Bruce Nesmith exclusive: Skyrim’s design lead on where he would set The Elder Scrolls 6 and what to expect from the future of Fallout

Bruce Nesmith has called on Bethesda to make player choices count for more and build more dynamic worlds in order to meet fan expectations for The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 in an exclusive interview with digital PR agency Press Box PR.

Nesmith, who left Bethesda in 2021 midway through the development of Starfield, held a number of key roles at the studio, including Lead Designer for Skyrim, and is known as one of the architects of the radial questing system.

In a wide-ranging interview, Nesmith discussed his The Loki Redeemed series, a trilogy of novels he has released after leaving Bethesda, and his hopes and ideas for how The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series could continue to evolve.

Read the full interview below.

Q: How have you been enjoying your career as an author since leaving Bethesda? 

Well, my career has been about telling stories. It’s not something that I immediately understood myself. It comes to you a little bit later. 

Now I get to tell stories I want to tell that are wholly my own and that I have full say in. Not that I didn't absolutely love telling stories that were more collaborative or had more direction or guardrails on them, but now I get to play in a new area, a new sandbox where I don't have to deal with all of that.

Q: Is there anything you miss from your time at Bethesda working on Elder Scrolls or Fallout?

Absolutely. I miss the sense of total control over the minutiae. I did a lot of systems design so for me, dealing with how the world is actually going to work, on top of creating the stories, you're creating an entire actual world at a level of detail that would be boring as hell in a novel. Nobody wants to hear about that. But that's a lot of fun for me. 

I'm kind of a math geek so I've lived a lot of my life in spreadsheets and I really enjoy the process of making games, game rules, all things like that, especially on a very, very large stage when working for Bethesda and prior to that TSR. As a novelist, I’m on a very small stage.

Q: How does the lore-building of writing a novel compare to the environmental storytelling that’s  possible when creating games?

It's just different. In novels the world building has to serve this story. When you're making a game, because it has so many different stories, the world has to take center stage a little more and the stories sort of plug into that.

You are restricted by the nature of the world building whereas when I'm writing a novel the world building is the servant to the story. If I want to tell the story a certain way I could just change the world. I don't need to deal with the mathematics of it. I don't need to explain everything. I only need to explain those things that the reader would need to know to understand the story. 

When you're making a game like Skyrim, everything has to make sense. The eating of the food, the sleeping in the beds, all of it. Things that are not necessarily relevant to the story but are highly relevant to immersion and that feeling of being in a place.

Q: What was it like to be such a trusted resource on the lore of The Elder Scrolls series from your time at Bethesda? 

Oh, I was not the lore master. That was Kurt Kuhlmann. He was definitely the lore master. When I had lore questions or any other issues I'd be trotting down the hall to his door and asking him those questions. 

Did I know quite a bit about the series? Yes, but I was not the final authority. I was probably three or four or five down the chain there.

I was more of the systems guy. I was the Lead Designer in Skyrim and Design Director for Bethesda for quite some time.

Q: How far forward did you or the team look ahead to potential ways to take the world of The Elder Scrolls?

Todd Howard sets the direction for the series and the games. His philosophy, which I completely subscribe to, is you have this game in front of you. You have to make it as awesome as you can. You worry about the next game later.

With that said, there’s obviously some things you don’t want to do. We don't tell a story where we literally blow up Tamriel and sink the continents. We don't do excessive things like that but you don't spend your time and energy worrying about the sequels. You don't even spend your time and energy worrying about DLC.

You have to remain focused on this game. This game has to be amazing because if this game isn't amazing, there is no next game. You can always find a way to go to the next step on whatever it may happen to be but you have to remain focused in the present. You can't be looking at the future, at least at least not at that level.

Q: Are the DLCs designed at the same time as the base game or does that come later too?

It was when we were done. Todd may be noodling around with some stuff towards the end of the project in advance because that’s his job. To set the direction. But once we go gold, which is no longer a term that really has any meaning but has stuck around for a long time, that’s when we can start looking at DLCs.

But you also have to remember, once we're done and can no longer touch anything, it hasn't hit the players yet. There's quite a delay there and there's two things that start going on. You immediately start working on fixing those bugs that still remain in the game. Every studio does this. This isn't unique to Bethesda. That's also when you start looking at what the DLCs are going to be?

DLC is largely a matter of opportunity as well as the obvious stuff. You don't know at the beginning of the project what's going to make great DLC for that game but by the end of it, you probably have a pretty good idea because now the game is made, you can see where the spots are where you could attach something.

In the case of the Shivering Isles, Sheogorath had done so well in Oblivion. We thought OK, we’ve got to do more with this guy. He was a fan favourite. He had a very good treatment in Oblivion. He really deserved to have his own place, and he’s not your standard villain either. He’s not going to conquer the world so he can rule over it all. He’s just this insane guy who really likes cheese.

With Dragborn for Skyrim, we wanted to do as much with the dragons as possible. They were the big feature of Skyrim so we definitely were looking to do more with them and do as much as possible with that in Dragonborn.

You’ll remember too the vampire story was another one of the big DLCs, Dawnguard. Vampires had gotten short shrift in Skyrim before that. Not that they were not present but we didn’t have a lot of good storylines with vampires in Skyrim and they were something that all the way back to the Daggerfall days they had been a very important part of the lore. So we decided hey let’s do something big with them.

Q: Does Todd Howard have a framework for where he wants to take the story and setting in The Elder Scrolls 6, 7, 8 and beyond?

