The Elder Scrolls 6 taking a backseat to Starfield was a matter of the Todd Howard dragging Bethesda along for the ride, Skyrim's co-lead has suggested.
ES6 development needs to take exactly as long as possible, it would’ve been a disaster if it launched in the pace of Starfield. There exists people who still find new things after hundreds of hours on Skyrim, and ES6 is expected to be a title surpassing it, which is a really high bar.
If a higher proportion of the team actually cared about what they were making, the results should have been better and arrived faster. When creatives are creating things because they’re told they have to, what they make is typically not their best work. For the ones that had been at BGS for a while, they might have had lots of ideas that weren’t ready to be included in Skyrim, then they mulled over in the back of their mind while making Fallout 4, and could have worked on right away if the next project had been TES VI.
Starfield was in dev for 8 years. If they can’t pull it off in 8 years, they aren’t going to pull it off. Witcher 3 was done in 3.5 years. Skyrim was about 6 years. Crimson Desert was around 7 years. These games are all vastly more rich than Starfield, and I think Todd has lost the plot. Games need time, but they can also become a narrow, over baked turd. I worry for Bethesda’s future.
ES6 development needs to take exactly as long as possible, it would’ve been a disaster if it launched in the pace of Starfield. There exists people who still find new things after hundreds of hours on Skyrim, and ES6 is expected to be a title surpassing it, which is a really high bar.
If a higher proportion of the team actually cared about what they were making, the results should have been better and arrived faster. When creatives are creating things because they’re told they have to, what they make is typically not their best work. For the ones that had been at BGS for a while, they might have had lots of ideas that weren’t ready to be included in Skyrim, then they mulled over in the back of their mind while making Fallout 4, and could have worked on right away if the next project had been TES VI.
Starfield was in dev for 8 years. If they can’t pull it off in 8 years, they aren’t going to pull it off. Witcher 3 was done in 3.5 years. Skyrim was about 6 years. Crimson Desert was around 7 years. These games are all vastly more rich than Starfield, and I think Todd has lost the plot. Games need time, but they can also become a narrow, over baked turd. I worry for Bethesda’s future.