Todd Howard回顾Bethesda的发展历程&启示

原作者：James Batchelor 译者：Willow Wu

Todd Howard的故事基本上就是Bethesda公司的故事——如果说它反映的不是发行公司Bethesda Softworks的故事，那么至少也是他们王牌游戏背后Bethesda Game Studios开发团队的故事。

作为Develop:Brighton在线讨论会的其中一个环节，今天的炉边谈话内容是Howard的职业生涯，以及他在游戏项目工作中遇到的挑战。

以下是我们整理编辑后的内容：

《上古卷轴》系列

Howard与Bethesda旗舰系列的第一次正式接触是协助完成《上古卷轴》的第一代游戏《上古卷轴：竞技场》CD-ROM版本，之前已经发行了软盘版本（还记得这个东西吗？）。然后他就全身心投入到了《上古卷轴2：匕落》中，团队对游戏设计进行了调整完善，直到今天他们仍在使用这套设计公式。《上古卷轴：竞技场》创造了泰姆瑞尔，《匕落》则引入了进阶系统。

虽然按照现今的标准来看，这两部游戏的成就都没有《上古卷轴5：天际》《上古卷轴3：晨风》高，但是Todd表示它在当时已经算是个很有野心的项目了，并且他们开创了一种团队至今仍在遵循的工作理念。

“从时间和技术的角度来看，有些东西显得很简陋粗糙，但我们当时做的事情和现在做的事情确实是差不多的，不管你信不信。”他说。“即使游戏规模有所增长，但与其它游戏系列相比，我们所做的工作真的没有增加多少。”

他说到了《竞技场》和《匕落》早年的评论，其中称赞了游戏世界的自由感和广阔——Bethesda在之后的每一代《上古卷轴》中都会相当重视这种感觉。但其实《上古卷轴3：晨风》才是Bethesda团队名声大噪的导火索，本质上来说公司也是因它而得救。

“我们之前做了一些糟糕的游戏，犯了些错误，开发团队只剩下大概6个人，”他说。“在做这个游戏的时候我们彻底放开手了，无所畏惧。我们感觉公司要撑不下去了，所以在开发《晨风》的时候，我们就想着‘再糟还能糟到哪去呢？’我们冒了更大风险，如果当时没有成功的话，我真不知道我们现在还会不会在这里。万幸的是，结果比我们设想的好很多。”

关键的是，Xbox版本的《晨风》促使主机平台负责人注意到了Bethesda的其它游戏，并向他们证明了平台用户对这类游戏是有需求的。它的成功促使公司能够对《上古卷轴4：湮没》加大投入，提供PS3版本，甚至帮他们获得《辐射》系列的版权（下文会讲到）。

《晨风》对Bethesda来说是一场赌博，但是《湮没》也是被下了很大的注。虽然大多数发行商会立即投入到续作的工作中，但是Howard说他们很幸运地被给予了四年的开发时间，为的是能充分利用下一代硬件的优势。虽然他不认为在制作《晨风》的续作时面对的压力是更大的，但他承认团队在《湮没》上承担了“更多可预测的风险”。

“我们也没有料到《湮没》会取得如此大的成功——当时《湮没》成为了新一代游戏中的耀眼之作。”他说。

而系列的第五部《上古卷轴5：天际》则成为了Howard的巅峰之作，也是迄今为止Bethesda最成功的游戏。明年就是这个游戏发行的第十个年头了，系列的任何一部前作都无法像这样吸引到上百万的玩家。但为什么是《天际》？

“如果我能回答得出来的话，那我就能轻而易举地做出一部又一部这样成功的游戏了，”Howard说。“那已经是那一代硬件生命周期中的第三个项目了，我们一直在打磨自己的作品。而平台已经成熟，所以能够接触到游戏的人数……成功往往是基于可触及的数量。”

他还表示《上古卷轴5：天际》利用了当时的热门趋势。《权力的游戏》的第一季在同年播出，所以幻想题材与热词是有关联的，而《天际》可以提供维斯特洛世界无法提供的东西。

“电子游戏最擅长的事就是把人们带入一个新世界，问他们‘你想在这里做什么？’，然后让这个世界做出响应，”Howard说。“《天际》做到了这一点，无缝衔接式的流畅体验，无论你是谁，只要你喜欢游戏，这里就会有适合你的东西。你投入到游戏中，游戏就会一直给你回馈。”

