Skyrim Creative Director Says Gaming Is All About Pride

Todd Howard, who is the creative director working on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, told an audience at the DICE 2012 conference in Las Vegas during his keynote that the main emotion behind the title that his team created was pride.

According to the veteran game developer, accomplishment is something unique to the video game medium and he stated, “Most entertainment can give you lots of emotion, but what's the emotion that games can do? The answer is pride.”

He added, “You can design for. How people feel with they accomplish something in games is like nothing else in entertainment can give you.”

The examples given by Howard include the light and music show, which starts when the player manages to take down the final peg in the PopCap Games developed Peggle, and the way Call of Duty as a series uses leveling up trying to make the player feel pride about his actions.

The Bethesda developer says that developers themselves should also be proud of their own work and make sure that everything that they deliver to gamers is good enough to make them boast with the development process they have gone through.

The Bethesda leader also talked about the success of his latest release, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, saying that the whole team was surprised by how quickly players adopted the game and by the fact that most of the more than 10 million gamers have put in an average of 75 hours.

The development team at Bethesda has released the long-awaited 1.4 patch for Skyrim on the PC, which is supposed to fix pretty much all remaining issues with the game, and also put out a PC version of the modding tools that the dedicated fan base needs to create more new content.

The 1.4 patch is also expected on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 before the end of the week.