Name: ベセスダ・ゲームスタジオのトッド・ハワードが自社ゲームの歴史を解説 | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-01-31T09:46:30.000Z
Duration: 15 min 57 s
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I am Todd Howard here at Bethesda Game Studios.

To-infinitive

You might know me from games like Skyrim, the Fallout series, and now Starfield, and I'm here to talk to Wired about some of the games that we've made.

What people don't know about this game, it's one of the first full 3D shooters...

...where you look at controls today with mouse-look controls and using WSAD.

We're talking, like, 10 people, 12 people, tops.

Everybody had to do a lot of different things, so I did a bit of programming.

What's fun with this is the old manual that came with the game.

There's a lot of cool artwork here, and one of our concept artists did a sketch of the core team here, positioned as if we were the resistance in the Terminator world.

And there's me in the back, and I remember David Plunkett here, the artist who drew it, just said,

Whenever you're on a team, even if it's four people or 400 people, learning how to use everybody's skills and work together is, you know, what gets you the best game.

So, you know, a couple of these games, starting with Terminator, is the beginnings for me at Bethesda, and there's a couple of different phases and chapters in terms of the games we made, the platforms that we're on, and how everybody worked together.

Daggerfall is a game where so much of it is a giant procedural world where we're relying on the computer to generate all of the content and put the individual things that we had built kind of in smart places around the world.

How we built the world is we have a height map, where you get a bunch of vertices at a certain period, and then you're building a height map for the landscape, and then instancing, building 3D objects that get replicated over and over on that height map. And believe it or not, that's how we build games today.

It also pushes for us, as we do role-playing games, what kind of character that you're going to create.

So Daggerfall's character system really is this jump up in terms of defining yourself, what are the advantages of your character, what are the disadvantages of your character, and brings in for the first time the Elder Scrolls skill system that so many people know now from games like Skyrim.

And this game had a lot of success, really brought the Elder Scrolls to a new audience.

Redguard is the first game that I was the main project leader on. Didn't do that well. It's the last kind of

DOS-based PC game that we made. It might be one of the last DOS games.

It's right when 3D acceleration starts coming out. Really didn't hit a technology window or a gameplay style. It's listed as an adventure game, but it's a true genre mash-up. It has some adventure game elements.

It has action game elements. It has some role-playing elements. I guess you could say at that time, we started making a lot of games instead of focusing, and none of them turned out really, really great. And the company was in a really difficult position financially, and I did feel responsible, and I kind of stepped back from it and said, it's a really good game. Where did it not resonate? What's the takeaway?

We made a very, very small game. I think it's well-crafted, but we weren't as ambitious as we could have been, and not what our audience we'd had at the time from Daggerfall and Arena really wanted from us when it came to The Elder Scrolls.

We probably have one more shot if we're going to stay in business, so let's go all-in.

The company was kind of sold to ZeniMax Media, a new company, and reformed around that.

The decision came down, we're going to have one team. It's going to be under Todd, and we're going to do Morrowind.

We aimed very high. We were very, very ambitious to bring back

The Elder Scrolls with a core team that we had had, but taking the learnings from a game like Redguard, where we are hand-building a world, but now we're doing it on a larger scale compared to the games people know today. It's actually still very, very small, but it's very, very detailed. The other big thing that comes with Morrowind, we finally took it to console. So if we go back to the year 2000,

Microsoft is thinking about creating the Xbox, and technically it was great for us. It's a very

It has a hard drive, so many things that we would be looking for in a console, and the big question was, how do we translate the controls and all of those things?

Fortunately, we are all here today, because this game was a huge success. I was stunned.

Xbox at the time, it became the second best-selling game behind Halo.

Instead of coming out with a quick sequel to Morrowind, why don't we take four years and really go ambitious again for the next console, with hardware that doesn't exist.

Team size now is getting up to around 60, 70 people, and this is a game where the core group from Morrowind was still here. We could build on that and be ambitious.

We changed the technology hugely again, getting into pixel shaders, having to guess on hardware.

So whenever you're doing technology in your own side of masses of amounts of content and art and design, and then you have a moving hardware target, it's the most difficult game development or any type of exercise that you could do as it comes to tech.

