Gaming

‘The popularity just didn’t wane’: Bethesda’s Todd Howard on 10 years of Skyrim


Is there anyone who’s played video games over the last 10 years who hasn’t played Skyrim? When it came out in 2011, this must surely have seemed to the outside world like one of the nerdiest games around: potions and spells, axes and swords, dark elves and giants and, of course, dragons. But Skyrim nevertheless became one of the most widely played games ever, a touchstone in the video game world, for players and developers alike. It has been re-released on every console and platform imaginable, to the point where it’s become a gaming in-joke. It’s still huge on YouTube and TikTok, even with people who were little kids when it came out. At a wedding a few weeks ago, I met someone whose wife had played Skyrim as her first ever game; a decade later, she’s still playing it.

Skyrim was made at Bethesda Game Studios by a team of around 100 people – far fewer than the 400-strong team working on its forthcoming game, Starfield. Coming straight from wrapping up development on Fallout 3, a post-nuclear-apocalypse role playing game, the team quickly found a tone and direction that they were excited by. Unlike The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), a glossy, classical high-fantasy set in the most gilded area of the world of Tamriel, Skyrim is grimy and cold. Its aesthetic is more Nordic: furs and leather, snow and stone. If Oblivion felt like a Roman legend, and its intriguingly weird predecessor Morrowind resembled a tattered novel from an unknown author plucked from the back of the fantasy shelf at your local library, Skyrim is like one of those brutal Scandinavian folk stories where someone always gets an axe to the head.

Todd Howard, now Bethesda Game Studios’ director and executive producer, led development on Skyrim, as he had for all the Elder Scrolls games since 2000. Working from a base of a map, concept art and music – “we always do music really early”, Todd says, “I find that’s a really good thing to get you into the mood and tone of a game” – the team began constructing the different regions of Skyrim: mountains, tundra, pine forests, settlements. “We have so much stuff – landmass, locations, quests, themes – and it mustn’t feel like 50 different games, it has to come together. We call that the glue, that’s the phrase we use … Once we’re going, once we have the world and the tone, our designers and everybody else are really in sync about what’s going to be appropriate.” Howard had a statue of Conan the Barbarian on his desk during early development that was a strong design inspiration. “To me that was the feeling of the game,” he says. “We kept using the term ‘epic reality’… it wasn’t super high fantasy, it felt very grounded, that was the tone we were going for. We wanted to ground everything in a reality that you believe, so that when the dragons and magic come in you feel it more.”

The Conan statue Todd Howard had on his desk during the development of The Elder Scrolls IV: Skyrim.
The Conan statue Todd Howard had on his desk during the development of The Elder Scrolls IV: Skyrim. Photograph: McFarlane Toys

Partly thanks to the fact that everyone involved had a good sense of what felt right for the world, there wasn’t actually that much that had to be cut as development went on, says Todd – though one element of Skyrim’s world was originally intended to be a much bigger part of it. “There’s a civil war that’s going on in the game, and it was a great idea from our designers to have some backstory and conflict that didn’t necessarily get fully resolved,” explains Howard.

“A lot of our games have this main quest, this big threat that gets resolved – and then you keep playing and you’re like, now what? We wanted to have a tension in the game world that didn’t necessarily go away. Originally the civil war was a much bigger thing that you got involved in, with these big battles, and some of it remains, but the battle parts ended up being pretty small. It was constantly on the chopping block for the project. Thematically it works, but what you’re seeing is the simplest version that we could do.”

Despite being an epic fantasy, Skyrim isn’t a game that is usually remembered for its characters or its story. Instead, players remember what they did: that time they ended up running all the way up a mountain trying to get away from a frost troll, or when they accidentally dragon-shouted a companion off the edge of a cliff and lost five minutes to guilty, uncontrollable laughter, or discovered the remains of an underground city. Some characters do stand out in the collective memory of Skyrim fandom, though – including, unexpectedly, Lydia, a housecarl who is likely to be your first companion on your journey. Despite having absolutely no memorable features, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard stories from players who cried because “their” Lydia accidentally died in a cave full of wolves.