《晨风》之后，系列成功在一定程度上要归功于团队转向了手工制作世界，而不是再像《竞技场》《匕落》那样由程序生成环境。Howard指出，团队并没有完全放弃程序生成，“《湮没》是先程序生成，然后我们手工调整，确保一切按照我们想要的方式展现出来。”

有些程序生成是被用来创建内容的，以确保玩家永远不会没有事情可做——例如《天际》的环境任务，但最重要的事情，如主线故事，则由开发人员直接处理。计算机功能的进步意味着越来越多的工作能由程序处理——听起来这将在《上古卷轴6》中发挥作用。

“每个游戏我们都想做一些程序化方面的尝试，如果没有效果，那就手动去修改吧，”Howard解释说。“我们现在正在做的事情，就是把程序化生成发展得更远，着眼于更遥远的未来。”

《辐射》系列

《上古卷轴3：晨风》获得成功之后，Bethesda Game Studios想要发展别的系列。摆在团队面前有很多想法，而末世题材则排在第一的位置。可能会制作一个3D后启示录世界游戏，Howard对此很高兴——他的第一个项目The Terminator: Future Shock就是类似的题材——但对他来说，这个新系列必须是《辐射》。

这个IP之前已经沉寂一段时间了，但是Interplay仍持有它的版权。幸运的是，Bethesda中的有些人知道该去联系谁，Howard职业生涯的一个历史性时刻来临了——他的键盘旁边有一张Todd Vaughn留下的便签，上面写着这么几个字：“《辐射》是你的了。”

直到今天，《辐射3》仍是Howard最喜欢的游戏项目：“这些游戏我当然是都喜欢的，但是《辐射3》在我心中占据着一块特殊的位置，因为它对我们来说是一种全新的体验，当你在创作《辐射》游戏的时候，你可以做很多很多的尝试，几乎没有哪个点子是无法找到方法应用到《辐射》中的。这是一个混合了末世主题、戏剧、黑色幽默、B级电影的游戏，如果你做对了，它就能形成一种非常独特的风格。

如果你《上古卷轴》《辐射》两个系列都玩过，那么它们之间的交叉影响应该是非常明显的，但是Howard说它们的开发过程有一些不易被察觉但是十分重要的区别。首先，《辐射》系列是着重于“讲述一个特定的故事”，而玩家选择也是刻意增加了难度。

“你站在哪边？谁能活着？谁得赴死？鉴于你所处的世界，你愿意牺牲什么来使自己能够继续活下去？”Howard列举了《辐射》中的一些经典问题。“而《上古卷轴》的设计则更偏向于系统化。你可以加入任意的派系，不需要去做特定的选择。”

剧情也呈现出一种难以平衡的局面。众所周知，《上古卷轴》游戏通常会把玩家设定成一个背景空白的角色，让他们自行决定自己的动机和最终命运。龙裔并不一定要屠龙。

但《辐射3》和《辐射4》都让玩家看了展开冒险前的生活，另外，加长的开场动画让玩家有了非常明确的目标：找到你失踪的父亲或被绑架的孩子。这造成了开发者想要讲述的故事和玩家想要体验的冒险无法对上——为什么一个急于寻找孩子的母亲会停下脚步去帮助一个机器人园丁恢复温室的水？

Howard承认平衡问题确实不好办：“我们至今或许都没有解决这个问题。你想给玩家施加某种时间压力，但这会跟其它事情产生冲突。我们在《上古卷轴》中所讲述的故事就少一些矛盾感。”

他补充说，《辐射4》的角色应该是系列中最贴合玩家体验的角色：“你能够体会到东西被摧毁所带来的损失，因为你有那种身临其境的感受。你会因为失去家人而悲痛。游戏刚开始有很多机制需要学习上手，你需要花一点时间来适应这个世界。过一段时间你才会见到另一个人类。即使你知道还会有更多人出现，但如果你投入其中，大概一个小时之后，你不禁会想：‘我是唯一活着的人吗？’”

