Do we like them?

Do we like Todd Howard?

Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing harmful found and a long career honoured by his peers, but little on how he treats people, so a middling score.

Todd Howard is the face of Bethesda Game Studios, the people behind The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. He directs and produces the big games, which is why he gets asked about them in basically every interview going.

His peers have given him the big gong. The Game Developers Choice Awards handed him its Lifetime Achievement Award at its 2016 ceremony, chosen by an advisory committee of developers. That's a trade honour for the work, not a character reference, but it's a real one.

The latest from him is all about The Elder Scrolls 6. In March 2026 he told an interviewer that “The majority of this building is working on The Elder Scrolls 6.” He wouldn't put a date on it, which is the most Todd Howard thing imaginable.

On the harm check, we searched for what he has said and done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines and the climate, and for who he works with. Nothing came up: no campaigning, no conspiracy slide, no culture-war grift. That's a clean result, though the search turned up mostly games coverage, so it isn't a deep one.

On the good-person side, there's no court case or formal complaint against him in what we found. There's second-hand chatter that former colleagues say people around him are reluctant to push back, and union anger over Xbox layoffs at his studios. We couldn't open those pages to check them, and none of it was reported as his own conduct, so we're leaving it as a note rather than a mark.

The honest gap: we found no charity work and no stand he took at a cost to himself. That's why this is a 6 and not an 8. A clean record is nice, but we'd want to see more of the good stuff before cheering.