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

“So, if you're going to debate, like, do I like that game? It's about finding an auction. Okay, so I love Regard. And the people who play it won the bunch of awards and critically was a pretty good game. Did not sell. And the reason for that, again, like we probably made the wrong type of game and we missed a technology window. We also thought it was very conservative. We're going to do this. So my main takeaway was I'm not going to be conservative again. I'm going to swing for the fences. And we've had, you know, 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I would say this honestly. I enjoy it so much. You know, like I'm so heads down, like that becomes for better or worse, like my life. And it's just something that I want to play so much, it becomes like there's a little bit you get a little obsessed with it.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's when it got reformed with Xenomax media. And Robert Altman came in and we were starting more when we had just sort of started. And it was sort of that whole experience that made you sort of realize someone says, okay, you're going to get another shot And that's where you're like, okay, we're going to 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 like callbacks to how we built the world in Redguard. More wind is a large scale handcrafted. But if you were to put it pixel per pixel with Daggerfall, you wouldn't even see Morrowind, like this Daggerfall is so big. But the impact of playing it, I think, is in many ways equal, but different.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“3D effects cards had just come out, and so okay, we can do, and it was the last, I think it's one of the last like DOS games in a Windows world. So I think it missed kind of a technology window as well as ultimately not what people wanted from us. 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 a really bad shape and I felt really like personally responsible like 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 a company almost went out of business”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I wanted to do something a little more ultimate feeling handcrafted world. I really like things that blend up genres. So 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. And really see what we could do with the engine. But it's very much, I think, plays like it would have had a much better home on, say, PlayStation or Xbox. Though this predates Xbox, right, where it's a much more like constantly Tomb Raider had come out. So you see those influences of Tomb Raider on that game.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A dark question. Was well, a lot of reasons game game that I love and really got us going on a handcrafted world. So we're coming off a Daggerfall. Morrowind is sort of in design. And then, you know, part of our development teams broke up to do different things. Redguard was my game.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's dragon lings and daggerfall to my memory. Look, I guess someone will probably correct me actually, there is a dragon here, but I'm pretty sure there's sort of they're not. And then game I did Red Guard, which we bring back, it takes place beforehand. So we have a dragon there in that game, and that was unique to that at the time.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's dragon lings. They were hard to do. Dragons are hard to do. So when you start Skyrim, say, hey, look, you know, 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? Or what would they, and ours are less, I believe they are 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 role in Skyrim and that the people in the world are reacting to the dragons appearing. And that's somewhat, you know, mirrors. You want something that mirrors the player experience as well, it says back to you, like, hey, no, this is, have you heard this? Someone's all dragon.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, 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's where we get into some more fantastical things, it intentionally starts a little more grounded. You know, there's a very classic medieval-looking town that you come into be looked just beyond it. There are mushroom trees and giant insects and things like that”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their technology level, like 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we sort of take the same approach with Fallout, where admittedly things can get omittedly, things can get even a little bit crazier the longer you're developing Fallout content.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Athurian like Excalibur or your sci-fi channel. You know, series of the month kind of thing. And so finding that what's going to make it kind of unique, and usually Eileen 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, it's a science fiction game. There are laser guns and spaceships that fly around shoot each other and 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The soundscape is really, really important in the sky. We spent 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Like, 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a lot of graphics, it's a lot of mood. We 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 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Compared to what it used to be, that has increased. So we do use, like 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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... You know, are traditionally our games are, you know, we okay with 30 frames a second as long as it looks really good and the simulations running and all of those things. So we'll sacrifice some of that fidelity for the player experience in this kind of things that I do. But from like a manpower standpoint, the graphics programmers work on graphics, the artists work on art, and we have a 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 gets 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 couldn't do what you want, if that makes sense.”
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? 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 where like that might age at that time where every year somebody was coming up with some new method or some new game system.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You build a bigger world much faster and not, you know, not every single version of that building isn't its own unique architecture that is going to take up memory and processing speed, et cetera, et cetera.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's some games Wall or building is kind of a 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so Daggerfall was a bit more 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. 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 like this limbo legally. So there was no one to tell us what to like, no, you can't do that. So we would pick apart the movies and how does he mention the gunny once 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. Like it's a large, open world post.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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. Maybe there's 20 people on development. And we were doing both Daggerfall and the new Terminator.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was In those days, the number of floppy disks was very, very important to what Money we're making. So, you know, if you want to do a big, huge game, like, well, that's just too many discs. So the CD-ROM became this. This jumping off point for the whole industry where, oh, it's unlimited data”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 I 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 Bethesda was NCA basketball, rode to the Final Four. So that was kind of an external project was 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. Like, I love that. And they're doing sports. Like this, I have to work here. So.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted to make 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. You don't play every type.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there 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 because they were struggling. And when I started Bethesda, I remember the owner had John Madden's Oakland Raiders playbook. His office, like, oh, can I see that? And I love sports, right? So I still play Madden to this day. I love it.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I had gotten Wayne Gretzky hockey three. Christmas for 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 McMary 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 door was 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. Like, okay, we'll 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? And as I got older and was really going through college and I Even the computer classes then weren't where I wanted them to be, so I'm still kind of doing my own stuff And I ended up getting a business degree and then interviewing for some jobs like finance jobs. 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. How do you make this thing dance?”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it was usually made in Miami Vice game, made a Grew 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a way of experiencing things that I couldn't myself. So, you know, 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 loved 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I really enjoyed programming on the Apple II then. And that, I think, was the right level of complexity, you know, at that age where you could kind of, you were always learning, but you could still understand a lot of the problem set for like, this is when I 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Apple II.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can walk outside the cities. You can do that in arena too, but it looks more faky, right? It's all going to be a flat plain. Here comes things, and then a dungeon entrance is a, you know, eight bit. Here comes a little flat coming at the camera.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dackerfall has a lot more depth, particularly in the character system. That's what it introduces, all of the skills and those kind 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 Domstyle engine, I agree with you that Daggerfall feels like there's more possibilities when you're playing it.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Ilik Bay area. ARNA does it all. It just changes the scale in terms of one block on the map equals this much space.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then follow a quest line and go through 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 and if you want her 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 is a different kind of gameplay experience when you just wander outside a city in Dagrafall.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just that it's bustlings that they feel rooted in it. They don't feel like a storefront for come here, do quests, get experience.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 Mages Guild be doing in a fantasy world or the fighter's guild be doing in a fantasy world versus just sign up, do quests, geckold.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't prioritize the stuff you can't see, so it's more like an amusement park. If you study the design, or 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 when a dragon lands or a death law comes out of the wasteland or those kind of things that you, it has the impact to you as the viewer that it would to the people.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that makes what we do particularly unique. 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 until 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's going to shut down so that they can really make that as impactful”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. We tend to write them in stacks with, you know, it's a very small, think of it as a small state machine that just says, okay. 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? Know sneaking in in the middle of the night or those kind of things, the more that we can do, the more reactive and interesting the characters appear.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 There's some characters like that that the player definitely cares about. 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, 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.”
2022-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source