当然，在他参与开发过的游戏中，《辐射3》的开场仍是他的最爱。虽然他承认，现在回想起来，在101号避难所的成长经历可能是“过于漫长”，但如果没有这样的铺垫，离开避难所、进入首都废土的冲击感就会减弱。

“当我在内部提出这个想法时，有很多人产生了质疑，”他说。“但我觉得当角色离开的时候，不光要有视觉方面的冲击，情感方面也不能少，这很重要……这会影响玩家所体验的现实。”

《辐射76》，Howard最新的项目，或许也是野心最大的一个项目。最初这个游戏是被设定为《辐射4》的多人模式版本，但是团队了解到有些任务在多人模式中是行不通的。然而，受到像Day Z这样的生存游戏的启发，看到它们都是末世生存题材，开发团队决定做一个前传。

它最初只是一个副业项目，但很快就壮大了起来。他们所面临的主要挑战之一是试图创造一个囊括所有Bethesda特质的RPG游戏——但没有提供任务的NPC。《辐射76》的玩家将是第一批离开避难所走向地面的人，他们的任务是建立一个新社会。Howard承认这是一个棘手的麻烦，尽管他们在努力寻找解决方案，但依然没有完全解决。

“剧情和任务是到项目后期才加入进去的，我们的设计师在很艰难的情景下交出了一份出色的答卷，尝试通过全息磁带、终端机和类似的东西来讲故事，”他说。

“虽然生存部分在很多人看来是没毛病的，但是我们很快就意识到游戏其实并没有给玩家提供他们真正想要的东西，游戏发行的第一天他们就表示很失望了。毫无疑问，不少人都对我们很失望。”

他补充道：“我们想做些不一样的东西，但是用户们并不是总想要不一样的东西。这并不是他们的错，完全可以理解。我想也许我们没有表达清楚这游戏究竟会有多不同。”

Bethesda的目标是做一个非常系统化的游戏， 内容比过去的《辐射》或《上古卷轴》游戏更丰富。自发行以来，团队推出了更多的NPC和扩展包，比如最近的废土人，玩家可以享受经典《辐射》游戏的体验。

但我们无法否认《辐射76》的发行是坎坷的。很少有live service类游戏能从糟糕的发行中恢复过来，但《辐射76》可以说已经确立了自己的地位。当然，Howard表示他的团队可以从负责开发《上古卷轴Oline》ZeniMax Online那里吸取一些教训。而且，重要的是，玩家们并不想放弃《辐射76》。

“最终，尽管有一堆问题，面对着理所应得的差评，但还是有很多玩家继续在玩，”Howard说。“没有之前《辐射》系列游戏那样的数量规模，但是也有上百万的玩家在告诉我们这个游戏还有闪光之处，所以不要放弃。游戏团队非常令我自豪，他们通过持续数月的努力让游戏变得更好了。我认为没有经过逆境的磨练是很难获得什么神奇配方的。如果没有玩家社区对这个游戏的喜爱，并且真正相信我们，我不知道我们还会不会走到今天的位置。”

Howard现在专注于新IP项目Starfield以及《上古卷轴6》，都是单人游戏，但也不排除Bethesda会再做一个多人开放世界游戏。在未来，他会做更广泛的beta测试，而不是让大部分人在正式发行时才会接触到。

谈起《辐射76》，他说道：“总的来说，这是一段有积极意义的经历，它让我们成为了更好的开发者，加强了我们与社区之间的关系。所以我不能说这样的事情以后不会再发生了。”

未来

新一代主机的到来还有PC硬件性能的提升将谈话引向了另一个方向：《辐射》《上古卷轴》两个经典系列的未来将会如何发展。《辐射76》《上古卷轴5：天际》使用的都是内部开发的引擎，是基于《辐射3》的代码库开发的。在很早以前，批评人士们就说过Bethesda游戏的技术方面需要更新，那么PS5和Xbox Series X/S能否带来提升呢？

Howard说其实每个游戏的引擎都有在更新，但他们确实发现每次的工程量都比上一次有所增加。这就是为什么Bethesda在引擎优化上不断地加大投入，“现在做引擎工作的人比之前多了5倍。”

