{"id":34780,"date":"2023-09-08T18:00:35","date_gmt":"2023-09-08T17:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.xtremeservers.com\/blog\/from-elder-scrolls-to-starfield-how-bethesda-defined-the-role-playing-game\/"},"modified":"2023-09-08T18:00:35","modified_gmt":"2023-09-08T17:00:35","slug":"from-elder-scrolls-to-starfield-how-bethesda-defined-the-role-playing-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xtremeservers.com\/blog\/from-elder-scrolls-to-starfield-how-bethesda-defined-the-role-playing-game\/","title":{"rendered":"From Elder Scrolls to Starfield: How Bethesda Defined the Role-Playing Game"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In late 2001, the dot-com crash struck ZeniMax, and a team of thirty-some developers in the company\u2019s basement feared for their jobs. They were late delivering their new role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, to Microsoft; their board of directors had begun having doubts about the whole videogame enterprise. People were pulling seven-day workweeks on something none of them were sure would ever see the light of day. Morale was in the toilet.<\/p>\n

<\/section>\n<\/p>\n

When project leader Todd Howard called an off-site meeting, mere months ahead of launch, most of his crew thought they were being laid off. In fact, it was to be the most important moment in the studio\u2019s history. Howard had sent out emails to everyone on his team days earlier, asking them, \u201cIf you could have any title in life, what would it be?\u201d In a dim-lit hotel conference room in Rockville, Maryland, he handed out a personalized business card to each Morrowind dev, complete with their chosen honorific, and gave a brief speech. It was a rallying call that saved the game and, according to those who were there, probably the entire company.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a bad time,\u201d Howard told me in 2019. \u201cMorrowind was a very difficult crunch. There was this sense that if we don\u2019t get the game done, and done well, we would be in trouble.\u201d It had been six long years since the developer\u2019s last big hit, 1996\u2019s Daggerfall. \u201cFor me, it was kind of a no-fear moment: \u2018Well, it can\u2019t get any worse, right? We\u2019re about to go out of business, and now we have a lifeline, so you better take advantage of it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/section>\n<\/section>\n

And so they reached for the stars. Morrowind became the first Elder Scrolls game to land on consoles, roughly six months into the life cycle of the original Xbox. It sold millions on Xbox alone, rivaled only by the likes of Halo, Tom Clancy\u2019s Splinter Cell, and Fable. Howard refers to that period as \u201cthe recreation of Bethesda.\u201d Its story spans nearly four decades, from humble beginnings in sports games and movie tie-ins to blockbusters like Skyrim and Fallout 4. But so much of that journey would never have come to pass without Morrowind \u2014 and that fateful meeting they remember so vividly.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cMorrowind was kind of this galvanizing, make-or-break moment,\u201d says Skyrim environment-art lead Noah Berry. \u201cIt was the crucible by which the modern Elder Scrolls, and the studio as a whole, evolved and was shaped.\u201d Look at Bethesda\u2019s single-player titles from Oblivion on, and you\u2019ll find more or less the same formula Howard concocted for The Elder Scrolls III, a game that changed RPGs forever.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Elder Scrolls: Arena and The Introduction of Tamriel<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Years earlier, in 1994, The Elder Scrolls: Arena became a cult success thanks to its playful spell-creation system and effectively infinite fantasy world. But some folks at Bethesda weren\u2019t satisfied with the somewhat generic look of that first game, its limited number of memorable locations, or its derivative story, which began in a weekly Dungeons and Dragons campaign. For the sequel \u2014 originally called Mournhold and set in the province of Morrowind, where Arena\u2019s story had ended \u2014 the devs had a new sense of vision for what their dungeon-crawling series could be. Its first-person 3D perspective led them to push for a greater level of detail, which came in the form of their new XnGine technology, as well as a more literary style of storytelling.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Arena had been a fairly standard D&D adventure, albeit one set in an original world called Tamriel, with nine large provinces. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall would center around two of those regions, High Rock and Hammerfell, and take inspiration from sources like French literature and Vampire: The Masquerade, another tabletop game known for its gothic setting and rich mythology. Some of what Daggerfall\u2019s designers wanted to achieve proved untenable at the time; the team didn\u2019t manage to implement dragons the way they\u2019d hoped, for example. But its procedural world-generation system was a landmark achievement, allowing for more than 15,000 unique locations. (For comparison\u2019s sake, the original Diablo, released the following year, had 16 levels.) The sequel became a huge triumph for Bethesda, selling over 100,000 copies in just 48 hours.<\/p>\n

