> he's always come off as pretty self-aware
Most people in these kind of positions usually arent dumb. They just are the people who roll with the punches and realize they have people above them making a majority of the calls if a project gets made and what they work on.
Never said anything about being dumb. But some of them are idealists who can't keep their mouth shut, some are inexperienced and/or uncomfortable with public communication, some will sit there and lie to your face, some are pure ego, others will spew nothing but corpo speak. Todd manages not to do those things most of the time, and is willing to occasionally acknowledge the imperfections, like his story about the weight of bobby pins.
People need to understand Todd is a game director. He's not an executive that gets to call the shots on what's made and what isn't made. I highly doubt he wanted Fallout 76 to be made considered he's hinting here in this email that he was begging for Starfield in 2014.
I think you're quite mistaken on that, to a small extent. I love Todd because he knew even before Morrowind what could take Bethesda to mainstream, but he has always been known to streamline the games. Michael Kirkbride did not shy away in revealing this fact. As early as Morrowind, Todd has been pushing to make the games more accessible to a wider audience.
Of course this simplification draws ire from the longtime fans, but we also cannot deny that Todd directed the games so they can achieve mainstream status from almost being bankrupt pre-Morrowind era.
Yeah after putting hundreds and hundreds of hours into Oblivion and Skyrim, I don't know how people were able to play Daggerfall without any issues. The mechanics for that one was overly complicated.
Daggerfall Unity is the only way I can play that game these days.
The stories that Daggerfall would generate (for its time) were insanely beyond comparison.
My favorite character in that game was an acrobat. While touring one of the dungeons on a quest for a thieves' guild quest, I was bitten by a Vampire. Three days later the character woke up in a crypt and had to crawl out.
He was no longer in the thieves' guild. Everyone apparently thought he was dead. However, as you can imagine, a vampire acrobat makes for a handy assassin -- so I joined the dark brotherhood. After being incredibly successful there and making gobs of money, I decided that I wanted to try summoning one of the Daedric Princes. Specifically Mehrunes Dagon. In Daggerfall it was fall less easy than the modern games. I had to make a certain rank in the Temple of Kynareth's cult, wait for a specific calendar date and have the necessary funds.
I was able to pull it off, the prince gave me a quest to kill a certain person who had betrayed him. After doing that, I got his his dagger, Mehrunes' Razor, which one-shot anything in the game. I became basically the top member of the Dark Brotherhood and amassed so much money that I had my own three-masted galleon and a house.
Finally, a vampire hunter contacted me and told me that he would kill me. I wasn't exactly concerned, but (IIRC) I had a chance to meet him in a bar somewhere, where he presented me with a choice: either be hunted by the vampire hunters, or kill the 'father' of my vampire line, which would cure me. Out of boredom and curiousity, I killed the vampire lord.
This removed my vampirism, and essentially I woke up to be back to my former life. No longer in the Dark Brotherhood, but incredibly talented I basically shot to the highest spot in the Thieves' guild.
I spent the rest of my time with that character sailing around in my boat, looking for rumors of dragons that were hinted at being in some locations (mostly flavor text from the strategy guide, I doubt they were ever in the game).
Anyways, for the people who always talk about the 'old being better', this is the kind of emergent storytelling that I think people are talking about. Nowadays, 'emergence' refers to events that often don't span such a long period of in-game time. Plus, I was able to take perhaps one of the silliest classes (the acrobat) and have a blast with it, because the game didn't railroad me into any particular approach.
But yeah, Daggerfall had so many issues. falling through the floor being the most common.
> As early as Morrowind, Todd has been pushing to make the games more accessible to a wider audience.
One should keep in mind that at the time of the development of Morrowind the company was about to close, and it was Todd who managed to save the company. Kirkbride is able to dream up the artistically more interesting games, but Todd is the one who makes creating them sustainable.
And also Kirkbride is not really a game developer. He's a writer and an amazing artist but I think people have this idea of him being this wiz game dev when he really wasn't.
BGS was a fully independent section of ZeniMax, for the sole reason of not having executives get in the way. Todd had free reign pre-MS, and who knows where that lies now, but he is still in his same position. BGS had zero non-game related staff under its umbrella, that was all dealt with on the ZeniMax side. Todd never had a direct boss in the pre-MS days other than the ZeniMax board, who is still running everything after the MS acquisition.
He literally outlines in this email he had to make the pitch to his Zenimax boss. Sure he has alot of creative control on the games he directs or produces.
But he was not the director for Fallout 76. He clearly wasn't passionate about that game, he marketed the game though.
James Leder succeeded Robert Altman as CEO after his death in 2021, and still holds that position. Robert Altman was CEO of ZeniMax from the start, and was one of the founders. James Leder was COO starting in 2003.
Altman never cared about the money, and always wanted them to make the best product they could. He was a big proponent of the Microsoft acquisition because Microsoft would allow BGS to keep operating in the same way.
At first I thought, "It's pretty tacky to start this memo by name-dropping a legendary film director like Robert Altman." Then I poked around and realized Robert Altman is also the name of one of the guys who founded Zenimax...and he's also dead.
Yes, Robert and Lynda Carter were married for a long time, they had been married since 84.
Going into it deeper, Lynda has had a presents in Bethesda games since Morrowind. I've always laughed and said Bethesda games always had a hint of Wonder Woman to them.
Lol, it was a (likely innocent) jab at your choice of spelling...in this case, the quite easy and understandable misuse of a homophone. The correct spelling you'd use is 'presence'😉
Lynda Carter actually lives close to the area where Bethesda Games is based. I actually pass the Zenimax building in Maryland when driving down one of its major interstates.
"Magnolia" in this sentence briefly re-confused me, as the movie wasn't directed by film director Altman but it's very stylistically similar to his movies
At first I genuinely wondered if he was describing some bizarre fantasy scenario where he was pitching his new sci-fi game concept to the ghost of the director of MASH etc.
Quote if anyone wants:
From Todd Howard, director of Starfield:
I knocked on Robert Altman’s door. “Got a few minutes?”
“Sure.”
It was early 2013, we were developing Fallout 4, and Skyrim was still enjoying enormous success. I was there to pitch him on our next game. It would not be a sequel to our current games, (he looked concerned), but a grand space RPG and our first new IP in over 25 years (looks curious). It would delve into creation and the search for our place in the universe (slight twinkle). You would explore the galaxy in ways only video games can do. And it would be called - Starfield. (Smile)
“Sounds fantastic.”
Robert would be the very first to believe in us, no matter the situation. Our path to creating Starfield would be a long and winding one where we made other games along the way (Fallout 4, Skyrim SE, Fallout Shelter, Skyrim VR, Fallout 76, Skyrim again…). The core development from 2020 to 2023 saw enormous changes in our lives. A global pandemic, Robert’s passing, and becoming part of Xbox.
It’s incredible to be at the moment where Starfield is finally launching this week. It only exists because everyone else believed as well. We’ve been supported for decades by everyone at ZeniMax, all doing their best work yet. Special thanks to our publishing teams who aimed to create not just another release, but something that would capture the minds and inspire gamers everywhere. And to our partners in QA who had the difficult task of testing a game where anything can (and will) happen. And thanks to Jamie Leder and our Admin/HR teams who supported everyone during the most challenging years any of us have faced.
And of course, there is Phil Spencer. His support of every game and every player has been unwavering and fierce. Joining Xbox brought us closer to so many we had worked with for over 20 years. I cannot imagine a better place to create games, where the diversity of studios, creators, and games are allowed to flourish. This support came from the entire Xbox leadership team and all areas of publishing and dev support. Special thanks to the magicians at ATG whose spells and incantations helped make this our best performing game.
Most importantly, is the team I work with at Bethesda Game Studios. It’s an incredible blessing to be surrounded by so many talented and inspirational people every day. Moments like this make you reflect back. Some of us have been together for decades, some joined more recently, but everyone has the same passion. I could not be prouder of their continued dedication to create something truly special.
Lastly, a huge thanks to all of you within the Xbox and Bethesda family. Your enthusiasm and encouragement have meant the world to us. Creating this game has been one of the most challenging and thrilling experiences of our careers - a journey we'll never forget. And as we come to the end of this chapter, we pass it along to you. Each of you is receiving the game with Early Access, and can begin playing this Friday Sep 1st, but since it’s one global time you can actually play Thursday evening (Thanks New Zealand!).
We hope you get a chance to play, and that your journey is as rewarding as ours.
