Single-player is still a thing it might continue to grow or evolve, but it’s part of who we are, and we still think there’s room to be successful. Rage 2 is a giant single-player game, Doom Eternal is single-player, and Wolfenstein: Young Blood is single-player. “There was a lot of hand-wringing around Prey, but we just announced a huge update. Nonetheless, Hines is bullish about the future of epic single-player adventures. This year’s Fallout 76 is an online game that throws people together to cooperate or clash – not the lone player experience fans expect. But from Fortnite to League of Legends, many of the most popular and profitable games around in 2018 are competitive multiplayer games, which has led to speculation about the future of the expensive single-player experience that Bethesda is known for. It’s gonna take a while for what we have in mind to come out.”īethesda is revered for these gigantic worlds that set out a banquet of options for the player. You’ve seen it happen to music and movies and I think it’s a great thing.”Īs for Starfield, Bethesda’s new sci-fi role-playing game, Howard says we shouldn’t expect to play it soon: “We’ve been talking about it for a decade, we started putting things on paper five, six years ago, and active development was from when we finished Fallout 4, so two and a half, three years.” When it comes to both The Elder Scrolls VI and Starfield, he says, “everyone should be very patient. I think streaming technology is definitely coming, and it’s gonna make people’s access to games infinitely easier. We get asked a lot to remaster Fallout 1, and I usually say, if you have a PC you can play Fallout the way it was. But for something like Morrowind, my personal preference is not to remaster it. “For Skyrim Remastered, we had done some work on it but it was already pretty visually close. The Elder Scrolls … a 25-year franchise that has always tackled relevant themes. “I’d rather you play Morrowind the way it was. I actually prefer that over remasters,” he says. I’m really happy that Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and others are making it easier for people to play as they were played at the time. “I’m happy that you can play Morrowind now on an Xbox One, as it’s backwards compatible. Howard also demurred on something that fans are constantly asking for, especially since Skyrim was rereleased on PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch: modern remasters of Bethesda’s older games. I thought the Obsidian guys did a fabulous job.” it becomes less likely, but I could never say never. “ now that our company is so big, it’s always better to keep stuff internal. According to Howard, this isn’t something that Bethesda plans to do again. The result was Fallout: New Vegas, a game that used Bethesda’s technology but had a different style of writing and characterisation, filling in more shades of grey in the game’s moral choices. In 2010, Bethesda plugged the long gap between its own Fallout games by letting another developer, Obsidian, give the series a spin. “The thing that helps with, whether that’s science fiction or fantasy or post-apocalyptic, is that it lets you handle themes like racial stereotypes in ways that you don’t notice at first, and then become very obvious.” “People look at Skyrim and say, ‘That’s a dragon-killing power fantasy,’ but the actual underlying theme was: do you take a nationalistic view of your own country, or look at the whole world? I think that’s still pretty topical today,” he says. He asserts that the Elder Scrolls series has always tackled relevant themes. It has stood the test of the Lord of the Rings movies becoming popular,” says Todd Howard, the hugely influential game designer who joined the company in 1994 and now leads Bethesda’s game development. “With The Elder Scrolls, you’re looking at a 25-year-running franchise. How will The Elder Scrolls remain relevant? But a lot has changed about both video games and the fantasy genre since Skyrim, not least the world-conquering popularity of Game of Thrones. Pete Hines, Bethesda’s senior vice-president of PR and marketing, cautions that “the Elder Scrolls VI is still two games away from Bethesda Game Studios”, which means another one or two years at least. It’s been nearly seven years since the last massive, single-player Elder Scrolls, Skyrim – though it’s been rereleased so many times on different consoles that you could be forgiven for thinking it was only a few years ago. Todd Howard … ‘I’m really happy Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and others are making it easier for people to play as they were played at the time’ Photograph: Bethesda Games
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