Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield
Guests: Todd Howard
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents18 chapters
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Blink once if you know when Elder Scrolls 6 is coming out, but are not going to tell
me.
The following is a conversation with Todd Howard, one of the greatest video game designers
of all time.
He has led the development of the Fallout series and the Elder Scrolls series, including
Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and the future Elder Scrolls 6, and a totally
new world in an upcoming game called Starfield.
Many of these have won Game of the Year awards and have been some of the most celebrated
and impactful games ever made.
To me, Skyrim is quite possibly the greatest game ever.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Todd Howard.
Is it possible that we are currently living inside a video game that the future you designed,
can you give hints as to how one would escape if this was a video game?
How can a video game character escape to outside the video game?
Are these things you don't consider when you design a game?
Actually we do, because in the kind of games that we make, we want it to be as open as
possible.
So when you start a game, you're always testing it.
What can I do?
What would the game allow me to do?
And you check everything.
You try to pick up the mugs, you try every door, you collide with everything, like, hey,
what are the rules of this world?
We try to do games where we say yes as much as possible.
That leads to some level of chaos.
But if you were stuck in a video game, you would try everything.
And usually you're going to find a door or a space where the designers didn't anticipate
you piling all those crates up and getting over a wall that they didn't expect.
Right, so it's not a designed doorway out, it's an accidental, unintended doorway out.
It's a happy bug.
You could like Truman Show, just get in the ocean and go until it's stuck.
It keeps going.
Right, right.
It keeps going.
The more realistic the game becomes, the harder it is to find that door.
The bigger the world, the bigger the open world.
And then as we do it, we learn they're going to find a way.
So just don't try to pen them in.
Usually we leave like this developer test cell area in the game that we don't anticipate
anyone will find.
And they ultimately find it.
It has crates of all the weapons in the game and things like that.
The little hints you drop now will just drive people mad, which is something I enjoy deeply.
So Skyrim NPCs have at times hilarious dialogue.
What does it take to build a good NPC dialogue?
The main thing is to make them reactive.
A lot of times when you write characters for movies or things like that, you want to make
that character interesting for themselves, right?
What's their story?
And there's some characters like that that the player definitely cares about.
But the best characters are the ones that react to you.
So you'll find a lot of people love our guards.
And the guards are written almost purely to be reactive.
Hey, nice tie.
I like your jacket.
Do this cool watch.
You know, hey, what'd you do?
And so that, hey, you're the man as you walk by.
That makes them interesting.
Or the way they react to something that you do.
Lydia in Skyrim, who everybody loves, I'm sworn to carry your burdens.
That's a generic line that all of the House Carls have.
And it just kind of lands when she says it.
Why does it land?
And did you anticipate it would land?
There's a slight snarkiness in that particular read of it.
And you're asking her to do something.
And she's reacting to you.
What about the trade-off between maybe the randomness and the scripted nature of the
dialogue?
Like, is there any room for randomness of the dialogue tree?
Oh, absolutely.
We tend to write them in stacks.
It's a very small-- think of it as a small state machine that just says, OK, this is
what's happening.
Here's a random list of things I could say to that.
And then some of that plays out in ways you don't anticipate.
But we look at the things.
What are the players doing that we could have the characters respond to that they don't
expect?
You know, jumping on tables or stealing stuff or sneaking in in the middle of the night
or those kind of things.
The more of that we can do, the more reactive and interesting the characters appear.
And these state machines, how big are these things?
Are these individual to the individual characters?
It's just fascinating how you design state machines.
Is it just a giant database?
I would think of the AI as one big one.
Yeah.
For sort of everybody.
So there's an AI--
There's a manager for all the people.
And one of the things--
It's the people manager.
Right, right.
Nice.
One of the things that makes what we do particularly unique is-- and this is a trade-off for what
people are seeing, because a lot of it's not on the screen.
But we're using cycles to run this, which is we're thinking about everybody in the whole
world all the time.
The ones that are further away at a much less tick rate, they go into low.
But we know if they want to walk across the world.
And we're running every quest at the same time.
Whereas in other open world games, you start an activity, the rest of the world is going
to shut down so that they can really make that as impactful.
I really prefer that the rest of it's going on.
It's more of a simulation that we're building.
So when those things collide, that's where it gets the most interesting.
And so we're running all of those people and understanding where they want to go and their
cycles and what they want to do.
And the ones that are closer to you, we just update a lot more.
It's one way to think about it.
I mean, that's really fascinating.
It's something that people had-- they were wondering about to what degree it's possible
to run the world without you.
So there is a feeling to role-playing games that you're the central, you're at the center
of the world and the whole world rotates around you.
As it does in normal life.
Like when we walk around, there's a-- when you forget yourself, you start to take yourself
very seriously.
Like you are the center of the world.
You forget that there's 8 billion people on earth and you forget that they have lives.
That's actually a sobering realization that they all have really interesting life stories
and they have their worries, they suffer in different complicated ways.
And yet, when you play a role-playing game, there's a-- I mean, both computationally and
from a storytelling perspective, you wonder if the world goes on without you.
Like if you come back, if you take a break and you come back, is there still a bustling
town that now has a history since you have last visited?
So to what degree can you create a world that goes on without you?
Or goes on at the same time as you do your thing, whatever the heck you're doing?
We don't prioritize the stuff you can't see.
So it's more like an amusement park.
If you study like the design, our level designers did this, how do they build Disney World in
these places?
So it still exists for you, the player.
So it is fairly, you know, when you're going to come in, this is what you're going to see,
the shops are in the front, you're going to do this.
It's just for us to make it far more believable and get some more emergent behavior that not
just make that sort of the verisimilitude of what you're in for that moment, but you
buy it all.
I always say like, you know, we got to do the little things so that you buy the reality
of the virtual world you're in.
So we want to do something crazy, you know, when a dragon lands or a death law comes out
of the wasteland or those kinds of things that you, it has the impact to you as the
viewer that it would to the people in the world.
Okay.
But still you're simulating stuff that's close to you.
It is a bit of a simulation going on.
Oh, absolutely.
Yes.
And so that creates some interesting dynamics then.
And the stuff that we're looking at in the future, you know, our plan is to push that
even more to think about how these things exist in the world first.
And we do some of this, but even more so in the future to say, how do these things exist?
Take like a faction in the world.
What is their role in the world as opposed to just their role is for the player to join
it, go through a bunch of quests and become the head of the faction.
You know, think a little bit deeper about the simulation and what would the mage's guild
be doing in a fantasy world or the fighter's guild be doing in a fantasy world versus just
sign up, do quests, get gold.
And so that when you show up to that mage's guild, it's a bustling guild full of stuff
going on.
It's not just that it's bustling is that they feel rooted in it.
They don't feel like a storefront for come here, do quests, get experience.
Is that one of the essential components of randomly generated worlds?
So when I think back to Daggerfall as gigantic world, when I first played it, I thought like,
I mean, you're just struck by the immensity of it.
The immensity of the possibility.
When you're young and you look into your future, it's wide open and you can do anything.
And that's what Daggerfall felt like.
The openness was gigantic.
And Daggerfall is interesting coming off Arena where Arena does the same thing, but Daggerfall
in many ways is bigger despite focusing on an area because of how the density of, okay,
this is how much physical game space we'll do for these villages and towns.
And it does feel endless, even though you're looking at a map that has constraints.
And Daggerfall actually was a touchstone for us going into Starfield for how we do the
planets because there's a different kind of gameplay experience when you just wander outside
a city in Daggerfall.
Then follow a quest line and go to this place and it's completely handcrafted and everything
around every corner we've kind of placed like Skyrim.
Starfield's a bit more like Daggerfall in that if you wander outside the city, we're
going to be generating things and you kind of get used to that game flow, different than
we've done before and fun in a different kind of way.
We'll talk about Starfield.
So just for people who don't know, and how dare you for not knowing, but with Daggerfall
we're talking about the Elder Scrolls series that started, so we're talking about the big
titles within the series, started with Arena in '94, Daggerfall in '96.
I didn't look up the years before this, this is depressing or awesome.
So all of these games brought hundreds, probably for some of them thousands of hours of joy
for me.
So Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim.
So I don't remember Arena being that open world.
Well, it's all the provinces.
It follows kind of the same pattern.
It just doesn't have all the number of villages and places that Daggerfall has while Daggerfall
focuses on the Iliac Bay area.
Arena does it all.
It just changes the scale in terms of one block on the map equals this much space.
§02Transcript · 12:40–23:24
There is something that, I mean, I'm speaking to anecdotal experience, but I just remember
it feeling wide open, Daggerfall.
It definitely was, yes.
In the way Arena didn't.
I don't remember, maybe because Arena, it was so cool to have just the role playing
game aspect.
You're focused on the items and the character development.
Daggerfall has a lot more depth, particularly in the character system.
That's what it introduces, all of the skills and those kinds of things.
Arena, it's actually, it's a game I love.
And it's very, very elegant if you look at the first one where it's just an XP based
system, do this, get XP, level up.
Very classic role playing game.
Daggerfall digs deep into who's your character, how you're going to develop it, what are
your skills, there's advantages, there's disadvantages.
And the environment going full 3D from Arena, which is actually like a two and a half D
Doom style engine, I agree with you that Daggerfall feels like there's more possibilities when
you're playing it.
Were you able to look up to the sky in Daggerfall?
Yep.
My memory is...
It's full 3D, yeah.
So that's what full 3D means.
And then you can go outside the city?
You can walk outside the city.
You can do that in Arena too, but it looks more fakie, right?
It's all going to be a flat plane.
Here comes things and then a dungeon entrance is an 8-bit, here comes a little flat coming
at the camera.
So before we go to the end and the middle, so from Starfield to Fallout and the Elder
Scrolls series, let's go to the very beginning.
What's the origin story?
You know what, let's even go before then.
What's the first time you remember the thing that made you fall in love with video games?
Well, I think it's partly my age coming up with the arcades and playing Space Invaders
at the pizza place and then Pac-Man really...
It's interesting about video games and what Pac-Man did for video games, where it popularized
them in a way that was just insane at the time.
Had a song, had a cartoon, had all of the things.
Nintendo comes along.
So it was always part of...
You know, I think if you were a kid growing up then, it was such a newness to playing
things like that.
I remember being in fifth grade when the TRS-80 was brought into the classroom and there was
a Star Trek game.
And I was enamored with it and they were going to start teaching some rudimentary programming.
Like, "Okay, would you like to know how this is made?"
And I was hooked.
I was like, "I need to figure out how to make this stuff."
And so I was a self-taught programmer and my whole goal was to write my own video games.
And by sixth, seventh grade, I had written my own much better Star Trek clone for the
Apple II.
And I really enjoyed programming on the Apple II then.
And that, I think, was the right level of complexity at that age where you were always
learning but you could still understand a lot of the problem set for like, "This is
what I want to get on the screen."
And I was also into art.
So I did a lot of art and I did a lot of programming and I was always making games.
That was my hobby from the time I was 10 or 12.
What was to you involved in making games?
How did you think of it?
Was it from a graphics perspective, like what shows up on screen?
Was it how it makes you feel?
Was it about the story?
Was it the text-based stuff and the dialogue and the prompting?
What does it mean to create a video game at that young age to you?
Well, it was a way of experiencing things that I couldn't myself.
So if you're playing Dungeons and Dragons at the time too, where you really feel, even
pen and paper, these are like, they feel somewhat in quotes "real" to you as you're playing
them.
You're very invested in your character and what you're doing.
And then I love the games, the Wizardry and Ultima, that were able to bring that to a
computer so I could do it on my own time.
It was very, very real to me.
I'd sit in my bedroom and then go to bed and think about it.
And then, "Oh no, I have to go to school.
I want to come home and figure out how to do this problem in the game."
And so whatever I was creating was something that I was excited about at the time.
I made Raiders of the Lost Ark games.
Like with graphics and everything?
Yeah.
So it was usually, you know, I made a Miami Vice game, made a Gru the Wanderer game, made
a Traveler game.
But every time I was doing it, I wanted to figure out a new method on the Apple II of
pulling it off graphically.
Whether that was editing character sets to get graphics in different formats, or how
can I enable the secret double high res mode it had, or just things like that where it
became kind of this limitless, "What can I make this do?"
And I had some friends who were doing the same thing.
And then you get into who can impress each other.
And I was kind of middle of the pack, I would say.
But again, this was the time where they're bringing computers into the school, and the
Apples come into the school, and the teachers are learning it because they have to teach
the students.
But then I would say I was part of a group of students that were like way past that.
And it was very much of a self-taught, you know, "How do you make this thing dance?"
I'd like to ask a strange question.
So at that time, a lot of people consider you one of, if not the greatest game designer/creator
of all time.
You were middle of the pack then.
Did you ever sense that this would be your life, and you would also be creating the greatest
games ever?
Not in the slightest.
No, I don't think anybody...
But I was very much like that was my dream at that age.
But you don't think that that's a job.
You know, and as I got older, I was really going through college, and even the computer
classes then weren't where I wanted them to be, so I was still kind of doing my own stuff.
And I ended up getting a business degree and then interviewing for some jobs, like finance
jobs.
So, well, I guess I should do this to make money, and I can keep doing this on the side.
And I remember I actually got to like the final level of like this corporate finance
job at Circuit City.
And they turned me down.
And I was like, "Fuck them.
I'm just gonna go make video games."
So thank you, Circuit City.
Yeah, I remember Circuit City.
I think they went bankrupt, actually.
Well, they were based in Richmond.
I was going to school close to there, and so...
So what's the origin story of you joining Bethesda Softworks at the time?
So I had gotten Wayne Gretzky Hockey 3 for Christmas from my girlfriend at the time,
who's now my wife.
I was in college, and I noticed that it was in Rockville, Maryland.
And oh, that's on my way home over Christmas break, back to William & Mary, where I went
to college.
And I was at this point committed, like, "This is what I want to do.
So I'm just going to drive by and knock on the door," which is what I did.
So I drove by and knocked on the doors, Martin Luther King Day '93.
And someone came out and met me and said, "Well, maybe..."
And I said, "Well, I'm in college.
I'm talking about when I'm out of school."
I'm like, "Okay, well, contact us then."
And I will say I would contact them every once in a while.
I did work for a small software company right out of school, down in that area of Williamsburg,
and still would contact Bethesda.
Arena had just come out.
So then we're in '94.
Arena had just come out, and I loved it.
So I was into sports games.
I like the hockey stuff.
They were doing a basketball...
They did a basketball game.
Yeah, I'm just looking at...
They did a lot of...
They did, like, six sports games, six.
Bethesda, at least ten games.
Six of them sports games, NCAA basketball, hockey league simulator.
Hockey league simulator, yeah.
So it was really like sports gridiron, which is like the first kind of physics-based football
game at the time.
And there's a famous story with Electronic Arts trying to do Madden and then hiring Bethesda
before my time to make Madden, 'cause they were struggling.
When I started at Bethesda, I remember the owner had John Madden's Oakland Raiders playbook
in his office.
Like, "Ooh, can I see that?"
And I love sports, right?