“引擎上的改变应该是最多的，这个程度甚至可能比《晨风》到《湮没》的跨度还大。”他说。

“有一些东西我们仍是非常喜欢的——比如建造世界的方式、让人们可以制作mod——我认为这些就是我们技术方面的基本优势。从渲染到动画到路径到程序生成……我不想把所有东西都说一遍，但是我得强调引擎的提升真的很大。我们花的时间比之前预计的更长，但是这会让Starfield、《上古卷轴6》都呈现出更好的效果。当人们看到成果时，希望他们能和我们一样，对屏幕上的内容以及我们的游戏制作思路感到满意。”

Starfield和《上古卷轴6》都是在2018年的E3展会上公布的，但之后就几乎听不到关于它们的消息了，Howard也无法透露什么时候才会有新消息。他强调说公开项目是为了向粉丝们保证Bethesda仍在全力打造他们所期待的游戏体验，特别是考虑到那年的热门话题是只有多人模式的《辐射76》和衍生手游《上古卷轴：刀锋战士》。

“我们想要尽可能地在接近发行的时候向大家展示产品的最终感觉和样子，这样我们就有100%的信心说‘这就是我们的新产品，游戏是这样的玩法，你们可以在什么时候玩到它。’”

他补充说，虽然大家对Starfield和《上古卷轴6》已经建立了预期，但他发现，如果你告知用户游戏可能还有多久才会正式跟大家见面，其实他们可能会对你“相当宽容”。如果游戏开发周期很长的话，定时的更新和提供预览不一定能带来积极作用。

“就是不要这样一直吊着他们的胃口，这样会很让人疲惫，”Howard说。“你必须在‘引起兴奋’和‘因为见得多了所以内心毫无波澜’之间找到平衡。此外，准备预告、demo和材料，这些都会占用你的开发时间。有一些开发时间很长的游戏，你持续几年都在重复这个流程，就像你必须超越自己一样，你必须拿出比上个demo更好的demo。我宁愿把所有时间都花在游戏开发上，只准备一个最终demo。”

他列举了《辐射4》的成功，游戏是在发行前半年公开的，自然也就没有受到这类事情的影响。

《上古卷轴5：天际》到明年就发行十周年了，但这个游戏依然还有很多玩家在玩。Switch版《天际》是Bethesda过去几年响应最热烈的发行活动之一，这就证明了游戏所具有的持久魅力。Howard说玩家游戏时间平均是170小时，这在一定程度上要归功于mod制作社区能够不断找到新方法制造新的游戏体验。虽然他说Bethesda并不完全依赖mod制作者，但他们的存在对游戏来说是一种恩赐。事实上，Bethesda团队现在依然都在Creation Club上月更《天际》的新内容。

《上古卷轴5：天际》的成功引发了未来游戏设计理念的转变。虽然他们仍在追求90年代《竞技场》《匕落》所表现出的那种自由感，但了解到十年后人们仍然会玩同一个游戏，他们需要比过去更有前瞻性。

“他们沉浸在游戏世界中，他们所投入的时间都是有意义的——对他们和我们而言都是如此，”Howard说。“所以要怎么让玩家永远保持下去呢？当你说‘永远’这个词时，这就意味着你要采取一种非常不同的设计方式。有人就打算让游戏撑个3年，7年或者10年。也许有人能做得到，但我不行。你得从‘永远’这个期限去思考。

“有一些相对简单的办法可以帮助你实现‘永远’，但久而久之游戏体验会变得愈发索然无味。你不希望这些游戏对玩家来说就好像是一种折磨——我们都经历过这样的游戏。”

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

The story of Todd Howard is largely the story of Bethesda — if not the Softworks publishing side, then certainly the Game Studios development team behind the company’s biggest games.

Today’s keynote fireside chat as part of the Develop:Brighton online conference — hosted by myself on behalf of GamesIndustry.biz — explored Howard’s career and the challenges of the games he has worked on.

We already spoke to him last week, where he told us the next generation is all about access, and now we present the highlights from today’s keynote.

The Elder Scrolls

Howard’s first experience with Bethesda’s flagship series was assisting with the CD-ROM version of its first entry Arena, having already launched on floppy disks (remember those?). He then moved onto Daggerfall full-time, where the team refined the Elder Scrolls formula still used today. While Arena established the world of Tamriel, Daggerfall introduced the ‘use skills to improve them’ progression system.

