Skyrim: Special Edition interview - Todd Howard on remastering the fantasy epic

“I don’t know that I can point to what made it so big,” Howard tells The Telegraph. “Hey, if we could explain that then we’d do it every time. It definitely hit some tipping point for us where it spilled over into people who traditionally weren’t our audience –– those who traditionally wouldn’t play role-playing games, or games that require a lot of time.

“We heard a lot of stories, you know, we called it the ‘sofa game’. Where, if you had a friend who didn’t play these kind of games then you’d say ‘hey you gotta check this out’. It just spilled over into this whole other thing.”

This learning is something that was clearly taken on board with Fallout 4, Bethesda’s follow-up to Skyrim. It didn’t take away any of the in-depth exploratory wonder that the studio captures so well –– instead it looked at the game’s fundamental mechanics and made them easier to understand, better to play and more satisfying to repeat. This arguably created a far more popular game. One that’s at least more mechanically accomplished than Skyrim.

Still, that didn’t stop The Elder Scrolls V from selling over 20-million copies. It spawned several large pieces of downloadable content, and has regularly topped Best Of lists even today. It’s also the first game that the studio has ever, in its 30-year history, returned to remaster.

“When we were finishing the game back in 2011, we’d been working on it so much it was hard to see it for what it is,” says Howard. “When you come back to it later, it’s like seeing some old friend and appreciating them in a weird kind of way. It’s still a game that we love, and we had picked it up again when we first got the Xbox One dev kits and we decided to start a port of it –– really just to learn that hardware. One we started playing it again we said once we’ve done Fallout 4 we need to come back to this, we thought there’d still be a lot of people who would enjoy it. We really enjoyed it.”

While Bethesda has returned to rework of the game to bring it up to today’s standard, Skyrim on PC has enjoyed a huge amount of community driven modding that has kept it looking great despite its ever increasing age. These mods vary greatly, from changing the look of different armour, to adding new enemies and mechanics into the game. There is a trove of interesting stuff to play around with. Some even add entirely new quest-lines and new areas to explore, extending the longevity of the game (technically) infinitely.

“As far as coming back to Skyrim, the mods were a big part of it,” says Howard. “Particularly on the PC, it still gets up into the top 10 Steam games and I think that’s because of mods. So that was one of the reasons we really wanted to have modding for Skyrim on the consoles. And I think the modding really builds into ‘you’re going to make this world your own.’

"With Fallout 4, we’ve done over 20 million downloads, and most of that is mods. That’s a staggering number. It has always done well on the PC – but the console audience has such a hunger for it because they’ve waited so long. We think there’s a really good future there, with both Skyrim and Fallout 4, that we hope to continue to add to.”

Bethesda is an interesting studio in and of itself. It operates in complete secrecy, rarely succumbing to leaks that so often seem to spoil game announcements. It is also an unusually small studio for the size of games it releases. As opposed to the ‘Ubisoft approach’, Bethesda focuses on more tight-knit development teams –– it’s reported that Skyrim was created by a team of 100 people, compared to the 1,000 or so that worked on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.

“I’d ask them why their teams are so big!” Howard says. “We genuinely like to keep it small and then spend longer on the games. At the end of the day, we’re going to spend three or four years on a game, and we could add a lot of people and do it faster, but I don’t think the game would end up the same. I think –– I know –– that we would not enjoying making it as much, so we’d end up with a lesser product. I think the journey of making a game... we want to enjoy that process.”

Whether Bethesda is focusing on the fantasy magic of The Elder Scrolls or the irradiated post-apocalyptica of the Fallout series, it is a studio that’s always pushing its template to bring impressive new worlds to its players. But the bar is ever changing –– the release of new technology, including the rise of virtual reality, is revolutionising how we see and play games.

“For us it’s about having the game react to the player as much as possible,” he explains. “There’s ways you can do that with technology, graphics, AI – we’re doing some VR stuff right now – and so it’s what we think is great about not just our games, but what’s great about video  games –– how are they better than any other form of entertainment?

“It’s not just because they’re interactive but it’s that they’re reactive. If you wanna go over that hill then the game is going to reward that curiosity. Or you’re going to do this thing and that character is going to say something. And so we want people to think about what they would do and who they would be in these worlds, and then reward that curiosity and react in any we can to what they’re doing.”

That reactive approach to game design has been growing exponentially over the last few years. From Skyrim, through to open-ended choice-driven games like Mass Effect and The Witcher 3. But games aren’t quite there yet, and Howard is eager to push the bar forward with every single game he and his team create –– to deliver something for players to come away with, having been left with a lasting impression through the game’s ability to say something, or to react to your actions and decisions as you play.

“There aren’t many that I can point to that react the way we really like them to," says Howard. "I think there’s something good in every game out there that we can take away from –– [a] game I just finished, and I love, is a game called Inside. You end up finishing that game and then thinking about it for a week,” he laughs. “That’s a very linear game, but  it’s one of those games that made me think a lot, instead of just ‘well that’s that’. It’s been on my mind.”

As a creator there’s always a tendency to work on improving something forever to reach this level of emotional impact –– to never properly “finish” development. Going back to remaster a game, it’s an opportunity for you to see what you would’ve liked to make better, or what you could’ve added. This is no different with Skyrim: Special Edition. Even despite the huge amount of success, Howard is open about what he thinks would make the game better, and the ways in which he would change it if he could turn back time. Or if he could, you know, quit his day job entirely.

“I’d have probably messed with the radiant AI system,” says Howard. “The system under the hood is amazing – the display manager looks at what you’ve been doing and gives you encounters. And we had tried to do some procedural storytelling, and the system and the technology is there for it, but we never quite nailed the design. So, if I quit to mod I would probably spend my time there.

“I think that when it comes to other characters, we’re not where we’d like to be,” he continues. “As far as how the other characters in the world look, or react, or animate. We make strides with every game – it’s definitely better in Fallout – but it’s still something we look and say ‘that’s a long way to go to be where we really want it to be’. A lot of that is understanding how people play our games. Because, the best character stuff that you see out there are genuinely static scenes that you can’t mess with – you know, you see a really good scene in our game and you want to think ‘can you punch that guy in the face while he’s talking?’ [laughs] We never wanna let go of the ‘player can do whatever they want’.

Remastering Skyrim isn’t just turning an older game into a prettier one, it’s offering up one of gaming’s best role-playing games to audiences that may never have experienced it before. For a game like this, that’s rare, and it extends its sphere of influence even further. “As far as a legacy?” Howard ponders. “I think it’s the kind of thing where, if you hand it to somebody and say ‘you can make this your own’, I think that’s why people talk about it.

“They’re sharing their experiences and those are different experiences, and I think that’s the nut of why it’s so popular.”