YouSaid · the spoken record

Todd Howard

lines on the record: 202
first: 2022-11-29
most recent: 2022-11-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, we always 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 slash confusion or boredom. You got to put the player right in the middle of that.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? Where's the memory growth? 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, 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, do we break anything? Because you don't want to waste QA's time like you guys broke it again within five minutes. So yeah”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, there's some VOT stuff out there that does it. We have some very, very dumb bots that we use to run through the world to test it. We'll deploy on a whole bunch of servers just to, you know, we do it every day. We run through every space. We're doing it Starfield.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, really pushing it, it does take us, which is why you see. We have a new game come along, the palette that they have is there's so many more things they can do.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people do visual things because it's the easiest thing to do first, or they'll build a new space. There's some great things with like, I love the Khajit follower mod for Skyrim. It's awesome. There have been quest lines. Those things just take a really, really long time. And so someone is going to do that. That's almost like it takes them a long time. It's more than a hobby. We're always looking at ways that we can make it like, hey, they can turn a career into it because it's just awesome.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have an editor you can download on Steam, the creation kit for our games, and then it loads up the world, 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 of the game. And then you can run your game with that. It's on console now that the mods, not the editing. And it's just been incredible. Our community there has been amazing what they do with the games.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 because if you're like a developer in house, you can deal with some cludiness 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 we have, look, we have people been doing it for 20 years with us.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you know what? The content, even if I think if you step away from it for a while, then play would all put, say, the vanilla version without mods. If you go and haven't played 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 going to keep supporting. We've hired a large number of modders that are now professionals. We want to support the people who are doing on their own so they can be professionals on their own.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are going to play the next Elder Scrolls game for decade, two decades. And that does change the way you think about how you architect it from the get-go.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, it's part of who I've spent more time there than anything else in my life, probably, right? So it's deeply love it. We all do. It's a part of us. And You know, 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 That was a meeting yesterday. It was like I just want to play all this right. But we're going to 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”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish it was soon. We want them 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 definitively. Other life out there.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe if I'm understanding it right, that there's two ways they're going to look at planets when they can look at, 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 star systems and these planets. But it takes a lot of time because you have to book time on that telescope. You have to like look at that planet over a long period of time. In theory, given enough time, given the amount of space out there. Would find one.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 is quite fascinating. And recent stuff I read say they think in 20 years they will. So it's actually quite encouraging to think. I almost spent a dream of mine, like in our lifetimes that we discover life on another planet”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know if I'd make the leap now. That's all what we're doing might now. Maybe, you know. Of our, you know, hopefully it might inspire some young people who are headed in that direction 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, you know, it really sparked that interest in me. So I'm going to go take that as a field. And maybe that's the person who goes and does some of these things.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interfaces and then he looks at his 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seeing it and like, oh, that's real. That's a ship that. 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Then you realize I could get in my ship blast off and land there and build myself a home. I think that's pretty cool. 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 engine, you look up and the ship is taken off or coming.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“gravitational pole. And like so the engineering that has gone into that R space program, what he's doing now, I just marvel it. I don't understand, right? I'm not at that level, but I marvel at the kind of human ingenuity and scale. I was The Delaware coast last month. When I was outside, 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, 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. 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?”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 meets NASA. It's like the most amazing. And here we're building the next gen. Like, see the dragon stuff before it was, you know, other people saw it. I was really Awe. You know, just giant machine that looks for imperfections on the surface of these giant, you know, fusion. We're in DC. Go to the Aeron 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 that Elon really impresses we're reaching the edge of physics on a lot of this stuff where how hard it is to leave orbit.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 we most of our robots are there as utility robots, and there are some combat ones as well as enemies.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vosco does, and then there's a whole bunch of, I call them generic robots. You like we use them for utility, you know, okay people we actually dialed them back because if you think about, well, you know a lot about this more than me in terms of”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the idea was well, it's very, you know, games do that. If you had like 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 like 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, you know, in your spacesuit. Obviously, there are a lot of different spacesuits and buffs for, you know, the gases or the toxicity or the temperature on various planets.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More of that goes back to a tone thing, right? When you actually play the game, because 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 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 and you don't know who's going to come. Turns out that's not like, 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, you know, it's a fun killer.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It'll be like when you look at a map in a game, it says this is the area for low level players. This is level one. Oh, gotta got it. Yeah, yeah. So we do that on a system basis.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Daggerfall 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 is 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 100-ish systems we have.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I think it gives them the ability to say. Want to 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. Long answer. I don't know if I answered your question.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of problem to solve in terms of what's fun about landing on a planet where there's potentially nothing because there's a lot of planets and moons, if you kind of write in reality that, well, there's nothing on them 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 because that's how we like to do things. So you can watch whatever that gas giant or moon, it will rotate and go and”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've probably seen a lot of 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-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. We had pretty successful results with that. So we thought, yeah, we could do this. And so it was a big design.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you mentioned Daggerfall. We go back to some of that. Well, the first one we did it was how are we going to 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 kind of craft and you would have a very limited set of those. 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 can, you know, how can we have a system to generate these planets and make them look, I'll say, reasonable as opposed to fractally goop.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, you know, the other games that I love, there was a pen and paper RPG I love 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. I love this game. Starflight was one. Star Control 2 was a game that I loved. Sundog 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's weird. Now that we're in the age where you have achievements and you can look at your library and see your hours in games It's almost like a scrapbook now. I wish one of my wishes was like, I wish I had that achievement list for everything, like back to the late 70s.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 proud of what I accomplished. And we want people to have that in our games. And the fact that they've had those experiences and we hear from them and how important it is to them, it's like, This is really, really special.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to 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, and it leads to romance, myself and others, and I find a lot of players, those moments are really, really impactful. And special them because they did put in the time Another thing that I always commit it with, which is, I think people 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. That's not like you're not getting a lot out of that. You haven't really experienced it in the way that you can because”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when you make him upset, you drift out of like it never happened. You drift out of it, whereas we wanted one where, okay, we can be in a relationship. 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 is actually working. We want you to do you're going to be someone else now. Sorry, that got cut.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if we go back to it being reactive, some of that bot stuff, you know, it's pretty 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 like different flavors of it.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 applications.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, we're always iterating on it. And again, as we look in the future. 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to 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, because what you don't want, we actually had this problem started in Oblivion, I believe, which 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. Don't take those, they take the ones that are dropped. By other NPCs or the player.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 like very unexpected. You can drop a crazy weapon be in a fight in an NPC runs over, picks it up, and uses it on you. It's not something you would expect. But I love that stuff”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what are the things there that are meant to be interact 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, blah. You then have the AI, which loops in the stuff we talked about earlier in terms of processing everybody. Combat systems, which is a lot of what people end up doing combat systems on top of that AI, how do they react to those types of things? And then”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so you have the rendering of like, okay, this is how I'm going to render the data that I have. A lot of people confuse engines with rendering. I mean, they're combined, obviously, but there's the data you're going to 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 going to 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. Then obviously have the physics and the interactivity. What are the things that are there just to be drawn?”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 want to build systems because they're going to play the game for a very long time 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source