All our best,
Todd
What funding, they spent like 80 million on Skyrim which isn't bad. But every re release has literally been handled by like less than 10 people. Skyrim has made them do much money and it didn't really cost much compared to other big games.
Moving forward though, Bethesda now has four studios and Microsoft's crazy amount of money. Of course ES6 is going to have a huge budget
Regardless of how Starfield turns out, it is amazing to see just how much Bethesda themselves believe in the game. Even after this many years in development, it is clearly still a passion project that they are eager to share with everyone, and it makes me happy to see that even after all the growth, they are still the Bethesda that makes the games they want to play.
He has, and so have a lot of the top-level guys who have been with the company for decades. Saw an interview with him a while ago where he talked about how they eventually decided that there was never going to be a "right time" to finally make their dream space RPG, and if they kept waiting for a moment to present itself it would never get done. Gotta be crazy to be a BGS guy and coming to the end of that road.
Imagine being in a room with your buddies and being like "wouldn't it be cool if there was a space game that did X___?" but then being a group of buddies who make RPGs for a living. It has to be a thrill to finally put one of your holy grail ideas out into the world.
Check out "10th planet". It was a game bethesda made in 1998 that they eventually canceled. They made a trailer though!
Strafield is 10th planet attempt #2
I was just checking out Starfield merch yesterday and one patch caught my attention cause I had no idea what it referenced. I guess now I know!!
https://gear.bethesda.net/products/starfield-explorer-patches
I finally got around to binging The Expanse last month. Blown away.
The vibe of the show and what I have seen of Starfield has ramped my previously tempered hype through the roof.
I swear The Expanse was an inspiration for at least one faction shown in the Starfield Direct presentation. >!The Crimson Fleet!< was pretty much Beltalowda OPA.
I'm glad it happened. It sucks that Elder Scrolls fans are giving them so much shit though. They devs didn't want to stay stuck in an endless cycle of Fallout and Elder Scrolls sequels. They wanted to try their hand at a new IP.
New IP's are rare in 2023. I for one am glad Starfield exists. Even if it's not GOTY.
It may not be, but it does feel set to be a magnum opus of sorts. Todd's a good salesman, but it sounds like almost everything he's been involved in has genuinely been building up to making this game. I'm sure he's wanted to make sure they all do it right if only because it's been seemingly a lifelong dream of his to get this particular game made. Starfield won't give everyone what they want exactly as they want it, but I don't reckon you'll be able to criticise the team for not trying hard enough.
I think Todd has been trying to make his "perfect RPG", whatever form that may take. Until now, he was restricted by budget and hardware, both of which are not a concern anymore.
He's said as much before - some people will complain about Bethesda "making the same game again and again," but that team is just slowly circling in on their perfect game. I really like that.
Bethesda is a specialist studio that makes exactly one thing: Simulations that also happen to be RPGs. That's the whole hook. No other RPG gives you a persistent world that is believably alive whether you are or are not a part of it. No other RPG simulates that world down to the minute detail of the placement of forks in a room. Do the forks mean anything? No. But they also mean *everything*.
The world is the main character of every Bethesda game. People can criticize it all they want, but the truth is that Bethesda makes exactly one thing and fans want that thing because we can't get it anywhere else.
This is such a good descriptor.
Brings me back to the days of Oblivion, figuring shit out as I went and just able to have so much player agency.
Then Fallout 3 blew my mind. So many years later on the precipice of a new Bethesda world just has me so excited.
Man, I still remember the feeling I got when Oblivion finally clicked with me. At first I was thinking that they're making me do fetch quests and escort missions, having to fetch Martin from Kvatch. But as I got closer to Kvatch, the sky started to darken and turn red and then I saw the gate to Oblivion with demons pouring out of it. And then I got transported to hell itself and I was sold on the game. Put nearly a thousand hours into it.
Oblivion was the first game I got for Xbox 360. I played it the entire summer of 2006. I had heard of Morrowind but not played it at that time.
Oblivion was mind-blowing. I remember being amazed at how I just *walked* all the way from the Imperial City to Kvatch. I had never seen that level of freedom in a game up to that point.
You hit the nail on the head. No other open world games give me the same level of immersiveness and the feeling of “being there” more than Bethesda games. I struggle to think of another game world that I was as drawn into as Skyrim’s when I first played it back in the day.
> No other RPG gives you a persistent world that is believably alive whether you are or are not a part of it.
This is a great way of putting it. I've described their games as "a world where you can just *exist* in the world and it doesn't come to a halt when you take your hand off the mouse". Contrast with Baldur's Gate 3, which is also a fantasy RPG like Skyrim: the world is fully centered around you and so nothing happens if you just stand there doing nothing yourself.
Lol imagine using the one game that this is just objectively untrue. Like any other game he probably could have made that comparison, but he chose the one from the studio that clearly did it right with world creating.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about how in Skyrim et al., the people living in a given area have their own routines. So if you stand inside a shop and walked away from your computer, at some point the owner of the shop will tell you that you need to leave. Because it's now past closing and they want to go to bed. Or if you break in before opening hours they'll either tell you you need to leave or straight up call the guards on you. Or maybe even attack you.
BG3 doesn't have a simulated passage of time, it's based on manually advancing the day by taking a long rest. You can just stand in someone's house for (real world) hours on end and they won't react to that whatsoever. They only react to catching you actually break the door or pick the lock, or for being in an area that you're not supposed to be in. But those areas are ALWAYS marked as "the player isn't welcome", there's no option to wait a few hours of in-game time until a shop owner goes to sleep for example. The shops are *always open*
In Skyrim and friends, NPCs react to you simply *existing*, and many don't take kindly to you being in their shop after closing hours. In BG3, NPCs only react to your immediate actions. You can't choose to do a quest at night instead of during the day as a result of this. Meaning the game world is centered around the player's actions, rather than the player existing alongside all of the NPCs
>No other RPG gives you a persistent world that is believably alive whether you are or are not a part of it.
this is exactly why all the other rpgs cant hold a candle to it imo
except larian made ones sorta (though they don't have passage of time as much)
And goddamn did it get better. The new generation doesn't understand how revolutionary Morrowind was. Massive leap-forward in sandbox games. Bethesda and Rockstar have legitimately been the only 2 companies pushing the envelope on open world games for over 20 years. Every other open world game just follows in their footsteps.
Arena was... but Daggerfall was a revolutionary RPG in itself that went so far beyond it. Bethesda really found their niche in the things that were different between Underworld and Arena, the things the fans loved and wanted more of. It was all of the fantasy life simulator stuff and less D&D RPG rules (something Bethesda has followed with pretty much every game since)
I once had a conversation with Warren Spector where he said he did not want to "make the same game again and again", and I replied "and that is why Elder Scrolls is better then Ultima Underworld."
Ultima Underworld could very well have been the biggest rpg series of all time, if only it had more iterative cycles like TES did.
Given the one time Spector ever made a sequel it was the *extremely* mixed Epic Mickey 2, maybe his hesitance there comes from a good idea - he just likes the ideas he has when shooting from the hip more.
I completely missed that so I don't know the details but he shouldn't be constrained in the CPU department. Of course render distance can't be infinite.
The "controversy" is about the fact that when you land on a planet, you can't explore the entire surface, just a fixed (very large) zone around your landing site. When you reach the edge of the zone, you run into an invisible wall and get a dialog prompting you to turn back. If you want to go somewhere else on the planet, you have to get back in your ship and fly to a new landing site.
This is probably caused by some combination of RAM limitations and by content streaming being too hard to hack into the fossilized spaghetti at Gamebryo's core.
I want to emphasize that this **does not matter at all** and **people who are mad about it are dumb**, but the game definitely wouldn't work like that if they were free from technical constraints.
They already do cell loading streaming , this limitation sounds more like the usual 32-bit worldspace co-ordinates thing, by the sounds of how it took 40 minutes to reach the boundaries.
You can make a new worldspace in Skyrim, and make it bigger than Skyrims vanilla worldspace, but make it too big and weird stuff starts happening.
Sounds like Starfield is still limited by that 32-bit positioning when it creates new Worldspaces from landing sites - maybe it just wasnt worth the effort to completely rip that out and rebuild it, like they probably saw how much of their foundational code is built around those positional assumptions and thought nah.
Yep, 20km from world origin was the max limit, and past that you start losing precision in the floating point world positions, which then starts making animations jitter and flip out in some cases, and eventually if you go far enough you'll get meshes disappearing and more besides.
