Todd Howard blames the pandemic for Starfield delays: Working from home was 'very, very slow'

pcgamer.com:

You may have heard about a little space game called Starfield, the gravitational pull from which risks swallowing all games discourse for months and possibly years to come. Perhaps that's no surprise for a game that's been in development and hyped for as long as any title that I can remember (well, ones that have shipped anyway) but it's easy to forget now the thing's in our hands that it was subject to multiple delays along the way.

The majority of the audience now seems to understand that delays are a necessary evil for large and complex projects. But they're still a bummer. Bethesda director and executive producer Todd Howard has been on the interview circuit promoting the game, as part of which he and Xbox head Phil Spencer sat down with the Washington Post, and during that chat Howard put the delays down to a mix of production and pandemic issues. 

The Post reporter first of all noted they'd landed on Earth while playing the game, and half-expected to find the DC of Fallout 3 (in Starfield, Earth has suffered an extinction event).

«We talked about it,» laughs Howard, «Oh, we planned, and those plans went out the window. We knew we were going to rewrite parts of the engine, so we started building technology for the planets and the outer space stuff on our previous engine and renderer.»

This culminated in Bethesda realising they'd done years of work that needed porting to a newer version of its in-house engine: Bethesda's previous games are made using the Creation Engine, while Starfield is the first to use Creation Engine 2. At around the same time the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and like everyone else the studio had to quickly adapt to remote working.

The game was at one point scheduled for a 2022 release but this