While the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls developer Bethesda is renowned in the gaming community for its large, content-dense open-world RPG titles, its latest projects — 2018's Fallout 76 and 2023's Xbox game Starfield — were departures from the studio's norm. The former is a multiplayer MMO-lite take on the post-apocalyptic franchise, while the latter has a significantly grander scale than any Bethesda title before it.
The developer getting more experimental in recent years has made many curious about the reasons why, and in a recent interview, Bethesda game director and executive producer Todd Howard explained that Fallout 76 and Starfield were "creatively different" by design, as the studio wanted to play around with different ideas and directions.
"I think it's true that Fallout 76 and Starfield clearly — they're creatively different than what we had done. And we really wanted to do that. When you're doing a certain type of thing for, in my case, 20 years, we want to try some other things and learn from that. We have ideas that we want to get out there," he told GamesRadar+.
Howard is thankful that these two releases have performed well despite the fact that they veer away from Bethesda's usual style, and that the studio as a whole was able to take some risks with its recent creations.
"We're fortunate those games have found, in the scheme of things, giant audiences that let us keep doing things in them," he added. "Even though they're a bit off the core path of the single-player games that we have been doing, we're just fortunate to have the success that we've had with them."
Indeed, Fallout 76 and Starfield both have passionate fanbases, though both games are undeniably more divisive than more traditional Bethesda titles like, say, Fallout 4 or Skyrim. Howard acknowledges this, though ultimately points out that at one point, people felt the same way about The Elder Scrolls and Fallout compared to other competing RPGs or the old-school '90s Fallout games from Interplay Entertainment.
"If you look back at the beginning of Elder Scrolls, beginning of Fallout, they're a little bit the same. And then, you find an audience that loves that," he commented.
In Fallout 76's case, most criticism of the game was centered around performance and bugs at launch, though many were also frustrated by the lack of NPCs in its world. These issues were ironed out with time, though, and it's grown into a fairly popular live-service game that's quite successful, especially after Amazon's Fallout TV show kicked off a series-wide resurgence.
Starfield, I would argue, has deeper problems. The space exploration RPG may have over 1,000 planets to explore across 100 star systems, sure, but tons of them are bland and empty, only sparsely populated with repetitive and reused structures and landmarks. On the whole, it's painfully shallow compared to Bethesda's other single player titles, and neither the Shattered Space expansion or the new Terran Armada DLC change that.
I'll never say a studio shouldn't take risks or try something new, but with Starfield, I think Bethesda got too far away from what makes their games fun. The magic of a well-crafted open world isn't just its size, but also how all that space is used, and what it's filled with for players to discover. Howard mentioned learning from its experimentative titles; I believe valuing handcrafted content over scale is the lesson to take from Starfield.
The game's lack of depth and engaging experiences has me worried about The Elder Scrolls 6, though my concerns have been assuaged somewhat by Howard saying that it will be a "classic" Bethesda game. I like Fallout 76 and I respect the devs for their ambitions with Starfield, but I've been waiting for Skyrim's sequel for 15 years now, and I'm glad it's not trying to change a winning formula.
How do you feel about experimental Bethesda games like Fallout 76 and Starfield? Are you glad The Elder Scrolls 6 will be more of a traditional RPG? Share your thoughts in the comments, and vote which Bethesda franchise is your favorite in our poll, too.
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