There was a moment we were making the game with Xbox where that console didn't have as much memory as we wanted, and when they finally called us and told us that they were doubling the memory on the console they were shipping, we threw a party here, and I have never seen programmers look so happy in my entire life. This was a game that for many reasons it vaulted us to an audience we had never expected to see on the

PC and the Xbox. It comes out later on PlayStation and it really starts this other era of games for us, the 360 era.

We were asked, what else does the team want to do, what do you want to do

Todd? It'd be good to have more than one franchise or one game every four to five years. At the top of our list was

Fallout. It was a series that we had loved that had come out a while ago and we were able to get the license. This game comes out I believe about two and a half years only after

Oblivion. It uses a very similar technology base that we have built.

Xbox 360. One of the things that happens with games is knowing your tools, knowing the level of technology, and getting your whole team used to working with that pays big dividends.

It's also really special because we're picking up a franchise that we hadn't worked in before. It's very new for us, it's very exciting, but how is it going to resonate when we translate basically somebody else's work the way we would do it or the style of game that we enjoyed best and this game was even more popular than Oblivion.

Some of that audience came with us and it also found an all new audience because yes, there's post-apocalyptic things in movies and literature and games obviously, but really there's nothing like

Fallout. It's the world before the bombs fall.

This world where the view of the nuclear future is this utopia that then gets destroyed. And it also has my favorite beginning of a game.

This idea that when you leave the vault, you would spend your whole life there and how do you make the player feel that way? So us jumping through this montage of these periods of your life, I think it's on your first birthday in the game, when you're a baby and you're able to walk around, you press the button and the baby says dada.

That's actually my son on his first birthday that I recorded saying that back to me, so very special game for me. And that sits right with Oblivion.

Well I think the one we're best known for is Skyrim.

Now the team has grown. Now we're about a hundred people. You're looking at a team that grew from Morrowind to Oblivion to Fallout 3 and then to Skyrim.

We were really firing on all cylinders in Skyrim and it shows. We also started pushing the modding community.

Modding is when you modify a game. You take it, you change something. People want to create their own adventures or artwork or anything.

Our games allow it. We're huge fans of it. It's kind of how I started back on the Apple II, changing other games. It's still a complicated role-playing game, but the number of people who had never played a game like ours or some people, not even any video game, they came to Skyrim.

So that right there is kind of that 360 era for us with our role-playing games where they find an audience that we never ever expected to find.

A level of popularity and us here learning how to make these games. The team's about 110 or so after

Skyrim and we set our sights on the next Fallout.

Skyrim is the first creation engine game where we had redone a lot of the technology that then feeds into Fallout 4.

New scripting system, how we're handling all of the NPCs and the AI.

Where the technology level jumps up again and we had a very, very dynamic world with this game. If you look back in Morrowind, we have NPCs that feel believable for that era.

They're signposts. As we go into Oblivion, we push that. The NPCs could wander around. They had day-night schedules. They went to bed. You could poison them by stealing all the food and then just putting poison apples around. They would decide to eat that. Fallout 4, it does feel like a good action game in your hands, but it has those RPG systems. Everything can be used for crafting or used in some respect. So everything you pick up has these base components. Build your own settlements, modify your guns, modify your power armor.

Minute to minute, I think Fallout 4 is a huge success for us for just how a game feels in your hands.

So we have Fallout 4 and then really an offshoot of Fallout 4 that is multiplayer.

Every game we do, everyone asks us to do multiplayer. We usually decide, obviously, not to. With Fallout 4, we had gotten inspired by these online survival games a lot of us were playing.

We said, well, if we ever did multiplayer for Fallout, that's how we would do it.

It borrows a lot of systems from Fallout 4. It's the first game really where we do that, where you can see things from the previous game almost directly in it.

And despite its issues, we had a lot of successes. We built our own online platform from scratch.

Sold really well, we had a core audience playing the game despite its problems who were telling us, we love this.

Please fix it. We joined with our community and having that communication about what would make the game better, how do we go about it.

And us here learning how to get in a cadence and continue to update a game, put our heads down, do the hard work.

And today, five years later, it is one of our most played games.

Now a very big success for us both in terms of what it's doing for players, but also it made us much, much better developers going through a difficult process.

The most ambitious game that we've made and the scale of it dwarfs everything that we had done so far.

For a long time, we wanted to do a space game.

Something that I've wanted to do for a long time.

And something new outside of Fallout and Elder Scrolls.

So we did our first new IP in almost 30 years.

Started development right after Fallout 4.