One of Bethesda’s bosses, Todd Howard, uncovers a secret in The Elder Scrolls III for Xbox that no one knew about until now.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, the celebrated and revolutionary third part of the Bethesda saga, kept a little secret in its version for the Xbox console; so much so, that the game restarted the console on the loading screens without anyone knowing, all to make up for the lack of memory that a game of such magnitude demanded in a system like Microsoft’s first home console. This was revealed by Todd Howard, executive producer of Bethesda, by way of curiosity in an interview with other prominent names in the Redmond company.
Microsoft buys Bethesda
Thus, and through a recent interview in which Major Nelson, Phil Spencer, Pete Hines and Todd Howard himself participated on the occasion of the recent purchase of their company by Microsoft, the Bethesda executive producer discovered to the surprise and laughter from the rest of the participants that this was one of the most original tricks that they carried out on the first Xbox console.
Todd Howard reveals that one of the tricks to combat low memory on the original Xbox was to reboot the console without the player noticing pic.twitter.com/9HcbztOUCF
– Nibel (@Nibellion) September 23, 2020
The reason was none other than The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was a game that was too demanding for Xbox hardware and that the console’s memory did not allow for more; For this reason, the developers chose to resort to a trick that has remained hidden until now, which consisted of freeing memory from Microsoft’s hardware in a hidden way behind loading screens, some of which were suspiciously long.
In reality, what the game did was reboot the system in order to have a minimum of free memory available to load the next part of the game; According to Howard, this was one of his favorite tricks that they performed on the Microsoft console, which leads us to wonder if similar tricks were performed in other games and systems that remain hidden to this day.
