todd-howard posts

Developer Irrational Games has been doing some interesting and fun things on their official web site like offering a look at past projects, profiles for canceled games at the developer and interviews with their employees. Now the site is launching a new podcast series called Irrational Interviews that interviews (natch) people from outside the developer that the team admires.

The first such interview has Irrational head man Ken Levine along with Shawn Elliot interviewing Todd Howard, the game director at Bethesda Softworks and the main force behind the Elder Scrolls RPG series and more recently Fallout 3. The trio have a wide range of topics to go over including some surprising revelations about how Irrational could have had some of their games published by Bethesda. Oh, and the podcast is definitely NSFW.

On Friday during QuakeCon 2009, Bethesda Softworks' design director Todd Howard presented a speech about their ideas about game development and then took some questions. We reported on the event, which included his response to an audience question about plans for a new Elder Scrolls game. While we did not give Howard's direct quote (for which we apologize) we did state quite correctly that folks should not expect a new game in the series in the near future.

Unfortunately many have interpreted our article to mean that Bethesda has turned its back on the Elder Scrolls series and will never create a new game in the franchise. Now Pete Hines, the PR head of Bethesda, has posted a note on their blog site that puts that to rest. He states, "At his QuakeCon talk he was asked when TESV is coming out and Todd replied, 'Don't look for a new Elder Scrolls game in the near future.' He also went on to say how much the franchise means to us and that it definitely will continue. He just wasn't going to provide any timeframe on "when.'"

Ultimately Hines said the Elder Scrolls franchise is safe, saying, "Both Todd and I have said repeatedly that, of course, we're going to do another Elder Scrolls game. The last one was enormously popular. So was the one before that. You get the idea. So do we."

While John Carmack's speech at QuakeCon 2009 was super long, Todd Howard's speech today was under an hour but still highly informative and extremely funny. The executive director at Bethesda Softworks made his QuakeCon debut with a video and slide presentation that was very entertaining.

Howard pointed out that Bethesda and id were very similar; both were PC hardcore developers that slowly turned into multi-platform teams. Currently Bethesda has between 85 to 90 employees. To work at the company you have to have several qualities, according to Howard, including having a "low a**hole quotient".

Most of Howard's presentation went through some of the things they did while developing their last game, Fallout 3.They looked through not only the previous two Interplay made RPGs but also old reviews of the games to see what people responded to in the games.

Bethesda makes marketing part of the process of developing their games because marketing is how people are first introduced to the game before actually playing it. Even things like designing what the art will look like on the game disk is part of that process.

Check out more from Howard after the jump

QuakeCon, id Software's annual free LAN fest-games event, is getting some interesting content for this year's installment. Part of the reason is due to id's recent acquistion by Bethesda Softworks who will be bringing their own content to the show. Case in point; the first public demo of Brink, the recently announced sci-fi shooter from Bethesd and developer Splash Damage, will happen during QuakeCon next week.

While id has shown trailers and given live engine demos of their next game Rage at two previous QuakeCons, this year's show will finally have actual live gameplay demos from the game for the first time in publich. Also, Bethesda Softworks' Todd Howard will be making a presentation at the event and as always id Software's master programmer John Carmack will make his annual QuakeCon keynote and Q&A with the audience.

Once again, QuakeCon is totally free to attend and is being held this year at the Gaylord Texan hotel in Grapevine, Texas from August 13-16.