Todd Howard has commented on the importance of SP games and how they let down a lot of people after the launch of Fallout 76.
In an interview with The Guardian, Todd Howard talked about the launch of Fallout 76 and its evolving nature as a GaaS model. He admitted that there were a lot of fans that were disappointed with how the game turned out at release. “We let a lot of people down,” said Howard.
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As for single-player games, which have been the highlight for Bethesda Softworks, he stresses their importance saying that the studio is a big fan of this genre.
“Obviously, we’re big fans of single-player and we’ve had some success with some multiplayer-focused games,” says Howard. “We have found that even if it’s multiplayer, whether it’s Elder Scrolls Online or Fallout 76, a large number of our players want to play it like a single-player game and not have the other players distract from it. Games handle multiplayer in different ways, and I think it all has merit.”
We have already covered that the upcoming Starfield will be an SP game, and based on the comments of Todd Howard, there is no reason to doubt it. The Elder Scrolls VI is another upcoming project that is currently in development at Bethesda along with Starfield.
Howard also shared his vision of the next-generation future praising the fast load times as a big factor for the new generation.
“Let’s just cast forward to the next five to 10 years of gaming – for me, it’s more about access than clock cycles,” he says. “Just the time it takes to even turn [a console] on and load up some of these games is a barrier – it’s time that you’re not enjoying being in that world … The kind of games we make are ones that people are going to sit down and play for hours at a time. If you can access a game more easily, and no matter what device you’re on or where you are, that’s what I think the next five to 10 years in gaming is about.”
“I’d like to see more reactivity [in game worlds], more systems clashing together that players can express themselves with. I think chasing scale for scale’s sake is not always the best goal.”
Bethesda Softworks has been recently acquired by Microsoft paving the way for a partnership that is worth billions of dollars. While it hasn’t materialized yet, Microsoft hasn’t clarified whether this affects the upcoming major projects of Bethesda with Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI in the near future.
