The company’s executive producer talked about three projects in the works and explained why millions continue playing Fallout and Skyrim.
We’ve got a good number of projects on the go. We’re bigger now and we do want to be putting out more stuff. We have two larger projects that are more classically the scale of what we do, but even bigger. We overlap the projects so we’re working on them at the same time, but they’re staggered. I can’t talk a lot about them, but I can say that they’re bigger than anything we’ve ever done. They’re a bit different, but definitely in the wheelhouse that people are used to from us.
Howard has also stated that developing Fallout Shelter has taught the studio a lot:
It was a huge surprise to us. Particularly how successful it was. We’ve got – what – 75 million players now? The one takeaway was that the game is somewhat unique, so for the thing we’re doing next we wanted to continue to do that. We need to not look too hard at what’s working well for other people. The game we’re doing is a very different style game, unique in the space. There isn’t something else we’re looking at for style.
Mr. Howard has also recently talked to GameSpot about the importance of Skyrim and Fallout 4. Returning to the Skyrim series after so many years of developing Fallout 4 was an extraordinary experience:
It was like seeing an old friend from high school and realizing how much you missed spending time together.
When you’re making a game like Skyrim, it’s your whole life, and you start losing perspective on, is this fun? Is this not fun? What’s good? What’s bad? Being able to come back to it, you really see it–it’s kind of one of those rare times when you sit down and you see something you made as a gamer. You kind of forget all the versions of a certain feature or what it took to get it there and you’re just playing it for what it is.
Howard also stated that Skyrim is more about letting the player forge own story, while Fallout tells a stronger but specific story. Bethesda Game Studios is thinking about telling stronger stories in open-world games when it comes to future projects:
How do we tell a better story in an open world? With each of our games we’ve had successes and failures and if you ask us internally, we have new ideas that we want to explore in the future because we feel like we haven’t really cracked it yet the way we think it could be.
So we really break it down and say, ‘Going forward, what do we think the best way to proceed is?’ Where were the times where we spent a lot of time on something, innovating, but you can’t really tell; it doesn’t show up on the screen for the amount of time that we put into it. And there are other things that we didn’t put a lot of time into that are really shining through and we should have made that one stand out even more because that was a better design feature or better bang for our development buck.”
You can find the full interview here.