‘Starfield’ director Todd Howard has the “last say” on every Bethesda game
Todd Howard, the director of Starfield and Bethesda, is apparently the reluctant “last say guy” for every game that the developer has launched in his tenure.
In an interview with MinnMax, former design director Bruce Nesmith said that one of the reasons behind his departure from Bethesda was the burgeoning sizes of the development teams.
Nesmith worked on Starfield, as well as The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall before that.
“You didn’t get to interact with Todd as much anymore,” he explained, and added that the pandemic also changed how the teams communicated with each other.
Yet, these structural shifts didn’t impact one significant cog in the creative process. “All decisions run through Todd. He would hate, hate, hate me for saying that because he doesn’t believe it’s true. But unfortunately, it is true,” claimed Nesmith.
If a developer thought of “anything different than the Bethesda usual” to add to the game, then it would be passed to Howard for his opinion.
“I will give him credit: he has tried really, really hard to not be the last say guy… it’s not something he wants intellectually,” qualified Nesmith. This situation is the product of having “somebody that has opinions and whose opinions are highly valuable”, he continued.
Elsewhere in the interview, Nesmith explained that Bethesda began to rest on its laurels at the time that Fallout 76 was being concepted.
“We had had so many, not just success, but literal Game Of The Years,” he elaborated. “Like industry-wide-accepted Games Of The Year. Not just in our own heads, or in these two little magazines over there, but everybody saying ‘this is Game Of The Year.’”
“We started to talk ourselves into the fact that we were infallible, there was nothing we couldn’t do. Clearly that’s wrong.”
In other gaming news, some third-party Xbox controllers will stop working in November as Microsoft rolls out a new policy for “unauthorised” accessories.
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Imogen Donovan
NME
