Everyone loves a Bethesda Game Studios RPG. From Fallout to Starfield to The Elder Scrolls, Bethesda’s success in the RPG space has often come from the sheer expanse of these games and how many hours can be poured into exploring them. For some, the games are so massive that they’re daunting, or in Todd Howard’s words – ‘irresponsible’.
In a recent interview, Howard explained why Bethesda’s games are just so enormous.
Does Bigger = Better?
Over the years, Bethesda Game Studios’ titles have gotten more ambitious and larger in scope and size. In 2011, Skyrim was released, giving players a massive, open map to explore over hundreds of hours of play. In 2015, Fallout 4, which was the biggest game in the post-apocalyptic series at the time, turned heads worldwide, becoming the franchise’s best-selling title.
In 2023, the team released Starfield after many years of development, offering up a veritable feast of exploration featuring 1000 planets in a vast universe.
Many have argued that bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better, and as Todd Howard recognises, making these worlds so gargantuan isn’t always sensible:
We cut very little from our games at Bethesda, which is why the games are so irresponsibly large. And it really comes to the whole team, you know, putting a lot of creativity into the game. It’s obviously not just me, and I think that’s what really makes them special.
It’s a team effort, and the ethos at Bethesda Game Studios is apparently to just leave everything in. While we know that plenty was cut from the likes of Fallout 4, the firm doesn’t like trimming the fat, and in many cases, anything left out will just be added later anyway.
Here’s the full interview with BAFTA that unearthed these comments from Todd Howard:
Starfield might have been phenomenally huge, but BGS had issues filling that space. One of the leading criticisms about the game is how ‘rinse-and-repeat’ many of the game’s points of interest felt, with many caves and complexes featuring enemies in the same spots, loot in the same crates, and so on.
It’s widely expected that both The Elder Scrolls VI and Fallout 5 will be the biggest iterations of their respective franchises – but will bigger necessarily mean that they’re better?
Let us know on the Insider Gaming forum what you think about Bethesda’s games.
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