He thinks about it before we do. That is his role. That's his job. He would tell us I’m looking at this place that I’d like to do and I’m thinking about these things, but it was all very meta and very fluid.

There will be a lot of time between Skyrim and Elder Scrolls 6 so the things that were on his mind at the end of Skyrim compared to the things that are on his mind when it’s time to actually start working on what comes next, there are a lot of changes that go on there.

Since Skyrim, the industry has changed. The focus of the studio changed. New ideas came to light. It's a very organic process in that way. It isn't necessarily locked down tight.

Todd has his meta ideas and he shares some of them and others he just keeps to himself.

Q: Do you recall any promises made to Kurt Kuhlmann to be the lead on The Elder Scrolls 6 and turn it into the Empire Strikes Back of the series?

One of the beauties of Elder Scrolls stories, and to a certain extent also the Fallout stories, is that the world takes center stage with all the stories attached to it. That means there's room for lots of different stories. There's room for lots of things to happen. It's not mono-themed.

In Skyrim we had the whole civil war storyline, as well as the dragons, and those two coexisted and they coexisted quite nicely. You could have the cool Empire Strikes Back type story that Kurt was thinking about and 10 other really cool storylines going on. You don’t necessarily have to choose one or the other.

Every developer on the projects has their favorite moments, they have their favorite things, they have their favorite storylines, and they're not all the same, and that's a good thing. You want that diversity of opinion, you want that diversity of input in order to make a game that is grand in scope.

If I were to be still working on The Elder Scrolls 6, and if Kurt were to have been the lead, and that was a thing that Todd approved, I would have probably wanted him to be allowed to run wild with that idea.

Q: Going into The Elder Scrolls 6, does Skyrim have a canonical ending to set up the next game in your view?

I don't know but if I were to hazard a guess, and this is just purely a swag, I would say they will leave it undefined or leave it as neither side really won. 

We have a phrase that we use in game development sometimes which is put your toys away. For certain levels of storyline, you want to reset things back the way they were so that you don't make sweeping changes. 

Now, the big grand stories, you want those to make the sweeping changes. That's what is cool and exciting, that the world is dynamic. But if I'm doing a thieves guild storyline, I usually want to put my toys away. I want to make sure that the next guy who has to do a thieves guild storyline isn't highly limited or constrained by what I did so that they have the open world to be able to explore and have a new storyline. 

That’s why things like the guilds typically are more region-centered. The guild in Skyrim is local to that area. The guild over here could do something completely different. But dragons? Dragons are here to stay. Dragons are the new big thing. Dragons are a world change. 

If I were to hazard a guess, I would say either just not deal with what happened in the civil war or leave it and say there was a civil war but it didn't really come to a complete conclusion or some sort of détente, but that’s just my guess.

Q: Technology seems to be becoming less and less advanced or sophisticated in the lands of Tamriel with each new entry in the series, especially comparing Morrowind and Skyrim. Was that an intentional idea, and is it intended to show magic is growing in power as technology is lost?

It is intentional but not for the reasons or methods that you're talking about. 

Morrowind was a high fantasy story. High fantasy was more popular at that point in time but one of the things that Todd was drawn to is the idea that the world has a normality to it to make magic feel special, and to make all the other things that happen in the game more meaningful. 

If everybody is walking around teleporting up and down towers and all that stuff it would make all those things feel a little bit less special so while magic is understood and accepted and part of the world, the world has a normality to it.

When Skyrim was released, The Lord Of The Rings had dominated the fantasy genre during the Oblivion period, and that high fantasy stuff wasn’t quite as popular, so the magic and technology levels were brought down to meet the fantasy community where they were.

You hear a lot of fans who absolutely loved Morrowind and think that was the peak of The Elder Scrolls series and you know what, more power to them. That’s because they love that high fantasy motif. Todd’s view for Oblivion and Skyrim was to create more of a lower level of a fantasy setting. 

‍Q: In the early lore and early games there are some very out there ideas like nods towards some space exploration, the Battlespire and other features. Could these elements be brought back into the modern series and reinvented somehow?

There is a ton of stuff. That’s one of the beauties of the Elder Scrolls series. The lore is so deep. 

The guys working on The Elder Scrolls Online have expanded the second era so much that there’s now even more to deal with.

If you look at what they're doing, they're also creating more of a high fantasy version of Tamriel because their game is set so far in the past so that works for them but there's a lot of stuff they could go to. 

When you have a game where time has been split into six parts and giant constructs that are 100 feet tall stride the earth, there's all kinds of crazy things you could do if you were to choose to.

I think it's dangerous to mix science fiction and fantasy. People who like fantasy like fantasy. It’s not that you can't do it. It's been done before in the Might And Magic series. They took their series into space and even had ray guns by the end of it.

I would go deeper and deeper into the Daedric Lords and their realms. I think that's always been at the heart of what makes The Elder Scrolls feel like The Elder Scrolls and I think there's a lot of really interesting things you could do there. 

A lot has been done, and they've been featured very heavily in a lot of the Elder Scrolls pieces, but for me that’s where I would probably go.

Q: Are there any parts of the Elder Scrolls lore that you regret being written in or established because of how it limits future games?

The big one would go way, way back. That would be the time splitting thing that happened way back in the Daggerfall days. 

That is one of those cases where it's such a big change we kind of just didn't address it. There’s no way to claim one or the other. There’s no way to do anything with it. That would be a case where we should have put more of our toys away to use that phrase.

By allowing all the possibilities to exist and never resolving them, you cause yourself some lore issues and I think that probably could have been handled better.

