Todd Howard: Bethesda Games are 'Irresponsibly Large' as They Cut Very Little from Their Games - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 January 2025 / 6,650 Views
Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard in an interview with BAFTA stated Bethesda games are "irresponsibly large" due to the team cutting very little content from their games.
"My job on the games often is to be the director, a little bit like a movie director where you're bringing all the parts together from the art, the cinematography, the technology that our engineers are building to bring these worlds to life," said Howard.
"And obviously, there is all of the writing and the quest design and the level designer, and there's so many parts to our games that I’m in a really unique position to work with so many amazing people and bring all of that together."
He added, "Actually, we cut very little from our games at Bethesda, which is why the games are so irresponsibly large."
Bethesda released the Shattered Space expansion for Starfield this week.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Then you cut stuff out and people try modding it back in kinda tells you some folks actually liked/wanted that cut content put back into the game, Todd...
I mean even when Beth cuts stuff out, their games still end up largely jank/uncanny as a result.
Cut very little lol. Oh the irony with starfield, it feels like half a game is missing. But atleast they finially released shattered dreams.
Yeah irresponsibly large and broken
And then people criticize it's a lot of nothing and Bethesda tells people with letter written by AI but the real moon has nothing on it!
Perhaps they could use an editor. I stopped playing Starfield when I realized that after 20 hours I had done very little besides fetch quests.
I'll be honest! Bethesda has always made games with incredible stories, but unoptimized games, which has affected the quality and experience of what could be a 10/10.
The DLC should have been fully optimized, meaning bug-free, with stable frame rates at 60 FPS in performance mode and 4K at 30 FPS... forget it! If you expect that, you'll be disappointed. You'll have to wait for updates to fix several bugs.
I see several companies releasing games with little optimization. It seems like this has become an addiction, a perverse practice, in which users buy a game and months later several updates come out to fix gross errors. When a studio that only makes games does this, I get upset, but when a studio that is part of a large company, which also makes consoles and has a large presence in PCs does this, it makes me extremely angry.
Todd likes to centralize games so that he can be present, but from a management standpoint, his idea is old-fashioned, as it should be decentralized, create a sense of ownership among workers (this game is mine! I'll do my best!) and, finally, manage (provide support, monitor schedule progress, optimize...). The XBox division as a whole needs to change this culture of releasing games with gross errors, it needs to set a goal (release games with graphic quality higher than 1080p, stable frame rates at 30 FPS and 4K or with a resolution higher than 1080p but stable at 60 FPS, few bugs...). It is humanly impossible for one person to manage, take care of quality and participate in the creation of good stories, so we can see an excellent story in Starfield and poor quality at launch.
If the XBox division needs money, then it should create more mobile games, games that compete with the current hits and, with the revenue generated, invest in games for consoles, PC and cloud gaming.
Well, that rings true. Bethesda game often have a lot of stuff, some of it great, a lot OKish, some terrible. Cutting a bit more would probably improve them.
Ok Todd, whatever you say
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