Howard: Bethesda's heart is with single-player

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim director Todd Howard has said multiplayer is something Bethesda regularly considers, and always shelves.

"We always look into multiplayer, put lots of ideas on the whiteboard, and it always loses," the director told IGN.

"It's not that we don't like it. I can think of ways it would be a lot of fun, but at the end of the day, that dev time is going to take away from doing the best single player game we can, and that's where our hearts are."

However:

"The two most requested features we get are dragons and multiplayer. We got one of them this time!" he pointed out.

Although Howard didn't seem ready to give out new information about the game, he did make a couple of jokes which can probably be taken as "no"s.

Asked about unicorns, he replied "That's DLC. For a hundred dollars," and again about levitation, "Another DLC. Three hundred dollars."

There's a couple of new-ish images on IGN, too.

Skyrim is due on PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 on September 11. It's the fifth in the notoriously massive open-world RPG series, The Elder Scrolls.