Q: Having laid the groundwork for the series, what is the one holy cow aspect of Elder Scrolls lore you think the team should be brave enough to break for the next game?

Well, the big obvious one would be the disappearance of the Dwemer. That would be the one. I would be shocked if they do anything with that in Elder Scrolls 6 and quite frankly, if I was involved in Elder Scrolls 6, I would not deal with it either. 

I think the Dwemer are one of those mysteries you always want to keep a mystery but if they get to The Elder Scrolls 9 and it’s time to retire the series, I think that would be a really good thing to pull out again for the players. I think they would absolutely love that.

The Dwemer are kind of like the Elder Scrolls version of Tom Bombadil. You don't really know what he is but he's fascinating and keeping that mystery as a mystery, I think that is one of the smartest things they've done with the Elder Scrolls. 

Only if I thought the series was really coming to its last stages would that be the time I'd even begin to think about addressing it. 

Q: Where do you think would be the most interesting place to set The Elder Scrolls 6?

Where would I set it? I would probably go down to the Elven lands, the Summerset Isles. I think that would be a break and a change from the more gritty and ordinary stuff that has been done with the Nords and Cyrodiil. 

It would allow you to go back a little bit into the high fantasy and I've seen what the Elder Scrolls Online guys have done with that region. I think they did a bang up job and you could tell some really cool stories there and make it a little more elf-centric. 

The elves have always been kind of sitting on the side and it would be cool to make them more front and center.

Q: Could The Elder Scrolls 6 explore new areas of the world on a different continent entirely?

When you look at the known continents of Tamriel, there's a lot of space still to explore. One of the things that Tamriel does not need is more of that.

We don't need five new races. We don't need an entire new continent to explore. If we were talking about The Elder Scrolls Online, they might have more of a need for that, but when you’re doing the single player games, it’s not necessary. The single player games have explored 10-15% of the known world.

I would not go to new continents but you could have something where people from other continents come and invade or influence the world in some way but there's so much cool stuff to explore. 

You can run the risk of making the world too big and too complex and raising the barrier to entry for new players too high, and you see that happen a lot. It's an unfortunate reality of online games. In order to keep their current fan base, they keep adding more, and then for someone who wants to get it, it’s just overwhelming. 

Having 52 different races, 112 different magic systems, it’s exciting for the people who’ve been there on the ride from the beginning but it’s too challenging for people who are trying to get into it for the first time.

Q: Is that belief in lowering barriers of entry for new players part of why there has been a concerted effort to streamline a lot of the traditional RPG elements in Oblivion and Skyrim and do you think that trend will continue with The Elder Scrolls 6?

Absolutely, and I led the charge on that, to be frank.

Obviously I had to persuade Todd Todd as he is the ultimate arbiter on these things but I managed to do so. I did a lot of the character systems and one of Todd’s philosophies early on in Oblivion, which I took to heart and why I pushed so hard for these things, is that he wanted an interfaceless game so ideally you just play the game. You just play it. 

It was about getting the character system out of the players’ way. You don’t have your head buried in menus, stats and rules. Just enjoy the moment. It is a way to do that. In every version of the Elder Scrolls where I had any say in character systems, that is what I would push for.

We got rid of attributes in Skyrim and you know who complained? Almost nobody. They hardly even noticed it. I love the whole idea that you do something, you get better at it. That’s now a hallmark of the Elder Scrolls series because you play the character you want to play and you just get better at playing that character.

If you want to change, just start doing other stuff. You don’t have to worry about where you are going to spend your points or how you are going to do this and do that. Just play the game. Lets get the game out of your way. To me, it has always been one of the great things about the progression of the Elder Scrolls titles.

Q: For those who do want more of a traditional RPG experience is the answer that other titles are available rather than The Elder Scrolls rolling back on these changes?

Yes. If you look at Fallout, for example, and that’s another Bethesda title of course, they are embracing old school RPG features with that, and that is intentional. That’s by the same studio, by the way. We’re not talking about a studio that has a bias. It’s all about how each game should approach it. 

In Fallout, they want you to have that retro feel because everything in Fallout has a retro feel. It’s a world based on 1950s super science. The game rules do that as well. They’re very old school RPG game rules where you get experience points and decide how to manage your character at that level.

If you prefer those old school elements, there's a wealth of other games out there for you. For the players who want, they will find games for that. Bethesda as a studio can be the best at doing both with two different titles but a single game can’t be trying to do both. 

Q: When you designed the radiant quest system, did you envision it becoming the industry standard, or do you feel it has been overused?

Kurt and I were the primary drivers for the Radiant Story system. It was based on a napkin drawing from Todd. I mean,you hear jokes about this but it was literally on a napkin in the cafeteria. 

He drew this little circle and said this is where I want things to go. It was one of those things where he provided the long vision for the direction he wanted us to take, and from that, Kurt and I proposed the radiant system and it went back and forth. 

I think the radiant story system has actually taken a step back a bit. Not for bad reasons but because the whole vibe of Fallout is more old school therefore the whole Radiant system couldn't be utilized to the same extent as it could be in Elder Scrolls.

The last three Bethesda titles, not counting Starfield, have been Fallout stories so while the radiant story system was used in the service of Fallout it has been refined and improved and gone through all kinds of wonderful ideas but there’s aspects that were last used in Skyrim. They’ve been languishing because they did not serve what the Fallout games have needed.