Arena’s procedural world-generation system was a landmark achievement, allowing for more than 15,000 unique locations.<\/section>\n

After Daggerfall, the development arm of the company \u2014 eventually rechristened as Bethesda Game Studios, to differentiate it from the publishing division \u2014 would adopt a fairly different game-design philosophy, particularly under Todd Howard\u2019s direction. And yet much of the studio\u2019s history reflects the awesome ambition of those early Elder Scrolls games, including this year\u2019s Starfield, which leverages procedural generation and boasts more than a thousand explorable planets.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

As audiences and tech alike headed for a new millennium, the teams working on the Elder Scrolls series thought constantly about ways to make their next game better, and more like the dense, sprawling fantasy epic in their imaginations. A pair of spinoffs, Battlespire and Redguard, underperformed commercially, but Redguard in particular set a new standard for the Elder Scrolls\u2019 world-building. The game\u2019s print manual included The Pocket Guide to the Empire, an in-world lore bible containing references to gods, goddesses, a \u201cDragonborn,\u201d and \u201cthe disappearance of the Dwarves,\u201d along with an extensive history of the various peoples of Tamriel.<\/p>\n

<\/section>\n

When lead designer Ken Rolston came aboard the project in 1996, Elder Scrolls III was meant to be set in a place called the Summerset Isles, home of the High Elves. But some people on the team, including concept artist Michael Kirkbride and writer Kurt Kuhlmann, were passionate about the volcanic island of Vvardenfell. So the idea for a game set in the land of the Elves, ruled by a Tribunal, was transplanted to Morrowind.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Noah Berry recalls seeing early documentation for The Elder Scrolls III that described a sequel encompassing the entire territory of Morrowind. \u201cThat was an initial plan, if not the initial plan,\u201d he says. But eventually the scope of the game was whittled down to the island of Vvardenfell itself, and the surrounding areas were cut during the preproduction phase. With Rolston and Howard steering the project, the team sought to trade Daggerfall\u2019s vastness and cookie-cutter environments for a more detailed and believable world \u2014 one with several thousand lines of voice-over.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cMorrowind was a healthy steering away from what Daggerfall had done,\u201d says Berry. \u201cWe consciously pivoted to: \u2018Let\u2019s hand-build the world.\u2019 And so Morrowind had very little to no procedural generation, if I remember correctly.\u201d Part of the reasoning for this was the team\u2019s love for immersive-sim games like Ultima Underworld and System Shock, which took advantage of the first-person perspective by giving players a greater degree of interactivity with objects in the world.<\/p>\n

One of Morrowind’s greatest innovations was NPC scheduling \u2014 the illusion that non-player characters live full, human lives<\/section>\n

The Elder Scrolls III took a more kitchen-sink approach to game design, favoring density, character behavior, and artfully arranged \u201cclutter\u201d over scale alone. It\u2019s an approach that\u2019s stood the test of time, and helped define later Bethesda RPGs like Skyrim and Fallout 4. One of its greatest innovations, inspired by Ultima VII: The Black Gate, was \u201cNPC scheduling\u201d \u2014 the illusion that non-player characters throughout the game world live full, human lives, working and eating and sleeping at designated times. \u201cWe wanted it to feel like this simulated, detailed space that persisted and existed after you had shut your computer off at the end of the night,\u201d Berry explains. \u201cAnd one of the ways that came to life was this idea that NPCs were not just talking dispensers for quests, stuck in a static spot saying their lines over and over again. They were real entities doing their own thing as much as possible, as much as was allowed by the crudity of our pathfinding system and their ability to know where they were in the polygon soup.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