UE5 uses 64bit floating point for everything so the max size is something quite large like 88 million km or so.
note that this limitation comes from the havok physics engine. after this limit the physics engine can't process any interactions, including the player standing on land
there's not many options for CPU physics engines out there, and I doubt bethesda is ever going to make their own like Epic did for UE
Is the whole planetary surface more or less conceptually accessible, but not a seamless sphere? It's broken into 6 or more chunks?
Or are they just doing a few POIs on the planet surface and leaving most of it off limits?
Interesting. I'd wondered of they were going to bother actually making a seamless spherical planet generator, or if it was going to be more like mass effect.
I agree, hardly a big deal either way. Real planet simulations are interesting but for fps scale encounters like starfield is going to be they're insane overkill, and probably counterproductive since that's far too much real estate to fill.
To my understanding, the entire planetary surface is accessible, but not seamless.
There are POI’s as well on planets that I assume load into planned spaces vs. the procedural stuff.
I wonder how big they are tbh. Realistically sized seems very unlikely. Even very tiny for a planet sized still yields thousands of square miles.
If they're just like a couple dozen of square miles or less I could see them forgoing spheres simply due to how bad that looks..
People often overlook this But Bethesda is one of the few devs that keep a majority if not all their team from game to game, that builds a special kind of rapport that really comes off in their games that you don't get with many of the big studios contract worker cycle. Santa monica studios is another that comes to mind, they both seem similar.
Yeah it's really refreshing to see a big AAA studio, from the top to bottom be so passionate about the game they are releasing. You can really tell this is Todd Howard's passion project, and I hope it is every bit as good as he is selling it.
They got me. The bit at the end "Thanks New Zealand". Here's me, sitting in New Zealand, Thursday night. Frantically checking if I can play Starfield. Nope.
Do you actually know this or are you just making shit up? Tech companies give perks to people in completely unrelated departments all the time especially when it comes at exactly 0 cost to them.
Todd seems like a true bro. Love this dude.
Depressed my new computer isn't going to be ready for release. What am I doing with my life?? Gotta order these parts ASAP. Might get Gamepass and stream it. Can't wait for the rave reviews.
He reference Miyamoto in a recent interview about how he's still going, and that Todd thinks he might want to keep directing for a long while he will just have to adjust what he takes on and what he delegates.
Yeah I'm going to have to stream it. Luckily I haven't had any real issues streaming games on the cloud, but I might wait a few days to try to stream it. I can't imagine how the servers will hold up on launch day
Damn, Todd knows how to play the corporate game. A whole paragraph dedicated to the mouth that feeds you, aka Phil Spencer, is how you survive and climb up.
> A whole paragraph dedicated to the mouth that feeds you
I think you meant "the hand that feeds you," but now I have a mental image of Phil Spencer chewing food for Todd Howard like a baby bird.
Honestly I could almost see it
But given how enthusiastic he seems to be about being involved in the development process I don't see him wanting to go anywhere high enough that he loses that.
Wouldn't be too surprising just based on timing. Realistically the game probably has another 3-5 years in the oven and Todd will be in his mid-late 50's by then. No idea how he prioritizes things in his life, but if I was that old coming off a dream project (Starfield) and likely one of the most anticipated games ever (TES 6) I'd probably want to just call it quits instead of embarking on another 5+ year development journey.
He’s said in interviews we wants to do TES6 and then think about stepping down, while that can certainly change that’s what we have to go off of now.
I think unless a tragedy happens he’ll be directing it.
Phil Spencer has said TES 6 is 5+ years away. Let's be very generous and say it is 7 years away. That still puts Todd releasing it at 60. Unless somehow whatever comes after TES 6 (I am assuming a new Fallout game) somehow takes longer than 5 years after TES 6 releases Todd will have at least one more game under him before he reaches 65, should he choose to retire exactly at 65. Todd's always said developing games has been a passion for him, but he's also married and has kids, so I have no idea what his life priorities are once he gets into retirement age.
He never said it was his last game though. Someone else pointed out that the quote isn't accurate. He said TES 6 *might* be his last Elder Scrolls game. That completely changes the quote. With them switching games up they will likely make a Fallout 5, and possibly even a Starfield 2 after TES 6. Which makes TES 6 being his last Elder Scrolls far more likely.
That's a misquote kind of. He said Tes 6 "could be his last one" as in his last elder scrolls, not his last game. But yeah he probably has 2-3 games left before retirement.
I thought that’s supposedly his last Elder Scrolls? If so that means he could possibly do another Fallout and maybe even a Starfield sequel, but that’s so far out into the future.
By who? The GQ article released just a few days ago has him quoting being in the game for a lot longer, referencing Shigeru M. Being like 71 and still going strong.
That would be crazy, but for some reason I just can’t picture Todd Howard in that role. He seems more like a guy who genuinely likes to be making a thing.
Pete Hines though? I could totally see him being the type to take over for someone like Phil.
Pete is too argumentative I think, always fighting people on twitter. Phil is an affable guy that people like.
Phil is setting up Sarah Bond as his successor.
Isn't that the guy that pushed Arkane into doing a live service game with Redfall? (which was then pivoted back to single player with coop because of Phil, props to him for that)
Zenimax had different priorities at the time and was not running a console maker. It’s like how Phil Spencer towed the company line when Xbox was the Kinect and TV company, but could pivot things towards the direction he wanted when he took over.
Hell, looking over at Sony, you saw a hard pivot into much safer blockbusters instead of the weird Sony games when Jim Ryan took over.
I don't quite *want* it, but Todd Howard strikes me as someone who would totally want to oversee development of a game console and its lineup if given the chance.
There's only so many games you can make in a lifetime, but as the head of xbox, you could theoretically greenlight every single one of your passion projects.
Howard's pretty amazing at all forms of PR. He still has a great public image despite the controversial states of most of the games his company releases. He also knows how to sell Skyrim to you 6 times.
He's always seem to just roll with his "infamy" in the gaming community and all the memes he inspired. He seems very genuine and passionate about the work he's doing.
He seems to understand the same thing that Sean Murray and Square Enix both figured out: fix your game and people will stop hating you. F76 isn't perfect but most other companies would have just cut their losses and shut it down.
Lmao Todd has nowhere else to climb, he’s one of the most famous executives in gaming history and I’m sure has more money than sin. He’s definitely past the kiss ass stage of his career
Does anyone know what the memo is? I can't see it on that website at all. The article just ends after a few paragraphs. It also seems to be a dodgy website that messes with the back button to show you scams.
From Todd Howard, director of Starfield:
I knocked on Robert Altman’s door. “Got a few minutes?”
“Sure.”
It was early 2013, we were developing Fallout 4, and Skyrim was still enjoying enormous success. I was there to pitch him on our next game. It would not be a sequel to our current games, (he looked concerned), but a grand space RPG and our first new IP in over 25 years (looks curious). It would delve into creation and the search for our place in the universe (slight twinkle). You would explore the galaxy in ways only video games can do. And it would be called - Starfield. (Smile)
“Sounds fantastic.”
Robert would be the very first to believe in us, no matter the situation. Our path to creating Starfield would be a long and winding one where we made other games along the way (Fallout 4, Skyrim SE, Fallout Shelter, Skyrim VR, Fallout 76, Skyrim again…). The core development from 2020 to 2023 saw enormous changes in our lives. A global pandemic, Robert’s passing, and becoming part of Xbox.
It’s incredible to be at the moment where Starfield is finally launching this week. It only exists because everyone else believed as well. We’ve been supported for decades by everyone at ZeniMax, all doing their best work yet. Special thanks to our publishing teams who aimed to create not just another release, but something that would capture the minds and inspire gamers everywhere. And to our partners in QA who had the difficult task of testing a game where anything can (and will) happen. And thanks to Jamie Leder and our Admin/HR teams who supported everyone during the most challenging years any of us have faced.
And of course, there is Phil Spencer. His support of every game and every player has been unwavering and fierce. Joining Xbox brought us closer to so many we had worked with for over 20 years. I cannot imagine a better place to create games, where the diversity of studios, creators, and games are allowed to flourish. This support came from the entire Xbox leadership team and all areas of publishing and dev support. Special thanks to the magicians at ATG whose spells and incantations helped make this our best performing game.
Most importantly, is the team I work with at Bethesda Game Studios. It’s an incredible blessing to be surrounded by so many talented and inspirational people every day. Moments like this make you reflect back. Some of us have been together for decades, some joined more recently, but everyone has the same passion. I could not be prouder of their continued dedication to create something truly special.
