Todd Howard, game director and executive producer at Bethesda (and all around nice guy), has recently opened up about hot topics in the videogame industry and its future. Part of the discussion concerned the prospect of VR, and the director says he is looking forward to what it has in store – especially for future Bethesda games.
Howard has been with Bethesda for 25 years after first starting his career as a programmer. Over that period, he’s overseen the development of many of Bethesda’s successes, including Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and the Elder Scrolls series, and is no stranger to seeing shifts in technology and witnessing how the industry changes with them.
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“I’m a little more VR than AR”, Howard explains to Gamelab (via VentureBeat) when talking about his preference for the latest gaming technologies. “We did Fallout and Skyrim in VR. We’re just about to enter the second generation of VR. Historically, the third generation is where it starts to become popular.”
Fallout VR acquired mostly positive reviews on Steam when it launched December last year. It’s surely enough to encourage Bethesda to continue embracing the technology with its future projects. If nothing else it should reinforce what vice president of Bethesda, Pete Hines, said about VR and its potential last year.
Speaking to GamerHubTV in 2017, Hines clearly has a different perspective to Howard, but he does see room for VR in Bethesda’s future: “I work with lots of people who have VR. I don’t really see VR as a replacement for other things as much as sort of augmenting and supplementing our existing VR experiences.”
Bethesda currently has Starfield and Fallout 76 in development, alongside the recently announced Elder Scrolls VI, but if the words of Howard are anything to go by we could see VR ports of these games: “the idea is to keep being ambitious,” he says, “playing it safe is the worst way to do things.”