Todd Howard is feeling nostalgic, and in a new video he's outlining the history of his work at Bethesda and how it's informing the next era of the studio's RPGs, including Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6.
For Wired, Howard grabbed a stack of the games he'd worked on, starting with the 1995 FPS Terminator: Future Shock - which, he's quick to note, was one of the first games to feature proper mouse look. From there, Howard essentially gives an abbreviated history lesson through his introduction to the Elder Scrolls series with Daggerfall, and his first stint as a project lead with the Tomb Raider-style Elder Scrolls spin-off, Redguard.
Of course, it was 2002's The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind that would catapult Bethesda to fame among the gaming fandom, particularly because of its robust console port on Xbox. "We are all here today because this game was a huge success," Howard says in the video. "I was stunned. Obviously, it did well on the PC, but on Xbox at the time it became the second best selling game behind Halo."
Throughout this history lesson, Howard lays out each of the games into one of a handful of categories - the MS-DOS era for those early PC titles, the console era for everything from Morrowind to Skyrim, and the next-gen era for Fallout 4 and 76. Then, there's what the video labels as 'the future and beyond,' where Howard places Starfield.
"These share a very similar technology base," Howard says, indicating Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim, "in the same way these share a technology base," as he points to Fallout 4 and 76. Finally, he points to Starfield, then to an empty space next to it. "And now this does. If we meet again, there'll be an Elder Scrolls 6 here."
Our list of the best RPGs wouldn't be the same without Bethesda.