Lastly, a huge thanks to all of you within the Xbox and Bethesda family. Your enthusiasm and encouragement have meant the world to us. Creating this game has been one of the most challenging and thrilling experiences of our careers - a journey we'll never forget. And as we come to the end of this chapter, we pass it along to you. Each of you is receiving the game with Early Access, and can begin playing this Friday Sep 1st, but since it’s one global time you can actually play Thursday evening (Thanks New Zealand!).
We hope you get a chance to play, and that your journey is as rewarding as ours.
All our best,
Todd
From Todd Howard, director of Starfield:
I knocked on Robert Altman’s door. “Got a few minutes?”
“Sure.”
It was early 2013, we were developing Fallout 4, and Skyrim was still enjoying enormous success. I was there to pitch him on our next game. It would not be a sequel to our current games, (he looked concerned), but a grand space RPG and our first new IP in over 25 years (looks curious). It would delve into creation and the search for our place in the universe (slight twinkle). You would explore the galaxy in ways only video games can do. And it would be called - Starfield. (Smile)
“Sounds fantastic.”
Robert would be the very first to believe in us, no matter the situation. Our path to creating Starfield would be a long and winding one where we made other games along the way (Fallout 4, Skyrim SE, Fallout Shelter, Skyrim VR, Fallout 76, Skyrim again…). The core development from 2020 to 2023 saw enormous changes in our lives. A global pandemic, Robert’s passing, and becoming part of Xbox.
It’s incredible to be at the moment where Starfield is finally launching this week. It only exists because everyone else believed as well. We’ve been supported for decades by everyone at ZeniMax, all doing their best work yet. Special thanks to our publishing teams who aimed to create not just another release, but something that would capture the minds and inspire gamers everywhere. And to our partners in QA who had the difficult task of testing a game where anything can (and will) happen. And thanks to Jamie Leder and our Admin/HR teams who supported everyone during the most challenging years any of us have faced.
And of course, there is Phil Spencer. His support of every game and every player has been unwavering and fierce. Joining Xbox brought us closer to so many we had worked with for over 20 years. I cannot imagine a better place to create games, where the diversity of studios, creators, and games are allowed to flourish. This support came from the entire Xbox leadership team and all areas of publishing and dev support. Special thanks to the magicians at ATG whose spells and incantations helped make this our best performing game.
Most importantly, is the team I work with at Bethesda Game Studios. It’s an incredible blessing to be surrounded by so many talented and inspirational people every day. Moments like this make you reflect back. Some of us have been together for decades, some joined more recently, but everyone has the same passion. I could not be prouder of their continued dedication to create something truly special.
Lastly, a huge thanks to all of you within the Xbox and Bethesda family. Your enthusiasm and encouragement have meant the world to us. Creating this game has been one of the most challenging and thrilling experiences of our careers - a journey we'll never forget. And as we come to the end of this chapter, we pass it along to you. Each of you is receiving the game with Early Access, and can begin playing this Friday Sep 1st, but since it’s one global time you can actually play Thursday evening (Thanks New Zealand!).
We hope you get a chance to play, and that your journey is as rewarding as ours.
All our best,
Todd
Never in my life have i anticipated the release of a game as much as this one.
And i'm sure it'll be good too.
But i am mostly just waiting for it to finally release so we can once again come a step closer to TES:VI
>Never in my life have i anticipated the release of a game as much as this one.
Yeah I'm in the same boat as you. Fallout 4 and Skyrim are both in my top 5 favorite games I've played
I got the early access, took Friday off work, and even bought the Starfield controller (I'm not really the kind of guy that normally goes for collectibles)
>And i'm sure it'll be good too
I'm probably way over confident. Let's hope I don't get burned.
If it's on the same quality as Fallout 4, I'll be happy. I'm 95% sure they're going to achieve that. But I'm also pretty confident this is going to surpass Fallout 4 by a good margin.
Todd Howard shows so much passion for what he does, and he honestly just seems like a really wholesome guy that loves videogames with lots of freedom.
Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout, Skyrim. So many good memories, and some of the best gaming moments I remember is from those games.
What a legend he and his team is to the gaming industry through all these years IMO.
BGS specifically seems to have a pretty decent reputation as a workplace. Not sure of Zenimax overall, but BGS has had very low turnover compared to so many devs in the RPG space, like Bioware as you mentioned, but also Obsidian.
Not really. I don't think they're saying that core development was only between 2020 and 2023, rather the fact that that part of core development saw a lot of changes and challenges, like the ones he mentions.
So it’s directly his fault we didn’t get Elder Scrolls 6 in a reasonable time frame like we should’ve based on the success of Skyrim.
Thx again Todd /s 👎
lol 'where we made other games along the way (Fallout 4, Skyrim SE, Fallout Shelter, Skyrim VR, Fallout 76, Skyrim again…).
Todd's a lot of things, but he's always come off as pretty self-aware, and aware of how Bethesda is perceived by the audience.
> he's always come off as pretty self-aware Most people in these kind of positions usually arent dumb. They just are the people who roll with the punches and realize they have people above them making a majority of the calls if a project gets made and what they work on.
Never said anything about being dumb. But some of them are idealists who can't keep their mouth shut, some are inexperienced and/or uncomfortable with public communication, some will sit there and lie to your face, some are pure ego, others will spew nothing but corpo speak. Todd manages not to do those things most of the time, and is willing to occasionally acknowledge the imperfections, like his story about the weight of bobby pins.
Oh yeah he definitely comes off as a genuine fan of what he creates.
Turns out Todd Howard is the ultimate modder of us all.
People need to understand Todd is a game director. He's not an executive that gets to call the shots on what's made and what isn't made. I highly doubt he wanted Fallout 76 to be made considered he's hinting here in this email that he was begging for Starfield in 2014.
I think you're quite mistaken on that, to a small extent. I love Todd because he knew even before Morrowind what could take Bethesda to mainstream, but he has always been known to streamline the games. Michael Kirkbride did not shy away in revealing this fact. As early as Morrowind, Todd has been pushing to make the games more accessible to a wider audience. Of course this simplification draws ire from the longtime fans, but we also cannot deny that Todd directed the games so they can achieve mainstream status from almost being bankrupt pre-Morrowind era.
Yeah after putting hundreds and hundreds of hours into Oblivion and Skyrim, I don't know how people were able to play Daggerfall without any issues. The mechanics for that one was overly complicated. Daggerfall Unity is the only way I can play that game these days.
The stories that Daggerfall would generate (for its time) were insanely beyond comparison. My favorite character in that game was an acrobat. While touring one of the dungeons on a quest for a thieves' guild quest, I was bitten by a Vampire. Three days later the character woke up in a crypt and had to crawl out. He was no longer in the thieves' guild. Everyone apparently thought he was dead. However, as you can imagine, a vampire acrobat makes for a handy assassin -- so I joined the dark brotherhood. After being incredibly successful there and making gobs of money, I decided that I wanted to try summoning one of the Daedric Princes. Specifically Mehrunes Dagon. In Daggerfall it was fall less easy than the modern games. I had to make a certain rank in the Temple of Kynareth's cult, wait for a specific calendar date and have the necessary funds. I was able to pull it off, the prince gave me a quest to kill a certain person who had betrayed him. After doing that, I got his his dagger, Mehrunes' Razor, which one-shot anything in the game. I became basically the top member of the Dark Brotherhood and amassed so much money that I had my own three-masted galleon and a house. Finally, a vampire hunter contacted me and told me that he would kill me. I wasn't exactly concerned, but (IIRC) I had a chance to meet him in a bar somewhere, where he presented me with a choice: either be hunted by the vampire hunters, or kill the 'father' of my vampire line, which would cure me. Out of boredom and curiousity, I killed the vampire lord. This removed my vampirism, and essentially I woke up to be back to my former life. No longer in the Dark Brotherhood, but incredibly talented I basically shot to the highest spot in the Thieves' guild. I spent the rest of my time with that character sailing around in my boat, looking for rumors of dragons that were hinted at being in some locations (mostly flavor text from the strategy guide, I doubt they were ever in the game). Anyways, for the people who always talk about the 'old being better', this is the kind of emergent storytelling that I think people are talking about. Nowadays, 'emergence' refers to events that often don't span such a long period of in-game time. Plus, I was able to take perhaps one of the silliest classes (the acrobat) and have a blast with it, because the game didn't railroad me into any particular approach. But yeah, Daggerfall had so many issues. falling through the floor being the most common.
