There are a handful of studios out there that, if they revealed they were using generative AI in their games, I'd be particularly heartbroken about. Bethesda is absolutely one of them - hand-crafted, detailed worlds and quests full of memorable moments and flair are the core pillars that helped it make some of the best RPGs of all time. Even the procedural generation used in many of Starfield's vast planets muddied the waters a bit, so injecting AI-generated content into its games could be even more damaging and disappointing. Todd Howard has previously gone on record to say that AI is not generating anything inside the studio, and in a new interview with Kinda Funny, he reaffirms that. However, he appears open to adopting AI tools that can help Bethesda tackle "big data tasks" so that developers can "move on to the creative stuff."
The Elder Scrolls 6, announced in 2018, is probably Bethesda's most anticipated game of all time. It would be a return to form for the company, which has spent a lot of the last seven years on Fallout and Starfield, among other projects, slowly but surely chipping away at its original franchise away from the spotlight.
In a recent interview with Kinda Funny Games, Bethesda creative director Todd Howard said the studio is going to return to its "classic style," for which the company has become known. The Elder Scrollsis the poster child of Bethesda Game Studios, while the other games it has worked on, i.e., Fallout 76 and Starfield, were "creative detours," Howard believes.
That classic style is characterized by Bethesda's recognizable approach to fantasy RPG elements and, naturally, the use of the Creation Engine (a new version, of course). Though it'll stay true to what fans expect, a lot of "innovation" will come as well.
And this brings me to the meat of this featurette: Bethesda has a ton to innovate on if it's to make The Elder Scrolls feel great again.
The Elder Scrolls is Bethesda's poster child. Image via Bethesda Softworks
As time progressed, Bethesda increasingly embraced a shallower, more approachable, and less complex RPG style that favors quantity over quality and believes that so long as players have things to "do" in a game, that should be enough. Because of that, we got Skyrim, which ditched stats and any kind of build complexity in favor of a streamlined set of categories aimed at removing a proper class system.
That game also had countless fetch quests, shallow "go there and do that" types of assignments, stories that rarely overlap, side missions that don't make sense in the grand narrative of the game, as well as faction quest chains that don't take your character into account, allowing them to become contradictory as well (becoming a member of multiple factions at once, for example).
The game almost completely did away with roles to be played, remaining an RPG in name only.
Skyrim isn't the worst offender, however, as Bethesda's subsequent titles had even more of these flaws. But, then again, it seems Howard considers these "creative detours," so I'll refer to their last TES game instead.
Though it pains me to accept the Creation Engine at all, I think it could be overlooked so long as Bethesda did away with these "classic" aspects of its design philosophy, not to mention the jank and the bugs the company has come to be associated with.
The Elder Scrolls 6 will utilize the Creation Engine 3, as confirmed by Todd Howard in a recent interview. This marks a shift from Creation Engine 2, previously used for Starfield.
In these days of shrinking attention spans, the success of a game is too often determined by its overture: you either capture the audience during those crucial early minutes, or you never get another chance. Developer Bethesda understood this quite some time ago, and since 1992, dramatic openings have been one of the most notable aspects of its hit RPG series, The Elder Scrolls.
