Todd Howard hails Starfield as "our best performing game" and Starfield redditors as "gaming's smartest fans"

rockpapershotgun.com:

Today is Starfield early access release day, providing you bought the pricier editions, and senior Bethesda boffins are feeling appropriately festive, and probably also totally exhausted. Bethesda Game Studios director and executive producer Todd Howard has sent an email to staff thanking them for their efforts and ruminating a bit on Starfield's "long and winding" development, which began with Howard chatting to ZeniMax Media's now-passed co-founder Robert Altman in the wake of Skyrim's enormous success.

In the letter, obtained by Windows Central, Howard touches on the struggles of game development during the pandemic, and offers special applause to Starfield's QA teams, Xbox big cheese Phil Spencer, and the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, who pitched in to help make it the company's "best performing game" yet. The full thing is below:

I knocked on Robert Altman's door. "Got a few minutes?"

"Sure."

It was early 2013, we were developing Fallout 4, and Skyrim was still enjoying enormous success. I was there to pitch him on our next game. It would not be a sequel to our current games, (he looked concerned), but a grand space RPG and our first new IP in over 25 years (looks curious). It would delve into creation and the search for our place in the universe (slight twinkle). You would explore the galaxy in ways only video games can do. And it would be called - Starfield. (Smile)

"Sounds fantastic."

Robert would be the very first to believe in us, no matter the situation. Our path to creating Starfield would be a long and winding one where we made other games along the way (Fallout 4, Skyrim SE, Fallout Shelter, Skyrim VR, Fallout 76, Skyrim again...). The core development from 2020 to 2023 saw enormous changes