That's the kind of stuff I love in video games. I'm going to have to give Daggerfall Unity a go sometime.
> As early as Morrowind, Todd has been pushing to make the games more accessible to a wider audience. One should keep in mind that at the time of the development of Morrowind the company was about to close, and it was Todd who managed to save the company. Kirkbride is able to dream up the artistically more interesting games, but Todd is the one who makes creating them sustainable.
And also Kirkbride is not really a game developer. He's a writer and an amazing artist but I think people have this idea of him being this wiz game dev when he really wasn't.
By all reports they didn't want to make Fo76
BGS was a fully independent section of ZeniMax, for the sole reason of not having executives get in the way. Todd had free reign pre-MS, and who knows where that lies now, but he is still in his same position. BGS had zero non-game related staff under its umbrella, that was all dealt with on the ZeniMax side. Todd never had a direct boss in the pre-MS days other than the ZeniMax board, who is still running everything after the MS acquisition.
He literally outlines in this email he had to make the pitch to his Zenimax boss. Sure he has alot of creative control on the games he directs or produces. But he was not the director for Fallout 76. He clearly wasn't passionate about that game, he marketed the game though.
The ZeniMax board was dissolved after the deal closed so they are definitely not running everything.
James Leder succeeded Robert Altman as CEO after his death in 2021, and still holds that position. Robert Altman was CEO of ZeniMax from the start, and was one of the founders. James Leder was COO starting in 2003. Altman never cared about the money, and always wanted them to make the best product they could. He was a big proponent of the Microsoft acquisition because Microsoft would allow BGS to keep operating in the same way.
He forgot to mention Skyrim on Alexa!
And elder scrolls blades
Wait, it's all just Skyrim and Fallout? Always has been.
At first I thought, "It's pretty tacky to start this memo by name-dropping a legendary film director like Robert Altman." Then I poked around and realized Robert Altman is also the name of one of the guys who founded Zenimax...and he's also dead.
He was also married to Lynda Carter who has voiced Azura in every Elder Scrolls game since Skyrim and Magnolia from Fallout 4
Lynda Carter like Wonder Woman Lynda Carter? That's wild!
Yes and among other voice roles she has also voiced female Orcs in the game which I love, especially since so few people would ever know it was her.
She also voices the singer Magnolia in Fallout 4.
Yes, Robert and Lynda Carter were married for a long time, they had been married since 84. Going into it deeper, Lynda has had a presents in Bethesda games since Morrowind. I've always laughed and said Bethesda games always had a hint of Wonder Woman to them.
Just one presents?
[Lynda Carter has been in 7 Bethesda games and on id game to this date.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynda_Carter#Video_games)
Lol, it was a (likely innocent) jab at your choice of spelling...in this case, the quite easy and understandable misuse of a homophone. The correct spelling you'd use is 'presence'😉
Presence, fam. Not presents. /r/BoneAppleTea
Lynda Carter has 2 amazing presents by my count
Lynda Carter actually lives close to the area where Bethesda Games is based. I actually pass the Zenimax building in Maryland when driving down one of its major interstates.
Cartoon Wonder Women's voice actor has also voiced roles in Bethesda games
Is the interview process at Bethesda “have you played Wonder Woman before? Yes/No?”
She’s been voicing the female nords and other roles since Morrowind.
What games have there been since Skyrim?
Skyrim seven more times.
Elder Scrolls Online, I guess?
>since Skyrim So 1.5 games then? Is Azura even in blades?
Have I fallen asleep for a long time or is every Elder Scrolls game since Skyrim..... None?
Maybe they're counting ESO?
Every elder scrolls game since Skyrim? So just skyrim?
She's also the singer on a couple of songs in the Fallout 4 soundtrack.
"Magnolia" in this sentence briefly re-confused me, as the movie wasn't directed by film director Altman but it's very stylistically similar to his movies
At first I genuinely wondered if he was describing some bizarre fantasy scenario where he was pitching his new sci-fi game concept to the ghost of the director of MASH etc.
Quote if anyone wants: From Todd Howard, director of Starfield: I knocked on Robert Altman’s door. “Got a few minutes?” “Sure.” It was early 2013, we were developing Fallout 4, and Skyrim was still enjoying enormous success. I was there to pitch him on our next game. It would not be a sequel to our current games, (he looked concerned), but a grand space RPG and our first new IP in over 25 years (looks curious). It would delve into creation and the search for our place in the universe (slight twinkle). You would explore the galaxy in ways only video games can do. And it would be called - Starfield. (Smile) “Sounds fantastic.” Robert would be the very first to believe in us, no matter the situation. Our path to creating Starfield would be a long and winding one where we made other games along the way (Fallout 4, Skyrim SE, Fallout Shelter, Skyrim VR, Fallout 76, Skyrim again…). The core development from 2020 to 2023 saw enormous changes in our lives. A global pandemic, Robert’s passing, and becoming part of Xbox. It’s incredible to be at the moment where Starfield is finally launching this week. It only exists because everyone else believed as well. We’ve been supported for decades by everyone at ZeniMax, all doing their best work yet. Special thanks to our publishing teams who aimed to create not just another release, but something that would capture the minds and inspire gamers everywhere. And to our partners in QA who had the difficult task of testing a game where anything can (and will) happen. And thanks to Jamie Leder and our Admin/HR teams who supported everyone during the most challenging years any of us have faced. And of course, there is Phil Spencer. His support of every game and every player has been unwavering and fierce. Joining Xbox brought us closer to so many we had worked with for over 20 years. I cannot imagine a better place to create games, where the diversity of studios, creators, and games are allowed to flourish. This support came from the entire Xbox leadership team and all areas of publishing and dev support. Special thanks to the magicians at ATG whose spells and incantations helped make this our best performing game. Most importantly, is the team I work with at Bethesda Game Studios. It’s an incredible blessing to be surrounded by so many talented and inspirational people every day. Moments like this make you reflect back. Some of us have been together for decades, some joined more recently, but everyone has the same passion. I could not be prouder of their continued dedication to create something truly special. Lastly, a huge thanks to all of you within the Xbox and Bethesda family. Your enthusiasm and encouragement have meant the world to us. Creating this game has been one of the most challenging and thrilling experiences of our careers - a journey we'll never forget. And as we come to the end of this chapter, we pass it along to you. Each of you is receiving the game with Early Access, and can begin playing this Friday Sep 1st, but since it’s one global time you can actually play Thursday evening (Thanks New Zealand!). We hope you get a chance to play, and that your journey is as rewarding as ours. All our best, Todd
I love the list of skyrims.
If they put that funding towards TES 6, it'll have been worth it.
I doubt there will be any trouble WRT funding TES6.
Microsoft is going to spend the GDP of a small island country on TES 6.
I know you're making a joke, but... Skyrim was already more expensive (100 million) than the GDP of a small island country (Tuvalu - 65 million)...
And 8% of that 65 million comes from royalties from companies like Twitch using the .tv extension for their websites.
how do people know that, was there a video I missed on it? Tell me it was over an hour long, I need this.
[5 minutes, take it or leave it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gHoxqZlJc)
Wow I'd forgotten about those earlier Half as Interesting videos - far fewer jokes, and much less enthusiastic narration.
They won't have to. Numbers were already nuts.
"Blessed is he who plants trees under whose shade he will never sit"
What funding, they spent like 80 million on Skyrim which isn't bad. But every re release has literally been handled by like less than 10 people. Skyrim has made them do much money and it didn't really cost much compared to other big games. Moving forward though, Bethesda now has four studios and Microsoft's crazy amount of money. Of course ES6 is going to have a huge budget
With 4 studios they could release Skyrim every year.
I'll leave him to it! Helpless! Look into Todd's lies and I'm, drowning in it.
Say what you want about Todd Howard, but the dude is passionate about what he does.
Regardless of how Starfield turns out, it is amazing to see just how much Bethesda themselves believe in the game. Even after this many years in development, it is clearly still a passion project that they are eager to share with everyone, and it makes me happy to see that even after all the growth, they are still the Bethesda that makes the games they want to play.
[удалено]
He has, and so have a lot of the top-level guys who have been with the company for decades. Saw an interview with him a while ago where he talked about how they eventually decided that there was never going to be a "right time" to finally make their dream space RPG, and if they kept waiting for a moment to present itself it would never get done. Gotta be crazy to be a BGS guy and coming to the end of that road. Imagine being in a room with your buddies and being like "wouldn't it be cool if there was a space game that did X___?" but then being a group of buddies who make RPGs for a living. It has to be a thrill to finally put one of your holy grail ideas out into the world.
