Todd Howard Revealed Details About Working on The Elder Scrolls 6 and the Starfield Update

Todd Howard Reveals Details on The Elder Scrolls 6 and Starfield Update

Cover: Starfield screenshot

Todd Howard, head and creative director of Bethesda Game Studios, talked about progress on The Elder Scrolls VI and an incoming update for Starfield. He also offered brief remarks on Phil Spencer leaving Xbox and the new appointment, Asha Sharma.

The notion of letting players fly freely in Starfield isn’t new to the studio; it sat around as an idea for a long time while other priorities took precedence. Planet-level content and narrative threads came first, then complaints about lost scale started trickling in from the player base; modders stepped in, expanding what space travel could do (e.g., community-made fixes and tweaks). Eventually Bethesda decided to own that direction again. Free flight will be part of the April 7 update, arriving with the Terran Armada expansion — and yes, Starfield hits PlayStation 5 that same day.

On The Elder Scrolls 6, Howard stayed deliberately vague; spoilers are off the table, he said, and more will come "in due time." Still, he reassured fans that work is underway: most of the team and partners are currently working on "The Scrolls" (i.e., the core devs plus external collaborators). The build is reportedly stable "most of the time" but far from finished. It’s being built on Creation Engine 3 — Howard praised the engine not just for visuals but for how it handles data and speeds up internal processes like loading.

About the leadership shuffle at Xbox, Howard said he’s heard good reports about Asha Sharma. He also admitted he’ll miss Phil Spencer — calling him a "good friend" and a leader — and you could hear a bit of pause when he said it.