So I still play Madden to this day.
I love it.
So there's an alternate reality where...
I made sports games?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
This blew my mind.
I wanted to make, like, the ultimate college football game.
Well, it's always like...
You know, it's like music.
You probably listen to lots of type of music.
Like, you don't play every time.
But I think of open worlds as fundamentally different.
Absolutely sure.
No, like, source of happiness, entertainments, storytelling, world, gaming than Madden.
I mean, it's just...
'Cause I love both.
I love both worlds, but...
They're two totally different experiences.
Just like when you might watch a movie, you might be in the mood for Lord of the Rings
one day, and then you want some other, I don't know, competitive show or game show or something
like that.
Or watch football on TV, right?
You watch football on TV.
But then you kind of want to watch, get really into Game of Thrones.
So I think all those things have validity.
And actually, one of the first things I worked on when I started at Bethesda was NCAA basketball,
Road to the Final Four 2.
So that was kind of an external project.
It came in like, "Hey, you know sports.
Get this game done."
And then went on to...
But they were doing everything I loved.
It was like, "This is where I have to work."
They're doing, like, the Terminator science fiction stuff.
I love that.
They're doing these open world role playing games.
I love that.
And they're doing sports.
Like, "This, I have to work here."
So I started there.
And Arena, you loved.
§03Transcript · 23:25–36:01
I loved it.
Yeah.
So when I came in, it had just come out, and they were doing the CD-ROM version.
So CD-ROMs aren't even out yet.
Oh, it used to be floppy disks.
That's probably when...
What was Arena released?
We would burn them in the basement.
We had the disk replicators.
Right.
So Arena was not released on floppy.
It was.
Yeah, I believe it's six floppy disks.
Six floppy disks.
Maybe it was eight.
Yeah.
But in those days, the number of floppy disks was very, very important to what the money
you were making.
So if you wanted to do a big, huge game, like, "Well, that's just too many disks."
So the CD-ROM became this jumping off point for the whole industry where, "Oh, it's unlimited
data."
By the way, I played Arena.
So that was, of course, attained legally, as one does.
Alternate means?
By alternate means.
Right.
On floppy disks.
And that was such an incredible...
As you probably have seen, interacting with a large number of people.
It's a whole world.
It's a world that you escape to in the way...
Your favorite book, like Lord of the Rings.
It was just...
It was unlike anything else.
It was incredible.
It's probably...
I mean, of course, as people say, the first game you play is the one that really sentimentally
means the most to you.
I think the first role-playing game I played, and it just changed everything.
Was Arena?
It was Arena, yeah.
I think Daggerfall is what I really played, especially because, like you said, the character
development was really rich.
But just that you can feel like you travel to this whole other world that's less about
entertainment like a shooting game and more about a world.
It felt like it's a world.
Like you're literally there.
You can travel there.
You can live there.
You actually feel like that person versus like a Pac-Man, like an arcade, fun, entertaining
adventure game.
So you joined...
You made it.
What did you work on first there?
I worked...
Well, everyone did a bunch of stuff.
So I worked on the basketball game really just to get it out the door.
And Terminator Future Shock.
So we were doing Future Shock and Daggerfall at the same time.
They were developing a new engine.
So it was one of the first 3D engines, the X-Engine.
There were a bunch of guys from Denmark, actually.
There's like a big Danish demo scene in those days on the PC.
And so a bunch of the top programmers there...
Well, look, this is not big.
This is not a big company.
There's 20 people in development.
And we were doing both Daggerfall and the new Terminator.
And so Daggerfall was a bit more, again, behind the Terminator game.
So I was one of the main people on the Terminator team.
And I don't know.
Things kind of worked out.
I very quickly...
I don't know why.
Like I quickly became the producer and I was making levels and doing all these things.
And it was awesome.
And looking back now, I can understand it better.
But at the time, I didn't appreciate it, which is no one quite owned the Terminator license.
It was in this limbo, legally.
So there was no one to tell us, "No, you can't do that."
So we would pick apart the movies and, "Oh, how does he mention the gun he wants and the
wattage of the laser and all these things?"
And so Future Shock is a game that I still love today.
It does a lot of things that if you go back and look at it, we're frankly still doing.
It's a large, open world, post-apocalyptic landscape height map with instanced objects
all over it.
And that is still a lot of how we build our worlds.
What's an instanced object?
Some games, every wall or building is unique in its data, whereas we would just build these
little husks of buildings and then place them all over the place.
So the memory and the way you render it is much more optimal.
So that allows you to build a bigger world, a more open world?
It allows you to build a bigger world much faster.
Not every single version of that building is in its own unique architecture that is
going to take up memory and processing speed, et cetera, et cetera.
So you're there very much feeling the computational constraints of the system when you're creating
these open worlds?
And you know what?
That's the thing then.
You see some of it now, but in those times, I do feel like every year the technology moved.
And maybe it's because, same thing, we're like that my age at that time, where every
year somebody was coming up with some new method or some new game system.
And it was every year that innovation, innovation, innovation, and then 3D acceleration comes
along and then these things come along and then HD comes along.
And it is true that as time goes on, there is visually a diminishing return in terms
of what you're able to do on the screen.
And there's a ton of work that goes into it now because just rendering this cup to
the perfect shine and material and roughness and how does the global illumination off this
wall, it's a ton of work.
But you can pretty much do what you want now if you want to put the time in.
Whereas then, okay, you can't do everything you want.
So pick your battles really carefully and technically you can do what you want, if that
makes sense.
- How much trade-off is there now in how much effort you put into the realism of the graphics
versus the story?
And actually not even how much effort you put in, but is there a trade-off in the experience,
the feel of the game in terms of realism and story?
- Usually we will start with let the player have as much agency and do as many things
as they can as possible.
And we will sacrifice some graphic fidelity for that, some speed for that.
We could make a game that, traditionally our games are, we're okay with 30 frames a second
as long as it looks really good and the simulation's running and all of those things.
So we'll sacrifice some of that fidelity for the player experience and the kind of
things that I do.
But from a manpower standpoint, the graphics programmers work on graphics, the artists
work on art, and we have an awesome team of artists and designers and writers and programmers.
It's usually where we find as time goes on, the amount of art time that it takes to create
a cup compared to what it used to be, that has increased.
So we do use, most people use art outsourcing as well so that we're not, we still relatively
compared to our industry and what we're doing, have smaller teams.
- What about the experience of the beauty of the graphics?
So like one of the most amazing things about Skyrim, and maybe you could say that about
some of the other games, but for me Skyrim is the outdoor, when you step outside, it's
the outdoor scenery.
So what does it take to create the feeling, especially of that, being outdoors of nature
and just like lost in the beauty, whatever it is when you go hiking and you feel the
awe of it, how do you create that awe?
Is that graphics?
What is that?
- It's a lot of graphics.
It's a lot of mood.
Let me just talk about it in terms of tone.
And those are, again, going back to my previous comment, the graphics are very, very important
to us because, and we always push them, because when you're doing the kind of things we do
where you step into a virtual world, it does have to have that moment of wow, this feels
real.
I've never experienced this.
And it's okay, I think it's okay to let just like the time settle, meaning you step out,
how does the wind sound?
How are the trees moving?
How are the clouds moving?
I enjoy strolling and watching the sunset.
How does it land over the water?
Like it doesn't have to be like, hey, let's go, let's finish a quest, let's go kill things,
let's figure out the next step, let's level up.
I like the quiet moments a lot.
And I think when you play our games, you can tell we spend a lot of time on them.
Then you watch the weather roll in.
I think that's just part of being, being that character, being that person in that space.
- Yeah, I saw that there's a mod that removes all enemies.
I've been meaning to do that, to just do like a live stream where I for hours walk around
Skyrim just, and then answer questions and so on.
That just feels, that's a completely stress-free environment.
It's just, you are just like you said, in this moment in time.
It's so incredible.
It feels as incredible as going hiking or something like that.
But in another, in a totally different place, like Iceland or something like that, this
whole other surreal, ethereal place.
So yeah, it's incredible how you kind of create that.
So graphics is a part of that, but also letting it, the temporal aspect of that, like the
wind, the rustling sound and look and all of that.
- The soundscape is really, really important.
And the sky, we spend a lot of time on the sky, because it's taking up much more of the
screen than a lot of people give credit for.
- What about the rendering, the openness of it?
Like how do you, is that?
- There's a lot of level of detail, streaming work.
And nowadays it's getting more common.
Like frankly, the systems are built better for it.
Hard drive speed is really prioritized.
Like they're so blazing fast.
You take Skyrim and Oblivion and the fallouts of that 360 era.
It's a, and it was a lot of time spent on how do we get all this data streaming in as
you move, and then levels of detail so you can see all the way, but not crush the processor.
- You know what, let's even step back, 'cause you mentioned tone.
You mentioned tone a lot.
What do you mean by tone?
- It's all of it together.
If you look at, I think you can flip through, let's just take fantasy.
You can sort of look at a couple images or things and know how does Lord of the Rings
different from Game of Thrones that is different than a Thurian like Excalibur, or your sci-fi
channel series of the month kind of thing.
And so finding that, what's gonna make it kind of unique, and usually I lean on something
that is grounded in reality for what it is, and then have lesser kind of fantastical things,
at least at the start, and then they kind of build.
So even when we do Starfield, I mean it's a science fiction game, there are laser guns
and spaceships that fire around and shoot each other and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
but it's grounded in, you can look at it and say, "Okay, this is kind of an extension of
things as we view them today in space."
And we sort of take the same approach with Fallout, where admittedly things can get even
§04Transcript · 36:08–45:28
a little bit crazier the longer you're developing Fallout content.
So just to linger on this, so defining the tone starts at creating a realistic experience,
like you feel like, "I could walk into this and this feels like life."
What's their technology level, even for a fantasy world?
Like is magic, how prevalent is it?
Or are they making weapons and things and armor?
Is it for utility?
Is it for decoration?
How do they live their lives?
Does this feel like a place that you believe that has some grounding in our reality, whether
that's historical or near future, or that it's grounded in some semblance of the reality
that you and I understand so that it can feel, it's also making it feel a little bit welcoming.
Like, "Okay, I understand this."
Is that art or science?
So how do you know when it feels welcoming and everything fits and is grounded?
I don't know.
I guess it's personal taste.
Some people like things that are weirder, that have more fantastical from the get-go.
Even a game like Morrowind, where we get into some more fantastical things, it intentionally
starts a little more grounded.
There's a very classic medieval-looking town that you come into, but you look just beyond
it and there are mushroom trees and giant insects and things like that.
So in Skyrim, when you put a dragon in it, what are your thoughts about dragons and tone?
How does that fit into tone?
That's a great question.
It's a ridiculous question, but yeah, I just love dragons, so I wanted to bring it up.
No, no, no.
These are the things that we debate with...
Do we include a dragon?
Why didn't you include a dragon in Daggerfall?
That's what I want to know.
I think there's dragonlings.
They're hard to do.
Dragons are hard to do.
So when you start Skyrim, say, "Hey, look, dragons are going to be a theme."
Start visually.
You can make the argument that dragons existed.
Okay, what would they look like?
How close to dinosaurs would they be?
And ours are less...
I believe they're less fantastical-looking in general.
They look like beasts that could exist in that world.
And then how we introduce them, it's kind of a little bit of a slow roll in Skyrim,
and that the people in the world are reacting to the dragons appearing.
And that's somewhat mirrors...
You want something that mirrors the player experience as well.
It says back to you, like, "Hey, no, these are...
This is...
Have you heard this?
Someone saw a dragon."
That's what Daggerfall...
Isn't there mentions of dragons or something?
Because I remember being sure that there's dragons in Daggerfall as I'm playing it and
I'm searching.
You're pretty sure...
Well...
Is there a dragon in Daggerfall?
There's dragon wings in Daggerfall.
To my memory...
Look, I guess someone will probably correct me.
Like, "Actually, there is a dragon here."
But I'm pretty sure they're not.
And then a game I did, Redguard, which we bring back a dragon...
It takes place beforehand, so we have a dragon there in that game, and that was unique to
that at the time.
Yeah.
Just a brief tangent on that.
I thought Redguard was a really, really good game.
I played it and there's a...
Again, you don't...
You forget stuff, but I remember getting...
I guess it was the first in the Elder Scrolls series to put it into that world, but it was
like an adventure game.
It reminded me of another game I really love, like Prince of Persia.
That was one of the inspirations.
Prince of Persia is one of my favorite games.
I apologize if I'm forgetting, but you can jump in buildings and stuff.
There's a dynamic, airy nature.
It's a park-more type of situation.
Yeah, it was an incredible game.
Why do you think...
Let me ask a dark question.
Why do you think that game was a flop?
One of the few...
Not a dark question.
It was.
Well, a lot of reasons.
One that I love and really got us going on a handcrafted world.
We're coming off of Daggerfall.
Morrowind is sort of in design.
Then part of our development teams broke up to do different things.
The game that did Battlespire and Redguard was my game.
I wanted to do something a little more Ultima feeling, handcrafted world.
I really like things that blend up genres.
I know it's in the adventure game category, but it really does a lot of things.
It's a love letter to Prince of Persia.
There's a little Raiders of the Lost Ark in it.
There's a lot of Ultima in it.
Really see what we could do with the engine.
It's very much, I think, plays...
It would have had a much better home on, say, PlayStation or Xbox.
This predates Xbox.
It's much more constantly Tomb Raider had come out.
You see those influences of Tomb Raider on that game.
3D effects cards had just come out.
Okay, we can do...
It was the last.
I think it's one of the last DOS games in a Windows world.
I think it missed a technology window,
as well as, ultimately, not what people wanted from us.
I felt I was really kind of...
The company let me make that game, and it was a big flop.
Battlespire hadn't done well.
The company was in really bad shape,
and I felt really personally responsible.
They let me do this creative thing.
It didn't do what we needed it to do,
and now we're in a very, very bad situation.
Company almost went out of business.
And that's when it got reformed with ZeniMax Media,
and Robert Altman came in, and we were starting Morrowind.
We had just sort of started,
and it was sort of that whole experience
that made you sort of realize...
Someone says to you, "Okay, you're gonna get another shot."
And that's where you're like, "Okay, we're gonna make Morrowind
and make the biggest, best RPG we can make.
We know what the audience wants from us.
We know what we could do building a world."
So there's callbacks to how we built the world in Redguard.
Morrowind is a large-scale, handcrafted...
But if you were to put it pixel per pixel with Daggerfall,
you wouldn't even see Morrowind,
because Daggerfall is so big.
But the impact of playing it, I think,
is in many ways equal, but different.
- Just you personally, psychologically,
did you have doubt about yourself
from the performance of Redguard?
Do I even know what it is?
- Of course, of course.
- Where do you get the...
How'd you overcome that?
- I don't know.
I would say this, honestly, I enjoy it so much.
I'm so heads down, that becomes, for better or worse,
like my life.
- Yeah.
- And it's just something that I wanna play so much,
it becomes like there's a little bit...
You get a little obsessed with it.
- No, but I mean, you love Redguard, right?
