Content creator Mortismal Gaming recently had the opportunity to visit Bethesda headquarters to preview the upcoming Starfield content (of which you'll find everything you need to know at this link) and also managed to interview game director Todd Howard while there.
The man behind The Elder Scrolls and the last two mainline Fallout games admitted that there was a series of circumstances that, mixed together, made developing Starfield harder than the studio had anticipated. That said, on the whole, Howard is pleased with how it turned out and excited about the upcoming Free Lanes update and Terran Armada DLC.
If I look back over the development, which was very long for Starfield, new IP, company change, pandemic, how do we work together? All of those things made for a more difficult development than we anticipated. Looking at the player reaction to it, we put everything on a list and said, you know, where do these line up? You have the buggy, but then you have really quality of life things from the local surface map or how you interact with certain systems, because it's a very complex game. I'm really happy, and I think the whole studio is, with where we've sort of taken the game in the right way. I'm excited about this release and excited about what's coming up.
Despite not wanting to talk about The Elder Scrolls VI (in fact, he'd rather pretend it doesn't exist for now), Todd Howard also dropped an interesting tidbit about the studio's goal to improve hardware scalability going forward.
The PC audience is so much of where our core is. And I think if you look at PC gaming or even handhelds coming in, even though you're going to see the AMDs and the NVIDIAs pushing the high-end tech, the gamut there of what people are playing on is actually widening both on the high end and on the lower end. When we look at ourselves now and going forward, I think it's much more about casting a pretty wide net and having our game scale really well where we can take advantage of the latest hardware, but also be able to run really well and really have more things that users can turn down, because they just want to enjoy the game and they don't care about the latest specular highlight. I think we've done a good job there, but not as good a job as we want to do going forward. So, we're looking at casting an even wider net when it comes to that.
This sounds encouraging for TES VI's system requirements, especially given the ongoing memory and storage crisis that has driven component prices through the roof.
There's a final piece of info from the interview that's worth reporting. Todd Howard said Bethesda is very happy with the Verified Creators program, though he wishes to improve how those mods are surfaced on the store.
We really like where we're at. Our creators are great, and we've seen it kind of raise all boats in terms of hey, there's great content here, go into the menu and check it out. So, we're really, really happy with that program, how it's going for both free stuff and paid stuff and our own stuff. I think our issue now actually is getting that content in front of more people because we think it's so good. I think we have a little bit of friction in making it easier to get that stuff and play it for our audience.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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