According to Fallout 4 lead producer Jeff Gardiner, it was Morrowind\u2019s sequel, Oblivion, that really put these systems to the test. \u201cWhen you do a simulated AI, they use a lot of CPU cycles, and that\u2019s where you get a lot of limits in terms of creature density. Even frame rate is oftentimes affected by that,\u201d he says. \u201cBut the designers at Bethesda are big proponents of making NPCs feel as real as they could within the technical limits of the time. When you play a lot of modern open-world games, they\u2019re still very scripted. Over time, things have gotten a little better, but they don\u2019t have these eat-and-sleep packages and desires and all these things that they would wake up and do \u2014 where you see some of the most amazing interactions, and you also see some of the \u2018jank.\u2019 But jank comes with the territory. I\u2019m a big fan of RimWorld and other games that do this, but they\u2019re doin\u2019 it in like two-dimensional, top-down views, so they don\u2019t need quite the graphics horsepower.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/section>\n

\u201cA lot of big open-world games are very cleverly resetting things behind your back,\u201d Berry adds. \u201cBut as a player, if you pick up a cup and put it two inches to the right in a Bethesda game \u2014 when you come back 200 hours later, it\u2019s still there in that spot you moved it to.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

As with Daggerfall\u2019s missing dragons, there were ideas the Morrowind team would\u2019ve loved to implement, like real-time boat travel or Silt Striders that moved naturalistically through the world, that just weren\u2019t possible given the constraints of the time. In game development, every feature comes at the cost of another. \u201cThere\u2019s a phrase that the Bethesda studio likes to bandy about,\u201d says Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith, \u201cand that is that we can do anything, but we can\u2019t do everything.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone always dreamed big about the worlds. I think that\u2019s probably what drew a lot of us together,\u201d Morrowind world artist Mark Bullock observes. \u201cGrowing up, I was never that much into video games, but I loved tabletop games. I was playing D&D with my friends, and I\u2019d be like, \u2018But the picture in my head is so much better.\u2019 So that\u2019s where we started seeing the possibilities: \u2018How can we move toward these open worlds that we played in pen-and-paper campaigns?\u2019 Whether it be fantasy or sci-fi. I think everyone just wanted it to be more convincing, with that sense of joy and discovery of moving through a space. And have a good driving story, but with the freedom to pay attention to it or not pay attention to it. That\u2019s been the backbone of Bethesda, even going back to Arena\u2019s side quests. As the worlds get bigger, and the players get to have more opportunities to express themselves, that\u2019s still the core.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Into Oblivion<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Although wildly different from Daggerfall, The Elder Scrolls IV offered another example of Bethesda Game Studios going big in response to the game that preceded it. If Morrowind could be described as \u201cAlice in Wonderland meets Dune meets The Dark Crystal,\u201d as Berry puts it, its sequel would be the Elder Scrolls series\u2019s answer to the Lord of the Rings films. The fourth entry would aim for a wider audience, more approachable writing, and some familiar iconography \u2014 yet not without taking advantage of the fact that the roman numeral IV could be found dead center in Tamriel\u2019s name for hell: Oblivion.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Given the Xbox 360 era\u2019s higher polygon counts and the addition of pixel shading \u2014 but still being a scrappy studio of fewer than 50 people \u2014 Oblivion returned to procedural generation for things like rocks and trees. It also added a number of quality-of-life features absent from the launch version of Morrowind, including a full-fledged quest journal, waypoints, a horizontal compass, and fast travel.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWe added in things to make the user experience more palatable \u2014 things we learned from other games or we wanted internally,\u201d says Gardiner. \u201cAnd I think that there are some games today that have gone too far with that, where it\u2019s too convenient. I get to a new zone, and there\u2019s this big list of chores. For me, I like a sense of discovery, which that stuff totally kills. Two, I\u2019m also OCD when it comes to gaming; I\u2019ve been trained my whole life to do all the stuff in every zone before I go on to the next one. And I\u2019ve had a lot of these big open-world games where I actually stopped 70, 80 percent of the way through because I can\u2019t not do everything. And then by the time I get toward the end, I\u2019m burnt out. I\u2019ve sucked the marrow out of the bone of the game. So that\u2019s the magic of Elden Ring \u2014 because Elden Ring didn\u2019t do any of that. Baldur\u2019s Gate 3 isn\u2019t doing a lot of that. You need to find a balance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oblivion was a challenging project for Bethesda for a number of reasons, not the least of which was Microsoft deciding, late in the development of the Xbox 360, to ship its new console without a hard drive<\/section>\n