So doesn't that mean...
Isn't there a kind of self-doubt about,
do I know what it takes to create a great game?
- Well, no, I think Redguard's a great game.
- Right, so you were sure, even if it wasn't...
- Okay, so if you're in a debate, like, do I like that game?
It's about finding an...
Okay, so I love Redguard.
And the people who play it, it won a bunch of awards.
Critically, it was a pretty good game.
Did not sell.
And the reason for that, again,
we probably made the wrong type of game,
and we missed a technology window.
We also thought it was very conservative.
We're gonna do this.
So my main takeaway was,
I'm not gonna be conservative again.
I'm gonna swing for the fences.
And we've had...
There'll be some rough edges in swinging for the fences
and shooting for the moon,
but we'd rather do that and land where we land
than be very, very conservative
in what we're putting out there.
- You've mentioned, just referencing this game,
on the Reddit AMA,
that long time ago during Redguard,
the lead programmer made me,
made all the buildings hop up and down
after you played for 10 minutes just to mess with me.
Just an curious tangent.
What's involved with programming in open-world game?
So we talked about, we will talk about design and so on,
but specifically the programming.
'Cause I think this question came from,
what are some interesting sticky bugs
that you've encountered throughout your life
in creating these games?
And this is one of them that you mentioned.
So what are some of the challenges
of programming these open-world games?
- I mean, there are different flavors of them, right?
Your GTAs will have different issues
than the Ubisoft games versus our games.
I can sort of speak to ours,
which is you wanna build systems, right?
'Cause they're gonna play the game for a very long time
§05Transcript · 45:31–54:01
as well, which we've learned.
And you can't go through and touch everything by hand,
per se.
So you have to rely on some systemic level of creation
and a lot of systems that are robust enough
so that when they touch another one,
things aren't breaking apart.
- So there's like a, what are the major systems?
Is there like the physics of the game,
the engine of how like stuff,
yeah, like, yeah, the physics, the motion,
and maybe how light is rendered and all that kind of stuff.
- Right, so you have the rendering, right?
Of like, okay, this is how I'm gonna render
the data that I have.
So a lot of people confuse engines with rendering.
I mean, they're combined, obviously,
but there's the data you're gonna give to a renderer,
which is the thing, you know,
that draws the pixels on the screen.
So there's a, most of the engine is,
how are you gonna bring in that data
and give it to the renderer to draw it?
So you have that whole system of walking through the world,
feeding in the data and drawing it.
You then obviously have the physics and the interactivity.
What are the things that are there just to be drawn?
And what are the things there
that are meant to be interacted with and touched?
We put a big premium on the ones
that can be interacted with and touched,
whether it's flowers, whether the trees move,
whether you can sleep on the sofa, sit in this chair,
pick up all this stuff, bake bread, blah, blah, blah.
You then have the AI, which loops in the stuff
we talked about earlier in terms of processing everybody,
and combat systems, which is a lot of what,
and the people end up doing,
combat systems on top of that AI.
How do they react to those types of things?
And then how do they look at the things
that can be interacted with?
One of my favorite things is when NPCs
will go pick up weapons in the world,
which you don't see in other games.
And the first time you see it in one of ours,
it's very unexpected.
You can drop a crazy weapon, be in a fight,
and an NPC runs over, picks it up, and uses it on you.
It's not something you would expect, but I love that stuff.
- And that's integrated into a larger system,
the ability to pick up, the NPC picking up,
so it's not like a little quirk that's hard-coded in.
It's part of a bigger system.
- They have their own AI for scanning the environment,
and that's one of the rules.
Hey, is there a weapon that is better than the one I have?
I'm gonna go get it.
Now, we do lock off if it's in a chest,
and that's treasure we left for the player.
But it's in particular, 'cause what you don't want,
we actually had this problem, started in Oblivion,
I believe, which is we set up a level.
Hey, let the enemies go pick up the weapons
if they're better.
So we make a level and go in,
and all of the enemies are armed to the teeth,
and there's no treasure for the player,
because the enemies went and took all the good weapons.
And you say, okay, they don't take those.
They take the ones that are dropped
by other NPCs or the player.
- That's such a fascinating world
of designing the experience for the NPC,
because in part, that experience
defines the experience of the player.
So how they interact with their environment
defines how the player experiences their environment.
Is there room for further and further development
of the AI that controls the NPC?
- Sure, we're always iterating on it.
And again, as we look in the future,
it's more about us finding those,
more reactivity to the player,
and also understanding their roles in the world.
So they're not just there.
They're not just there for the player
as a signpost for the player.
- But they're reacting to the player.
But what about some of the richest experiences we have
with people is like the chaos of it,
the push and pull, the unpredictability.
Is there something, I don't know if you've been following,
but the quick, amazing development of language models,
the neural network, natural language processing systems,
dialogue systems.
Do you think there's some possibility of using
sort of these incredible neural nets
that can have open-ended dialogue, basically chatbots?
- Yep, I've seen some incredible demos.
I do think it's coming.
I don't know when.
And there's a little bit of a question,
like what's ready for real deployment and release
versus, hey, let's use that to generate some things
that is then static that we're giving to the players,
versus it's generated on the fly.
But it's definitely coming.
It's definitely coming.
And I think you'll see it in the types of games that we do.
It has great application.
- I love the idea that you'll be using that
to design different NPCs and then testing
if they're good enough.
If they're a little too crazy,
you don't want the super--
- Right, but if we go back to it being reactive,
some of that bot stuff, it's incredible.
It's then translating that into voice.
And then is that being done by the client?
Is it being done on a server?
Is it baked into the game?
There's different flavors of it.
- So there's still computational challenges,
like how do you actually make that happen?
- Right.
- Well, what about in terms of creating
the feeling of an NPC,
what's the role of voice actors?
- Awesome, yeah.
We work with a ton of voice actors
and they bring so much to it.
And that's the thing.
We can write some stuff and the best ones get in there
and make it so much better, or even ad lib things.
And so we do a lot of voice recording.
And we used to do it kind of like at the end of the project.
And now we do it throughout.
We start really early and we just start recording.
So we're recording for years and years, literally.
Probably three years, four years.
- So part of the actual experience of the recording
will help define the characters and the tone of the game.
- Right, and we'll go back sometimes
and, "Hey, we really like this.
"We want more of this.
"Let's write, let's do another session."
Or, "Hey, we don't think this character's actually working.
"We want you to do a different,
"you're gonna be someone else now.
"Sorry, that got cut."
- Do you ever try to sort of imagine
that people fall in love with the characters,
with the NPCs?
- I do.
- Like, do they get really attached to the--
- Oh yeah, I mean, I've done it in games.
- These are like close friends, right?
Like, you can, like you miss them.
- 100%. - Isn't that part
of the thing you miss? - I actually,
like whenever I'm playing a game and there is, you know,
if there's like a friendship option
or make friends or a romance thing,
I find those moments really, I enjoy them.
I find them pretty impactful emotionally
to what we're doing.
And so we've done a little bit of it.
It's one of the things that we actually have pushed
in Starfield.
So we have a number of companions, but for them,
we go, you know, I won't say super complex romantic,
but more complex relationships than we've had
in terms of not just some, you know, state of they like you
or they don't like you, but they can be in love with you
and dislike something you did and be pissed
at you temporarily and then come back to loving you.
- So that relationship status, if it's complicated,
that they're existing in that gray area, it's complicated.
We're not dating, we're just, we're--
- Well, it's in a lot of games, you know, previous stuff,
you just work your way up, they like you more and more
and more and more, and now you're in a relationship.
- Now you're in, yeah.
- And when you make them upset, you drift out of,
like it never happened, you know, you drift out of it.
Whereas we wanted one where, okay,
we can be in a relationship and we've committed
to each other in some way, but I just did something
that really made you angry.
And as opposed to just drifting out of that status,
you're in a temporary, I don't like what you did state.
- Wow, so some greater degree of complexity
in the relationship with a companion.
- A little bit.
- A little bit, a little bit.
Are we talking about--
- I don't wanna oversell that part, but my point is,
I think those things where you meet a character in a game
and you do spend time with them, a companion in a game,
§06Transcript · 54:04–1:02:46
and it leads to romance, you know, myself and others,
and I find a lot of players,
those moments are really, really impactful,
and special to them 'cause they did put in the time.
That's another thing that I always commit it with,
which is, I think people who don't play video games,
they sometimes think like, oh, that's, I don't know,
that's a waste of time, or that's not real,
or that's not like, you're not getting a lot out of that.
Like, well, you haven't really experienced it
in the way that you can,
because these moments that I spent in games,
not the ones I made, other ones when I was growing up,
or even now, that is important time to me.
Like, I love those moments.
I felt really, like, proud of what I accomplished.
And we want people to have that in our games,
and the fact that they have had those experiences,
and we hear from them, and how important it is to them,
it's like, no, this is really, really special.
- Yeah, it's fun.
I mean, from a game design perspective,
I wonder if you can honor the time you spent
together with a game, because, you know,
sometimes there's a heartbreak at the end of the game.
Like, when you're, when you leave a game, there's a,
yeah, it's a really complicated relationship, actually,
because when you leave a game,
it's almost like leaving a romantic partner,
because it's like you spent so much meaningful time
together, and there's a sense in which it was,
it was ephemeral.
Like, this is not, this doesn't--
- It didn't happen.
- Yeah, it didn't really happen.
It was good, it was like you went to Vegas,
you got drunk and stuff, and now life goes on.
I wonder if there's a way to sort of
always carry that with you.
I mean, I guess with words, you can kinda
share with others, like--
- It's weird, I don't, like, now that we're in the age
where you have achievements, and you can look
at your library and see your hours in games,
like, that's, like, it's almost like a scrapbook now.
Like, I wish, one of my wishes was, like,
I wish I had that achievement list for everything,
like, back to the late '70s.
- Like, every game you played--
- Right, when, yeah.
- Yeah, like, you, I mean, that's one of the cool things
with Xbox, like, we're moving towards that direction.
It'd be cool to be, from, like, childhood,
the first time you play a video game,
it will actually tell you what is the first game you played.
- But you know what?
Kids today, they will have that.
- They will have that.
And see--
- But you could look back and see, oh my God,
I put 1,000 hours in Daggerfall.
- What is the first game--
- And my last save was 1997.
- Last save.
Man, I don't know, Golden Axe, maybe?
I'm trying to think, what was the first game I ever played?
No, it was probably Commodore 64 games, yeah.
Yeah, arcade games.
Okay.
You mentioned Starfield.
What is Starfield?
And what's the origin story of this game?
- We had always wanted to do something
where you explore space, you know?
The explore space role-playing game.
So take the kind of games that we make
and give it a little bit of a different spin.
And the other games that I love,
there was a pen and paper RPG I loved, Traveler.
It was one of the first games I made for the Apple II.
I never finished it, right?
I'm just doing it on my own.
And I love this game, Starflight was one.
Star Control II was a game that I loved.
Sun Dog was a big one in the Apple II days
that a lot of people don't know that I loved.
And so a lot of us in the studio felt
it was time to do something new.
You know, we're going between Elder Scrolls and Fallout
and going back and forth.
And I mean, we love that, but hey,
we've always wanted to do this,
explore the galaxy science fiction game.
You know, now is the time to do that.
- And that's a brave move.
So Fallout is post-apocalyptic
on a single planet.
You know, Elder Scrolls series is on a single planet.
So this is going out into the open world
of many star systems, many planets.
I saw that it's thinking about a hundred star systems
and a thousand planets available to explore.
What is that world of stars and planets like?
- Well, you mentioned Daggerfall.
We go back to some of that.
Well, the first when we did it was
how are we gonna render a planet,
like pull it off for the player?
Like, can we?
Or do we have to sort of do it
where you can't land on all of them,
where you're landing in a very controlled,
small world space that we, you know,
kind of craft and you would have a very limited set of those.
You go back to tone, like,
well, that's probably the wrong tone.
And how can we say yes?
Like, I want to land on that ice ball.
So it started, we started the game
right after Fallout 4, so 2016.
And the first thing we did was,
how can we have a system to generate these planets
and make them look, you know,
I'll say reasonable as opposed to, you know,
fractally goop.
- Well, what's the technical definition of goop?
Fractally goop?
- Fractally goop.
You've probably seen a lot of like simulations,
whether they're space things or landscape things,
where they're using fractals
and just the landscape does not look real.
It just is like highs and lows and it's muddy.
And so we did find a way, we came up with a way,
had prototyped of building tiles,
like large tiles of landscape,
the way we would usually build them.
We kind of generate them offline,
hand do some things and end up with these
very realistic looking tiles of landscape.
And then built a system that wraps those around a planet
and blends them all together.
And we had pretty successful results with that.
And so we thought, yeah, we could do this.
And so there was a big design kind of problem to solve
in terms of, well, what's fun about landing on a planet
where there's potentially nothing?
'Cause there's a lot of planets and moons,
if you kind of, right?
In reality that, well, there's nothing on 'em,
except resources.
And so we spent a lot of time figuring out,
okay, let's just lean in on that can A,
be a lonely experience, as long as we tell the player,
here's what's there, here are the resources that are there,
go find them.
But I equate it to that moment of we said about
listening to the wind go and watching the sunset.
And I do think there's a certain beauty
to landing on a strange planet,
being somewhat the only person there, building an outpost.
And we are modeling all of the systems
'cause that's how we like to do things.
So you can watch whatever that gas giant or moon,
it will rotate and go and sunrise, sunset,
and all of those things that you would expect.
And it's all really happening.
And most people probably won't notice
or appreciate all of that,
but I think it gives them the ability to say,
I wanna go do that and see that on that place,
as long as we tell them,
hey, the quest leads over here,
here's where the handcrafted content is
that you would expect,
and then here's more of the open procedural
planet experience.
- So you're-- - Long answer,
I don't know if I answered your question.
- There's no, the questions are stupid
and the answers are brilliant, so that's how this works.
So this is the world's most immense simulator
of the human condition of loneliness.
'Cause I can't imagine a more lonely experience.
- You mean you put it that way?
I don't know if that was the goal, but--
- Just on a planet alone,
that must be a deep embodiment of what loneliness is like.
I mean, both on, like when you hike alone,
there's a deep loneliness to that.
It's like, it's humbling that this thing
will last much longer than you,
it's been here way before you.
- Is it the line from the moon landing?
Beautiful desolation, the Buzz Aldrin, is it?
- Beautiful desolation, is that what you said?
- I think so. - Beautiful desolation.
Well-- - Something like that.
- But that's just words, there's a feeling to it,
and you want that feeling to be real.
§07Transcript · 1:02:49–1:11:47
You just hear, there's some resources here.
I just feel like it'll hit people at a certain moment,
like it does for me with Skyrim,
like, holy shit, I'm here alone.
And whatever cruel nature that's out there,
it doesn't really care about me.
(laughing)
- Exactly. - That's the experience.
So you wanna create the whole planet,
and you wanna have many of them.