In Fallout, for example, vendors don't have schedules. Your NPCs don't have all this real world stuff where they go to bed and go here to eat and whatnot to the same extent as they do in Skyrim. That's because in an old school RPG, you want the vendor to be there to serve the player. You're not trying for a greater level of immersion. 

One of the things that I did in The Shivering Isles was anytime an NPC was killed, all his stuff goes into his grave, and so you can go get his stuff. He's buried and anything that's left there goes there. That kind of immersion doesn't make sense in Fallout.

There are things that you could do to elevate things even more in the next Elder Scrolls title, assuming that they wish to keep the radiant system. I don't know what the team's plans are. They may decide to go in a different direction. They're very sensitive to what the audience is interested in and if they think the audience is more interested in maintaining those things, that's what they'll do.

‍Q: GTA 6 is apparently going to push to create the most unprecedented AI for NPCs. Based on your experience with Bethesda’s radiant AI, what is the actual limit of making a city feel alive before the simulation starts to break under its own weight?

I'll give you a multi part answer to that. 

Todd Howard is very fond of saying we can do anything, but we can't do everything, so you have to make a choice. Where are you going to put your energy? Are you going to put it into expanding radiant AI? Are you going to put it into having all these AI pieces involved in your game? Or are you going to put it elsewhere? 

And that's just a decision. Where am I going to spend my effort? I have limited resources, both in time and personnel. I can't do everything. I have to choose. 

Secondly, one of the lessons learned early on with radiant story in Skyrim is the realization that it is a tool. It is not the end-all be-all. We actually went too far with radiant stories in the process of development and the game felt flat, because we weren't using it as a tool to create the best stories. We were using it because it was there. 

It’s the old saying that everything is a nail or when you have a hammer. When you start seeing it as a tool to create the best player experience, that's when you get the most out of it. You focus on the player experience, what you want to get out of it, and how this is a tool that helps you do that, to make things happen the way you need them to happen. 

In order to make the world feel alive in Skyrim, we had a very sophisticated system with radiant story where if this NPC dies, this other one will take over their role, and then there's aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, and they all interact with everything. It made the world feel very, very alive. 

But you go to Fallout and Fallout is much more compartmentalized. The world has a completely different feel to it and they didn't want to lose those cool NPCs that they had spent time crafting to put a second one in and a third and have all this other stuff going on, so their NPCs are more static because it served their world. It gave them a better experience. They used radiant AI in a different way. 

As far as what the GTA team are doing, I would really hope that they're focusing on what makes for the best player experience and how to use radiant AI to get that rather than saying, AI is cool, what can I do with it? If you create a player experience that serves the technology rather than the other way round I think that's the cart before the horse. 

That's just my opinion as a developer though, and you can see pieces of that in Skyrim and in the Fallout games where, quite frankly, the quests feel flat because they're completely radiant story generated. They don't have any color to them in the way that the players really want.

To be fair, more advanced radiant AI or other AI systems could solve those problems too but now you're back to the start of the problem. We can do anything but not everything. 

Q: What ideas or themes are you now able to explore in your books that wasn’t possible at Bethesda? 

I've been reading science fiction fantasy for a very long time and a lot of fantasy and science fiction books deal with the superman complex, and that's something that I explore in my books. 

My first trilogy involves the Norse god Loki being in the modern world. He's hiding out as a stage magician and he's been doing that for almost a thousand years, and then the Norse gods finally come looking for him and all kinds of fun mayhem ensues. 

But in a game, you have the issue where the player can only be a little bit special. The Dragonborn is about as special as the player character has ever become because video game heroes need to be more of an everyman that has the potential to become a superman. But they have to start off as an everyman and grow into that, and they rarely exceed the world.

In a novel, especially in fantasy and science fiction novels, many times that scenario is the other way around. The protagonist, your hero, may already be special and unique and the story is about how they are trying to find their way in an otherwise normal world, or find their place within it so they can exist in it.

In my first trilogy, the Loki Redeemed series, it’s about Loki trying to deal with these two disparate parts of himself. To some extent he is a normal person, which is one of the things that always drew me to Norse mythology. Their gods feel like normal people in many, many ways compared to other mythologies. They weren’t way up there. They did human things but had that divine aspect too. For Loki, it’s about how these different parts can come to coexist inside himself.

Q: Given the strong Norse influence on Skyrim, was your trilogy inspired by any of the research that went into the game and its writing?

No, I had that idea for quite a while. I've always been fascinated by mythology and in particular the Norse mythology, albeit as a layman. I'm not an academic. It has some unique aspects to it. It feels a little more like Paul Bunyan and tall tales of American lore in that the stories don't necessarily fit a timeline. In fact, they can almost bounce back and forth in certain ways and all of their gods are flawed. They have very human flaws that get preyed upon, and so they feel like they are regular people struggling in the same world that we are struggling in.

That really drew me to the mythology and I had this idea for a long time. I actually started working on it while I was at Bethesda. I had to get special permission to do that because it's something I wanted to write. 

The research for the Nords and Skyrim was very very different. They may have that Viking look to them but they're not really Norse if you know what I mean.

Q: As an author, do you sympathise with George R. R. Martin and his struggles to finish the A Song Of Ice And Fire series?

For me, with Loki Redeemed, it was three books and that series is done. Never say never, I might write more on that series some day, but I would prefer to write other, different stories rather than continue to write that story.

George gave his story to somebody else and they ran with it and they did an amazing job with it. I think he'd be wise to say they finished my work and now I want to do something new. Getting the work finished, for me at least, would have precedence over the fact that I had to personally do it.