\u201cAudience expectations continued to change over the years,\u201d Nesmith says. \u201cI was a game developer for decades, and if you go way back, you find that games are extremely unforgiving \u2014 lack of save games, and the fact that you could die really, really easily. They were difficult; in those early days, what was celebrated was mastery. It was me against the machine. As the audience matured, and the industry matured, it became more about telling fun stories and less about the fact that I had to be better than the software. It became, \u2018Let\u2019s have an experience together, and it doesn\u2019t have to be something that\u2019s nearly impossible. It can be something that\u2019s fun in and of itself.\u2019 And that goes, too, for things like waypoints and fast travel. In the early days, you had to walk everywhere. Well, where\u2019s the fun in that if you\u2019ve already been there?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Oblivion was a challenging project for Bethesda for a number of reasons, not the least of which was Microsoft deciding, late in the development of the Xbox 360, to ship its new console without a hard drive. \u201cWhich is quite a nightmare for an open-world, streaming game,\u201d says Gardiner. Still, Howard\u2019s notion of capitalizing on the success of Peter Jackon\u2019s Rings trilogy proved out. It became another bottled-lightning moment for Bethesda, and, for some, The Elder Scrolls IV remains the sweet spot. Oblivion might lack the handcrafted, richly imagined quality of Morrowind\u2019s ashen landscapes. But the tools it gave players for navigating its own province of Cyrodiil have endured ever since.<\/p>\n

<\/section>\n

And where Morrowind had relied heavily on dice rolls and under-the-hood statistics for its combat, Oblivion strove for a more intuitive and tactile style of swordplay.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt sucks to swing a sword and miss,\u201d Gardiner reflects. \u201cWhen you\u2019re standing in front of something, you\u2019re swinging madly, and you\u2019re hitting every third time, it feels like a bug. It works in top-down tactical games because you see the dice rolls and you understand it. A lot of those early games were an attempt to mimic Dungeons and Dragons, so they used these mechanics. But we thought, \u2018No, it needs to be more skill-based, where you actually have to hit the thing.\u2019 Even through Oblivion, I believe we had a ray-cast system where you did the attack, there was a ray that cast out, and if the enemy was within the cone of that ray, it registered a hit. So it had nothing to do with collision spheres, or any kind of collision on the sword. We struggled with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/section>\n

Dropping Morrowind\u2019s dice-driven combat in favor of a more hack-and-slash approach to the action was the right move, but it presented its own unique set of problems that persisted through the two games that followed. \u201cStun-locking\u201d was a popular complaint among players, who found that your character\u2019s hit reaction, or stagger animation, could leave you vulnerable for longer than it took for an opponent to start attacking again. \u201cYou just get locked, especially if two of them are hitting you,\u201d says Gardiner. \u201cSo what we had to do in the end \u2014 and why the combat never felt as good as I thought it could \u2014 is because we never got those timings down. And we had to randomize the hit reactions. That stopped the stun-lock problem, but it also made it feel weird, because sometimes you\u2019d swing a sword and hit, but you wouldn\u2019t see the guy flinch. So there was this weird disconnect; the combat didn\u2019t feel very responsive.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Oblivion also made use of smaller bits of downloadable content players could pay for to modify their game, even on Xbox and PlayStation. (Its widely criticized \u201cHorse Armor Pack\u201d has become something of a meme.) If you look at Bethesda RPGs that followed, these decisions still reverberate through the Elder Scrolls series today, as well as in the franchise the company acquired in 2007: Interplay\u2019s Fallout.<\/p>\n

