The creator realized it was finally time to take a well-deserved break.
Fallout 4 recently marked its first anniversary. The head of Bethesda Game Studios gave an interview in which he reflected on the game and shared some memories.
It turned out that he had gone two decades without a meaningful break, moving from one project to the next. So, after the release of the new installment of the franchise he decided to finally take a vacation:
Moving from Oblivion to Fallout 3, and then from Skyrim to Fallout 4 — outdoing our previous work and even earning “Game of the Year” — I never took any of it for granted. Whenever I think about those projects I picture the teams: years and years spent together creates a unifying experience. But I had been working extremely hard for a long time. After Fallout 4 I took about a three-month break. I hadn’t had a pause in twenty years.
When the interviewer asked whether Todd Howard missed working, he responded:
There’s always that small question: “What will it feel like to come back to work?” But I was genuinely excited. The night before I couldn’t sleep. I knew new challenges awaited us with Fallout 76 and Starfield.
The team faced fresh challenges with new projects, and the so-called “routine” work on Fallout 4 was far from an easy stroll:
If “routine” means constantly working yourself to the bone, then that’s exactly what we did. It becomes a kind of obsession. At some point you spend more time in imaginary worlds than with real people, and you find yourself thinking: “Maybe I should go touch some grass” — to reconnect with reality.
Source: iXBT.games