What a clickbait title. Not OPs fault, they just copied the original article title.

Saved you a click: This is about a short interview with one of the leads behind Fallout Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel. When 3 was coming out, Todd Howard said that for their purposes, Tactics and BoS didn’t happen.

Game lead says it sucked to hear, but he’s happy that elements have become canon in kind of a back door way, and thatcs good enough for him.

It was a different time with far less people needing clearly defined canon lore for things, and the canon of the other series Todd oversaw/sees Elder Scrolls was/is a massive clusterfuck with multiple conflicting events being simultaneously canon due to “dragon breaks” allowing multiple conflicting game endings to somehow all have officially occurred all at once. Seriously look up how the lore handles the endings of Daggerfall, or the fact that the entirety of the gameplay area of Oblivion (the Empire) had been consistently described as a (tropical) jungle in every game pre-Oblivion.

Anyway, here’s the relevant quote in its entirety, with bolding added by me that changes the sentiment from the headline significantly:

“It sucked,” says Orman. “You don’t want to be told that what you’ve done is non-canon. By the time he said that I had a lot of distance from this, so it wasn’t heartbreaking or gut-wrenching—it was just like, ‘Oh man. You didn’t have to officially say it, we could have existed in this weird quantum state where it was kind of part of things.’ But the way things go now, with the reinterpretation of IPs and the retelling of stories—and especially with the creation of the TV show, where it’s existing in the universe, but they’re taking liberties and they may have to make adjustments to make that world work for TV—lots of ideas are going to get shuffled around. There have been little bits and pieces of Tactics which you can see kind of are canon now, just through the back door over time. And that’s good enough for me. I don’t need anything more than that.”

Todd Howard can’t talk. He’s become Bethesda’s weakness.