Starfield's Todd Howard pays tribute to Skyrim and Fallout

Ahead of Starfield's launch, game director Todd Howard has paid tribute to Bethesda's hits of the past.

Earlier today on August 23, Howard was at Gamescom 2023 in Cologne, Germany, to present a new demo of Starfield behind closed doors. During the presentation, the Starfield director took a moment to pay tribute to the Bethesda games of the past, as far back as The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind in 2002.

"I wanted to say is how great it's been to be part of Xbox," Howard began. "Like Phil [Spencer, Xbox head of gaming] was saying, we've known each other a long time, we started working together over 20 years ago on the original Morrowind on the Xbox. So it's just been this long journey that feels like, in many ways, it's culminating in a game like this that in many ways we couldn't have built without doing these other games."

The game Howard is referring to there is obviously Starfield, set to launch in just a few weeks from now on September 6, or September 1, if you're part of the Starfield early access gang. Howard clearly feels as though Starfield is built on the bones of The Elder Scrolls' success, and while he doesn't specifically namedrop it, we can imagine the likes of Fallout is also on Howard's mind.

Earlier this year, Howard revealed he'd actually been thinking about making a spacefaring RPG for 25 years. A 27-year-old Howard absolutely adored the idea of setting an RPG in space, and now in 2023, Howard finally gets to realize that dream. Starfield is no small thing for a developer as big as Bethesda, as it's the first new game world the developer has made from scratch in well over two decades.

Todd Howard explained Starfield's opening mission yesterday at Gamescom Opening Night Live, showing us how the game's entire prologue would unfold.