Skyrim's retired lead designer says anything other than the 'Bethesda usual' has to be approved by Todd Howard: 'He doesn't believe it's true, but unfortunately it's true'
Liked Starfield? Hated Starfield? You probably have Todd Howard to thank. A recent chat between MinnMax and Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith shed some light on Bethesda's structure and organisation, and it sure sounds like pretty much every choice the company makes needs Howard's stamp of approval before it can go ahead, even as it's grown bigger over the years. To be fair to Howard, though, it seems like that's in spite of his own wishes.
«All decisions run through Todd,» the retired Nesmith told MinnMax's Ben Hanson, "[Todd] would hate, hate, hate me for saying that because he doesn't believe it's true, but unfortunately it's true."
The way Nesmith tells it, it really sounds like the relative, ah, similarity of the games in Bethesda's output over the last decade or so can to a significant extent be attributed to Howard's weight at the company. «If you want to have anything different, other than the 'Bethesda usual' on some particular aspect or you have something else you want to propose, it's somehow got to get in front of him.»
«I will give him full credit,» Nesmith continued later on, «he has tried really really hard to not be the 'last say' guy, [but] it hasn't worked out that way. That's not something he wants intellectually, I think it ends up being that way because he's somebody who has opinions and whose opinions are valuable.»
It's interesting and, I think, revealing to put those comments in the context of something Nesmith says a bit later on in the interview, that Howard has «an attribute that none of the rest of us did: he was always able to put himself into the seat of your everyday player… he always was able to see it from Joe Average Player's perspective.» That would certainly explain the general tenor
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