Elder Scrolls and especially its fourth installment, Oblivion, was a superhit sprawling RPG that helped establish a whole new style of games that would further go on to increase in popularity on consoles.
With the launch of Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim in 2011, Bethesda further strengthened its stance in the franchise. One man who has been instrumental in the success of the series was the game’s game director and executive producer, Todd Howard.
Todd Howard believes Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion missed some aspects
During an interview with Gamasutra, ahead of the launch of Skyrim, Howard revealed some key details about the game and the series in general. He was asked about what was one aspect of Oblivion that he paid special attention to while making Skyrim, and what the team changed.
To this, Howard replied,
“Each game is its own thing. There are certain things that Arena does better, or that Daggerfall does better than Morrowind or Oblivion, or even better than Skyrim. There are certain things, depending on the game you make, that you’ll sacrifice to make that particular game. But I think we tried a lot of new stuff with Oblivion, and it was new — it came out four months after the Xbox launched. So that was very difficult to get all of those systems running on a console that was still in development at the time.”
Thus, he says the team was happy about the result that they produced. However, they were also aware that there were things that could have been better.
He said,
“So we sort of came out of it very happy with what we got on the screen, but knowing that there were things we could do a lot better. Some of that we did better in Fallout 3.”
He went on to add,
“But I think the big things for us are still — and we still struggle with — are the NPCs, the interaction, and how they act. That’s because the game is so dynamic, we don’t want to script them, so weirdness can ensue sometimes. So we came out of Oblivion thinking, hey, how do we get more believable characters on the screen who are reacting to you.”
Howard adds that the team knew that one of their biggest strengths was that they did environments well. So they wanted to continue that, but at the same time, he always prioritized the characters and how they performed on the screen.
Skyrim was made on a new and different game engine
Notably, Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim was made on a whole new engine as compared to its predecessors. After using the Gamebryo engine for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, as well as Fallout 3, devs, Bethesda concluded that Gamebryo’s capabilities were becoming too outdated.
As a result, they started creating a new game engine called ‘Creation Engine’ for their next game, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The new engine was created on the basis of Gamebryo by deriving the codebase used for Fallout 3.
During the interview, Howard was asked how the new Creation Enigne handled the sheer scale of Skyrim. To this, the game creator admitted that the size of Skyrim was almost the same as its predecessor Oblivion. He said,
“The scale changes with each game, based on a number of factors. The factor in [Skyrim] that messes with the scale are the mountains. So putting mountains on the screen, they feel like mountains when you see them, but they’re at the same time small enough where you can scale them without taking a really, really long time. And they cut up the terrain. In Fallout 3 or Oblivion, you can cut across the landscape, for the most part. You can draw a line and say, “I wanna go there.” But in Skyrim, you can’t. You might run into a mountain, and you might have to scale a mountain.”
Howard also added that in general, they tried to make Skyrim harder as the elevation increased. Those kinds of changes transformed the flow of the game.
