Todd Howard had an interview with Wired where he went over his career from the start of Bethesda to Starfield. He gives his own experience growing up in the company and revealed some personal feelings about it. While the critics may not like The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard as much as Howard, he believes it was important to create The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
During the interview, Howard explained that when Redguard was getting panned by critics – I loved Redguard as a kid – Howard took a look back at the creation and wanted to see why it failed. He likely didn’t know that the company would choose him to bet their existence on after bombing with Redguard, but he helped himself by analyzing the game.
“It’s listed as an adventure game but it’s a true genre mashup, It has some adventure game elements, some action game elements, some RPG elements. I guess you could say at that time, we started making a lot of games instead of focusing and none of them turned out really, really great… Where did it not resonate? What’s the takeaway? And it was just too conservative.”
Todd Howard
Howard went on to mention that he knew that Bethesda needed to learn from Redguard. He said that the game was well crafted but it was so incredibly small and not ambitious. When the studio realized they had one more shot, they bet on Howard and the next game. Howard said that they made sure to give it everything they didn’t before.
“We were very, very ambitious… But taking the learnings from a game like Redguard where we are hand building a world but now we’re doing it on a larger scale compared to the games people know today. It’s actually still very, very small, but it’s very very detailed.”
Todd Howard
I personally liked Redguard as a kid. I thought it was very fun, the sword combat was easy to learn and master, and the only thing that stumped me was the puzzles. However, I can see why many weren’t expecting that kind of game and definitely didn’t fit the Elder Scrolls Series at the time. I think Redguard gets a pretty hard time but getting Morrowind out of it is a pretty nice thing either way.
Make sure to check out what Howard said about Oblivion being what vaulted the company to its wider audience today.
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