It would also be remiss if I didn’t mention that I have also written a LitRPG series. Aethon Books published the first three titles and I’ve published the final three myself, and that was a combination of gaming and novel for me. It felt very natural for someone with my background.

I had already written the Loki Redeemed trilogy, Mischief Maker and whatnot, and given that I come from a gaming background and have now successfully written the trilogy, it felt like a cool blend of two things that I love, so I did it. I put out a six book series, and I completed it, which I like to be able to say. I don’t want to go down George’s path unless somebody wants to offer me an HBO deal for my stories, in which I’d be glad to let David Benioff finish it for me.

Q: Do you agree that expectations are now so high that creating The Elder Scrolls 6 or Fallout 5 has become an impossible job?

I am very fond of a phrase called the game of expectations, and I've been trotting the game of expectations out for well over a decade. Bethesda's in the bad position of having expectations being so high they cannot be met. 

Managing expectations is the number one thing a good marketing department has to do. Let's take a look at Starfield. Let's assume that a new studio had put out Starfield. I suspect it would be talked about like the second coming. But because it was released by Bethesda, the expectations were so much higher that it was seen differently. Starfield is a good game. It's a very good game. It's just not the game that people expected it to be. 

Now, going back to Elder Scrolls 6, they have that same problem but they also have the advantage of having done Elder Scrolls 5 and 4 and 3 and 2 to where I think they've got a good shot at meeting expectations. 

After Oblivion, there were very sky high expectations and Skyrim met them and exceeded them. After Fallout 3, there were very high expectations for Fallout 4, and the studio met them. So the potential is definitely there, but I agree with Nate Purkeypile. Boy, do they have their work cut out for them.

Q: How could they shake up the Bethesda formula to subvert expectations and wrongfoot players in a good way for Fallout 5 or The Elder Scrolls 6?

I would probably look at two things. I would probably look at having the world be more dynamic. 

Bethesda games in the last decade have become less dynamic in order to meet the needs of what the games needed and audience expectations, but to be able to have the world be more fluid, I think that would be very cool. 

I also think, to look at Baldur's Gate 3 and draw lessons from that mash hit, that part of what made it so popular is that it felt like all choices were meaningful because you made a choice and it made a big difference in your play.

Bethesda games have maybe pulled back from doing that a little bit. The focus is on putting your toys away but in these games you do something in the thieves guild quest line that completely changes what becomes of the mages guild, for example. The world and the game is changed because of your choices. Have it make a real impact.

If I were in a position of being able to make the decisions, that's something that I would look to be doing because I think the gaming community has spoken and said they want games like Baldur's Gate 3 where their actions feel like they have impact in a broader sense.

Q: Do studios step away from having the player close off or change aspects of the game out of a fear that they won’t experience all the content available to them?

That was actually an intentional thing in Skyrim. The thinking was that we spent time and effort making this content. We want to make sure the player can experience it all. 

That was done intentionally and I think those are good decisions. But as we're pointing out, every formula can get stale after a while, so maybe it's time to shake it up and do it a little bit differently and say all the content is available but you may need to do another playthrough to experience all of it.

Q: Where would you like them to take the Fallout series next?

That's a good question. I think you need a place that is dripping in character so I would look at places like New Orleans, St. Louis or Orlando. What happened to Disney World in the Fallout universe? That could be a tone of fun.

You need a place that feels like it has a lot of character. It can’t be cities that don’t have that, and I'm focusing on cities because Fallout tends to be a game that is developed around cities.

Some of the most impressive places have already been done. Las Vegas. I mean that’s a place that's just dripping with flavor. Boston and DC, these are places that just exude that. So you need to find someplace like that.

It would be interesting to take Fallout overseas but it is a series so steeped in Americana that I don’t think they do that. It almost wouldn't work in other places. But the reason I even brought it up at all is that America is a newer nation than many of the old world nations. 

When you look at Paris, London, Moscow these are places dripping in character but it would make for a very, very different game. Fallout as we know it wouldn’t play there.

Q: If you did have to take Fallout to somewhere outside of the USA, to create a new and very different Fallout experience, where would you go?

I would probably have to go to Asia. I think Tokyo would be great. 

They could lean into Kaiju and that would feel a very natural fit for the series. You could do a lot of very cool stuff out there.

I have no idea where Fallout 5 will be set but it’ll be in America. I would be shocked it it wasn’t.

Q: How does the public perception of Todd Howard differ with the man you know?

Well, you'll have to tell me what you think the public perception of him is. I've known the man for a long time. For me to see the forest for the trees is a little difficult.

I can tell you candidly that when working at Bethesda up through the Skyrim days, Todd is probably one of the best bosses I've ever had. I can also tell you he's keenly aware of the fact that he is a bottleneck and he works his ass off to not do that. Unfortunately, he doesn't succeed very well.

But this is not something where he is being an ogre about it. It's part of the culture of the studio and that is extremely difficult to get away from because it's baked into how things are done. Even though he tries desperately not to, he does what he calls seagulling where he swoops in and changes things. It still happens.

I will give you the counterpoint too. When you build games as big as Bethesda games, Todd was very good about saying I care about this and this and this and this, and he spends a lot of time and attention on those things. We were left to go our own way on it, not that he wouldn't come in and have to approve the work, but he would give a lot of leeway. 

You know, I revamped the entire magic system for Skyrim because I felt it was very old and cliched and it needed to be redone. We had talks about it. He approved the general idea and he was very involved in that. Then he let me have my head. Not that we didn't have discussions about this particular thing or that but I had a lot of freedom to create that. A lot of freedom. 