<\/section>\n

Fallout and Reinventing RPG Combat<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Fallout 3, Bethesda\u2019s open-world, fully 3D entry in a series known for its old-school isometric RPGs, had a lot to live up to \u2014 and some significant problems to solve from a design standpoint. Players knew and loved the world that Interplay and Black Isle had created. Thankfully, so did Bethesda, dating back to the studio\u2019s Redguard and Morrowind days. Not wanting to make only Elder Scrolls games, Howard once toyed with the idea of a game series called Apocalypse Road, along the lines of the early Fallout games, with the same immersive open-world design that had helped make Western role-playing games like Morrowind viable on consoles. He and the rest of the company fought hard to get out of ZeniMax\u2019s dusty warehouse basement and break out into the mainstream. With Fallout, they had a chance to do it again.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The move from Tolkienesque Tamriel to the irradiated rubble of postnuclear Washington, D.C., meant figuring out how to make first-person gunplay feel at home in a Fallout sequel. \u201cWe were operating under the tagline that this would be \u2018Oblivion with guns,\u2019 and that\u2019s kind of how we approached it,\u201d Bruce Nesmith recalls. \u201cWe wanted all the best things about the Elder Scrolls games \u2014 the open world, interesting character creation, lots and lots of loot and things to pick up \u2014 but with the Fallout background.\u201d<\/p>\n

VATs was an attempt to make Fallout 3 more palatable for people who weren\u2019t into twitch combat<\/section>\n

Bethesda\u2019s solution was VATS (\u201cVault-Tec Assisted Targeting System\u201d), a slow-motion mode you use to target specific body parts on a given enemy, without having to react as quickly as you would if you were playing a shooter like Doom. It didn\u2019t require you to aim so much as make decisions, which fit with the turn-based combat of the original Fallout. Similar ideas had been used by BioWare, with its dice-based Dungeons and Dragons combat for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Action would play out in real time, but the player could pause, evaluate the battlefield, and issue commands.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were afraid we were going to make the RPG too action-focused, and turn off the RPG people,\u201d Gardiner says. \u201cThat\u2019s where VATS came from. It was an attempt to make it more palatable for people who weren\u2019t into twitch combat. First-person shooters were in their heyday back then, but not everybody played them. People were coming from Baldur\u2019s Gate II and other role-playing games, so it was this big conundrum. That combat evolved quite a bit. First-person melee is very difficult to pull off. Some games have done great at it, but you can\u2019t see three-sixty around you. You might get little reticle indicators and stuff, but it can be a chaotic experience.\u201d Ironically, he says, Bethesda largely perfected melee combat for the sequel, Fallout 4, a game in which people tend to avoid melee weapons.<\/p>\n

<\/section>\n

\u201cWith Fallout 3, we were very concerned. I think the whole team was,\u201d says Noah Berry. \u201cIt was a dramatic tone shift across the board. There were some things that translated very nicely, in a gameplay-loop kind of manner, but we were extremely self-conscious about how to go from our more colorful, atmospheric fantasy \u2014 that Alan Lee, Lord of the Rings, brooding fantasy world \u2014 into Fallout.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWe weren\u2019t used to writing with modern dialogue. We weren\u2019t used to writing with something as simple as cuss words,\u201d Nesmith says. \u201cAnd some of our early attempts at it were positively dreadful. Emil Pagliarulo, who was the lead designer for Fallout 3, really helped us get into the modern vocabulary and how to make all that stuff feel right. Because that was trickier than we had anticipated.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

