Todd Howard likes "to start over" on every Elder Scrolls game, and as we approach Skyrim's 15th anniversary I don't know that Bethesda needed to start over that hard

1. Games
2. RPGs
3. The Elder Scrolls
4. Skyrim

Todd Howard likes "to start over" on every Elder Scrolls game, and as we approach Skyrim's 15th anniversary I don't know that Bethesda needed to start over that hard News By Dustin Bailey published 6 February 2026

"You look back across the franchise and say, 'Okay, what's important?'"

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Todd Howard likes to go back to the drawing board every time Bethesda makes a new Elder Scrolls game. That fact is laughably obvious given the long, long wait for The Elder Scrolls 6 – we're hitting Skyrim's 15th anniversary this year – but it's an important part of the studio's philosophy about revisiting its most notable franchises.

"When we go to do an Elder Scrolls game," Howard tells Game Informer in a tangent during a Fallout interview, "I do kind of like to start over, so you look back across the franchise and say, 'Okay, what's important? How do you sort of file away the age? Like, okay, what's underneath that? Why do certain game mechanics… how do they make you feel, as opposed to the actual mechanic? What are the unique things about the world?'"

Bethesda's willingness to dramatically reinvent core parts of the series is apparent if you look back at its history. Morrowind killed the procedural generation of Arena and Daggerfall in favor of a fully handcrafted world. Skyrim ditched the hardcore number crunching of its predecessors in favor of a more intuitive stat system.

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And it's true of Fallout, too, which is the actual subject of Howard's statement. But instead of referring to its own games to figure out the basic core of the identity, the team looks back at the 1997 Interplay classic that started it all. "Fallout 1, like, the tone of that game and the world of it became our boilerplate in terms of whenever you go to do something new," Howard explains.

The original Fallout's grim tone carried into Bethesda's series debut on Fallout 3, and the devs wanted to explore a different space for Fallout 4. "We're coming off of Skyrim, so it's our follow up to Skyrim," Howard explains. "There was an idea of not having it as visually and tonally bleak as Fallout 3 was, and we want each game to have its own kind of identity. We do it with Elder Scrolls, we do it with Fallout. That was one of the main goals as we went out and did research and took photos of areas that had decayed or buildings that have been destroyed or other things, there's an interesting colorfulness or beauty to some of that."

Todd Howard knows there's "anxiety" about Fallout 5, admits "we do like to wait" but reassures fans "we never stopped developing Fallout."

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Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsBy submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. TOPICS Bethesda Softworks Bethesda Game Studios CATEGORIES PS5 PS4 Xbox Series X Xbox One Nintendo Switch 2 Nintendo Switch PC Gaming Platforms PlayStation Xbox Nintendo Dustin BaileySocial Links NavigationStaff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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