Whether it was a headless inn keeper or an airborne mammoth, it’s no secret that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, for all of its ambition and scope, contained its fair share of glitches and bugs. Truth be told, these rather bizarre, unscripted gameplay moments were part and parcel of the game’s charm, and it wasn’t long before YouTube became inundated with montages of the glitches.
It’s a feat that is by no means exclusive to Skyrim, with numerous bugs rearing their head throughout the Fallout series, too.
And in a recent interview with Game Informer, Game Director Todd Howard touched upon Bethesda’s handling of the technical hiccups within 2011’s acclaimed RPG and how that has shaped the studio’s approach for Fallout 4.
“It probably took us a month or two before we really had a handle on it. The team had to decide how it was going to identify problems before it could figure out how they happened or why they surfaced at particular times. All of the updates we did on Skyrim, and all of the DLC – once we sorted [the bugs out] we had a different process for how we checked the content out.”
Howard admitted that there “will always be problems” in a open-world game of this nature, though he did note that overall, Bethesda is much better prepared to handle these glitches should – or when – they occur.
For us, [the player’s] saved game is the number one thing. If the game crashes that’s bad, but it is nowhere near as bad as someone’s saved game being hosed. That’s our scenario that we will do anything and everything to avoid. We made a lot of progress given how Skyrim went, but we did it during Skyrim. This just builds on that.
Fallout 4 will make its debut across PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on November 10.
