Words matter. These are the best Todd Howard Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I loved playing ‘Ultima.’ Getting my computer in college and playing ‘Wing Commander.’ I hear a lot from our fans, and they are the same way. Games are where I want to be.
I think if someone has a gaming obsession, ‘Ultima’ became mine. I would say no other series ingrained itself in how I want to make games or what I want them to be more than ‘Ultima’ did.
I think the journey of making a game… we want to enjoy that process.
With ‘The Elder Scrolls’, you’re looking at a 25-year-running franchise. It has stood the test of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies becoming popular.
Ashley Cheng, who I’ve worked with for 20 years, he’s the studio head in Rockville now. He manages more of the day-to-day stuff. I can focus creatively on what we’re doing now and what we should be doing in the future.
I’m a believer that players are good self-directors, and I think one thing that’s good about video games is they can direct their own experience.
‘Minecraft’ is like that, where you might say to one of your friends who doesn’t play games, ‘Hey, just sit down and try this with me.’ There are other games you might put in front of somebody and say, ‘I know you don’t traditionally play games, but you’ve got to check this out.’
There are more players on ‘Fallout Shelter’ than all of my games combined. That’s a little sobering at times. It’s not a good or bad thing.
Games have gotten so big and interesting that they’ve moved beyond the toy/entertainment space. It’s not just a diversion from their regular lives; for a lot of people, it becomes an important part of their lives.
Particularly with our games, people get involved with the characters and the world. They’re going to take their time with it pretty seriously, so we need to take it even more seriously to make it good.
Batman. I like the idea that if I had enough money, time, and vengeance, I could become him.
‘Fallout 76’ and ‘Blades’ get a lot of my time right now. I’m in more meetings as it’s gotten bigger.
Every year, there’s a new idea we can’t do and a new technology for something that excites us.
I liked that line in the movie ‘Shakespeare in Love’: ‘How is this going to work out? I don’t know, but it always does.’
I see games… as the ultimate combination of art and technology.
We didn’t start at ‘Fallout 3’ and think about how to add to that. We take a step back and think, ‘Okay, if we look at all the ‘Fallout’ games, what would a new one feel like?’ So the focus is not ”Fallout 3′ plus this’. Then we start really digging into the world.
When you start over and jump into new tech, you don’t know what the negatives are going to be until you go through a few cycles. We’re always changing our tech, but we don’t wholly destroy it with each game. We’re taking parts out.
I played everything, but the games that kept me up and night and tickled my fancy were the larger role-playing games like ‘Ultima.’
I’d been playing everything and decided that this was something I maybe wanted to make a career out of. I knew where some companies were, but I saw the name ‘Bethesda, Maryland’ on ‘Wayne Gretzky Hockey 3.’
The technology for radiant stories in ‘Skyrim’ is phenomenal. We tried and pared it back.
Despite all of our games, all of our success together – ‘Elder Scrolls,’ when we started, it was a very generic fantasy. It had its parts. We pushed it to have more of its own unique identify. We’re proud of the work everyone did there.
Don’t define the game by the list of the features. Define it by the experience you want to have.
Memory is a big one: our ability to use the memory and move things in and out efficiently – that affected what we were able to do more than anything.
Your plan is not as important as your culture. That means you will run into problems that will disrupt your plan and schedule, and how you deal with that depends on the culture you have created within your team.
People tend to look at processing power as how to gauge a piece of hardware is powerful for us.
I liked hacking into and pirating computer games while in college. One of my favorites was Bethesda’s ‘Terminator 2029.’ So I drove to their offices and asked for a job.
Epic science fiction game, that’s always been on my mind. Post-apocalyptic, ‘Fallout,’ was our first choice. Sci-fi was our second at the time, when we got the ‘Fallout’ license. We were going to do our own post-apocalyptic universe if we didn’t get ‘Fallout.’
Eventually, there will come a day where I’m not making games at Bethesda. Hopefully that’s a long time away. But I want to make sure that who we are, what the worlds are, what the company is, that’s sustainable far beyond me.
We all have bad things that happen in our lives, and a lot of us wonder how we can go back to before the event, whatever it is. ‘Fallout 4’ is about realising that your life has a new normal. We want to put you in the shoes of someone who knows what life was like before this.
One of the things that we really like about ‘Fallout 76’ is that we’ve built it so that we can support it on a month-to-month and week-to-week basis.
A lot of times, when someone’s going to pick up a game, it can be a bit daunting, like if they haven’t played a roleplaying game, or they haven’t played things in the series. We spent a lot of time on flow. How it feels to move through the world. How the game rewards you depending on which way you turn.
The main thing that excites me is that games are successful everywhere now. Now it’s successful everywhere, and that’s really important for the health of the industry.
‘Fallout 76’ is a very different ‘Fallout’ game. We’re very aware of that. We think a lot of people will like it, because we like it. But a lot of people probably won’t. We need to balance that. This is an idea we have, and there’s a lot of old ‘Fallout’ stuff in it, but it’s a very new experience.
I think streaming technology is definitely coming, and it’s gonna make people’s access to games infinitely easier. You’ve seen it happen to music and movies, and I think it’s a great thing.
I’m addicted to my iPhone and get a game for it every few days.
I’m happy that you can play ‘Morrowind’ now on an Xbox One, as it’s backwards compatible.
Time makes a bigger difference: just making a game, shipping it, looking at what you did, how you did it, what you did well, what you didn’t do well, and doing better.
What’s funny is that by the time everyone plays the game – you know, we finish it, and then it takes a long time to make copies and ship it and get on the shelves – we probably haven’t worked on it for a month, two months. So, we’ve already taken our break, and then we’re on to the next thing.
Great games are played, not made.
Since I first got my iPhone and ‘Super Monkey Ball’ came out, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is great.’ I’m always searching for the nirvana of mobile gaming, whether that’s from a Game Boy or a Vita or a PSP or now the Switch.