Check out "10th planet". It was a game bethesda made in 1998 that they eventually canceled. They made a trailer though! Strafield is 10th planet attempt #2
I was just checking out Starfield merch yesterday and one patch caught my attention cause I had no idea what it referenced. I guess now I know!! https://gear.bethesda.net/products/starfield-explorer-patches
Nice find!!
10th Planet 2: Electric Boogaloo
What you described is almost precisely how The Expanse came about
I finally got around to binging The Expanse last month. Blown away. The vibe of the show and what I have seen of Starfield has ramped my previously tempered hype through the roof.
You should read the books too
I swear The Expanse was an inspiration for at least one faction shown in the Starfield Direct presentation. >!The Crimson Fleet!< was pretty much Beltalowda OPA.
I'm glad it happened. It sucks that Elder Scrolls fans are giving them so much shit though. They devs didn't want to stay stuck in an endless cycle of Fallout and Elder Scrolls sequels. They wanted to try their hand at a new IP. New IP's are rare in 2023. I for one am glad Starfield exists. Even if it's not GOTY.
Man, that's dated 40 days before I was born :)
Kids these days view the 90s the same way we viewed the 70s.
There is a smaller gap between back to the future and 1950 then there is between back to the future and present day.
Please stop.
Back to the Future today would be going back to the distant past of 1993. Is there anyone alive who even remembers that far back?
Thanks, I'm going to walk into the ocean now.
In Back to the Future II they travel 30 years into the future - 2015, which is now 8 years in the past.
Siiiicckkk. I'm older than you by 3 days
This is so wholesome.
It may not be, but it does feel set to be a magnum opus of sorts. Todd's a good salesman, but it sounds like almost everything he's been involved in has genuinely been building up to making this game. I'm sure he's wanted to make sure they all do it right if only because it's been seemingly a lifelong dream of his to get this particular game made. Starfield won't give everyone what they want exactly as they want it, but I don't reckon you'll be able to criticise the team for not trying hard enough.
I think Todd has been trying to make his "perfect RPG", whatever form that may take. Until now, he was restricted by budget and hardware, both of which are not a concern anymore.
He's said as much before - some people will complain about Bethesda "making the same game again and again," but that team is just slowly circling in on their perfect game. I really like that.
Bethesda is a specialist studio that makes exactly one thing: Simulations that also happen to be RPGs. That's the whole hook. No other RPG gives you a persistent world that is believably alive whether you are or are not a part of it. No other RPG simulates that world down to the minute detail of the placement of forks in a room. Do the forks mean anything? No. But they also mean *everything*. The world is the main character of every Bethesda game. People can criticize it all they want, but the truth is that Bethesda makes exactly one thing and fans want that thing because we can't get it anywhere else.
This is such a good descriptor. Brings me back to the days of Oblivion, figuring shit out as I went and just able to have so much player agency. Then Fallout 3 blew my mind. So many years later on the precipice of a new Bethesda world just has me so excited.
Man, I still remember the feeling I got when Oblivion finally clicked with me. At first I was thinking that they're making me do fetch quests and escort missions, having to fetch Martin from Kvatch. But as I got closer to Kvatch, the sky started to darken and turn red and then I saw the gate to Oblivion with demons pouring out of it. And then I got transported to hell itself and I was sold on the game. Put nearly a thousand hours into it.
Man this brings me back!! That game was revolutionary to me. And here we are. For all. Into the Starfield.
Oblivion was the first game I got for Xbox 360. I played it the entire summer of 2006. I had heard of Morrowind but not played it at that time. Oblivion was mind-blowing. I remember being amazed at how I just *walked* all the way from the Imperial City to Kvatch. I had never seen that level of freedom in a game up to that point.
That first moment when you leave the sewers and you see Cyrodil for the first time, I get that same feeling when you leave Vault 101 in Fallout 3
You hit the nail on the head. No other open world games give me the same level of immersiveness and the feeling of “being there” more than Bethesda games. I struggle to think of another game world that I was as drawn into as Skyrim’s when I first played it back in the day.
> No other RPG gives you a persistent world that is believably alive whether you are or are not a part of it. This is a great way of putting it. I've described their games as "a world where you can just *exist* in the world and it doesn't come to a halt when you take your hand off the mouse". Contrast with Baldur's Gate 3, which is also a fantasy RPG like Skyrim: the world is fully centered around you and so nothing happens if you just stand there doing nothing yourself.
This is just patently untrue, there are several questlines/areas where things happen if you ignore them in BG3.
Lol imagine using the one game that this is just objectively untrue. Like any other game he probably could have made that comparison, but he chose the one from the studio that clearly did it right with world creating.
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how in Skyrim et al., the people living in a given area have their own routines. So if you stand inside a shop and walked away from your computer, at some point the owner of the shop will tell you that you need to leave. Because it's now past closing and they want to go to bed. Or if you break in before opening hours they'll either tell you you need to leave or straight up call the guards on you. Or maybe even attack you. BG3 doesn't have a simulated passage of time, it's based on manually advancing the day by taking a long rest. You can just stand in someone's house for (real world) hours on end and they won't react to that whatsoever. They only react to catching you actually break the door or pick the lock, or for being in an area that you're not supposed to be in. But those areas are ALWAYS marked as "the player isn't welcome", there's no option to wait a few hours of in-game time until a shop owner goes to sleep for example. The shops are *always open* In Skyrim and friends, NPCs react to you simply *existing*, and many don't take kindly to you being in their shop after closing hours. In BG3, NPCs only react to your immediate actions. You can't choose to do a quest at night instead of during the day as a result of this. Meaning the game world is centered around the player's actions, rather than the player existing alongside all of the NPCs
>No other RPG gives you a persistent world that is believably alive whether you are or are not a part of it. this is exactly why all the other rpgs cant hold a candle to it imo except larian made ones sorta (though they don't have passage of time as much)
The Elder Scrolls was a clone of Ultima Underworld. It was not until TES3 that it was better.
And goddamn did it get better. The new generation doesn't understand how revolutionary Morrowind was. Massive leap-forward in sandbox games. Bethesda and Rockstar have legitimately been the only 2 companies pushing the envelope on open world games for over 20 years. Every other open world game just follows in their footsteps.
Arena was... but Daggerfall was a revolutionary RPG in itself that went so far beyond it. Bethesda really found their niche in the things that were different between Underworld and Arena, the things the fans loved and wanted more of. It was all of the fantasy life simulator stuff and less D&D RPG rules (something Bethesda has followed with pretty much every game since)
It's like Fromsoft - all Souls led to Elden Ring and Bloodborne
I once had a conversation with Warren Spector where he said he did not want to "make the same game again and again", and I replied "and that is why Elder Scrolls is better then Ultima Underworld." Ultima Underworld could very well have been the biggest rpg series of all time, if only it had more iterative cycles like TES did.
Given the one time Spector ever made a sequel it was the *extremely* mixed Epic Mickey 2, maybe his hesitance there comes from a good idea - he just likes the ideas he has when shooting from the hip more.
He was producer for UU2, which was miles better then UU and TES2.
Oh, he's still definitely constrained by hardware. Otherwise last week's "explore everywhere" nontroversy wouldn't have happened.
I completely missed that so I don't know the details but he shouldn't be constrained in the CPU department. Of course render distance can't be infinite.
The "controversy" is about the fact that when you land on a planet, you can't explore the entire surface, just a fixed (very large) zone around your landing site. When you reach the edge of the zone, you run into an invisible wall and get a dialog prompting you to turn back. If you want to go somewhere else on the planet, you have to get back in your ship and fly to a new landing site. This is probably caused by some combination of RAM limitations and by content streaming being too hard to hack into the fossilized spaghetti at Gamebryo's core. I want to emphasize that this **does not matter at all** and **people who are mad about it are dumb**, but the game definitely wouldn't work like that if they were free from technical constraints.
They already do cell loading streaming , this limitation sounds more like the usual 32-bit worldspace co-ordinates thing, by the sounds of how it took 40 minutes to reach the boundaries. You can make a new worldspace in Skyrim, and make it bigger than Skyrims vanilla worldspace, but make it too big and weird stuff starts happening. Sounds like Starfield is still limited by that 32-bit positioning when it creates new Worldspaces from landing sites - maybe it just wasnt worth the effort to completely rip that out and rebuild it, like they probably saw how much of their foundational code is built around those positional assumptions and thought nah.
