Todd Howard says Bethesda is working on getting games into players' hands more quickly.

Waiting for upcoming Bethesda games, particularly The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5, often puts me face to face with my own mortality. Although I'm only in my early 30s, anything can happen at any time and there's no denying the reality that Bethesda games take a long gosh dang time to make.

Yes, The Elder Scrolls 6 is in active development and could release in 2026 (at the soonest), but what about Fallout 5? That hasn't even been officially revealed beyond the simple confirmation that it exists in Bethesda's pipeline, and worse yet, Bethesda veteran Emil Pagliarulo recently dashed all hope of playing it any time soon.

Thankfully, Howard recently gave us a small glimmer of hope when he told Kinda Funny Games (timestamped here) that Bethesda has been trying to speed things up.

"If I didn't make these games, I would just be playing them all the time," he said. "Even this weekend I was jumping between Starfield and Fallout 76 and Fallout 4; that's how I spent my weekend playing games. And they do take a long time, and so I think one of the things that we're focused on here is obviously making sure they're of the highest quality, but also finding ways to increase our output, because we don't want to wait that long either. That's never our plan, but we want to make sure we get it right."

It's genuinely encouraging to hear Bethesda, essentially, acknowledging what is a very real issue to fans of the studio's IP. I don't need to remind anyone that the last mainline Elder Scrolls game was released 13 years ago, and if the next one is released as early as possible, it'll have been 15 years in-between releases. It needn't be said that that's simply too damn long, my half-serious existential crisis aside.

Skyrim's magic system is "absolutely going to continue" into The Elder Scrolls 6, according to a former Bethesda designer.

We've been waiting for word on when Shattered Space, the first Starfield expansion, will arrive, and now we have it—or at least a somewhat narrower release window. During an interview with Kinda Funny Games today, Todd Howard revealed that the big add-on is expected to be out this fall.

Howard mentioned the detail in a conversation about a different Starfield update that's coming sooner. He said that Bethesda wants to serve players who love ship building, and that there's "some great stuff" coming in that department in an update that he expects will be announced sometime this week.

When asked whether that was connected to the Shattered Space expansion, Howard replied, "This is a separate update. Shattered Space is in the fall."

Even though it's far from precise, it's an unexpectedly off-the-cuff reveal for what has the potential to be a big moment for Starfield. Bethesda has been dutifully fixing bugs and making various gameplay tweaks, but calls for meaningful new content have gone unanswered. In December 2023, Bethesda said Shattered Space will include "new story content, new locations, new gear, and much more," but this is really the first we've heard about it since.

Howard talks about the next update to Starfield, and the Shattered Space launch window, beginning at the 34:30 mark.

Howard also touched on the long-awaited Starfield Creation Kit in the interview, which will enable more robust modding support in Starfield than has been available so far. It turns out that some Starfield content creators already have access to it, and the rest of us should be hearing more about it "soon."

"I don't have a date to announce on when its full release is coming," Howard said. "Really, really important to us. Our modders out there have been incredible. And a lot of those, I think before the Creation Club, and now our new Creators Program, I think one of the great things is, we get to see them kind of 'go pro,' and move from hobby to professional. We've hired some of them into the studio, but more so the ones who are out there just like, hey, I can make a living now, making stuff that's really really good content, I think those people deserve the attention and the praise for what they do in our games."