It was the same with a lot of the character systems. He was very involved in the perks because he had a vision for what he wanted for that. On the underlying stuff, I had a tremendous amount of freedom to do what I wanted to do. 

I would say that the reputation you just said is both earned and unearned because it's a big studio. It's a big project. We do big projects. We did big projects. You can have both of those things be true at the same time.

Q: Is there a system you’d love to get your hands on now to rework if you had the chance?

That's a tough question. I'm very much a character systems kind of guy so I would very much want to be part of that, and I think there's always evolutionary changes you can make. You don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

It’s been 13 or 14 years since Skyrim released so you could redo the magic system yet again, quite frankly. The technology has moved forward a lot. You could make magic very cool in new ways that hasn’t been explored. 

For me, probably the biggest thing I would want to see is more interest in variation in the creatures. I think a good job was done in Skyrim with that but I think that's one of the places where Starfield fell down is that the opponents weren't interesting enough.

In a fantasy world, you have the opportunity to do more really cool things with it, to do better bosses, for example, and to have creatures feel like they're special more often, but you also have to run into the anything vs everything discussion. 

You spend your time and attention on the magic system. Maybe you can't do the creatures. You do the creatures. Maybe you can't do the magic system. You’ve got to pick and choose. You don't have 20 years to make the game, although we are getting close to that now.

Q: From an internal perspective, what is the biggest misconception fans have about the Creation Engine and its limitations given the talk of moving Bethesda’s games to an alternative like the Unreal Engine?

What you have to realize is that if you were to switch engines, and I'll say this for any game anywhere, is that it is a massive effort. You are talking about dozens of people spent doing nothing but making an engine work. 

You are talking about putting your developers into a situation where they can't play the game. They may not even be able to work on making the game for long stretches because the engine is not there or up to snuff yet. 

That's an enormous thing. We ran into it with Fallout 76. The engine had to be changed dramatically to do multiplayer. It made things extremely difficult for the team.

Also, the Creation Engine has been tweaked to serve Bethesda’s purposes for so many years, decades really, that at this point, it's probably a wiser bet to keep working with it. The benefits that you get from switching to Unreal Engine are probably not going to materialize until two titles down the road. 

Every Bethesda game that has ever released has had major improvements made to the creation engine. Significant improvements are always being made to it. There's an entire team that's devoted to nothing but doing that. But the advantage you have there is that you can still run the game during the whole time because you have an existing engine. You're not having to figure out how to put this new thing in place.

I would fall on the side of keeping the Creation Engine, keep working on it. If there's something you see that is only possible in Unreal, put it into the Creation Engine. That would be a place where if it’s anything vs everything you say let's do that. Let's do that anything. If Unreal does it and Creation doesn't, and we feel we need to do it, do it.

Q: That’s fascinating because many people view the Creation Engine as a time sink for Bethesda that could free the team up to focus on their games if they switched out to Unreal but you’re saying it’s the other way around?

It is the complete opposite. You can't even begin to believe how much is baked into the engine in any of these games. To just swap out the engine, people have this sense that you just pull this plug, you put a new one in, and so it renders things more beautifully.

The Creation Engine is way more than a rendering engine. Way, way more. It's a whole method of how data is converted into function, and to graphics, and to the ability to do other things. You cannot just swap that out. That is not something that happens easily.

Q: Having worked on the world of Fallout for years, what have you made of the TV show?

I think it's amazing. I love the Fallout TV series. I actually think it's getting better the longer they go on. They're hitting their stride. For me, the first season had a couple of places where they were winking and nodding at the game. You give Dogmeat a stimpack and he instantly bounces up. That's funny and that's amusing but they're getting into actual storytelling in that world and that environment now in the second season, and I think they're really finding their mark. It’s still very much Fallout but they’re telling good stories of their own at the same time.

Q: Will the success of the Fallout TV series lead to The Elder Scrolls getting its own show?

What you have to realize about things like the Fallout TV show is that they don't make Bethesda money directly. I would be shocked if Bethesda is making any money that they care about really, not when you make literally billions of dollars on Skyrim. What you're going to make by licensing the IP to this TV show is just peanuts.

But what it does get you is attention. What it gets you is notoriety. It's marketing. Do they really need marketing for Elder Scrolls 6? 

I also think there's something very special and different and unique about Fallout that lends itself to becoming a TV or movie experience whereas The Elder Scrolls is trying to be a standard kind of fantasy. That’s not as interesting, not in this day and age where you already have The Lord Of The Rings movies. We’ve got Game Of Thrones. You’d have to try to find something to lean into that would be special about it. 

You look at Fallout, everything is special about it. There is nothing like the Fallout universe anywhere else in gaming. It’s very unique. That makes it easy to make a TV show and draw eyeballs as opposed to going into a fantasy world where I've got elves and people throwing spells around. You'd have to raise those stakes. There's a dragon? I've seen dragons 20 times before. What are you giving to viewers that's new? 

Different media have different needs and I don't know that The Elder Scrolls would fit that media well. Maybe a movie but I would struggle to see a TV show. That would just be for promotional purposes but they're not going to make a ton of money off it

Q: Why do Bethesda seem resistant to remaking Morrowind despite the massive fan demand?

The problem with doing Morrowind is that I bet they don’t have the original code. The game is so old. I don’t know if the original source code exists anymore. If it does, can you even compile it?