From a world-building standpoint, Fallout 3 was also a great challenge for the art team. Improvements in graphical fidelity had led to a huge increase in workload, so they were doing more hand-painted textures than ever before, putting in more hours per area (or \u201ccell\u201d), and struggling with the limited kit pieces used to construct the environments. \u201cThey were like chunks of rooms,\u201d world artist Nate Purkeypile remembers. \u201cThis is a corner piece, this is a wall piece, and it has the whole floor and ceiling. Whereas by the time we got to Fallout 4, going through Skyrim, that started to break apart more and more, so you could have all this destruction, and every dungeon was a lot more custom that way.\u201d He compares the process to putting together a LEGO kit, which he grew up loving to do.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Enter the Dragonborn<\/strong><\/h2>\n

After the artistic and technical hurdles of Oblivion and Fallout 3, Bethesda Game Studios hit another high point with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, one of the most beloved games ever made. Skyrim combined the team\u2019s love of Norse mythology, \u201clow fantasy\u201d like Conan the Barbarian, and the snowy, pine-laden mountainscapes of the Pacific Northwest. They sought out native Scandinavian speakers to lend authenticity to the game\u2019s considerable voice-over cast, which included Christopher Plummer, Max von Sydow, and series mainstay Lynda Carter. And they pushed their tools and engine to new heights, crafting the franchise\u2019s most lifelike game world to date.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Nesmith and Kurt Kuhlmann collaborated on a new kind of dynamic procedural content they dubbed the Radiant Story system, which introduced emergent quest lines based on how the player behaved in the game. The idea being that players could never truly run out of things to do in Skyrim. Where Morrowind and Oblivion had emphasized NPC scheduling as a way to add verisimilitude to their respective worlds, Skyrim would stretch things even further, with characters that reacted to the user in more meaningful ways.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cKuhlmann and I worked really hard, on Skyrim, to redefine procedural content \u2014 to try and make it feel less rote or mechanical or bland,\u201d Nesmith recalls. \u201cAnd I think we had a decent amount of success in that. But there\u2019s been a couple of times throughout all of Bethesda\u2019s games where the realization was kind of slapped in our face that, you know, totally procedural content is not what the audience wants. There\u2019s a certain amount of procedural processes that can be acceptable and can enhance the game, but at the end of the day those elements are tools in a very large toolkit for creating fun for the player. And they are not the end-all, be-all.\u201d<\/p>\n

You could more or less do what you wanted on Skyrim. [We] basically snuck in Blackreach, which is kind of a big thing to sneak in when it\u2019s not on the schedule!<\/section>\n

This was a point in Bethesda\u2019s history when folks could focus their passions on specific things they wanted to see in the game, as with earlier titles, while also taking full advantage of better hardware and a better understanding of what their Creation Engine was capable of. Nesmith pitched Todd Howard on the idea of overhauling the magic system, and was given a lot of leeway \u2014 along with programmer Steve Meister and some others \u2014 to revamp the way spells worked, and how elements like lightning, fire, and ice behaved.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cYou could more or less do what you wanted on Skyrim,\u201d Purkeypile says. \u201cMe and Joel Burgess and Daryl Brigner snuck in Blackreach, basically, which is kind of a big thing to sneak in when it\u2019s not on the schedule.\u201d Blackreach stands as one of the things players remember and cherish the most from Skyrim \u2014 a vast subterranean region filled with bioluminescent flora and fauna, hidden laboratories, and interconnected Dwemer ruins. \u201cThat\u2019s part of why I liked that era of the studio the most. There\u2019s a lot of trust that you\u2019re putting in people. Like, \u2018Hey, go make something cool. That\u2019s why we hired you.\u2019 And not just checking off another thing on a list.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/section>\n

