Demonstrating Skyrim to Edge in 2011, Todd Howard reached a barrow in the mountains just as a dragon swooped down and landed between him and the door. The encounter was not scripted. Howard explained that the game’s story system decided when a dragon should appear, and told the magazine about the time a designer added three dragons flying past a town as a piece of scenery: “They saw me and it was party time. I was like: ‘Who did this?!’” He ran for the mountains to lose them, and found it “really terrifying”. “Though I did make the designer take it out. Three dragons is too many.” Howard has spent most of his working life on games like that: worlds big enough for things to happen in them that nobody planned.
Fast facts
- Company: Bethesda Softworks from the mid-1990s; head of its development team, Bethesda Game Studios.
- Early work: The Terminator: Future Shock (1995).
- Project leader: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002).
- Executive producer: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) and Fallout 3 (2008).
- Director: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), Fallout 4 (2015) and Starfield (2023).
Joining Bethesda
Howard has said that the role-playing games Wizardry and Ultima III: Exodus inspired him, and Wikipedia’s account of his career says that Bethesda Softworks, the Maryland company behind The Elder Scrolls, hired him in 1994 after he kept asking it for a job. His first projects were Bethesda’s Terminator games, and he later traced his studio’s working method back to the first of them. Bethesda builds its places from kits of prefabricated pieces, he told Edge in 2011: “The paradigm for how we build our worlds has not changed since Terminator: Future Shock. We’ve just got better at it.”
Morrowind
Howard was project leader on Morrowind, the third Elder Scrolls game, and he was blunt about its predecessor. “We didn’t really like the result of Daggerfall,” he told Computer Gaming World in 2001. “There were about 20 to 30 hours of good gameplay, but then it began to just be the same thing over and over again. We went into Morrowind thinking that less is definitely more.” Daggerfall had generated its world at random; on Vvardenfell every place and every character was made by hand. To build so much by hand the team needed tools, and Howard told the German magazine PC Player that it had decided early on to make “an actual role-playing operating system, instead of simply a game”. The editor, the Construction Set, shipped with the game so that players could do the same.
Oblivion and Fallout 3
For The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), made for Microsoft’s new Xbox 360 as well as the PC, Howard was executive producer, and he wanted to keep more players with it. “Everybody likes the size of our games, but a lot of players were lost and confused,” he told Electronic Gaming Monthly in 2005. “With Oblivion, we’re still offering a massive world, but we’re going to hold players’ hands a little more.” He also looked forward to selling extras through Xbox Live: “One of the first mods we’re offering is horse armor.” And he admitted that the world’s characters could surprise even him. “There is a unicorn in the game, and the other day when I was playing I found it dead. The Minotaur killed it; he’s supposed to protect it, but his AI is just too aggro.”
Bethesda then took on Fallout. Howard, executive producer of Fallout 3, told Hyper in 2005 that the first two games had “really let me choose to play a certain character, and the level of immersion was outstanding. I was that guy on the screen, wandering the wastelands trying to survive.” To fans who feared a console Fallout would be shallow, he answered: “Anyone who says a console game can’t have depth hasn’t played enough of them. The platform is 100% irrelevant.” Fallout 3 came out in 2008.
Skyrim
Howard directed The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, released on 11 November 2011. “We rewrote the entire renderer,” he told Edge during its preview. “We have full shadows now. We rewrote the pathing, the AI systems, the quest systems, the dialogue, the interface and the animation system.” The landscape was drawn by hand rather than generated: “Procedural generation was a big thing in 2004 and 2005. As our tools got better we actually backed off that in certain areas and added it to others. So now, none of the landscape is procedural — it’s all created by our artists.” The quests went the other way, borrowing from Daggerfall the idea of procedural elements.
He also cut the character system down, from eight attributes and 21 skills in Oblivion to three attributes and 18 skills, and defended the change when players complained of “dumbing down”: “A fan may say ‘You removed my eight attributes!’, and my answer is, ‘Which ones do you want? They’re all a trickle down to something else’.” Edge gave Skyrim nine out of ten, printing Howard’s account of its making beside the review, and summed up the bargain his games strike: the developer builds “worlds of unrivalled scope, rich in lore and history”, and players do all they can “to ignore the rough edges that come, apparently, as the cost of such ambition”.
Fallout 4 to Starfield
Fallout 4 followed in 2015 and the online Fallout 76 in 2018, whose launch Wireframe covered for its bugs. Bethesda, with its parent ZeniMax, became part of Microsoft in 2021. In 2019 Howard said that the next Elder Scrolls game “has to last ten years”. Before Starfield came out in September 2023, Wireframe wrote that its success would rest on whether “studio director Todd Howard can live up to his promise of making over 1000 planets uniquely diverse”. It was Bethesda’s first new series in more than 25 years.
Sources
- PC Player (Germany), August 2000, pp. 34–35: Morrowind preview (Howard as project leader; Daggerfall’s empty world; the “role-playing operating system”; the TES3 Construction Set).
- Computer Gaming World issue 199, February 2001, p. 57: Morrowind preview (Howard on Daggerfall; hand-made places and characters).
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 197, November 2005, pp. 88 and 99: Howard as executive producer of Oblivion (the Xbox 360 hard drive; “lost and confused”; horse armour; the unicorn and the Minotaur).
- Hyper issue 139, May 2005, pp. 39–41: Fallout retrospective (Howard as executive producer of Fallout 3; his view of the first two games; “The platform is 100% irrelevant”).
- Edge issue 229, July 2011, pp. 81–86: Skyrim preview with creative director Todd Howard (the rewritten renderer; Terminator: Future Shock; the dragons).
- Edge issue 233, November 2011, pp. 48–50: Skyrim preview and Q&A with game director Todd Howard (procedural generation; factions).
- Edge issue 235, Christmas 2011, pp. 100–102: Skyrim review, nine out of ten, with Howard on the making of Skyrim.
- Wireframe issue 46, December 2020, pp. 112–113: “Killer Feature: The Elder Scrolls” (Howard’s 2011 interview with IGN on attributes and skills).
- Wireframe issue 1, November 2018: Fallout 76 and its bugs.
- Wireframe issue 16, June 2019, p. 15: “Elder Scrolls 6 ‘has to last ten years’, says Todd Howard”.
- Wireframe issue 70, 2023, p. 19: Starfield among the games of 2023 (“studio director Todd Howard”; over 1,000 planets).
- Wikipedia, “Todd Howard” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): Wizardry and Ultima III as inspirations; hired by Bethesda in 1994 after repeated requests; his credits on Fallout 4 and Starfield. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Howard
- For the studio’s history, Starfield’s release and Microsoft’s purchase of ZeniMax, see the Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks entries and their sources.