While neither title seems as accomplished as the likes of Morrowind or Skyrim by today’s standards, Todd says they were ambitious for their time and started an ethos he and his team still follow today.

“Certain things can seem primitive through the lens of time and technology but we were doing similar things to what we’re doing now, believe it or not,” he says. “Even though the scale has increased, what we were doing in comparison to other games really hasn’t.”

He points to old reviews for Arena and Daggerfall, which would praise the sense of freedom and the breadth of the game world — sentiments Bethesda continues to target with each new Elder Scrolls. But it was Morrowind that was “the beginning of the Bethesda people know today” — and essentially saved the company.

“We’d made some bad games, we made some mistakes and the development team probably went down to six people,” he says. “That’s the game where we had no fear. We felt the company was going to go out of business, so when we had a chance to make Morrowind, we were like ‘What’s the worst that’s going to happen?’ We took a few more risks and if it hadn’t worked out, I don’t know that we’d be here. It worked out better than we could have imagined.”

Crucially, Morrowind introduced Bethesda games to console owners via the Xbox version and demonstrated there was demand for those experiences on such platforms. Its success allowed the company to invest more into Oblivion, branching out with a PS3 version as well, and even helped it acquire the Fallout licence (more on that later).

Morrowind was a gamble for Bethesda, but Oblivion was a big bet in its own way. While most publishers would immediately leap onto a sequel, Howard says his team was given the luxury of a four-year development cycle in order to take advantage of the then-next-gen hardware. And while he disagrees there was more pressure on the sequel to Morrowind, he does admit the team took “more calculated risks with Oblivion.”

“We did not expect the success that one had either — Oblivion just became this lightning rod for next-generation gaming at the time,” he says.

It’s the fifth Elder Scrolls, Skyrim, that stands as Howard’s crowning achievement and the most successful Bethesda game to date. Celebrating its tenth anniversary next year, it drew in millions of players in a way none of the previous entries had managed. But why Skyrim?

“If I could answer that, it would be easy to do it time and time again,” says Howard. “It was our third go around in that hardware cycle. We were really honing what we’d been doing. And the platforms had matured by then so the amount of people that had access to the game… Success is often based on access.”

He also suggests it tapped into a wider trend. Game of Thrones’ first series aired in the same year, so fantasy was very much part of the zeitgeist, and Skyrim could offer something that Westeros could not.

“The thing video games are best at is putting people in a world and saying, ‘What would you do here?’ and then having the world react to it,” says Howard. “Skyrim does that, it has a flow and a vibe where whoever you are, if you like games at all, there’s something for you. You give to the game and the game keeps giving back.”

Part of the series’ success since Morrowind has been the shift towards hand-crafted worlds rather than the procedurally generated landscapes of Arena and Daggerfall. Howard notes that the team has continued to use procedural generation, with Oblivion “somewhat procedural and then we went over it with hand to make sure things were the way we like them.”

Some procedural generation is used to create content that ensures players never run out of things to do, such as Skyrim’s ambient quests, but the most important things, such as the main story, are handled directly by the developers. Advances in computing power means more and more work can be handled procedurally, and it sounds like this will play a role in The Elder Scrolls 6.

“We like to experiment each game with procedural stuff, and then if it’s not working out, go in and touch it,” Howard explains. “The stuff we’re doing now, we’re pushing procedural generation further than we have in a very, very long time.”

Fallout

After the success of Morrowind, Bethesda Game Studios wanted to branch out beyond Elder Scrolls. A number of ideas were passed around the team, but post-apocalyptic was top of the list. Howard was comfortable with the prospect of building 3D post-apocalyptic worlds — he’d already done so on his first project, The Terminator: Future Shock — but for him, it had to be Fallout.

The IP had been dormant for some time, but Interplay still held the rights. Fortunately, some people at Bethesda knew who to contact, leading to one of Howard’s favourite moments of his career, finding a sticky note left on his keyboard left by vice president of development Todd Vaughn. It simply read: “Fallout is yours.”