When you’re looking at Oblivion, they still had the code. They could still compile it. Putting the code into the new version of the engine was a possibility. 

The other thing I would say is go back and play Morrowind and tell me that’s the game you want to play again. We all have these fond memories of things that were pivotal moments in our gaming fantasy histories that we absolutely move but you go back and play a 20 year old game and you will cringe. 

People even had cringe moments with the Oblivion remake but they forgave it because they’re reliving something, they’re enjoying the nostalgia. I worked on Oblivion. I’m even responsible for some of those cringe moments! The further back you go, the more that’s going to be an issue. The reality of playing Morrowind would not stand the test of time, in my opinion. 

Now if you were to completely remake Morrowind with the Skyrim engine, to try and rebuild it from the ground up, that’s a whole other story, but that’s an entire project. That’s a whole four-year development cycle. Why not go and make something new?

Let's revisit the lands of Morrowind and do a new story. You can include the giant crab palace and all of that stuff but make it new and avoid all the things that would not have survived the test of time.

Q: Bethesda games are often criticized for their floaty combat. Why has it been so hard for the studio to nail the feel of hitting an enemy?

It took a step forward with Skyrim and I think they’re going to continue to take more steps forward in The Elder Scrolls 6.

Combat can get very dicey in these role playing games because it has to be exciting and energetic the minute you step out of the prison you start in, which means you have none of your special perks or attributes. You’ve got to maintain that too as the player’s power ramps up.

In a game that's focused on combat, your combat capabilities and nature of the combat does not change dramatically over time, and so they can hone the combat to make it super exciting. But if every time I gain a level suddenly I have a new perk that changes how I do business in a fight, that’s tough, and really tough on a combat team. 

But I'm willing to bet that they make improvements on it. It's something that I know in the past Todd has cared deeply about. He very much likes the action RPG style and he spends a lot of his time and attention on trying to make combat more visceral and exciting but it collides with the RPG elements and not in a good way. 

Stealth is the biggest example of this. How do you start out not being good at being sneaky but still make being sneaky exciting and then still maintain that when you're absolutely amazing at sneaking?  It's hard to have growth in those things and make that work from level one all the way to the end.

Q: What do you make of the debate over $100 games, especially for titles like Skyrim and the Fallout series that offer players so many hours of play? 

I remember for 15 years, the price of a newly released game was $59.95. For 15 years, it didn't change. Not even a cost of living increase. Not even recognizing inflation. It stayed at that price point. The fact that the prices are going up, I can't fault them for that. 

But I don't think players look at the hours of experience per price of the title once it gets past a certain number. There's going to be savvy players who do but I think a lot of times it's just that immediate hit you in the jaw, the impact that I've got to drop this amount of money for a game. 

What I'm surprised you didn't ask about is if they weren't going to go to a subscription model. A pay as you go model. That seems to be where everything is going these days. I can't get Microsoft Word unless I pay a monthly fee. The model for online games are indeed that way but are single-player games going to go that way too? I know most of the answers for that.

I think that they would most likely sell The Elder Scrolls 6 for whatever the industry standard price is at the time. If consumers are accepting $79.95, that's what it'll sell for. If they're accepting $99.95, that's what it'll sell for. It'll sell for whatever premium games go for at that time, and Microsoft has a heavy say in that and how it's marketed.

Economies around the world are struggling a little bit. I personally think game developers would be wise to not push the prices higher but gamers are a special breed. You know, they will pay for what they want. I would be loath to tell you how much I have paid for gaming in my life. I'm sitting at a fancy gaming table I paid way too much for. We’re willing to pay for our hobby so maybe people will pay for that and smarter people on the marketing side than I will be able to answer that question better.

Q: If Rockstar came and tapped you on the shoulder tomorrow and said Bruce, we want you to set the vision for Grand Theft Auto 7 — the setting, the story, everything. What would you do?

I’d tell them you’ve got the wrong guy!

That is so far out of my wheelhouse. I'm sure I could do a decent job of it but I'm sure they could find much better people. 

Now if somebody wants to come in and ask me to do a fantasy or a science fiction game, you know now that's my wheelhouse. Urban gang warfare and driving cars around that's I'm not your guy.

Q: Not even if they said you could make a GTA set inside the walls of the Imperial City in Cyrodil? 

That would be more like the five gangs in New York more than modern urban stuff.. I would have to steep myself in the lore way, way too much to be able to pull that off.

‍Q: Was there a sense inside Bethesda that it was good to see other big RPG series doing well to keep the genre strong and increase competition through games like Mass Effect, The Witcher and others?

We were probably more focused on Bethesda. The approach has always been we need to make an amazing game that our players and our audience loves. Audiences are influenced by other games and they shift around and you are wise to acknowledge those shifts and go with them. 

If you're always trying to beat the guy to your right at what he's doing, you're not going to make your best game. You have to make your best game, the game you know how to make, and maybe draw lessons from what they do. 

But Bethesda shouldn't be making the next Grand Theft Auto or the next Red Dead Redemption or whatever that may happen to be. They shouldn't. I mean, that's not their thing. They should look at those games and ask why they did these things really well and audiences loved it. Maybe Bethesda can find an analogue in their games to offer the same things. That's doing it smart but it still has to be our game. 

A Bethesda game is going to be a huge open world. A Bethesda game is going to be content rich. A Bethesda game is going to be immersive. These are all the things they're going to be. They shouldn't try to be something that they're not. They shouldn't try to make games that aren't in their wheelhouse. 