- We have, we do have many,
but once you build that system,
I think the numbers become, I mean, honestly,
a little bit, we wrap it in so we can name them all
and have a finite set, even though
it's a very, very large number,
but a set that we can validate and know about,
even though it's a huge number.
But once you're building a system that can build a planet,
I mean, a planet is sort of infinite space,
we go back to the dagger fall analogy, right?
If you have systems to build that much space,
doing 100 planets or 1,000 or 10,000 or a million planets
is not, it's just, you just press,
you just change the number and press the button.
But you can't name them all, you can't control,
like, when you're getting in really big numbers,
hey, what does this system way out here feel like
if you take your ship and jump that far?
We do level the systems, when you go to system,
you'll see, oh, this is like a level 40 system.
And us being able to at least control that scale
is how we kind of ended up
with the hundred-ish systems we have.
- What are the levelings?
What do you mean by level?
- It would be like when you look at a map in a game
and it says, this is the area for low-level players,
this is level one. - Oh, got it, got it.
- Yeah, yeah, so we do that on a system basis.
Star system.
- I read that space travel is considered dangerous
in this game, can you explain?
- That's more of, that goes back to a tone thing, right?
When you actually play the game, 'cause it's a game,
like, we don't really kill you when you fly out in space.
But it has a tone of, there's some effort involved,
and we've dialed it back as we've been making the game,
whereas we used to run out of fuel,
you'd jump and get stranded,
which on paper was a great, like, it's a great moment
when you get stranded and you have to press this beacon,
you don't know who's gonna come.
Turns out that's not, it just stops your game.
We found, you'd be playing the game and I ran out of fuel,
okay, I guess I'll just wander these planets
trying to mine for fuel so I can get back
to what I was doing.
It just, it's a fun killer.
- That's too realistic of a simulation
of the human condition.
- Yeah, no, the idea was, well, games do that.
If you had a hardcore, you're right,
a hardcore survival mode,
that's the kind of thing you would do.
Maybe we'll do it in the future.
But it's more of a tone, how they build their ships,
do they have all the right things for safety?
We do get into environmental things on the planets,
in your space suit, obviously,
a lot of different space suits and buffs for the gases,
the toxicity, or the temperature on various planets.
- Are there robots?
- Yes.
- Those companions, are they robots by chance?
Can you say?
- One of the companions is a robot, Vosko, yeah.
- Okay, so they have a name and a personality and so on.
- Vosko does, and then there's a whole bunch of,
I call 'em generic robots.
We use them for utility.
We actually dialed them back, 'cause if you think about,
well, you know a lot about this more than me in terms of--
- I'm offended right now, you're calling robots generic
and you dialed them back. - No, no, no,
the ones we use, the ones we use.
We made them more generic.
We didn't say actually-- - Sorry, I'm very sensitive
about this stuff. - I understand.
If you were to chart the future, you would say robots
would have a much bigger role in our future
than we are presenting.
But that was a tone thing.
So most of our robots are there as utility robots,
and there are some combat ones as well as enemies.
- So it's a deeply human world.
- Very much, yes.
- In terms of tone. - Yes.
- So have you talked to Elon about this game?
- A little bit.
- How much of reality, like the work of SpaceX,
is it an inspiration for the decisions made in this game?
- I wouldn't say it's for the decisions we made,
but visiting SpaceX and walking in there,
it was, it's like the Avengers meet NASA.
It's like the most amazing,
and here we're building the next gen,
like see the dragon stuff before it was,
other people saw it.
Like just, I was really in awe.
This giant machine that looks for imperfections
on the surface of these giant, you know, fuselage.
Just whenever, and 'cause we're in DC,
go to the Air and Space Museum a lot,
and so whenever I look at those kind of things,
or you'll visit the space shuttle,
sort of overcome with how big it is,
and I go stand back by the engines
and think about that thing leaving orbit.
And one of the things Elon really impresses,
we're reaching the edge of physics on a lot of this stuff
where how hard it is to leave orbit,
the gravitational pull.
And like so the engineering that has gone into that,
our space program, what he's doing now,
I just marvel at.
I don't understand, right, I'm not at that level,
but I marvel at the kind of human ingenuity and scale.
I was on the Delaware coast last month,
and I went, I was outside for some reason, it was dark,
and I saw this crazy light in the sky.
And I thought it was like a helicopter,
and then it didn't go away.
And I'm like, is someone, what is that?
I call my, we had some friends,
hey, does everybody see this?
What is that?
And we just stood dumbfounded
looking at this thing in the sky.
And like that is a UFO, nobody takes their phone out.
Everyone, I'm with like four people,
everyone is too dumbstruck.
You would think, why don't you take a picture of this thing?
And the next day we found out, it was in the news,
it was the SpaceX launch in Florida.
And I'm seeing it from Delaware, Maryland area.
It was one of the most, it was incredible.
It's just even just that, I am in complete awe of.
- Is there some aspect to that that you can replicate,
the majestic nature of that in a video game?
- I wish I had the answer to that.
I think some of it we were doing
when you're standing on a planet
and you see the other moons go by,
and then you realize, I could get my ship blast off
and land there and build myself a home.
I think that's pretty cool.
There's a minor thing we do,
which is we have other ships come and go
from the starports when you're there.
So you'll be in a city and then you hear this,
you hear the engine, you look up
and a ship is taking off or coming.
- That's great.
- There's nothing for you to do,
but I think it's awesome.
- Yeah, yeah.
And then that's all about creating the soundscape,
the feel.
- Seeing it and like, oh, that's real.
That's a ship that, or you jump into a system
and you see these freighters
and sometimes they contact you.
It's not all just like jump in and combat.
- Do you ever think about the fact
that science fiction seems to make,
it has a way of creating reality,
not just kind of predicting it or imagining it.
It's almost like the thing you put out there
with a video game like this, like Starfield,
that you can't anticipate.
It kind of fuels people's imagination of what is possible.
- Maybe, I don't know.
I don't know, I can't say.
You're making me think now about other science fiction
that, movie I love, "Minority Report."
It's more of like a, not a space movie,
but more like looking at the future.
If you look at a lot of the things in that movie,
it's almost like, I think those are coming true.
- Yeah.
I mean, is that the one that you do interface this like--
- It's the interfaces and then the,
the way he looks as a child's more like a holographic,
almost AR, VR kind of thing, or digital billboards,
or trying to predict human behavior.
There's just a lot of future stuff in that movie.
As it comes to sci-fi, to your other question,
I don't know, I don't know.
- Well, I think it does, and it's interesting.
§08Transcript · 1:11:50–1:20:47
I mean, I suppose you're trying to create the most realistic,
sticking to the tone, the most immersive, realistic world,
and almost by accident,
you create the thing that is possible,
because you want it to be realistic in some deep sense.
So, accidentally it can become the possible,
and then that places, that idea in people's heads.
I mean, if humans are ever to become
a multi-planetary species, we need to play games.
We need to read sci-fi to help imagine that that's possible,
to look outside of Earth, to look outside,
look up on the stars,
then we can actually travel out there.
I don't know, there's power to sci-fi to do that.
I guess you shouldn't feel the pressure of that.
- I don't know if I'd make the leap now, that's all,
that what we're doing might.
Now, maybe, you know, one of our,
hopefully it might inspire some young people
who are headed in that direction,
are like, oh, I thought about getting into space
and space exploration, and being an engineer,
or doing these things, and I played this game,
and it really sparked that interest in me,
so I'm gonna go take that as a field,
and maybe that's the person who goes
and does some of these things.
- Yeah, because in the next couple decades,
likely a human being will step foot on Mars,
which are the first steps
towards us becoming multi-planetary.
- And if you read some of the stuff they're doing
with the James Webb Telescope,
and them being able to look for signs of life
on other planets, it's quite fascinating,
and, you know, recent stuff I read say
they think in 20 years they will.
So it's actually quite encouraging to think,
I almost have a dream in mind, like in our lifetimes,
that we discover life on another planet.
- Yeah, especially if it's intelligent life.
I've been talking to a lot of biologists,
and a lot of folks, I imagine there's life
everywhere out there.
- The numbers would say so, yes.
- The challenging question is, what it looks like,
and how much of it is intelligent.
So a lot of biologists tell me the big difficult leap
is from the Prokaryotes to the Eukaryotes,
so like the complex life.
It could be that a lot of our universe
is just filled with bacteria.
- I believe, if I'm understanding it right,
that there's two ways they're gonna look at planets.
When they can look, you know, they can read,
hey, this planet has this kind of gas.
They can now look at the ones that are created
by potential life forms, and then the ones
that are created, the byproducts of industry.
There's only certain ones that are created
if you have a society there,
and that they can start looking on these types of,
in these types of star systems, in these planets,
but it takes a lot of time, 'cause you have to book time
on that telescope, you have to like look at that planet
over a long period of time, but in theory,
given enough time, given the amount of space out there,
we would find one.
That would be a cool thing in this short life of ours
to find out definitively that there is
an industrial intelligent civilization out there
before you contact them, so like die, end your life,
not knowing the rest of the story,
but just know that it's out there.
That's a cool, and then if you have kids,
be like, well, this one's on you.
F this, I'm out.
And I'm fascinated by what it would do to the way,
I think in a positive way,
the way humanity thinks about itself here.
Like no, there is a definitively other life out there.
- I mean, both things, if there isn't life out there,
that's also a huge responsibility.
Both are super exciting.
If we're alone, it's super exciting
because there's a responsibility to preserve
whatever special thing we have going on here,
this, whether you call it the flame of consciousness
or whether it's consciousness or intelligence,
that's a special thing, preserve it, have it expand.
But if there's others out there,
I mean, that sparks that drive for exploration
of reaching out into the stars and meeting them.
Most of them probably wanna kill us.
(laughing)
But luckily, we have the military industrial complex
on Earth that builds bigger and better weapons
all the time. - We have Space Force.
- Space Force.
It will both protect us and destroy all our enemies.
(laughing)
This is 100% a video game we're living in.
Okay, back to dragons.
So blink once if you know when Elder Scrolls VI
is coming out, but are not going to tell me.
- I have a vague idea.
- Okay, vague idea.
In, (laughing)
so like if you have the quantum mechanical interpretation
that allows for multiple universes,
in the universe where you didn't blink,
what would that, Todd, tell me about the year
it's coming out?
Would it be 2025? - That is a trick question.
- Or 26? - I've been asked
that question many ways, but never like that.
- Yeah, I thought I would try to sneak it.
I mean, there is, of course, no answer because--
- I wish it was soon.
- Soon. - Like we don't,
we want 'em out too, you know?
And I wish they didn't take as long as they did,
but they do.
And look, I mean, if I could go back in time,
would never have been my plan to wait
as long as it's taken for it.
- So you love that world, the Elder Scrolls world?
- Look, it's part of why I've spent more time there
than anything else in my life probably, right?
So I deeply love it.
We all do, it's a part of us.
And when you aren't doing it for a while,
you really do miss it.
And when I look at what we're doing,
have planned for that game,
and I was in a meeting yesterday,
I was like, I just wanna play all this right now.
(Todd laughs)
But we're gonna make sure we do it right
for everybody, and we do have to approach it.
People are playing games for a long time.
You know, Skyrim's 11 years old,
still probably our most played game,
and so we don't see it slowing down.
And people will probably be playing it
10 years from now also.
So you have to think about, okay,
people are gonna play the next Elder Scrolls game
for a decade, two decades.
And that does change the way you think about
how you architect it from the get-go.
- What are some elements that changed the way,
like how do you make a game that's playable for 20 years?
- Well, we're trying to figure that out.
(laughs)
- There are some elements, I should pause on that.
You know, pardon me, I'm of course asking,
jokingly, I'm excited for it,
but I think Skyrim is an amazing game still.
You know, I really enjoy it still.
- Yeah, and you know what, the content,
even if you step away from it for a while,
then play, what I'll put, say,
the vanilla version without mods.
If you go and haven't played it in a while,
there's always a new way to play it.
But then if you look at the mods
and what creators are doing to it,
we think that is just awesome.
It's something that we've always supported,
we're gonna keep supporting.
We've hired a large number of modders
that are now professionals.
We wanna support the people who are doing it on their own
so they can be professionals on their own.
- How do you create a world that's moddable?
So you think of designing the game from the start
as that enables mods.
- Yeah, absolutely.
So it starts with us, like everything we're doing,
okay, a modder, a content creator,
is gonna have to do it, use our tools.
Now we do clean them up for release,
'cause if you're like a developer in-house,
you can deal with some kludginess
when you're putting stuff together.
When you put it out for people,
we do clean a lot of it up.
And there's still obviously a learning curve there.
But look, we have people
who've been doing it for 20 years with us.
- What's involved with modding?
I'm actually quite newbish at this.
- Okay, so you-- - And I'm almost afraid
to ask, 'cause now that you explained to me,
I fear I will spend a very large amount of time
creating mods.
- Well, we have an editor you can download on Steam,
the creation kit for our games,
and then it loads up the world,
§09Transcript · 1:20:48–1:29:01
and you could do something really, really small,
like change the color of the weather.
And it creates a little plugin file, we call it,
you know, a modification to the game.
And then you can run your game with that.
It's on console now, the mods, not the editing.
And it's just been incredible.
Our community there has been amazing
what they do with the games.
- So a lot of it is the visuals.
- A lot of people do visual things,
'cause it's the easiest thing to do first,
or they're building new space.
There's some great things with,
like I love the Khajiit follower mod for Skyrim.
It's awesome.
There have been quest lines.
Those things just take a really, really long time.
And so someone who's gonna do that,
that's almost like it takes them a long time.
It's more than a hobby.
And we're always looking at ways that we can make it like,
hey, they can turn a career into it,
'cause it's just awesome.
- What about, is there any possibility in doing a mod
for some of the AI stuff?
- There is, and I've seen some,
but to really move it along,
if they're using the tools that we already put out there,
so to really move the AI along,
you'd have to get in the code,
which some people have figured out ways to hack in
and do things with script extenders.
But for the most part, like really pushing it,
it does take us, which is why you see
when we have a new game come along,
the palette that they have is there's so many more things
they can do.
- Well, I've built bots that play the driving games,
but they do that by just taking, reading the screen
and doing basic, not basic, it's actually pretty complicated
but computer vision and doing the control,
but you're basically simulating the human player.
To do that for Skyrim or for some of the open world games,
that's literally, you have to create AGI
to be able to play those open, well, maybe not,
maybe you can create a super dumb,
like just a two handed sword
and just keep swinging until everybody's dead.
- Look, there's some bot stuff out there that does it.
We have some very, very dumb bots that we use
to run through the world to test it,
that we'll deploy on a whole bunch of servers
just to, we do it every day.
We run through every space, we're doing it in Starfield.
And then just running, they're all out there.
- Well, it does it very quickly.
It loads up every place in the game
and runs around a little bit
and then loads the next place and runs around a little bit.
We're just testing, like, did it crash?
What's the memory growth?
What's the, get a report,
here are all the places where the frame rate
wasn't up to snuff.
And then we do have one that will play on its own.
It's heavily scripted, but it lets us test,
every time we make a build,
there's a bot that runs through
the first one or two main quests.
