Starfield, Indiana Jones and Fallout TV series details revealed by Bethesda director Todd Howard
'It is a definite love letter to Indiana Jones and everything with it,' said Howard about the upcoming Indiana Jones video game.
Bethesda director Todd Howard revealed new information about several upcoming projects such as Starfield, Indiana Jones and Fallout. Todd Howard sat for an interview at the Lex Fridman Podcast. He talked about the upcoming open-world Starfield game which is set to release next as an Xbox exclusive. He also talked about the latest Indiana Jones game being developed by MachineGames. Apart from video games, Howard also touched upon the upcoming Fallout TV series, dropping some revealing information about the story.
Starfield
Howard started with Starfield and addressed some issues that the development team wanted to avoid when it comes to providing a seamless gaming experience for the fans. We’ve seen the use of fuel in space exploration games such as No Man’s Sky and how running out of resources can leave a player stranded on a planet. Howard said the inclusion of such requirements like fuel can be too challenging for players and even turn out to be a “fun killer”.
“[Running out of fuel in a spaceship] just stops your game, we found. You’ll be playing the game and ‘I ran out of fuel, okay I guess I’ll just wander these planets trying to mine for fuel so I can get back to what I was doing. It’s just, you know, it’s a fun killer,” said Todd Howard.
Indiana Jones
Further in the podcast, we heard Howard talk about the upcoming Indiana Jones game. He revealed that Bethesda pitched the idea of a game way back in 2009 to those at Lucasfilms. The game obviously didn’t materialize back then, which Howard said was due to a lack of interest from Lucasfilms. Bethesda Softworks acquired MachineGames the next year in 2010. The Sweden-based studio went on to develop three Wolfenstein games which demonstrated their potential to make an Indiana Jones game to say the very least.
Lucasfilm Games, Howard and Disney talked about an Indiana Jones game once again and this time, it was a no-brainer for Howard that MachineGames be the ones who develop it. Howard said that MachineGames “is the perfect fit for this game. […] If you like Indiana Jones, it is a definite love letter to Indiana Jones and everything with it.”
Fallout TV series
Howard and Fridman also talked about the upcoming Fallout series on Amazon. Todd Howard revealed that the series will not be depicting the same story as the video games. Instead, it’ll look to tell an original story while being set in the world of Fallout.
Howard said, “For this, it was ‘Let’s do something that exists in the world of Fallout.’ It’s not retelling a game’s story. It’s basically an area of the map and like, Let’s tell a story here that fits in the world we built and doesn’t break any of the rules. It can reference things in the games but isn’t a retelling of the games. It exists in the same world, but it’s its own unique thing, so it adds to it.”
The Fallout TV series will be directed by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy who are known for directing Westworld. Howard revealed that Nolan is a fan of Fallout 3, so he was eager to work on this TV series. There’s no release window yet for the Fallout Series but it’s likely to arrive in 2024.