With Skyrim and Fallout 4, Bethesda landed two major gaming hits in the 2010s. Todd Howard has now discussed in an interview that he is annoyed they did not support both games like service games on a permanent basis.
What kind of interview was that? The interview was conducted by YouTuber MrMattyPlays. He currently has over 320,000 subscribers on YouTube. You can also find him on Twitch, where he currently has 31,484 followers.
The channel’s focus is on RPGs: Recently, he discussed among other things Fallout 76, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Dragon’s Dogma 2.
The interview with Todd Howard was published by MrMattyPlays on June 16, 2024, on his YouTube channel. In just over an hour, they discussed Fallout, Starfield, and Elder Scrolls 6 among other topics.
Fallout 76 is also a topic in the interview. New content for it has already been announced:
Starfield gets a 10-year plan – Because Skyrim didn’t have one
What exactly did Todd Howard say? In the conversation, Todd Howard explained that he regrets not having supported Skyrim and Fallout 4 more significantly over the long term. Both games still receive (smaller) bug fixes and have been expanded with several DLCs or add-ons. However, for Starfield, they already have a 10-year horizon.
The expectation that we will update [Elder Scrolls 6] over many years exists
, says Howard, When we look at Skyrim, which we are still updating to a limited extent, and all the creations and mods, [then it is] still a very popular game.
Specifically, he mentions Fallout 4: [We treated] Fallout 4 the same way, but we wish we had supported [the games] longer.
The first game they explicitly wanted to support long-term was Fallout 76 – a live-service game. Todd Howard says about this:
With [Fallout] 76, we knew: “Hey, this is a game that we will support for as long as possible. With Starfield, we approach it with the same understanding. And when we tackle Elder Scrolls 6, we need to start thinking about a 10-year horizon now.
Todd Howard in interview with MrMattyPlays, June 16, 2024
Why would Bethesda have wanted to support Skyrim and Fallout 4 longer? Skyrim and Fallout 4 are two of the best-selling games worldwide: Fallout 4 currently has around 25 million copies sold, while Skyrim has an impressive over 60 million since launch.
Skyrim is also now (almost) 13 years old. With such high sales figures and still high player counts (about 18,700 players of the Special Edition on average monthly according to Steamcharts), one can assume that additional DLCs and add-ons would have also sold well.
Fallout 4 is similar. Here too, a longer provision for the player base would likely have paid off for both sides.
At the same time, it is also the case that there is regularly new content for both games – just not from Bethesda. Especially the modding community of Skyrim has released over 60,000 mods for the game over the years alone on Nexusmods. Fallout 4 can at least boast over 48,000 mods.
From UI to graphic and follower mods, to completely new areas and multiplayer expansions. Specifically for Skyrim players, there is a very large selection. By the way, we have the five most important mods for you, which will make it easier for you to get started with modding the game: Skyrim: These 5 mods you should definitely install if you want to start the role-playing game in 2024