To this day, Fallout 3 remains Howard’s favourite project: “Obviously I love them all, but that holds a special place in my heart because it was so new for all of us and when you’re making a Fallout game, there’s so much you can do. There are very few ideas that you can’t fit into a Fallout game in some manner. It mixes post-apocalyptic with drama, dark comedy, B-movies and, if you’re doing it right, it moves between those in a way that it forges its own identity.”

The crossover between Elder Scrolls and Fallout is clear to any who have played both series, but Howard says there are subtle but important differences in their development. For a start, Fallout games tend to “tell a more specific story” and the nature of player choices is purposefully made to be more difficult.

“Who do you side with? Who lives? Who dies? What are you going to sacrifice to live, given the nature of the world you’re in?” says Howard of typical Fallout choices. “Elder Scrolls is a bit more systemic in its design. Intentionally, you can join all of the factions. There’s not a specific choice.”

The story also presents a difficult balance to strike. Elder Scrolls games are known for casting players as a blank canvas, an avatar with no backstory, leaving them free to dictate their motivations and ultimate destiny. The Dragonborn never has to defeat the dragons.

But Fallout 3 and 4 both give players a glimpse of their life before the adventure, with extended intros that leave them with a very clear objective: locating your missing father or kidnapped child, respectively. It creates a disconnect between the story the developers want to tell and the adventures players want to experience — why would a mother searching for her child stop to help a robot gardener restore water to his greenhouse?

Howard admits that striking the balance is tricky: “And I don’t know that we’ve solved it. You want some sort of time pressure on the player, but that fights against anything else you’re doing. The stories we’ve told in Elder Scrolls suit that better.”

He adds that Fallout 4′s character is the closest the series has got to creating a role that most matches the player’s experience: “You feel the loss of what’s been destroyed because you were there. You feel the loss of your family. The game throws a lot of mechanics at you, and it takes a little while for you to feel comfortable in that world. It’s a while before you see another human. Even though you know there’s going to be more humans, if you’re into it there’s an hour or so where you wonder, ‘Am I the only person alive?’”

Of course, Fallout 3′s opening remains his favourite of any game he has worked on. While he recognises that growing up in Vault 101 may have been “overly long” in retrospect, without it, the feeling of stepping out into the Capital Wasteland would have been diminished.

“That got a lot of question marks internally when I was pitching it,” he says. “But I thought it was important that when you step out, not just the visual but the emotion of it… it works for the reality of what you’re playing.”

Fallout 76, Howard’s most recent project in that world, is perhaps the most ambitious. Originally conceived as a multiplayer mode for Fallout 4, the team learned that some quests didn’t work in a multiplayer scenario. But inspired by survival games like Day Z and seeing the crossover with surviving a nuclear wasteland, they decided to make a prequel.

It started as a side project, but quickly grew momentum. One of the major challenges was trying to create an RPG with all the hallmarks of a Bethesda game — but without NPC quest-givers. Fallout 76 players would be among the first to emerge from the vaults, tasked with building a new society. It’s a hurdle Howard admits the team didn’t quite leap, despite working hard to find solutions.

“The story stuff and the quests didn’t go in until late in the project, and I think our designers did a great job with one-armed tied behind their back, trying to tell stories through holotapes, terminals and things like that,” he says.

“Whereas the survival aspects work for a lot of people, we quickly recognised that the game wasn’t really giving our audience what they wanted and they were really let down by what we delivered on day one. Without a doubt, we let a lot of people down.”

He adds: “We wanted to make something different, but the audience doesn’t always want something different. And that’s no fault of theirs, it’s totally understandable. I think maybe we did a bad job of saying how different it was going to be.”

Bethesda aimed to make a very systemic game, where players brought more to the table than they did with past Fallouts or the Elder Scrolls games. Since launch, the team has introduced more NPCs and expansions such as the recent Wastelanders have enabled players to enjoy it in much the same way as they would a classic Fallout game.

But there’s no denying the launch was bumpy to say the least. Few live service titles have recovered from a rocky launch, but Fallout 76 has arguably established itself as one of them. Of course, Howard notes his team could take learnings from the struggles their colleagues at ZeniMax Online faced with the Elder Scrolls MMO. And, crucially, the players refused to let Fallout 76 die.