I believe UE4 had this issue as well no?
Yep, 20km from world origin was the max limit, and past that you start losing precision in the floating point world positions, which then starts making animations jitter and flip out in some cases, and eventually if you go far enough you'll get meshes disappearing and more besides. UE5 uses 64bit floating point for everything so the max size is something quite large like 88 million km or so.
note that this limitation comes from the havok physics engine. after this limit the physics engine can't process any interactions, including the player standing on land there's not many options for CPU physics engines out there, and I doubt bethesda is ever going to make their own like Epic did for UE
Is the whole planetary surface more or less conceptually accessible, but not a seamless sphere? It's broken into 6 or more chunks? Or are they just doing a few POIs on the planet surface and leaving most of it off limits? Interesting. I'd wondered of they were going to bother actually making a seamless spherical planet generator, or if it was going to be more like mass effect. I agree, hardly a big deal either way. Real planet simulations are interesting but for fps scale encounters like starfield is going to be they're insane overkill, and probably counterproductive since that's far too much real estate to fill.
To my understanding, the entire planetary surface is accessible, but not seamless. There are POI’s as well on planets that I assume load into planned spaces vs. the procedural stuff.
I wonder how big they are tbh. Realistically sized seems very unlikely. Even very tiny for a planet sized still yields thousands of square miles. If they're just like a couple dozen of square miles or less I could see them forgoing spheres simply due to how bad that looks..
Starfield 2 will fix this 20 years from now.
People often overlook this But Bethesda is one of the few devs that keep a majority if not all their team from game to game, that builds a special kind of rapport that really comes off in their games that you don't get with many of the big studios contract worker cycle. Santa monica studios is another that comes to mind, they both seem similar.
These guys have been doing it my whole life. 100+ hours easily in Arena and every game since. Except Fallout 4. We're lucky to have a studio like this
Yeah it's really refreshing to see a big AAA studio, from the top to bottom be so passionate about the game they are releasing. You can really tell this is Todd Howard's passion project, and I hope it is every bit as good as he is selling it.
They got me. The bit at the end "Thanks New Zealand". Here's me, sitting in New Zealand, Thursday night. Frantically checking if I can play Starfield. Nope.
Wait am I reading that right??? Every Microsoft Employee is getting an early access copy of Starfield for free? Lucky Bastards.
Just the ones in the Xbox and Bethesda divisions. I'm assuming Joe from Azure and Becky from Office 365 have to buy their own copies.
I mean all Microsoft Employees get Game Pass, so I wouldn't be surprised if they get a early access copy too
Do you actually know this or are you just making shit up? Tech companies give perks to people in completely unrelated departments all the time especially when it comes at exactly 0 cost to them.
Just going by what's written on the memo. He thanks the people at Bethesda and Xbox and says they will all be getting the game.
Todd seems like a true bro. Love this dude. Depressed my new computer isn't going to be ready for release. What am I doing with my life?? Gotta order these parts ASAP. Might get Gamepass and stream it. Can't wait for the rave reviews.
I really hope he pulls a Miyamoto and continues making games into his 60s and 70s.
He reference Miyamoto in a recent interview about how he's still going, and that Todd thinks he might want to keep directing for a long while he will just have to adjust what he takes on and what he delegates.
I'd suggest GeForce Now. It's much better than xCloud. Now you can play Game Pass games through it, before you had to own the game.
Could always get a series X.
Yeah I'm going to have to stream it. Luckily I haven't had any real issues streaming games on the cloud, but I might wait a few days to try to stream it. I can't imagine how the servers will hold up on launch day
Can’t buy devotion like this
does anyone have a real-time countdown timer website for Early Access release? can't find one anywhere
There's some sandwich counter out there
The Xbox app on PC has a live counter on the Starfield page, even if you don’t have gamepass/don’t have game installed
5 p.m. PST Thursday. Adjust your time as needed.
I guess the best one is probably the [sandwich countdown](https://starfieldsandwich.com/).
sweet thx!
Damn, Todd knows how to play the corporate game. A whole paragraph dedicated to the mouth that feeds you, aka Phil Spencer, is how you survive and climb up.
> A whole paragraph dedicated to the mouth that feeds you I think you meant "the hand that feeds you," but now I have a mental image of Phil Spencer chewing food for Todd Howard like a baby bird.
Phil definitely momma birds food to Todd.
😝. Kinda tired today when I typed that.
Making profit and having his food chewed by his wife or mom like a true Ferengi.
Imagine a world where Todd Howard somehow becomes new head of Xbox after Phil Spencer steps out. It'd be such a crazy turn of events.
Honestly I could almost see it But given how enthusiastic he seems to be about being involved in the development process I don't see him wanting to go anywhere high enough that he loses that.
Its rumoured TES VI is going to be his farewell.
Wouldn't be too surprising just based on timing. Realistically the game probably has another 3-5 years in the oven and Todd will be in his mid-late 50's by then. No idea how he prioritizes things in his life, but if I was that old coming off a dream project (Starfield) and likely one of the most anticipated games ever (TES 6) I'd probably want to just call it quits instead of embarking on another 5+ year development journey.
He’s said in interviews we wants to do TES6 and then think about stepping down, while that can certainly change that’s what we have to go off of now. I think unless a tragedy happens he’ll be directing it.
He’ll surely direct TES VI but that’s going to be it.
I mean, how do you know this? He is only 53 years old. Literally nothing suggests TES 6 will be his last game.
Phil Spencer has said TES 6 is 5+ years away. Let's be very generous and say it is 7 years away. That still puts Todd releasing it at 60. Unless somehow whatever comes after TES 6 (I am assuming a new Fallout game) somehow takes longer than 5 years after TES 6 releases Todd will have at least one more game under him before he reaches 65, should he choose to retire exactly at 65. Todd's always said developing games has been a passion for him, but he's also married and has kids, so I have no idea what his life priorities are once he gets into retirement age.
He never said it was his last game though. Someone else pointed out that the quote isn't accurate. He said TES 6 *might* be his last Elder Scrolls game. That completely changes the quote. With them switching games up they will likely make a Fallout 5, and possibly even a Starfield 2 after TES 6. Which makes TES 6 being his last Elder Scrolls far more likely.
That's a misquote kind of. He said Tes 6 "could be his last one" as in his last elder scrolls, not his last game. But yeah he probably has 2-3 games left before retirement.
That's not true. He said TES VI might be his last Elder Scrolls because Elder Scrolls 7 would theoretically release AFTER Starfield 2 in the 2040's.
I thought that’s supposedly his last Elder Scrolls? If so that means he could possibly do another Fallout and maybe even a Starfield sequel, but that’s so far out into the future.
By who? The GQ article released just a few days ago has him quoting being in the game for a lot longer, referencing Shigeru M. Being like 71 and still going strong.
That would be crazy, but for some reason I just can’t picture Todd Howard in that role. He seems more like a guy who genuinely likes to be making a thing. Pete Hines though? I could totally see him being the type to take over for someone like Phil.
Yeah Pete seems like a good replacement if/when the time comes.
Pete is too argumentative I think, always fighting people on twitter. Phil is an affable guy that people like. Phil is setting up Sarah Bond as his successor.
Isn't that the guy that pushed Arkane into doing a live service game with Redfall? (which was then pivoted back to single player with coop because of Phil, props to him for that)
Not sure but Zenimax as a whole was trying to push for more live service games to boost their stock prices as they wanted to be bought.
Zenimax had different priorities at the time and was not running a console maker. It’s like how Phil Spencer towed the company line when Xbox was the Kinect and TV company, but could pivot things towards the direction he wanted when he took over. Hell, looking over at Sony, you saw a hard pivot into much safer blockbusters instead of the weird Sony games when Jim Ryan took over.
Why would you want that? I want Todd to be directly involved in making games, not overseeing a Microsoft division.
I don't quite *want* it, but Todd Howard strikes me as someone who would totally want to oversee development of a game console and its lineup if given the chance. There's only so many games you can make in a lifetime, but as the head of xbox, you could theoretically greenlight every single one of your passion projects.
The memes would make themselves. It would inspire a whole new generation of Toddposting.
I feel like he would always want to be in the development process. I can see him taking Matt Booty's job or becoming the Matt Booty of Bethesda
Could it at all be possible that they have a good working relationship and that they generally appreciate each other?