Like, it'll just play it.
That way we know, did we break anything?
'Cause you don't wanna waste QA's time,
like you guys broke it again within five minutes, so yeah.
- Yeah, so that's for broken stuff.
I wonder if you can build a bot
that estimates the quality of the experience.
- Oh my gosh, okay, can you do that?
- I don't know.
But just like the number,
like how boring or not boring, the boring meter.
- How many times you die.
- How many times you die.
- Is death boring or exciting?
That's the question.
I mean, I feel like there's a balance to be struck there,
'cause you always want to be in fear of death.
- Yeah, we always, we have this chart at work we use,
which is like, if you think about any game
that you've played that you've put down,
it's either about a frustration/confusion or boredom.
You gotta put the player right in the middle of that.
- But I've sometimes put down games from frustration
only to return again stronger.
- Dark Souls, yeah.
- So I mean, the challenge, that's part of it.
Well, I don't know, actually, Skyrim, I'm one of those,
I mean, I'm sure there's all kinds of humans
that you've interacted with about what they enjoy.
But to me, I could enjoy Skyrim
on any difficulty level.
It doesn't, all of it, so it depends.
The open world nature of it is what's really compelling.
Not necessarily the challenge
of the particular quest and so on.
But I'm not sure if that's the same experience for everybody.
- Do you play the survival mode?
There's a survival mode in Skyrim.
It was a creation club thing.
It does some hunger, it does hot and cold,
it does some other systems that make it,
you know, in our minds, more believable.
It was actually a creation club thing
made by an external creator who is now full-time with us.
- So can we actually, thinking about Starfield,
thinking about Elder Scrolls VI,
go through the full life of a video game you've created?
So what's it take to take a game
from the idea to finally the final product?
What are the different steps along the way?
- Great question.
Well, usually it starts with,
I mean, honestly, lunchtime conversations
with a number of us.
Hey, we think we wanna do this.
This is what it's gonna be like.
I mean, look, with an Elder Scrolls,
you know you're gonna do it.
It's a matter of when.
You say, okay, what's the tone we're going for, right?
Where is it set?
So we usually start with the world.
And then we're always overlapping.
So while we're making one game,
as we're getting in the throes of it or wrapping it,
probably by the midpoint of one game,
we've had enough conversations
to understand what the next one's gonna be.
What are the big ticket, like, where's it set?
What's the tone?
Is there a big ticket feature or two
that make it really unique?
And then when we're finishing one game,
we start prototyping.
Sorry, before that, we start concepting.
So we'll do concept art.
And for one reason or another,
I usually have the beginning of the game worked out.
I like to think about, okay, how's the game start?
What's the player do first?
We do music early.
So take Elder Scrolls VI, we forgot where it's set.
What's the tone?
What are the big features?
We discuss the beginning of the game,
which we've had for a very long time.
- Where's it set again?
- Yep.
(Luke laughs)
In Tamriel.
- Damn it.
Well, at least we know we narrowed it down that.
- Yeah.
- That would be epic if it was like
a portal into another dimension.
Anyway.
- Then I like to do music.
So we've already done a take on the music
for Elder Scrolls VI.
- So you can sit there with the concept art
and the music and you can feel it.
- No, no, the music, we put in the teaser for it.
This was 2018.
We've taken that further, obviously.
And again, we're working on the world.
You're then doing concepting and design for the world.
And then once we're wrapping up one game,
we can really start prototyping the new one.
And you're usually building kind of your initial spaces.
And so we do like to do like a first playable,
a smaller section of the game
that we can sort of prove out and show to people,
hey, this is how it feels different.
This is what it looks like.
This is what's unique about it.
Then we turn that into a larger chunk
when more of the team comes on, when the other game is done.
And that's still what we call a VS, vertical slice.
So you still don't have the full team on it.
And it's a larger chunk of the game that you can play.
And then once you feel good about that,
you're gonna bring on the rest of the team.
And we're fortunate that the other games we've done
are popular enough that we can be doing DLC and content
and those kinds of things while we're getting the one going.
And then we're at full production
where we're sort of at maximum size.
We just call that production.
That's like the full production period.
And that, depending on the game,
§10Transcript · 1:29:05–1:37:55
you know, can run a year, two years, maybe more.
And then you kind of have a finalizing final six months
to a year on a game, which is,
okay, we've built everything now.
And usually it needs a lot of glue
where we have a lot of very different elements
that maybe aren't clicking together the way you want
outside of the regular polish for levels and features.
And we're shaving and gluing and sticking things together
so that it's not the schizophrenic game experience
that things flow from one into another.
- In terms of story, like on that level?
- It's really, no, usually the story,
the designers have done a really good job.
It's more about game features, you know,
and then how they interact with the story or,
hey, I went from this experience to this experience,
or picking flowers in alchemy feels like a different game
and then how is another character referencing that?
And how is that intersecting with the skill system
and the interface?
Like the skill system and the interface is the party host.
If you think about a game, most games,
particularly what I like to do,
is that's your person that says,
welcome, do this, go here, check this out.
And the skill system and the way it reacts on the HUD,
the interface of the game,
is sort of leading you to the next thing.
And once you get that flow down
and the rate at which the game is giving you activities,
then you're in like what we describe as a game flow.
And it's not till really that last year.
Before that, the game flow was just,
it doesn't even exist in the way that you see it
in the final game.
And that's what we were working on a lot that last year.
- So at which point is like the set of skills,
a skill tree, the characteristics
of the role-playing aspect of it,
when is that set, the ideas?
- We usually have it in the beginning,
but it's just, we know it won't be done
until that last year.
We'll have one, but we know it's gonna get honed
because it's not until you really see,
okay, how impactful is that one?
How much are you doing it?
Like how much are you really,
and the main combat ones, they always win.
You always know the players will drift
toward the combat type skills
'cause every character needs some amount of that.
But okay, well, how important is cooking?
How important is alchemy?
How important is these other type of activities?
And then how do you balance them
where when you load up the skill menu,
it isn't automatically give me plus 10 damage?
- How do you get the, what about the combat system?
That does seem to be an important part of a lot of games.
- You start it in the beginning, yeah, every time, yep.
So usually when we're making that first playable,
it's an area you can go through,
some amount of dialogue, some amount of combat.
- How do you get the combat right?
What's the secret to a great combat system?
- Well, first on a control side,
helping the player when they don't realize it.
There's a lot of tricks you can do with magnetism
in terms of the controller and where the attacks go.
So it has to feel, the minute to minute
has to feel really good in your hand.
So there's a lot of animation time, right?
And changing animation so they're impactful
and they happen at a rate that the player feels
like they're really doing it.
And then ultimately it's the illusion
that the enemies are smart,
but they really are there for you to kill them, right?
So they do a lot of things to just let themselves get killed.
They're not near as smart as we can make them
'cause it turns out that is not fun.
- Right, so there's a balance between,
but that is, I guess, a kind of AI
and it's a very intimate interaction with an AI
'cause there's a lot of stuff going on.
It's not just very kind of shallow,
like a dialogue or something like that.
It's like, there's a time critical nature
where a lot of stuff is happening.
And if anything feels off, it's gonna feel wrong.
- Yep, all the games do it.
It's not unique to what we do
in terms of how they handle combat scenarios.
And there's some games that just do it extremely well
in terms of, even in multiplayer where you're playing bots
and most people don't know it,
or how a multiple enemy scenario is really,
they don't all shoot you, they trade off.
They're gonna wait.
And I was like, "All right, I'll just wait my turn
"'cause we don't wanna overwhelm them."
But you feel like you're overwhelmed
when there's six enemies, but a good game will,
no, they're gonna take their time.
- Is there a science to it?
Is it art?
Is it like, how do you--
- Yes, I mean, it's all of that.
- So it's like an iterative process
where you try different things, you have different ideas.
- There's a lot of-- - Mixture of animation.
- There's a lot of timing, animation work, HUD work also.
How does the reticule change?
What are the little sound effects?
- What about the gamify, like that is fun?
That aspect. - Again, that goes back
to the winning.
- So winning is fun.
- Yes. - Death is not.
- Yes, let the Wookiee win.
(laughing)
I like how you have to dumb down the AI
to make it fun for humans.
Because if you didn't, it would just be just slaughter
nonstop for all humans.
That's good to know.
What about things like, you said cooking, like crafting,
making potions and poisons and smithing,
weapons and armor, cooking?
How do you get that right?
What's interesting there?
It's such an interesting, a lot of games
don't have that kind of thing.
So what role does that play in the game's creation?
- I think we really cracked it in a way I like
with Fallout 4, actually, where when we're doing
Elder Scrolls, we have the flowers and things
and you have alchemy, and we took this to,
okay, if it's post-apocalyptic, what if everything
in the world was an alchemical ingredient in some kind?
So breaking it down to their components.
So when you walk around a world, again,
we like the simulation, we like the forks and the spoons
and the cups and all that.
Okay, how can I use those to create?
So I love how it starts working in Fallout 4,
where, okay, all these things I find,
they have some value in creating or crafting
outside of a cup is worth one gold piece or one cap.
- By the way, I have to be honest,
I haven't played Fallout 4.
I played Fallout 3.
I thought that was a legendary game.
Can you make a case for Fallout 4?
Or should I just wait till Fallout 5?
And when does that come back?
- I think you should play Fallout 4.
Love to hear your thoughts.
It's a different game.
- Skyrim is too.
I mean, it's--
- We try to make them all different.
They all have-- - They are fundamentally
different. - They all have
their own tone. - Keep the tone.
- So Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 are intentionally
a very different tone.
- Oh, really?
Interesting.
So what's that world like?
What's the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout,
if you can just briefly take a stroll
into that world, tone-wise?
- Well, there's, look, in entertainment,
there's a lot of post-apocalyptic stuff.
And what makes Fallout tick is the world
that was left behind, the world that blew itself up,
this utopian world of nuclear energy,
and it all goes wrong.
So I love the American dream of that,
like how they visioned the future in the '50s
and that blowing itself up.
I think that's a super interesting place to explore,
which is why we always wanted to play in that world.
And it does an amazing job of sort of weaving
the drama and darkness of a post-apocalyptic world
with B-movie humor.
Winks at the camera sometimes, often, actually.
And that when you're in that world,
it just has its own unique flow and vibe
outside of anything else kind of in that genre.
- So Elder Scrolls has, or at least Skyrim has,
some humor.
- Has a little bit.
- But Fallout leans into it a little more.
- A little bit more, a little bit more.
Yeah, yeah, it does.
It's like ironic humor.
§11Transcript · 1:37:56–1:46:48
It's the duck and cover.
It's a get under your desk if the bomb comes
and everything will be fine.
It's that type of humor.
- So the funny thing is, I do think Fallout 3
is one of the greatest games ever.
You've said that, quote,
"When we started Fallout 3 in 2004,
"we obviously had big ideas of what we could do with it,
"and I talked to a lot of people,
"from ex-developers to press folks to fans,
"what made it special?
"What are the key things you'd want out in a new one?
"The opinions," and I'll put this mildly, "varied a lot,
"but they would all end the same,
"like a stern father pausing for effect,
"but do not screw it up."
How do you not screw up a game?
You have not screwed up many games yet.
- I mean, back to the Fallout one.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, that was, look, I remember that.
We were met with a lot of skepticism in terms of,
"Oh, what are they gonna do with this?"
It was a beloved kind of isometric,
turn-based role-playing game.
You know, awesome for when it came out.
And actually, it was announced,
we had finished Morrowind, but not announced Oblivion.
But because we'd acquired the rights,
we had to announce it,
'cause I think Interplay was a public company.
I don't remember.
I just remember we had to announce it,
and we're thinking there,
"Well, we're gonna piss off all the Elder Scrolls fans,
"'cause we're announcing a Fallout game.
"We're probably gonna piss off the hardcore Fallout fans,
"'cause we didn't make the original,
"and clearly we'll probably make a different kind of game."
So I do remember, you know,
there was a lot of concern with all of our fans,
and fans of Fallout at the time.
And so, I think it was pretty rewarding for us
that that game found the audience and success that it did.
It's one of my favorite projects that I've ever worked on.
And because it was so fresh for us,
and we had a very clear,
even before we had the rights,
this is the game we're gonna make.
This is the kind of thing we're gonna do.
And we had done Morrowind,
and we were working on Oblivion.
And it was kind of a breath of fresh air to do it.
And what's kind of remarkable is,
Fallout 3 comes out just two and a half years after Oblivion.
And we did all this DLC for Oblivion.
So we were really, really kind of prolific
in how our development, how it was going.
So, I just remember enjoying making that game so much,
'cause it was, everything we were doing was new.
- Which, as to the world creation,
was there some innovation,
like technically that was happening to it?
- The world creation, like it was, you know,
obviously a different look,
even though some of us,
very few of us had worked on the Terminator things.
The VAT system, the skill system,
and we loved the original game so much.
So you felt this responsibility
to bring it back in a big way,
and reintroduce it in a way that, you know,
as much as we could, scratch the same itch
when you played the original game,
that it had the same tone.
- Are there some favorite things to you about that world
that just kind of connect you to the humor?
- Fallout 3, I love,
again, I usually start with the beginning.
I love the beginning.
I love the character generation.
If you go, if you played it a lot,
or you're developing it,
it starts to feel really long.
But the first time you play it, or second,
I just think it's awesome.
And this idea, it's a hard thing to say,
okay, we want you to feel like your character on the screen.
Even when you play like a Skyrim,
you don't know what you were doing before that.
But Fallout 3, you were born in the vault,
and you raised in the vault, and you lived in the vault,
but you experience a part of that.
So it's a very different, when you step out,
I think you're really,
I mean, the visuals are the visuals,
but the emotional moment of stepping out of the vault,
you feel like you lived your whole life in the vault.
- And you feel like you have a sense of your past.
- Right, and I need to find my father.
- Isn't it possible to have that sense
with Elder Scrolls, like a life story,
like childhood trauma and stuff?
Back to the human condition.
- I mean, you'd have to, look, you do some of that stuff,
but they go through menus.
Pick your background.
We're doing that in Starfield.
Hey, pick your background.
What were you doing before this moment?
- Can you pick your traumas and stuff?
(laughing)
- Say hey, if you wanna make a mod, you wanna make a mod.
- Yeah, thank you.
- Go for that.
- And then also make a mod for a therapist.
- But a lot of it is in your head,
so you're gonna pick this background,
and you do these things,
and you're sort of like, this is who I was.
And we intentionally with Elder Scrolls
kind of make it as much of a blank slate.
Elder Scrolls is a little bit more of a blank slate game
to who you are, which has a lot of positives,
and Fallout for us has been more of a,
this was your life before.
Here's who you were.
Go be who you wanna be, but this is the background.
It's a little more strict.
- Now, this might reveal something about me,
and speaking of childhood trauma,
but I feel like there's a lot of the meaningful experience
of a role-playing game is not just the development
of the character throughout the game,
but the initial character creation, like you said.
Is there something to that process
that you found to be powerful?
Like the design of that process,
because you think so much about that beginning.
