Inside The Elder Scrolls

The folks over at OXM UK had the chance to sit down with Bethesda’s Todd Howard for a brief but interesting interview about The Elder Scrolls franchise as a whole. The usual snip:

Were there any games in the series that suffered a particularly troubled development?

Oh yeah, all of them in some respect. We usually try to do too much, get ourselves in development trouble, and then back our way into a better game than the one we originally designed. We still push ourselves to try ideas out quickly, and not over think them on paper before we implement them. Fortunately, most of our staff has worked on the previous games too, so going through that process is just a natural state for us. We always feel like we’re trying something new, seeing it work or not, and adding it, removing it, tweaking it. And then the hard decisions come, because your time is not infinite. But the staff here works incredibly hard. We want to feel like we did everything we possibly could before the game comes out.

You passed Fallout: New Vegas to Obsidian, who did an excellent job. These days would you ever entrust an Elder Scrolls game to another development team?

We prefer to keep the stuff internal, but that’s not always possible, and I honestly don’t know what the future may hold. We’re just focused on Skyrim right now.