Recently, Bethesda Game Studios announced several new projects for the Fallout franchise, as well as remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. Todd Howard is communicating with various publications and talking about his work.
Windows Central journalist Jez Corden spoke with him to discuss various topics, including a new version of the engine — Fallout 5 and The Elder Scrolls VI will use Creation Engine 3.
Todd Howard said that when Bethesda Game Studios creates worlds, everything starts with technology. The developer explained that many people think it's only about the engine and rendering, but in reality, it also includes tools and the system part.
He noted that the studio's technical team implements all kinds of requests from designers:
For the worlds we want to create, and given that we're going to make Fallout 5, the question was how to do all this work in parallel, without constant stops and restarts. And we are very happy with the result. I can't stop admiring our technical team — they are just incredible. Our designers ask for a lot of crazy things, and the technical team finds a way to implement it. And I think that's what defines our games — the feeling that anything is possible.
Todd Howard also noted that user content has always been important to developers — it allows their games to stay alive for a long time:
If you look back, you can see that ever since we started this journey with Morrowind, we've always been very passionate about it. I insisted that The Elder Scrolls Construction Set [toolset] be shipped with the game — as a separate disc. And we've been doing this for decades. We have a community of content creators who have been doing this for just as long, and it's thanks to them that games like Skyrim stay alive even after fifteen years.
He compared it to the Dungeons & Dragons board game, where participants could create their own adventures — this is the spirit of creativity:
It manifests in many different forms, so it's important for us to support all these directions. I think we're in a great position now with Creations [mods]: there are verified authors, they get revenue. This has raised the entire ecosystem as a whole — including free mods, because such things are becoming more popular.
For some people, modding has become a real career. Over 10 million dollars have already been paid out through the Creation Club program:
You can see how people who used to do this as a hobby are now becoming professionals. The content they create amazes us — they do incredible work. For some, this is already a full-fledged career, and that makes us truly happy.