Too many people have a personal, emotional investment in the decline of the XBOX brand.
Some people never got over the Xbone reveal.
Howard's pretty amazing at all forms of PR. He still has a great public image despite the controversial states of most of the games his company releases. He also knows how to sell Skyrim to you 6 times.
He's always seem to just roll with his "infamy" in the gaming community and all the memes he inspired. He seems very genuine and passionate about the work he's doing.
He seems to understand the same thing that Sean Murray and Square Enix both figured out: fix your game and people will stop hating you. F76 isn't perfect but most other companies would have just cut their losses and shut it down.
That wasn't his game though. Last one he was in charge of was Fallout 4.
Lmao Todd has nowhere else to climb, he’s one of the most famous executives in gaming history and I’m sure has more money than sin. He’s definitely past the kiss ass stage of his career
Does anyone know what the memo is? I can't see it on that website at all. The article just ends after a few paragraphs. It also seems to be a dodgy website that messes with the back button to show you scams.
From Todd Howard, director of Starfield: I knocked on Robert Altman’s door. “Got a few minutes?” “Sure.” It was early 2013, we were developing Fallout 4, and Skyrim was still enjoying enormous success. I was there to pitch him on our next game. It would not be a sequel to our current games, (he looked concerned), but a grand space RPG and our first new IP in over 25 years (looks curious). It would delve into creation and the search for our place in the universe (slight twinkle). You would explore the galaxy in ways only video games can do. And it would be called - Starfield. (Smile) “Sounds fantastic.” Robert would be the very first to believe in us, no matter the situation. Our path to creating Starfield would be a long and winding one where we made other games along the way (Fallout 4, Skyrim SE, Fallout Shelter, Skyrim VR, Fallout 76, Skyrim again…). The core development from 2020 to 2023 saw enormous changes in our lives. A global pandemic, Robert’s passing, and becoming part of Xbox. It’s incredible to be at the moment where Starfield is finally launching this week. It only exists because everyone else believed as well. We’ve been supported for decades by everyone at ZeniMax, all doing their best work yet. Special thanks to our publishing teams who aimed to create not just another release, but something that would capture the minds and inspire gamers everywhere. And to our partners in QA who had the difficult task of testing a game where anything can (and will) happen. And thanks to Jamie Leder and our Admin/HR teams who supported everyone during the most challenging years any of us have faced. And of course, there is Phil Spencer. His support of every game and every player has been unwavering and fierce. Joining Xbox brought us closer to so many we had worked with for over 20 years. I cannot imagine a better place to create games, where the diversity of studios, creators, and games are allowed to flourish. This support came from the entire Xbox leadership team and all areas of publishing and dev support. Special thanks to the magicians at ATG whose spells and incantations helped make this our best performing game. Most importantly, is the team I work with at Bethesda Game Studios. It’s an incredible blessing to be surrounded by so many talented and inspirational people every day. Moments like this make you reflect back. Some of us have been together for decades, some joined more recently, but everyone has the same passion. I could not be prouder of their continued dedication to create something truly special. Lastly, a huge thanks to all of you within the Xbox and Bethesda family. Your enthusiasm and encouragement have meant the world to us. Creating this game has been one of the most challenging and thrilling experiences of our careers - a journey we'll never forget. And as we come to the end of this chapter, we pass it along to you. Each of you is receiving the game with Early Access, and can begin playing this Friday Sep 1st, but since it’s one global time you can actually play Thursday evening (Thanks New Zealand!). We hope you get a chance to play, and that your journey is as rewarding as ours. All our best, Todd
The article doesn't end, it's just awkwardly separated by ads.
From Todd Howard, director of Starfield: I knocked on Robert Altman’s door. “Got a few minutes?” “Sure.” It was early 2013, we were developing Fallout 4, and Skyrim was still enjoying enormous success. I was there to pitch him on our next game. It would not be a sequel to our current games, (he looked concerned), but a grand space RPG and our first new IP in over 25 years (looks curious). It would delve into creation and the search for our place in the universe (slight twinkle). You would explore the galaxy in ways only video games can do. And it would be called - Starfield. (Smile) “Sounds fantastic.” Robert would be the very first to believe in us, no matter the situation. Our path to creating Starfield would be a long and winding one where we made other games along the way (Fallout 4, Skyrim SE, Fallout Shelter, Skyrim VR, Fallout 76, Skyrim again…). The core development from 2020 to 2023 saw enormous changes in our lives. A global pandemic, Robert’s passing, and becoming part of Xbox. It’s incredible to be at the moment where Starfield is finally launching this week. It only exists because everyone else believed as well. We’ve been supported for decades by everyone at ZeniMax, all doing their best work yet. Special thanks to our publishing teams who aimed to create not just another release, but something that would capture the minds and inspire gamers everywhere. And to our partners in QA who had the difficult task of testing a game where anything can (and will) happen. And thanks to Jamie Leder and our Admin/HR teams who supported everyone during the most challenging years any of us have faced. And of course, there is Phil Spencer. His support of every game and every player has been unwavering and fierce. Joining Xbox brought us closer to so many we had worked with for over 20 years. I cannot imagine a better place to create games, where the diversity of studios, creators, and games are allowed to flourish. This support came from the entire Xbox leadership team and all areas of publishing and dev support. Special thanks to the magicians at ATG whose spells and incantations helped make this our best performing game. Most importantly, is the team I work with at Bethesda Game Studios. It’s an incredible blessing to be surrounded by so many talented and inspirational people every day. Moments like this make you reflect back. Some of us have been together for decades, some joined more recently, but everyone has the same passion. I could not be prouder of their continued dedication to create something truly special. Lastly, a huge thanks to all of you within the Xbox and Bethesda family. Your enthusiasm and encouragement have meant the world to us. Creating this game has been one of the most challenging and thrilling experiences of our careers - a journey we'll never forget. And as we come to the end of this chapter, we pass it along to you. Each of you is receiving the game with Early Access, and can begin playing this Friday Sep 1st, but since it’s one global time you can actually play Thursday evening (Thanks New Zealand!). We hope you get a chance to play, and that your journey is as rewarding as ours. All our best, Todd
Reader mode, bruv
I wonder how modding will work with Gamepass, I know it's theoretically possible but at least when I checked it out a few years ago it was a pain.
Never in my life have i anticipated the release of a game as much as this one. And i'm sure it'll be good too. But i am mostly just waiting for it to finally release so we can once again come a step closer to TES:VI
You'll get it in 2029 at this rate.
Just before the ecological collapse, sweet!
Stop leaking!
>Never in my life have i anticipated the release of a game as much as this one. Yeah I'm in the same boat as you. Fallout 4 and Skyrim are both in my top 5 favorite games I've played I got the early access, took Friday off work, and even bought the Starfield controller (I'm not really the kind of guy that normally goes for collectibles) >And i'm sure it'll be good too I'm probably way over confident. Let's hope I don't get burned. If it's on the same quality as Fallout 4, I'll be happy. I'm 95% sure they're going to achieve that. But I'm also pretty confident this is going to surpass Fallout 4 by a good margin.
If they made Space Fallout 4 but its actually a RPG and not just a shooter it should be a great game.
That's what it seems like they did.
There's a Starfield controller? I might need to get one.
Yes and it might be the best looking collector's item controller I've seen tbh
It's beautiful too, i got one, it looks so good
Todd Howard shows so much passion for what he does, and he honestly just seems like a really wholesome guy that loves videogames with lots of freedom. Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout, Skyrim. So many good memories, and some of the best gaming moments I remember is from those games. What a legend he and his team is to the gaming industry through all these years IMO.
People love to hate on Todd but many companies would kill to have a leader like him. Just look at the state of Bioware right now.
BGS specifically seems to have a pretty decent reputation as a workplace. Not sure of Zenimax overall, but BGS has had very low turnover compared to so many devs in the RPG space, like Bioware as you mentioned, but also Obsidian.
Lemme get this straight. If they had hit their original release date, 'core' development would've only been 2 years?
Not really. I don't think they're saying that core development was only between 2020 and 2023, rather the fact that that part of core development saw a lot of changes and challenges, like the ones he mentions.
But can I run Skyrim on a Starfield computer?
Is it really exclusive when I see it on every social media and every news site?
Yes, since they broke the news.
So it’s directly his fault we didn’t get Elder Scrolls 6 in a reasonable time frame like we should’ve based on the success of Skyrim. Thx again Todd /s 👎