How much should be controlled?
How much should be defined?
The interface itself?
The visual appearance of the character, too?
'Cause I feel like that you're loading in,
you start to load in the world that you're about to enter
by creating that character, right?
- Yeah, we think about it a lot.
It's a really, really good comment and question.
And it's more than, it has to set the whole stage.
Has to peak your interest for the world you're gonna enter.
And we've done it so many different ways
in terms of when you actually go to make your character,
when you're making the choice.
And one of the things over time that we've wanted to avoid
is people starting over.
So there's a lot of intentionality around
the types of choices you have
that can be undone or not undone.
'Cause what game players want to is,
I'll play it and then I'll make a new character.
But sometimes they do that because they realize
they made the wrong type of character.
And as a designer, you don't want that to happen.
So some people, and we get this comment in Elder Scrolls,
like, oh, you simplified it.
No, no, no, no, we moved those choices into the gameplay
so that you don't make this character in the beginning
and then eight hours later realize
you make a horrible mistake.
And so, okay, I'm gonna start out like that,
to me is a really, really bad experience.
- Also like life itself, but yes, go ahead.
- But like life is, okay, so you can then--
- Fix it in game.
- Right, I wish I had learned archery.
- Well, I'm gonna start tomorrow.
So you can do that, like the Skyrim character system,
it was really designed around that.
All you pick is like, what's your race?
And that gives you some things,
but there's nothing you can't get then on your own.
Mostly, it sounds weird, but you mostly want that
beginning character generation to be visual,
which you then can also change in the game.
And some starting skills that get you off
to the type of play that you want,
but if you discover you don't like that type of play
as you play, you can move your character along.
So we have moved away, post-Oblivion, to a classless,
meaning you don't have a strict character class,
warrior, mage, thief, whatever, in our games.
- And that's continuing for the,
are you like thinking of Elder Scrolls VI,
you're already thinking about that kind of stuff?
So you think of early on, like you said,
the first few experiences in the game,
you're already thinking through them.
- Yeah, yeah, we know what the first few hours are like,
we know what the character system is basically like.
§12Transcript · 1:46:53–1:55:17
- So tonally, what's the difference to you
between Oblivion, Skyrim, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim,
and Elder Scrolls VI?
- Like, to me, man, stuff blends together.
- Yeah.
- But Oblivion, that's when you could make spells and stuff.
- You could, you could do it in Morrowind as well.
Oblivion has some more guardrails on it.
Morrowind's where you can really go, and Daggerfall.
I don't remember if you can make spells in Arena.
I think you can.
Someone will correct me.
You definitely can in Daggerfall, it gets crazy.
Morrowind, you can somewhat.
And then we start putting guardrails on it,
'cause people started breaking the game in certain ways.
- Yeah, why is it bad to break the game?
Like, you always want it to be--
- Well, there's like one people love in Morrowind
where you can make these recall stones,
and you could teleport to different areas,
which you really need in that game.
It breaks so many quests.
- Yeah.
- And so as we, any quests, we would do this exercise
of designing a quest, and then someone would say,
"And then I recall away."
And you're like, "Oh, okay, the quest is broken."
And then one day someone says,
"Can we just get rid of that spell effect?"
Everyone's like, "Yes, please."
And so it allowed us to make better content.
- So, a tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent.
How do you create a compelling quest?
'Cause there's all kinds of personalities of humans
that play these games, right?
'Cause I like the grind.
- Well, there's, look, there's multiple flavors
of a compelling quest.
Some of them have very good upfront storytelling.
You just like the story and the NPC
that's giving you this task.
And you'll go through a more handcrafted experience
that the designers have done a really, really good job
on the space.
It has some twist or surprise in the middle,
and then the ending has some multiple options
that the player feels like they got to do something,
they made an interesting choice.
But the best ones for me are actually where
all of that was far more open-ended.
The how I am going to accomplish this task
is completely up to me,
and I'm gonna find some ingenious solution.
A silly, this sounds very basic.
It's gonna sound quite cliche and silly.
It's like, "Go find me five daedric hearts," or whatever.
Like, "Find me X of something that's hard to get."
It's a very simple,
you can give a simple story set up for that.
And we're not telling the player where to get those,
and they're thinking, "Now, where could I get those?"
And I actually find those to be just as rewarding
as the really handcrafted, well-done,
little bit more linear with an interesting choice
at the end, if those objects are in the world
in some believable way,
that there's usually some challenge at getting them.
- How do you place objects in a world in an interesting way?
'Cause it's a big part.
- We have a level design.
You cannot, people, if they only knew how much we spend,
we have a clutter group, a group of people who clutter.
- What's clutter?
- Clutter is all the stuff around.
It's like interior decorators for treasure and stuff
and trash, and they go through every space
and they clutter it.
Our level designers think about it a lot.
These also become landmarks for the player
when you're walking through a space and,
"Oh, this is the place with this."
And there is a logic to making a good level,
as they say, with, even if you walk by
like a little T intersection,
that becomes like a decision point in the player's head.
Like, "Oh, I didn't go down that way."
But the more you do that, it looks easy on paper,
but when you're playing a game,
you actually kind of want to limit those
because he's trying to keep track
of all these decision points, then they get lost.
And yes, we have maps, but anytime the player's going
to check a map in a place like that,
I feel that it's more of like a backstop
for certain players.
If they need to check the map,
I feel like we've kind of failed.
- Got it.
There's a momentum to it, just pulls them in.
It doesn't feel like they're-
- And you know, look, you played a lot of games,
you played a lot of levels where you're just like,
"I'm a little confused," or, "I don't know."
And you play other levels where like,
"Man, it was great.
"I went through it.
"It was well-balanced.
"I knew where I was going."
And you don't want to ever be mazy.
As long as you know where you're going,
as long as you know you made those choices,
then it feels fine.
But as far as the treasure and all of the loot,
it is really an art.
We will not do enough clutter,
and then we will over clutter,
and then there's too much stuff everywhere,
and then we declutter every single game.
I wish we got better at it.
It would save us a lot of time.
- But you're constantly going by feel,
like this is not, this is too much, this is not enough.
- Right, right, because the other thing is,
look, it creates, people want to pick everything up.
They want to click everything.
So if you have too many things of importance in a room,
it's like, it actually makes you feel
a little tight as a player.
You're like, "Well, I'm basically an idiot
"if I don't pick all this stuff up."
You probably felt this way.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
- And the moment where you decide,
that you're just like, "I've clicked so many things
"in this room, I actually am gonna leave
"that ammo canister there," but you feel like a dope.
You've probably experienced this.
- Yes, but also you have a joy from,
if there's not many items, and you found the one,
and you got it, and you feel good.
- I got it.
- And then it's finding, like,
"Oh, I stuck my head in this corner,
"and I picked this lock, and I opened this locker,
"and oh, there was this thing I've been waiting for."
- Yeah, what about rare and rare items?
- That's an art, even more so of an art.
I will say we have a ways to go there
in terms of finding the right drop rate
for special items, we call them,
and your epic rare legendary.
You look at games, so many games do it,
and there are ones that you just play and love
'cause they have it down.
Destiny 2 is great at it.
Diablo, a series I love, sort of famously,
Diablo III, which I think is great,
and they did an update, it mostly just changed
the loot drops, and it's like this whole new experience,
and there's a really, real art to it.
I think that we're still learning.
We're still learning a lot, and we're trying
to get better at it 'cause it's one of those things
where it drives you through the game.
It's fun to get the treasure in.
- Diablo and Skyrim have this interesting quality
of being extremely popular,
and there's a lore around rare items,
so it changes the dynamic of you could afford
to have really rare items,
- Yes.
- and then somebody finds it,
and that becomes a thing.
I mean, as you release a game,
a lot of people play, and they start sharing stories,
and so on.
It's so interesting 'cause that's part
of the game experience is the stories of others, right?
- For us, 100%.
Because we've been classically,
with most of our stuff, single player,
that that water cooler shared experience,
we would have a thing where we call them
did you know moments.
Like, we gotta have a bunch.
So, you meet someone, they do, what are you doing?
And then they say, did you know?
If you go here and do this, what did you know?
And that, to us, is where a lot of our community
has been sharing their stories,
and here's what you can do.
- Has there ever been a temptation to create
not a single player game that's gigantic,
that's open world? - Well, we did Fallout 76.
We have Elder Scrolls Online, not a game I created,
but look, that started as more classic MMO.
Know the folks, they're part of our company
who made that game.
And it's insanely, insanely popular.
§13Transcript · 1:55:21–2:03:44
- It is, okay, so I should try it out.
- They do some great storytelling quests.
Like, the actual mechanics aren't the same as Skyrim,
but the world is awesome.
They've just done an incredible job.
You know, it's about to be 10 years for that game as well.
And it's just, you know, great community around that.
- Yeah, it's, I haven't played,
'cause there's a mobile Fallout game, right?
I need to play that.
I was thinking of playing Diablo Mobile too.
- I mean, you can debate the monetization,
but I would not, it's, I think they did a phenomenal,
it's really fun. - On Fallout?
What's it? - Diablo.
- Oh, Diablo? - Yeah, well, Fallout,
I definitely recommend that one.
Fallout Shelter, completely different game.
Diablo Immortal is, I was very, very impressed with it.
I had a lot of fun. - On the mobile?
- Yeah. - What's the challenge
of designing a game for mobile versus the PC and console?
- Well, obviously the screen size, right?
- Is that what you feel first?
What's the fundamental change in the philosophy of design?
Does it constrain, does it change the tone of the game?
- Well, we've done a few things,
and we have a new mobile game that we're working on
that we haven't announced yet that I'm in love with.
There are a couple of things that you approach on mobile.
Now, I can give you sort of the classic mobile gaming thing
than what we do.
You know, a classic mobile gaming
is really for short play sessions.
'Cause for the amount of people you're gonna get,
the number that have the amount of time to sit there
for a long time and play it,
like a console game or a PC game, is lower,
'cause people are playing mobile games
on the move or whatever.
And how it onboards you,
'cause obviously most of them are free,
so how the tutorial works, how it gets you into the game,
because you haven't bought it,
you haven't done this investment of buying it
and then saying, "No, I'm gonna learn it."
People don't care.
So really understanding how they get into the game.
Those two things are really the magic to mobile gaming.
We have found, though, with our games,
you know, particularly "Fallout Shelter,"
people will sit there for an hour or two.
Like, they will just sit there and play it.
Like, large numbers of people will play it for hours a day.
- So there is a more, I don't know,
addicting element to the mobile?
'Cause I guess you can spend more time with it.
- And if you look at, you know,
if you look at kids these days,
they can stare at their phone for hours.
That's all they do.
That's where they watch everything.
So it's also like a demographic thing.
The younger audience,
they would rather sit and stare at their phone
than play it on a big screen.
- I would just love to sort of list out
throughout human history the evolution of sentences
that began with, if you look at kids these days.
(laughing)
- It's true, it's true.
- The kids of the kids these days
will probably be talking about,
be doing like virtual reality.
- Like, I love mobile games, though.
I play a ton of 'em.
I am, like, my favorite game this year is "Marvel Snap,"
this card game from the folks who did "Hearthstone."
You should really play it.
If you like, do you like card games?
- Yeah.
- Do you like superheroes?
- No.
- It's genius.
- You don't like superheroes?
- No, I don't like superheroes.
I never understood, listen, this never,
this is growing up in the Soviet Union.
What, I don't understand the,
all right, well, I don't understand,
you're wearing a costume, it's silly to me.
I can't, so you have to suspend,
like, you have to be able to immerse yourself,
and for some reason there's something about costumes,
it doesn't get me.
But then again, I'm like into elves and dragons,
so I don't understand, and I'm fine.
- I think I get it.
- Yeah, but the rest, at least the American,
the Western world disagrees with me, so.
Even Batman, you have, like, little ears,
but all right, that's fine.
Well, back to "Elder Scrolls Starfield."
So one thing I didn't ask you about,
when you look at the timeline of five, six, seven,
eight years, whatever it is, to create a game,
what's the role of the deadline internally,
not publicly announced? - Keeps you honest.
- Do you try to keep, in your own brain, a deadline,
for the team, a deadline?
- Yeah, all the time.
- And when you set that deadline early in the development,
do you try to set deadline, like,
that's really tough to reach?
- No, we try to make it, like, hey, this is our best guess.
If you make it tough to reach, it's sort of,
you know you're gonna miss it, it's arbitrary.
We really try to, you know, keep ourselves honest,
'cause it'll let you know where you're at, right?
We wanna have first playable,
we wanna be done with prototyping or design by this date,
we wanna have first playable this date, we wanna have this.
But, look, you know, things happen.
Pandemic happens, people go home, it throws everything off.
Or, you know, what you needed to do,
because we're not just like making a game
and then moving everybody on, you know,
what you needed to do, like Skyrim was so popular,
we kept people on that game for longer.
So it delayed a little bit,
we were doing with "Fallout 4" at the time,
'cause we can't, you know, hey,
we really shouldn't move the people on to "Fallout" yet,
'cause we're doing these things in Skyrim and we should.
So it just sort of keeps you honest for where you're at.
- Does it get super stressful as you get closer?
You try to avoid announcing anything?
Is there a temptation to announce?
- Well, I've done it all ways, right?
I've announced, you know, "Starfield,"
we were pretty loud with a release date
that we then had to delay, so.
- Was that tough?
- It was, it was, but it was the right thing to do.
- How do you know it's the right thing to do?
Like when you sat down and looked at it,
like, this is not ready?
- It's not an exact science,
but you can look at what needs to be done
and the amount of time you have.
And, you know, we've done it in the past
where we can get it done, we believe we can.
And so you're fighting that personal belief
that you can get something done.
But there's a lot of things that go into release date
with marketing and publishing.
And, you know, we've reached a point where on "Starfield"
where it was pretty clear to us,
even though you wanna say you can get it done,
that the risk involved with that to the fans,
to the game, to the team, to the company,
we're part of Xbox now, to everybody was,
we should really move it and give it the time it needs.
- So you mentioned part of Xbox,
Microsoft bought Bethesda and ZeniMax for $7.5 billion.
Well, what's it like joining the Xbox team?
You've, I think, written about it.
What are the exciting aspects of that?
- You know, when your company goes through a change like that
no matter what it is,
even if it's somebody that you've worked with
for a long time, you never know what you're in for.
You hope, and I had worked with them for,
since we started doing console stuff with "Morrowind"
was, you know, they came to us, came to me and,
"Hey, you should make this game for the Xbox."
And so when they were making that console,
had a great experience with them.
And then on the 360 with "Oblivion,"
and so I guess the point is,
we felt that we had a very good relationship
with everybody there,
and we understood what their culture was,
but you never really know.
And I mean this honestly, it's been awesome.
That the culture inside of Microsoft and Xbox
that people see from the outside is the culture inside,
the way they talk about players,
the way they'll invest in the players,
the risks they'll take,
the thoughtfulness from Phil Spencer on down
has been, you know, Phil really, really lucky.