Skyrim\u2019s crowning achievement, perhaps, was its implementation of dragons \u2014 the return of the Nords\u2019 world-destroying gods of legend, long thought dead forever. It was a herculean technological feat, with its own \u201cstrike team\u201d dedicated to making the noble creatures work as intended. But it was also the realization of a dream dating back to the Daggerfall days. \u201cTodd was all over dragons. That was something that he very much wanted to shepard,\u201d says Nesmith. \u201cAnd it was a big lift. It was a lot harder than we thought it was going to be.\u201d Like the VATS system, Skyrim\u2019s dragons took years of steady work, right up until the moment the game shipped.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThings are very broken for a long time, like dragons flying backwards and shooting up from the ground,\u201d explains Purkeypile. \u201cThat\u2019s really true for any open-world game with all these systems at play. It worked out in the end, but you have to kinda have faith for a long time that it\u2019ll be fixed. Just not too much faith.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cAt one point, for the Giants, one of the values that imparted momentum upon a strike got set wrong. It\u2019s akin to somebody putting an extra zero on the end of that number,\u201d Nesmith recalls. \u201cAnd so when the Giant hits you, you went flying. And I mean up above the clouds, you\u2019re looking down on the entire map, and you can see stuff you shouldn\u2019t really be able to see. Todd and the other leads, including myself, thought that was just absolutely hysterical. So it\u2019s like, \u2018We gotta keep that in.\u2019 We dialed it back to where it was a little more reasonable, but to this day, you get hit by a Giant, you go flying through the air and rag-doll to an insane amount. Because it was just fun to watch that happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

How Fallout 4 Was the Guinea Pig for Starfield<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Before Skyrim went out the door, a small team was already hard at work on Fallout 4. Their concept art depicted a post-apocalyptic Boston, with its colonial U.S. history and MIT-driven science community inspiring the retrofuture Commonwealth in equal measure. Purkeypile flew into the city and took countless photographs of Fenway Park, the real-world basis for the location he\u2019d be spending most of his virtual time in for the next few years: Diamond City, \u201cthe great green jewel\u201d of the Commonwealth.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWith Fallout 4, we took an important step toward not shying away from color,\u201d Noah Berry explains. Where earlier Bethesda RPGs had favored muted colors and selective palettes, the art team wanted Fallout 4 to be recognizable as a 20th-century coastal cityscape, the atom bomb notwithstanding. They studied artwork from the period, and it\u2019s probably no accident that the game was in development while Mad Men aired. Naturally, it came out looking like an Edward Hopper painting.<\/p>\n

<\/section>\n

A new generation of hardware allowed for huge improvements to Bethesda\u2019s level-of-detail system, or LOD, which players can see in the long-distance vistas when standing atop a tall building, aboard the Prydwen airship, or along the harbor. It\u2019s certainly one of the best-looking games Bethesda Game Studios has made, down to technological leaps in performance capture, facial animation, saccadic eye movement, and lighting. Upwards of 40% of the game\u2019s 111,000 lines of dialogue were recorded by the two actors voicing the player character, Courtenay Taylor and Brian T. Delaney \u2014 quite a change from Skyrim\u2019s silent hero.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

One of the pie-in-the-sky ideas Todd Howard had for Fallout 4 early on was a settlement-building system, a Sims-like diversion for players to fool around with when they\u2019re not off adventuring. It seemed likely to be too difficult, and many thought it would be the first feature to get cut. But after some experimentation, a team led by Steve Meister managed to get the building mode working, and it\u2019s a large part of Fallout 4\u2019s magic. So much so that it became the basis for Fallout 76, an online multiplayer spinoff.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The Final Frontier<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Looking ahead to Starfield and its emphasis on customizable spacecraft, it\u2019s easy to spot the creative lineage. \u201cAnd if you look throughout all of Bethesda\u2019s games, you can start to see that,\u201d says Bruce Nesmith, who worked on the starship systems before retiring from the studio in 2021 to write novels. \u201cIt started with being able to buy and own a home, which we did in Oblivion, and then slowly it got better and better. One of the DLCs for Skyrim was something I personally worked very hard on, which was the Hearthfire expansion, and it just got taken further and further in Fallout 4 and then Fallout 76. So building bases, and being able to customize your spaceship, is just a natural outgrowth of that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

