We're getting a little antsy - we haven't had our fill of single-player RPGs from Bethesda in a while and we're so looking forward to the titles they've already teased like The Elder Scrolls VI and Starfield. In an interview with The Guardian, Todd Howard a game director on several of Bethesda's big projects like Fallout 4 and Skyrim spoke about the his hopes for all fututre game projects and how immersive open worlds should ideally be.
In the interview, Todd Howard talks about the future of gaming from his perspective, this generation of games, and what he's like to see more of in the future from open-world games. Hint, hint, these sound like features and ideas he'd be happy to implement in his titles right?
To The Guardian, Howard says, "I'd like to see more reactivity [in game worlds], more systems clashing together that players can express themselves with. I think chasing scale for scale's sake is not always the best goal". As technology advances, open worlds have been getting bigger and bigger - some have argued that these bigger spaces aren't always better because they're not filled with quests, points of interest, or features players can interact with. If Howard says he's looking for a games to come with more systems like this, it seems likely that what we see next from Bethesda is going to reflect that.
The director also talks about getting players to be immersed in the game - the main barrier between a player and a world being loading times. This next generation of titles, he comment, will be more about getting access to these worlds sooner. "Let's just cast forward to the next five to 10 years of gaming - for me, it's more about access than clock cycles. Just the time it takes to even turn [a console] on and load up some of these games is a barrier - it's time that you're not enjoying being in that world... The kind of games we make are ones that people are going to sit down and play for hours at a time. If you can access a game more easily, and no matter what device you're on or where you are, that's what I think the next five to 10 years in gaming is about."
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Howard also says that he wants people to come away from games with a sense of accomplishment when you complete tasks or gets to the end of a story. It's about allowing people to "finish the week and say, 'I saved the world', and you legit feel that way. That's the magic." We can't take it as confirmation that we'll be saving the world in The Elder Scrolls VI but if any of the previous instalments are worth going by, it's not unlikely.
Featured Image Credit: BethesdaTopics: The Elder Scrolls, News, Skyrim, Bethesda