“Ultimately, despite the issues and the very well-deserved criticism we got, there were a lot of people playing,” says Howard. “Not on the scale of a regular Fallout, but millions of people that told us there was something here, so let’s keep at it. I’m hugely proud of the team who worked on the game and month after month made it better. I don’t think there’s a magic formula without having the discipline to go through the work. Without that community out there making this game their own and really believing in us, I don’t know that we would have gotten to where we are.”

Howard is now focused on Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6, both single-player games, but doesn’t rule out the prospect of another multiplayer-only Bethesda open world game. In future, he would do more extensive beta testing, rather than building something that most people experience first at launch.

“Overall, it’s been a really positive experience for us,” he says of Fallout 76. “It’s made us much better developers, much more connected with our community. So I can’t say it’s going to be a one-off.”

The Future

The arrival of the next-generation consoles and advances in PC hardware steer the conversation towards the future of both series. Fallout 76 runs on the same internally-developed engine as Skyrim, itself built on the codebase for Fallout 3. The tech running Bethesda’s games has long since been highlighted by critics as needing a refresh, so could PS5 and Xbox Series X/S give it the boost required?

Howard says his team refreshes the engine with every game, but acknowledges that it “needs more work than it has in previous times.” Which is why Bethesda has been investing heavily into improving it, with “more people doing engine work now by a factor of five than we’ve ever had.”

“The overhaul on our engine is probably the largest we’ve ever had, maybe even larger than Morrowind to Oblivion,” he says.

“There are things we do that we still like, the way we build our worlds, the way people can mod it — these are things I think are fundamentally good about our tech stack. But from rendering to animation to pathing to procedural generation… I don’t want to say everything, but it’s a significant overhaul. It’s taken us longer than we would have liked, but it’s going to power everything we’re doing with Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6. When people see the results, they’ll hopefully be as happy as we are with what’s on the screen and also how we can go about making our games.”

Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6 were both announced at E3 2018, but little has been heard of them since and Howard is unable to suggest when we’re likely to learn more about these projects. He reiterates that they were announced to assure fans Bethesda was still working on the experiences they’d expect, especially since the headlines that year were the multiplayer-only Fallout 76 and mobile spin-off The Elder Scrolls: Blades.

“We like to, as much as possible, really be able to show what the final product feels like and looks like when we’re closer to release so that we’re 100% confident in ‘Here it is, here’s what it does and here’s when you can play it.’”

He adds that, while anticipation is already building for both Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6, he finds audiences can be “pretty forgiving” if you warn them how far out future games might be. Regular updates and previews during a long development cycling can potentially be damaging.

“You just don’t want to string them along too long. You get kind of fatigued,” says Howard. “You have to balance that fatigue of wanting something versus that consumer excitement. Also it takes time, to be frank. Preparing trailers, demos and assets take time away from development. I remember games we’ve done where you’re doing that for multiple years and it’s like you have to top yourself. You have to top your previous demo. I’d rather spend all that time focusing on the game and prepare one big demo.”

He points to the success of Fallout 4, which was announced six months before launch and certainly didn’t suffer for it.

Besides, despite turning ten next year, Skyrim continues to be a widely played game. The Switch version was one of Bethesda’s biggest releases of the past few years, proving the staying power that game has. Howard says the median time for players is 170 hours, driven in part by the modding community continuously finding new ways to refresh the game. While he says that Bethesda isn’t exactly reliant on modders, they can be a boon for its games and “part of the vibe where, from the get go, a game feels endless.” In fact, Bethesda is still working on new Skyrim content every month through the Creation Club.

Skyrim’s success in particular has caused a shift in the design ethos behind its future games. While they’re still aiming for that sense of freedom captured in the ’90s by Arena and Daggerfall, knowing that people could still be playing after a decade requires more forward thinking than in the past.

“They’re investing in this world, their time has real meaning to them and it does to us as well,” says Howard. “So how can it go on forever? It’s a very different way of designing when you use the word ‘forever.’ You can just be like, ‘This will last for three years’ or seven or ten. Maybe someone can do that, but I cannot. You have to think in terms of ‘forever.’

“There are ways to do that that are easier than you think, but they water down the minute-to-minute and the hour-to-hour. You don’t want those to feel like a grind — we’ve all experienced games that do that.”

(source: gamesindustry.biz )