromising mood and tone, but expecting the same treatment for Bethesda RPGs just isn't reasonable, says former studio veteran Nate Purkeypile.

Of course, Bethesda just released the excellent Oblivion Remastered last year, which did a great job bringing the 2006 RPG up to 2025 standards in Unreal Engine, but for the most part, it's just a new skin wrapped around the same bones. That's very different from the Resident Evil remakes, which are essentially entirely new games.

"I really, really like the Resident Evil remakes and those are super cool where it was like, totally remade, but I don't think that's really viable for a Bethesda game to do that," says Purkeypile in an interview with Kiwi Talkz.

"With that many systems interacting, to try and get that to actually behave in the same way. Ugh, I wouldn't wish that on anybody."

As enticing as the idea of a Skyrim or Fallout 4 remake is, that absolutely makes sense. Open-world Bethesda RPGs are entirely different beasts from linear survival horror games like Resident Evil, and when you consider how long it's taking Bethesda Game Studios to make The Elder Scrolls 6, whose announcement teaser is now eight years old, you can understand why full-on RPG remakes probably aren't on the table right now.

Purkeypile was world artist on Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, and lead artist on Fallout 76. He left Bethesda during the development of Starfield to form his own studio, Just Purkey Games, which launched the "heavy metal horror" hunting game The Axis Unseen in 2024.

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The Starfield Free Lanes update is adding the spacefaring RPG's answer to Vault-Tec Bobbleheads from Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76 on April 7, 2026 - with a new twist for those who collect them all.

Players have submitted a lot of requests to Bethesda in the three years since Starfield first took flight. The studio is working through some of the biggest of those in the incoming Free Lanes update, as it introduces expansions to space travel and refinements to customization, exploration, and endgame content.

Speaking to GamesRadar+ as part of a visit to Bethesda Game Studios, lead creative producer Tim Lamb was quick to stress that the Starfield team has also been looking at some of the smaller pieces of feedback and suggestions from the community. One such request came in the form of players wanting an equivalent of Fallout's bobblehead collectible – something the team was only too happy to accommodate.

"We are introducing the Colony War Action Heroes. These are the toys that were made for the Colony Wars, and they function similarly to the Vault-Tec bobbleheads that you can find in some of our other games," says Lamb, "and we have 27 of them in total."

Every time you locate a Colony War figure out in the wilds, it'll provide a buff to your character, much like the Vault Boy figurines that can be found across Bethesda's three Fallout titles.. Some may increase your stealth viability or increase damage of laser weapons, while others will make healing items heal more. And as a nice added bonus, "yes, they all have unique pickup sounds," laughs Lamb.

Starfield did technically land with both Magazines (which provide permanent stat bonuses) and collectible Snow Globes, but the Colony War Action Heroes are designed to be more fun for players to not only find but display too.

"We were really inspired by the toys we had when we were kids, which made making them really fun for us. There are even packaged versions of the figures that you can put into a display case," says Lamb, speaking to some of the additions to Outpost building and furnishing. "And for the kids that weren't collectors, you can put them into a Colony Wars playset – which is another fun way to display your action figures."

I've never been all that interested in the building and Outpost management elements of Starfield, but the playset did pique my interest. It's a silly addition, and one that really has very little bearing on the wider game, but it is fun. And with Bethesda also taking steps to create more interesting locations for you to now call home as part of the Free Lanes update, I'm certainly tempted to give interior decorating another shot… You know, if I can figure out where all 27 of these action figures are located across the Settled Systems.

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