Starfield, for example, felt very natural. It's something that they're good at. If they choose to make a sequel to Starfield, I am betting it will rock because they will take those lessons learned. They will incorporate the things to make it a more traditional Bethesda game and we'll knock that out of the park. We'll have to see if that's something that's in the cards though.

I left the company halfway through Starfield’s development so I'm probably in the same situation as people who played a hundred hours of this game and, you know, I have these complaints. But excuse me, dude. You still played a hundred hours of that game. I played that game all the way to the bitter end and I have thoughts and I have concerns but I played it to the bitter end and therefore that's a win for Bethesda.

Q: What are your hopes for the next Mass Effect game?

I would hope that they would try to just take their lore and make a modern game of it. One of the knocks on Mass Effect that I would have is that they always felt like they were a generation behind. I know, they had very cool characters, they had great stories, but the gameplay always felt dusty and old. It just wasn’t there.

If they can take the things that they were so good at and do it in a more modern sense, I think that they'd have a fantastic game.

I think taking lessons from Baldur's Gate 3 would fit Mass Effect really well. They already had that kind of style in their games and Larian Studios had the advantage of having produced the Divinity and Divinity 2 games. They were able to use that engine for it.

But I think they should probably try to make a more Bethesda-style game, to be honest. I think Mass Effect players are dying for an open world science fiction game that has that kind of flavor to it. A big open world content heavy game? I think Mass Effect players would be going nuts for that. But I’m a former Bethesda guy so I’m probably going to say that about a lot of things. 

Q: Rockstar are reportedly allowing a terminally ill fan early access to GTA 6 before they pass. Do you remember any such requests at Bethesda?

Bethesda has done that. Bethesda works with Make-A-Wish and they've done exactly that but they do not advertise it. It is not something that they promo because that's not how they believe that sort of thing should operate. This isn't a marketing opportunity for them. That's not what it's about. 

This is about acknowledging that Make-A-Wish would approach them and say they have someone who is terminally ill and this is their dream, this is what they would like to have, and Todd is always generous with his time and with the studio for those. 

They're not gonna tell you who they did it for. They're not gonna say when it happened, because that's not what it's about. It's about. that person and that experience and it should remain that way.

Q: How would you go about bringing Arena or Daggerfall to life as modern remakes? 

I think Morrowind is as far back as you can go. 

I worked on Daggerfall. It's too old in the tooth to really remake in that way, not that you couldn't revisit the Iliac Bay. You could definitely set a modern Bethesda game there without any problem. 

The story in Daggerfall was minimalistic because that was what the technology allowed for at that point. The art was the same way. It was minimalistic because that's all you could do. 

Arena was just a glorified dungeon hopping game. That doesn't take away from Arena. It was state of the art back then and it was a cutting edge game in a lot of ways. You just have to view it in the context of its time.

Morrowind is the first time that you get the modern sense of the graphics as we think of them today being a possibility and therefore that’s a game you could remake but I would not go back to Daggerfall or to Arena. I don't think there's enough there. I don't think they contribute enough to make a modern game out of them.

‍Q: Rumour has it that The Elder Scrolls 6 will return to Iliac Bay with fans theorising that the teasers we’ve seen so far are hinting at High Rock and Hammerfell being the locations of the next game in the series. How rich is that location as a setting to revisit?

I don't think you have an area that isn't rich in potential in Tamriel. I think you don't want to step on the toes of things you've recently done yourself. Let's not go back to Cyrodiil, for example. But I think Hammerfell and High Rock would be great places to go. I think you've got lots of good stuff there. 

I think they could go to Summerset Isle and the other islands and do great stuff there. I think it's been long enough that you could revisit Morrowind. I don't think you can say this area is boring and therefore not worthy of Elder Scrolls 6. I don't think there is such a place in Tamriel, and that's by design. You're making a game world. You make everything cool and interesting. 

If anything, there's places that would be too interesting. I think Elsweyr would be a challenge with its cat people who change the nature of their catness as they mature. That one might be a little challenging to do. But I think pretty much anywhere you go, there's lots of cool, interesting stuff you could do.

Q: Ubisoft have come under criticism for their mandate for employees to return to the office, saying that people making games need to be together for creative ideas to emerge in person. What do you think of that idea?

There's multiple components to the work you do in a dev studio. It's not mono-themed. This is a mistake a lot of people make. 

There's times when I need to shut my damn door and sit down and do stuff by myself. That's great for working from home. But having done that, because I worked through the pandemic and I was completely working from home, you are also cut off from the other people and you start to lose the sense of the project. You don't get that sense of community or sharing of knowledge. 

But this isn't an either or thing. You can have your cake and eat it too. If you have certain times when you say we need people in the office because we need to have some camaraderie, we need people to be working together, you can also acknowledge that there's other times when you just need to sit down and do stuff and you need to get work done without disruption. That’s better done at home. Have time for that too.

It doesn't have to be one or the other. It isn't a single solution sort of thing. I'm also hopeful that online collaborative tools will get better, although that is for the distant future. Right now you tend to get isolated and so you need to somehow make it so that you don't have the isolation but you still can have the ability to focus. That’s the problem with the office environment. There’s so many distractions. You can’t sit down and focus so easily.

Mischief Maker is the first book in the Loki Redeemed contemporary fantasy series by Bruce Nesmith. He has also written Feast of Ghouls, the first book in the LitRPG series, Glory Seeker. Titles in both series are available to purchase from Amazon. Bruce and his workcan also be found on his author page on Facebook.

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