And then a game like "Starfield" where,
look, we've had a lot of success
with the games that you talked about,
but we've never been kind of the platform seller,
you know, the game for a platform for a period of time.
And so, you know, there is a lot of pressure there.
There's a lot of responsibility there
to make sure we deliver for everybody.
§14Transcript · 2:03:46–2:12:35
- Is there a chance that "Starfield" is exclusive to Xbox?
- It is exclusive.
- It's officially ready. - Xbox PC, yep, yes.
- So you're...
I get it.
So extra pressure also creating a new world.
- Yeah, it's new, but keep in mind,
for us that exclusivity is not unique,
even though we've done PlayStation stuff.
And I think the PlayStation 5 is just an insane machine.
They've done a great job
and we've had great success on PlayStation.
We were traditionally a PC developers in the beginning.
We transitioned to Xbox, became our lead platform.
Like "Morrowind" is basically exclusive to Xbox.
"Oblivion" was exclusive to Xbox for a long period of time.
"Skyrim" DLC was exclusive.
So we've done a lot of like,
our initial stuff is all Xbox.
So we get into development and saying,
we're focused on Xbox
and it's not abnormal for us in any way.
It's been kind of the norm.
And from a development side, I, you know,
I like the ability to focus.
So our ability to focus and say, and have help from them,
you know, the top engineers at Xbox to say,
we are gonna make this look incredible on the new systems
is like, from my standpoint, it's just awesome.
- What's the difference in creating the console
versus the PC?
I also have to admit, I've never, is this shameful?
Actually, you should recommend to me.
I've never played "Skyrim"
or any of the games you've created on Xbox.
- Really?
- Yeah, and on console.
I played, I mean, I've played very little Xbox.
- Yeah, sure.
I mean, look, there's the obvious interface part.
- Yeah. - Between mouse and keyboard
and then a controller.
But when you're looking at hardware, PCs, it's tough, right?
'Cause you're looking at, well,
you know, what are their driver versions?
You know, what kind of monitor do they have?
What is the actual refresh rate of X, Y, and Z?
We're used to it.
- Yeah. - But if, you know,
anyone will tell you, give me the hardware
that I know I'm writing it for, you know this.
And the Series X is just a incredible machine.
And now that- - And you know what it is.
You know- - You know what it is.
And now that we're part of Xbox,
getting the people who built it to show you
how to make it really, really dance is just awesome.
- Is there a case to be made?
Do you get people that enjoy,
people that do both PC and Xbox,
that enjoy Xbox more?
Like if they have a choice- - Yeah, absolutely.
- That they enjoy it?
- I think that depends on,
and look, now that you can kind of cross,
you can take your save and go between and all those things.
- You can? - Yeah.
Depends on if- - For which games?
So for Skyrim?
- If you have the Game Pass PC version of it versus Steam.
Not via Steam right now.
Not via Steam. - Got it, got it.
And so there's the Game Pass.
So I'm like learning about this.
So there's a Microsoft, so this is gonna be on Game Pass.
And then you can, yeah, if you can take it from PC
through Game Pass- - But I think it depends on,
like for me, what's my physical mood?
Do I wanna lean back on a sofa?
- Exactly. - Right?
Like the actual physicality of it
is what determines where I wanna play.
Do I wanna be two feet from a thing right now?
And sometimes I like that.
I am more of a console player just because
I sit at my PC at work all day.
Like I play a lot of video games.
So when I get home and I wanna play something else,
like I am a sofa, screen, controller person.
- Let me ask you a ridiculous question.
So you've created some of the greatest games ever.
I think there's, the question would be
what's the best game of all time?
All right, all right, just give me a second.
- Tetris. - Tetris?
All right, yeah, that's interesting.
- Have you read the book on Tetris?
- No. - You should read it.
Basically someone who grew up in Russia.
- Yeah, I'm sure there's an interesting story.
The fact that there's a book about Tetris
is fascinating.
Is there a book about Mario?
I would love to find out more,
but I think I would put, personally I would put Skyrim.
- I'll take that, good answer.
- At number one for me,
which is tough, however you put it,
'cause you could also make the case
out of the Elder Scrolls series.
Like what do you actually value more?
If you put Tetris and Super Mario up there,
then like the credit goes to Morrowind maybe over Skyrim.
I don't know where the biggest leaps are,
but overall I think it's Skyrim.
But for you, if you're not allowed to pick
any of the games you were involved with,
what are some interesting candidates for you
that are just games that inspired the world,
impacted the world, shook the world
in terms of what video games are able to do?
- Well, first, I'm just sort of like hearing you say
that you think Skyrim's the best game of all time
is quite, like thank you.
And it's an incredible thing to hear.
And when I think about,
well, I have a couple of answers.
There's ones that are like personal to me.
Ultima VII is probably my--
- Yeah, can you talk about Ultima?
Like you said that as an inspiration.
I never crossed that world.
- Well, it was-- - What kind of game is it?
- It's a role-playing game.
Circa 1992, '93, '94, Ultima Online,
first really visual online world in that way.
But for me, that was a virtual fantasy world
where you could bake bread, you could pick all this stuff up.
I mean, anyone who's played Ultimas and plays our stuff
can see the kind of touchstones
and callbacks to that or inspirations.
And the other thing that I loved about Ultima
was, they were all different, right?
That they iterated and there weren't necessarily
what I'll call a plus one sequel
outside of Ultima VII part two,
clearly a plus one sequel,
but they each had their own tone.
I love like the boxes.
It's something that we get into as well.
I love this idea that a game also is this tangible thing.
- Oh, when you buy it--
- You buy the cardboard boxes
and the way they were designed,
and Ultima VII is black and Ultima VIII is the fiery gate
and the paintings on them.
- Does that break your heart a little bit
that that culture is a bit gone?
- A little bit, a little bit.
And that's also why I like,
this goes to video gaming or any other digital things
where digital ownership has great value to people.
So I like looking at my collections of games,
even digitally, I wanna see nice,
in the same way you wanna see nice album art,
wanna see nice cover art for our games.
And we spend a lot of time in them
so that you take a look at Elder Scrolls
and Mormon Oblivion and Skyrim.
We want those boxes to look good next to each other.
Going back to the video games,
I always mentioned Tetris because I think it's,
obviously I love virtual worlds and those kinds of things,
but for the time and what an interactive like video games
for the simplest form,
I sort of think you can put Tetris
in front of just about anybody and they'll enjoy it.
It's got some moment of challenge and it's just so elegant.
It's like to me, like this very pure game
that only works 'cause it's a video game.
- And I think mobile games figured out
some of the magic of Tetris,
the simple-- - Some of them have, yeah.
- But Tetris did it a long, long time ago.
You can really create that immersive experience without--
- But for me, the ultimate civilization
as far as a grand strategy game.
Pac-Man I mentioned in terms of bringing games
into the mainstream in a way that captured people
that nothing before it had.
Super Mario, Donkey Kong, everything.
Nintendo, probably the best game makers in the world still.
They know who they are, they know what they wanna do,
always in awe of what they create.
- I gotta ask you about a game I haven't played
but people put up there as one of the greats,
Zelda Breath of the Wild.
Have you gotten a chance to play?
- A lot of it, yes, yes, it's fantastic, it's fantastic.
- What do you think about, I mean,
§15Transcript · 2:12:36–2:20:36
it's a very different experience.
I've played other Zeldas than the open worlds
you've created but it is also an open world.
- It is, it's my favorite Zelda
'cause I obviously like open world stuff.
And the one thing that they do really, really well
is they don't constrain you.
Some people, you know, even some of the things we do
constrain you a little bit more.
Zelda says, here's the whole thing.
And you are constrained by the actual
player abilities you haven't earned yet,
not some arbitrary barriers.
And so I think they just did a phenomenal job.
It's a magical game.
- It really feels open.
- It's 'cause it truly is, yes.
- What about, I mean, I just like asking
about some open world.
A very different one is the world of either
Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption.
- Both love.
I would put GTA 3, Grand Theft Auto 3 up there
with the landmark kind of usher in the open world.
When that comes out on the PlayStation 2,
even though there was GTA 1 and 2,
this was an all new thing with the mobster storytelling.
- Is that the first 3D version, I guess?
- It was, then Vice City's kind of a fast follow,
which could be my favorite one.
I loved all the Grand Theft Autos.
I think they're really phenomenally well-made games.
Same with Red Dead.
I think Red Dead Redemption 1 could be my favorite story.
Highly recommend finishing that game.
- So you like both the story.
You like the grittiness of that,
'cause they have a bit of the,
I guess if you like the fallout, there's the humor.
I don't know what it is.
It's the lighthearted humor of it,
but also the brutality of human nature's in there too.
But it's like, and also some of the fun
they create with the music when you drive
and stuff like that.
They create a world.
There's a tone.
There's a very strong tone.
- There is a very strong tone.
The satire on the world is just so well done.
The gameplay is great.
I think they've just done a phenomenal job.
- And yeah, there's that Pop to Mind.
- Portal.
- Portal, yeah.
That's another weird creation.
- I could just sit here and list games forever.
- For a while, I'm enjoying this.
- Hearthstone's a game I love.
I love all type, like sports.
College football, NCAA football was my favorite.
It's like, I would say this is a great role-playing game.
- Oh, you would actually keep getting role-playing?
- It's a role-playing game,
'cause I have all these characters.
I have like 60 characters, and they're all leveling up,
and then I have to play them.
And then the college ones, I like college football.
They graduate, so you lose your players,
and then they stop making the series.
You know the folks at EA, and they will say,
"I have bugged them.
"When is this coming?"
And they're doing it, so it's finally coming back.
- Nice.
What would you say is the greatest sports game of all time?
- Well, it's NCAA football.
I have to pick the year.
- NCAA versus Madden?
- Oh, yeah.
Yeah, but there's more teams.
You get the college fight songs.
There's more pageantry, and the players turn over.
They're only there for four seasons,
so you have to,
so it's more dynamic.
- So you like variety versus--
- So what was the last one?
2014, maybe it was.
- And you don't like FIFA?
- I like, look, FIFA's incredible.
Look, I'm a college football fan.
They give you that fantasy.
If you like European football/soccer, FIFA's incredible.
Yeah, I love that game, too.
- Have you been paying attention
to the game design of that world, of those worlds?
- Yeah, and the thing people, I think,
with those kind of games, it is really,
or racing games, Forza, put up there.
I love Forza.
Play them all.
When you have to recreate something that's real
in the real world, say it's cars or it's sports games,
everybody knows how it should work.
That's a really difficult task
when people know how it should work.
Then you're gonna balance it for single player.
The multiplayer parts of it, they're very, very competitive.
In many respects, you're forced
to put out a new version every year.
I say forced in quotes 'cause they're,
you count them as big updates.
But it's a much more difficult development process
than I think people understand
and how hard those teams work.
I know a lot of people who do it,
and I think they just do.
I've enjoyed them all.
I buy Madden every year.
- Yeah, every single year.
Yeah, they do refresh it.
There's a feeling of freshness.
I don't know what that is.
- Yeah, look, there have been years
where it feels like less was done and more was done,
but I enjoy it every year.
- Yeah, yeah.
What does a perfectly productive day
in the life of Todd Howard look like?
Maybe not perfectly,
but just like a perfectly average productive day.
Are you a morning person, evening person?
Is it chaos?
Is it pretty regular schedule?
- I'm in a good flow right now.
I'm still doing a lot of stuff.
So there's things I'm executive producing
and then Starfield I'm directing.
So I sort of view that as that's an everyday thing.
Fortunately, I get to do a lot of stuff
from look at the TV show we're making
and this Indiana Jones game
that's being developed at Machine Game.
So we get to look at that.
But the best really day or where I feel it's fulfilling
is get to play some of a game,
the game we'll say Starfield,
get to play some of Starfield,
look at the problem set of what it is doing
and then get in a room with the other developers
that I work closely with
and we solve that problem together.
So that's the most rewarding thing
when you can say, okay, what do we want this to do?
What's the real player experience we want?
What are all the pieces in front of us?
Where you know the actual tangible pieces
as opposed to the beginning,
the pie in the sky part is always fun.
But it's like anything is possible, that's fun,
but it's not rewarding in the same way
'cause you haven't solved something.
Whereas these are the elements you have to play with.
How do we make this all work together?
And you come out of it at the end of the day
like now that feels great.
- So brainstorming about specific big picture,
both big picture and very specific detail
of a game that's not working,
something's not working,
you wanna fix it, that kind of stuff.
- 'Cause you feel like, okay,
you've made tangible progress
on the actual build of the game.
Where something you played in the beginning of the day
didn't feel great, you've figured out a solution
with a group of people, it's always with a group.
And then the next day you're like, yeah,
that worked out.
- Who's on the team?
Is it designers, engineers?
- All of the above.
- Artists, voice, over folks?
- So internal to the studio,
it's a lot of programming, a lot of art,
you have design, which breaks into some quest design,
writing, systems design,
who are doing all the treasure and the loot
and the skill systems.
And then level design is making the spaces like those
that you'll play through.
Production is a big part of it,
the producers who organize everything.
Can't remember if I mentioned art, a lot of artists.
QA staff as well, they're hugely valuable in saying,
hey, we broke your game in these magical ways,
what are you gonna do about it?
- Is the loot design team still hiring?
How do I apply?
§16Transcript · 2:20:38–2:29:56
That seems like the most fun job.
- Always.
- I mean, all of this seems like a super fun job.
- You know what, it's the best.
Then you have audio and it by far is the greatest job
you could possibly have.
Even if you're into technology, it's great.
If you're into storytelling and creativity and art,
it's great.
And it's really the gaming, the combination of that.
- And like I mentioned to you offline,
I think of video games, to me,
it's brought thousands of hours of happiness.
And so when you're designing the game,
whatever you're doing,
you have a part to play in a thing that's going to bring
like millions, hundreds of millions of hours
of happiness to people.
It's crazy, right?
- It is, and I'm gonna play you saying that back to our team
'cause people forget, your head's down,
you're trying to solve these problems,
and then you do forget how many people it touches.
- Like even tiny decisions.
You make tiny little things, you create.
- Yeah, it's weird.
I wish there was a way to like,
I would notice things in a video game,
and it's like, huh, okay.
It feels good, but you don't get that signal.
The creator doesn't get that signal.
I wish they did.
I guess you could get that signal by,
why is Lux stuck in this room,
like digging through the loot?
- We do now get a lot of good data
on what the players are doing.
- Enjoying and not that kind of--
- Well, we know where they've been and where they've died
and how long they play in certain sections,
and we can sort of tell, outside of people just telling us
on forums or calling or other things,
we can tell for some data where people are dropping off
or having a, we can tell if there's a key frustration point.
- Do you ever think about making people feel
like human feelings when they play?
Like designing, like make them feel fear or excitement,
anger, longing, loneliness, stuff.
- All of the above, yeah, of course.
The big one I like to say is the video games give you
is pride outside of other, you know,
if you watch movies or things like that,
like, yeah, but you never think like, look what I did.