For years, Howard daydreamed about Bethesda\u2019s \u201cspace game,\u201d and would talk openly about it with others in the studio, but the timing had to be right. You couldn\u2019t just knock out something of that scale, with a thousand planets and interstellar travel, alongside a Fallout 4 or Elder Scrolls VI. In the mid-to-late \u201990s, Bethesda went so far as to announce a collaborative project with Centropolis Entertainment, called The 10th Planet, which was delayed a handful of times before ultimately being canceled. Nesmith and others worked for years on that first attempt \u2014 which had its own in-depth system for starship customization and space combat. But it would\u2019ve been closer to Bethesda\u2019s version of TIE Fighter, the popular Star Wars dogfighting sim of that era, with Earth fending off an alien invasion.<\/p>\n

For years, Howard daydreamed about Bethesda\u2019s \u201cspace game,\u201d and would talk openly about it with others in the studio, but the timing had to be right.<\/section>\n

The team at Bethesda is full of Star Wars fans, Howard chief among them, but Starfield has more in common with the grounded, dirt-under-the-nails futures of Ridley Scott\u2019s Alien and Stanley Kubrick\u2019s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It poses a fascinating question: If space is the final frontier, so to speak, for open-world games, at what point do all those pixels and planetary bodies begin to lose Bethesda\u2019s signature \u201ccluttered\u201d feel? Sure, Starfield looks to fit with the studio\u2019s long tradition of single-player RPGs, from the procedural dungeons of Arena and Daggerfall to the glittering horizons of Skyrim and Fallout 4. But what\u2019s the essence of that tradition? What keeps us coming back to the worlds of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, year after year, to make a new character and step out into that harsh light of a dawning adventure?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThe big word would be freedom. Freedom to make your character the way you want to make them,\u201d Nesmith says. \u201cYou\u2019ll notice that we don\u2019t really have classes. From Daggerfall on, characters are a conglomeration of whatever attributes you want to assign them. That\u2019s true in the Fallout series, the Elder Scrolls series. Freedom to go where you want. Todd\u2019s very fond of saying, \u2018If you can see it, you can go there.\u2019 And you don\u2019t have to follow a storyline the way we present it to you. Coming out of character gen, if you want to go left rather than straight, hey, go for it. That freedom is probably the number-one thing that defines a Bethesda game.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe first thing that comes to mind is world simulation and persistence. The level of detail,\u201d says Berry. \u201cPresenting the world as though it\u2019s a real place that the player can interact with to increasingly complex degrees, and in ways that also tie back to and influence the moment-to-moment gameplay. And how big a bite they take off of what they\u2019re trying to chew \u2014 we\u2019re gonna go for it. I can picture everybody\u2019s faces that I knew, and conversations along the way, and they loved what they were doing and sharing that with people. Gently pulling other people into that love, that explorative interaction in a virtual space.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

With the release of Starfield, Bethesda\u2019s first new universe in decades, there\u2019s a palpable excitement among a certain kind of player. Whether or not it lives up to its promise in the minds of fans or the folks who made it is not something that will be decided in a matter of days. But it\u2019s a welcome reminder, some eight years after the launch of Fallout 4, of why we care about these games so much. Characters like spymaster Caius Cosades, Piper Wright, and Preston Garvey illustrate how a Bethesda RPG is defined not just by its vast environments but also the people who live there.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

And that includes the user, from the casual role-player indulging their vampire-lord fantasies to the hobbyist game designer building their own custom modules with the Creation Kit. A new Bethesda game is only the start; countless stories await that the developers themselves can\u2019t possibly foresee. More than any dungeon or spell or starship, the player is the key ingredient.<\/p>\n