In a recent interview, Todd Howard talked at some length about Bethesda’s relationship with Microsoft, particularly Team Xbox. Todd had some nice things to say about the team and Phil Spencer
“Honestly it’s been awesome that the culture inside of Microsoft and Xbox, that people see from the outside, is the culture inside. The way they talk about players, the way they’ll invest in the players, the risks they’ll take, the thoughtfulness from Phil Spencer on down, it has been you know – I feel really really lucky.
And then a game like Starfield where – look, we’ve had a lot of success with the games that you talked about. But we’ve never been kind of the platform seller, you know? The game for a platform for a period of time. And so, you know, there is a lot of pressure, there’s a lot of responsibility there, to make sure we deliver for everybody.”
Interestingly enough, Todd also had some things to say about Bethesda’s history with Xbox, far far before this acquisition, all the way back to the days of The Elder Scrolls Morrowind. Old Xbox players would know about this history, but we’ll share his thoughts here.
“Yeah, it’s new, but keep in mind for us that exclusivity is not unique. Even though we’ve done PlayStation stuff, and I think the PlayStation 5 is just an insane machine, they’ve done a great job, and we’ve had great success on PlayStation. We were traditionally a PC developer in the beginning. We transitioned to Xbox, and it became our lead platform.
Like Morrowind’s basically exclusive to Xbox. Oblivion was exclusive to Xbox for a long period of time. Skyrim DLC was. So we’ve done a lot of – like our initial stuff, is all Xbox. So we get into development and saying we’re focused on Xbox, and it’s not abnormal for us in any way. It’s been kind of the norm.
And from a development side, I like the ability to focus. So, our ability to focus, and say, and have help from them – you know, the top engineers at Xbox – to say we are going to make this look incredible on the new systems. From my standpoint, that’s just awesome .“
While it wasn’t necessarily the intention of Bethesda to make Starfield their first console seller video game when they conceived it in 2016, it all fell into place for them and Xbox after their acquisition. As we had already reported and Todd reiterates in this interview, Starfield is not coming to PlayStation, and maybe we should have expected as such given their history. In fact, Microsoft told the UK CMA in their filing that The Elder Scrolls 6 would also be an Xbox exclusive.
Now that their relationship has been formally designated to official ownership, Bethesda is free to make Starfield the best game it can possibly be.
Starfield will be releasing on the Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, and Windows on 2023.
Source: YouTube