And that feeling of like accomplishment and pride
in what you did or you overcame,
you talked about going back to a game that,
like, those are real feelings of like accomplishment
that I've felt in games that I've played.
And when we get to see a player feel that,
it's really, really special.
The other one is there is a, you know,
there is an escape or to be someone else
that's more powerful in our games
that you aren't in real life
that gives you a confidence or a perspective.
We're doing one next week,
we've done a number of make a wish visits,
kids who could wish for anything,
and they wanna come and I wanna see the next game
and meet the creators and see how you do it.
And they come with their family.
And it is like the greatest thing that we do.
And it reminds you of like how important it is.
And the other really awesome thing is
that you can see like the family change
by the end of the day.
Like they don't, they didn't even realize what it meant
to their child or what went into it.
And it's just, that to me is like,
been involved with that foundation for a number of years.
And it's been really good, you know,
reminder of how lucky we are.
- And in general for young people,
that sense of accomplishment is hard to find.
- Yeah, where they don't,
not everybody has it in the outlets that real life provides.
- Well, that's the thing.
I mean, the world is cruel to when you're young.
Nobody takes you seriously.
You don't get like,
that's why you, everybody always wants to grow up
and get old as quickly as possible.
It's the hardest, it's hard.
- And then video games allow you,
I mean, to build that sense of confidence,
a sense of pride in something.
That's why when people talk down to video games,
like it's a culture and so on,
it's not, it misses out
on that really deeply meaningful thing.
Especially with like single player,
there's some darker aspects to multiplayer
that people create communities and, you know,
it can go off the rails a bit,
but the actual experience of the game,
especially one where you stick with for a while,
that's really beautiful.
Do you have advice for those same young folks?
Given that your life is an interesting one,
given what kind of degree you got
and being a legendary game designer,
do you have advice for young folks in high school,
maybe college, how to have a career or a life
they can be proud of?
- Well, you have to find something that you love so much
that it's never gonna feel like a job.
And don't do it for money,
don't do it for, find something you love
and the rest of it will come.
It won't be a straight path.
And do not ever underestimate yourself.
It's gonna take hard work,
but the worst thing that young people do
is think they can't accomplish something
or they underestimate themselves.
And maybe those first few times through
where they do fail, if they love it enough,
they're gonna be resilient and push past that.
Anyone who's had success or gotten somewhere,
they've had those times, right?
And they've stayed resilient because they love it so much
that this is what they wanna do.
When you do it for other reasons,
just don't think it's gonna work out the same.
- Did you have low points in your life,
dark points where your mind went to a dark place,
whether it's struggling to get a job,
but that's the soft works,
or maybe with a red guard flop
where you kind of started to doubt yourself
or any of that?
- Well, I think what's weird looking back,
I was always so in love with doing this
that I didn't view them as dark per se.
Looking back, I was like, oh, that was,
I just wanted to, okay, let me find a way to make this work.
- Even when it's hard and it's failing
and all that kind of stuff, you just kind of like,
it's a problem before you to solve.
- Yeah, when I started at Bethesda,
I don't know, my father had moved nearby to the office.
I was moving and I slept on a sofa.
I didn't care.
I don't need a bedroom.
I'll sleep on the sofa and work there.
It's all I wanna do.
When the company almost went out of business,
it was, well, I hope it doesn't.
I feel somewhat responsible,
but hey, let's, okay, that's a learning lesson.
Let's go.
I think I was pretty resilient to it all.
Fallout 76, really bad launch.
And okay, what did we do wrong?
What can we learn?
Let's go at it.
Now it's a success.
But those kind of ups and downs
for the length of developments that we have,
people don't see them, but we have them all the time.
And so it's that sort of belief that with the team
having done it time and time again,
to know that now we're gonna make it
as good as we possibly can.
And whatever we're experiencing now,
when we solve it and we get it out,
and we see the millions of people who love it,
it's all worth it.
- And you're getting into new spaces.
First of all, new worlds with Starfield,
but also new, I saw the TV show you're working on.
On Fallout with Amazon.
What's that like?
Worlds that you created in the digital realm
becoming, going on the screen.
- Yeah, people asked, I can remember 10 years ago
after Fallout 3 was a hit,
movie producers coming and,
"Hey, we think this would make a great movie."
And taking a lot of meetings.
And I think most people would jump at that.
Like, sweet.
And I sort of paused and like, I don't know.
What is this gonna do?
I feel like they're gonna synthesize.
I met great people, like well-known creatives.
Like, it's gonna get synthesized into this two hour,
I don't know.
I'm not seeing the great thing here yet.
So, I think the advent of television
§17Transcript · 2:30:01–2:39:24
in terms of what it's become nowadays
with big budget TV series,
it kind of came up again and met with people.
And Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy who do Westworld.
And I always love the work he did
writing Interstellar and the Dark,
like movies I just love.
- Wait, Jonathan Nolan's involved with this?
- Yeah, he's the EP.
- That's epic.
- And he's directed the first--
- Westworld's incredible.
- Yeah. - Okay, this is awesome.
- And he's the EP, he's directed the first few episodes.
And when I connected with him, Jonah,
he was like, "Hey, you're the person I want to do this."
So, I met with people, kept saying like,
just let me see if he wants to do it.
And to my joy, he was like,
"Oh yeah, Fall 3 is one of my, yeah, sign me up."
It was like, "No, how do we get this done?"
And at that time, he was at HBO
and we were trying to figure out,
it was put a little pause on it.
And got to visit the sets, reading scripts
and things like that, it's all new to me.
But they're doing such an incredible job.
Like, I think if you like this world,
you are gonna be just blown away.
- Some of the tone. - I've never made
a TV show. - Right.
- Those are all the best, no one ever does it
wanting it to not be great,
but they've just done their attention to detail
and just obsessive with what's on the screen
and the storytelling and how it looks, the whole thing.
- Yeah, I think obsession is really a prerequisite
for greatness, what they did, HBO did with Chernobyl.
Like, the attention to detail. - Great series.
- It's just incredible. - And he's doing
The Last of Us now, that showrunner.
- If you really care and you really put a lot of effort
into the details, you can basically truly expect it.
- I was stunned.
I mean, I don't wanna spoil it, but when people see it,
I think they'll just be like, "Wow."
The other thing, we were approaching it,
it's very different where when it was,
people would say they wanna make a movie,
they wanted to tell the story of Fallout 3
or then tell the story of Fallout 4.
And for this, it was, hey, let's do something
that exists in the world of Fallout.
It's not retelling a game story.
It's basically an area of the map
and let's tell a story here that fits in the world
that we have built, doesn't break any of the rules,
can reference things in the games,
but isn't a retelling of the games
that exists in the same world, but is its own unique thing.
So it adds to it, while also people who don't,
haven't played the games, who can't experience
how crazy cool Fallout is, can watch the series.
- Are there some similarities or interesting differences
between the creation of a game and a TV show
that you notice from the story perspective?
- Well, for them, it's much more character-driven.
You can do all these things with the world
and stuff that we already have.
It's the main characters, who they are,
what their motivations are, that really is the engine.
Finding the right actors to do those, yeah.
- 'Cause there's no interaction.
You don't get to enter that world.
They have to do the work for you.
The NPCs are on the show.
Yeah, I can't wait to see how it turns out.
You also mentioned Indiana Jones.
That's a weird, that's a different one.
How do you work with a famous protagonist?
When the character's known, how do you work with that?
- Well, it's different.
Indiana Jones is different where the name,
it is the, it's Indiana Jones, not a world, it's him.
Right, you can talk about the world of Indiana Jones,
but at the end of the day, it's about this character.
And Raiders, still my favorite movie of all time.
No debate, it's the best movie ever.
- Best movie ever. - Ever.
- On a tangent, what do you love about it?
- Well, I saw it, obviously, when I was younger,
and I believed it.
I believed this happened.
And when they found the Ark, I literally,
I could not believe that they found it.
And I have found over my life,
it's still really watchable every time.
I enjoy it every single time.
Love the character, love the story.
The opening is the greatest movie opening ever.
And I just love everything, I love everything about it.
- What was the opening?
Is this when the-- - What?
It's the temple, and then the ball rolls
and tries to crush him.
- Oh, that's the opening. - That's the opening
of Raiders, yeah, he steals the idol.
- I think you're deeply offended.
- I was like, what's the opening of Raiders?
So I've always wanted to, it's one of those things,
like what's on your bucket list?
Like, oh, I wanna make an Indiana Jones game.
And I had pitched Lucas, I met some people there
and pitched them back in '09,
this Indiana Jones game concept.
And they wanted to publish, kind of the deal fell apart.
They wanted to publish it, and we were a publisher,
and so we didn't do it.
And I didn't really have the team to do it,
I just was gonna figure that out after we agreed to a deal.
And well, we made Skyrim, so it worked out.
And then, fast forward 10 years plus,
and Lucas, now part of Disney,
and they're doing a lot more of licensing
and working with people, and so I knew some folks there
and said, oh, I have this idea
that I pitched a long time ago.
And they loved it, and again,
the internal team that I had,
not only didn't have the time,
they probably weren't as good a fit as Machine Games,
who's done the Wolfenstein series,
who is the perfect fit for this game,
with storytelling and how they record it.
And they are, it's awesome,
they're just doing an incredible job with that game.
People are gonna be, if you like Indiana Jones,
it is a definite love letter to Indiana Jones
and everything with it.
- Can you say if it's more on the action adventure side,
like the actual experience of the game?
- I could go back, I would just say it is a mashup.
It is a unique, it isn't one thing intentionally.
So it does a lot of different things
that we've, myself and Jurek
and the folks at Machine Games have wanted to do in a game.
So it's a unique thing.
- Before I forget, who do I,
how many humans do I have to kill,
I mean dragons do I have to kill
to get myself somehow into Elder Scrolls VI?
So mod, if anyone wants to create mods of me,
and is that possible?
- Yeah, of course. - Yeah, it's possible.
While maintaining realism somehow.
You don't want a person in a suit and tie.
Doesn't make sense. - You put you in both,
put you in Fallout, you can wear that.
- Yeah, please put me, so Fallout,
there's also a culture of--
- You do a mod where you replace the mysterious stranger.
- There you go.
That's a to-do task. - Top mod, right there.
- And you will have my deep gratitude
and more, dear stranger, for doing so.
What's the programming language for mods?
Is it mostly-- - They use our internal
scripting language that's built into the tool.
- Okay, I'm almost afraid to explore that world,
'cause you will never, never, never turn back.
How long, you've created so many incredible games,
is there, what does the future hold?
Is there, so going through this process,
do you still have the energy, the passion, the drive--
- I do. - To keep creating?
- I cannot imagine doing anything else.
I'd like to do it as long as possible.
I will say, though, as I've done it,
soon it'll be 30 years at Bethesda,
I've learned that to appreciate the developments
a little bit more, that the time it takes,
I should prioritize all of us enjoying
the development process more than I did in the past.
It was like, just wanted to, the end,
that's all that mattered.
And the more you do it, you realize,
no, I'm spending the majority of my life
in Tamriel and the Wasteland and Fallout,
so the moments that we're all doing this together,
we need to enjoy it.
It's a lot of work finishing Starfield,
but hey, we gotta enjoy this.
This is incredible.
We don't get that many shots.
So the actual process of creating the struggles
along the way of stuff not working,
like you said, at this point,
with Starfield probably creating some of the glue
of how stuff feels and going back again and again and again
to try to make the beginning better,
§18Transcript · 2:39:25–2:44:45
all that kind of stuff.
- And I would say it for anybody's vocation,
whatever you're doing, whatever people do,
you're gonna have harder times.
And sometimes people, you gotta maybe recalibrate yourself
to like, okay, how can we make this more enjoyable
for all of us, no matter what you're doing, and rewarding.
- So if life is a video game, which it most likely is,
what do you think is the meaning of life?
From having created so many games,
or the character has to try to figure out,
I mean, there's bigger questions
than just solving the quest.
You're asking the big questions of why am I here?
I feel like that's good practice
for answering the same question for this video game we're in.
What do you think is the meaning of life, Todd Howard?
- That's a very...
I can say what motivates me.
- That's a good start.
- Having a curiosity.
The ability to not assume a lot
and be curious about the world around you.
It's more, it's not the same
as just wanting to learn everything,
but what makes other humans tick?
How do they feel, how do they love?
It might be cliche to say the meaning of life is to love.
- So that curiosity is just, is about--
- Noticing the world.
- Noticing the world around you.
Look, there's an anecdote someone says,
everybody has two lives,
and the second one starts when you realize there's only one.
And I think, I usually preach to my children
and everything else, like have a curiosity
to the world around you,
and you'll have the most fulfilling days.
- Are you able to be inside the worlds that you've created
and be able to notice them, like really enjoy them?
- It takes time, so Skyrim had its 10th anniversary,
so when I went back into it,
I think I got to see it for what it is.
My younger son got really into it
a few years back on the Switch.
That's what we noticed, people age up into it.
So one of the reasons it's so popular is,
you know, people come into,
they're now becoming teenagers,
and oh, okay, I'll finally play Skyrim.
And, you know, he got obsessed with it.
And he wasn't, usually I'd say, hey, check out my games,
and he'd be like, ah, shut up, Dad,
we're playing this other stuff.
And he got obsessed with Skyrim,
like we're having deep Elder Scrolls lore conversations
at dinner, and I saw it through his eyes,
and that was pretty special.
And then the mods he was downloading,
and the YouTubers he was following, talking about stuff.
So the people who like the Elder Scrolls people
don't realize how much of that I have watched with my son.
And then I kind of, when the 10th anniversary came out,
like, oh, I'm gonna check out a build,
I have to check out the build out,
but I hadn't played it in so long.
And it was like, it does, it has this flow,
where like, oh my God, I just played for four hours.
I need to turn it off.
- Yeah, I mean, there's something about enjoying
video games with the people you love, too,
or the water cooler discussion, and with kids.
So I actually, I would love to have kids,
and hopefully soon in the future.
So I guess the thing I need your advice on
is how do I time it in such a way
when they're old enough,
right at the age they're old enough,
like, I wanna know when to have them
so that when they're old enough,
that's exactly when Elder Scrolls VI comes out.
So I wanna, can you give me a hint when I should have kids?
All right, nevermind.
- You are a genius at how to ask that question.
- The number of times.
Yeah, you told the anecdote
that your son asked you the same question.
But of course, it's all for good fun.
Take as much time as is needed.
Skyrim is still an incredible game,
and it has an impact on millions of people,
as do all of your games.
Thank you for everything you've done for the world.
- Thank you.
- It's a huge honor that you would talk with me.
- This has been an honor.
And it has to be said,
look, I have a huge team of people I've worked with
for some of them for 20 years,
and it's really all of us together.
- Keep doing a great job.
Guys and gals, I can't wait to see what you create next.
It really, really does have an impact
on silly kids like me,
and millions of silly kids like me.
So I really appreciate everything.
- Thank you.
- Thanks, Todd.
Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Todd Howard.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some words from Tolkien.
So come snow after fire,
and even dragons have their end.
Thank you for listening,
and hope to see you next time.
(upbeat music)
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