Todd laughs when I mention Lydia. “Everyone got attached to her, but she is a generic NPC!” he says. “None of her lines are written for her … we did not put the time into [Skyrim’s] characters that we do in, say a Fallout, and you can see that. I’m not saying there aren’t really good characters in Skyrim, but I don’t think it’s the reason people play it. At the end of the day, we build these games so that people do tell their own stories. We build the world, but what the player brings to it is the magic of video games … The games I played when I was young, like Ultima, I would go to bed thinking about them – I wonder if I can do this? I’ll try that tomorrow! I want to create that sense of wonder for our players as well.

“This is somewhat technical in terms of game design, but one of the things we do that’s unique, even though there are lots of open world games, is that we don’t shut down the world. You can be running 20 quests at once and we let them collide. Development wise, the hardest problems create the most magic on screen. You can be in town doing a quest and then two dragons can turn up and it’s pandemonium. Those are the moments I love the most.”

Bethesda’s Todd Howard.
Bethesda’s Todd Howard. Photograph: Bethesda

When the team was finishing up Skyrim’s development, they were playing the game all the time, trying out as many different ways of doing things as possible, testing the limits of the world they’d built. For Todd, reading people’s play notes was one of the most fun parts of the whole cycle – “I’d often be wondering, is there a bug here that we need to solve or is this just a fun story someone felt compelled to write down?” But of course when it actually came out and got into the hands of players, they immediately started finding things that the developers did not foresee. “There was a person who figured out that you could put buckets on people’s heads and block their line of sight,” Todd recalls. “There was a great debate as to whether we should fix that. We ended up deciding no, because it’s hilarious.”

Once the game came out, it just kept going and going. There was optimisation work to be done – anyone unfortunate enough to have bought the PlayStation 3 version will recall that there was a memory problem that caused people’s save files to corrupt, an issue that took a long time to resolve. But more than that, it became clear that there was enormous demand for the fantasy world that Bethesda had built. “The popularity just didn’t wane, and so the amount of time that we spent on updates and expansions was at the time by far the longest ever,” says Todd. “Usually after a while we’d have moved the bulk of the team over to the next project, which was Fallout 4, but we were still doing Skyrim stuff. We ended up moving Fallout 4 to what was the next gen at the time, and that was partly due to Skyrim’s popularity.”

Skyrim came out at a fortunate time, when fantasy as a whole was having a moment, thanks to the emergence of Game of Thrones and a general change in the cultural winds; I bet that there are a few million people out there who gave Skyrim a punt when, a few years previously, they might not have done so because its genre was not in vogue. Todd tells me that at last count, Skyrim has had 60 million total players – millions of whom are still active, every month.

Original Skyrim concept art by Adam Adamowicz
Original Skyrim concept art by Adam Adamowicz. Photograph: Bethesda/Adam Adamowicz

On PC, the game has an active modding community who mess with the game in fascinating ways, making their own adjustments from graphical and lighting upgrades to adding in lute-playing bears. This is part of what’s kept it alive, but not all of it, if you ask me. Most of Skyrim’s players never engage with modding; they’re drawn in by the power fantasy that it offers. This is a game that centres you absolutely. Characters reflect back your deeds and accomplishments; the world and everything in it bends to your will in an absolute buffet of fun and challenge. I’ve played a lot of interesting games in the past 10 years that challenge the player’s power, that question our role in the stories we tell through play, casting us as bit-players or nobodies struggling against powerful forces; nowadays Skyrim is almost refreshing in its straightforward hero narrative. You are the Dragonborn, and you can do anything.

Todd agrees that Skyrim is absolutely a power fantasy. “In Oblivion you’re playing Lancelot to Arthur. You’re not the anointed one; Martin is. So here, we want you to be anointed in some way, be special in the world,” he says. It’s certainly a game that means a lot to people. Of the 450 people that now work at Bethesda Game Studios, many of them came there because of Skyrim. Some were even plucked from the ranks of modders who adapted the game in creative ways. And as the game ages, it’s still finding new players – including those who were too young to play it the first time around.

“My son picked it up on the Switch and couldn’t put it down,” laughs Todd. “He became obsessed with it. My father’s day card basically said: Dad, you’re a great father, but where’s The Elder Scrolls 6?”



READ SOURCE

Leave a Reply

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.