Bethesda’s Todd Howard on AI in game development: ‘It’s certainly not a fad’

Bethesda creative director explains the studio’s stance on AI.

AI has proven itself to be a controversial topic in gaming, especially in the last few months. Although the CEO of Baldur’s Gate 3 studio getting hounded on X for his stance on using it to assist with concept art to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2’s creative director insisting it’s ‘hear to stay’, that hasn’t shifted the consensus among gamers that they’d prefer AI ‘slop’ to stay away from the games they play.

Now, Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard, who’s responsible for directing beloved RPGs such as Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 4, has weighed in on the subject.

Speaking on the Kinda Funny Gamescast earlier this week, Howard explains how he doesn’t think AI is a ‘fad’, and that the team at Bethesda Game Studios is ‘not fully ignoring it’.

“The AI answer becomes ‘ask me in six months’,” Howard says. “It changes so much.”

“For us, we’re being incredibly cautious. [We’re] viewing it as a tool, as an analyst, to look at the data in our games. We’re not using it to generate anything. There’s such an element of artistic intention that is essential to what we do and what others do,” Howard explains.

He goes on to say that Bethesda games rely on ‘handcrafted, human intention’ to make their games ‘special’. “But you can’t ignore it in terms of it’s coming, it’s changing every few months. We’re looking at that stuff, we’re not fully ignoring it because it can help us get better at big data tasks that take us a lot of time that we wish were done now so we can move on to the creative stuff,” Howard finishes.

While Bethesda’s most recent game, Starfield, didn’t use generative AI, the team did use procedural generation to help create its thousands of planets available to explore. Sadly, this was a major criticism of the game for many players with many of the explorable planets proving barren and not all that interesting to explore in the first place.

Generative AI may have helped Bethesda in this area, but it doesn’t sound like the team is diving down that rabbit hole for its next project.

In the same interview, Howard confirmed that ‘most’ of the team at Bethesda Game Studios is now hard at work on delivering The Elder Scrolls 6 with internal playsessions already happening. He claims that this latest title will be a return to the classic Bethesda formula after the departure of Fallout 76 and Starfield, although we’ll still need to wait a while before it launches.

Howard explains that he’s a big fan of waiting until the game is almost ready to go before showing anything, much like we saw with both Fallout 4 and the Oblivion remaster earlier last year.

Like most gamers out there, I’ve got my fingers crossed that we’re not waiting too much longer for The Elder Scrolls 6. There are only so many Skyrim stealth archer runs I can take, Todd.