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[JEMC]

Zkuq said:

JEMC said:

Skyrim's retired lead designer says anything other than the 'Bethesda usual' has to be approved by Todd Howard: 'He doesn't believe it's true, but unfortunately it's true'
https://www.pcgamer.com/skyrims-retired-lead-designer-says-anything-other-than-the-bethesda-usual-has-to-be-approved-by-todd-howard-he-doesnt-believe-its-true-but-unfortunately-its-true/
Liked Starfield? Hated Starfield? You probably have Todd Howard to thank. A recent chat between MinnMax and Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith shed some light on Bethesda's structure and organisation, and it sure sounds like pretty much every choice the company makes needs Howard's stamp of approval before it can go ahead, even as it's grown bigger over the years. To be fair to Howard, though, it sounds like that's in spite of his own wishes.

No wonder Starfield feels like such a relatively risk-free game, despite being a new IP. Anyway, I liked this part myself:

Kirkbride wanted to fill Morrowind with strange monsters, but knew anything too out-there would scare off his boss. So what he did was draw two versions of every monster: "the one that was weird… and then one that was fucking crazy," he'd show Howard the second one, get rejected, and then come back with the first, which would invariably be accepted into the game simply because it seemed so much more normal by comparison.

Yeah but, as the article says, something like that wouldn't work nowadays.

My take of the whole story is that Bethesda will run into problems sooner or later. The first one is that, as the article explains, that "Average Joe" point of view that only Todd Howard appears to have works in sales but limits innovation, and the second one is that Howard has already said that he may only stay for one more game, and Bethesda will have to change its design philosophy when that happens... and few studios manage to do that transition without problems, much less studios as big as Bethesda.