Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield | Lex Fridman Podcast #342

- Blink once, if when Elder

Scrolls VI 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 VI, 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 Alex 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 the game?

- Actually, we do,

'cause 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 gonna

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 accidental, unintended doorway out.

And it's a happy bug.

- You could like "Truman Show,"

just get in the ocean and go until it's...

- [Lex] Just keep going and keep going...

- Right, right, right.

- But 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 gonna find a way.

So just don't try to pen 'em 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 usually 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 wanna make that character interesting

for themselves, right?

What's their story?

And there's some characters like

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, like your jacket,

do this, cool watch, 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 housecarls have

and it just kind of

lands when she says it.

- Why does it land? What do you...

And did you anticipate it would land?

- It'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 'em in stacks

with, it's a very small,

think of it as a small state

machine that just says, okay,

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,

jumping on tables or

stealing stuff or 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.

- And these state machines,

how big are these things?

Are these individual to

the individual characters?

That's just fascinating how

you design state machines.

Is it just a giant-

- I would think

of the AI as one big one.

Yeah.

- Oh.

- For sort of everybody.

- So there's an AI.

- [Todd] There's a manager

for all the people and one

of the things...

- A 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,

'cause 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 wanna

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 gonna shut down

so that they can really

make that as impactful.

We're, 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 are running all of those people

and understanding where they

wanna go and their cycles

and what they wanna 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.

That'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 the center of the world,

and the whole world rotates around you.

As it does in normal life. Like

when we walk around, right?

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,

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

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, when

you're gonna come in,

this is what you're gonna see,

the shops are in the front,

you're gonna do this.

It's just for us to make

it far more believable

and get some more emergent behavior that,

not just make the sort

of the verisimilitude

of what you're in for that

moment, but you buy it all,

always say like we gotta do

the little things so

that you buy the reality

of the virtual world you're in,

so if we wanna do something

crazy, when a dragon lands,

or a death claw 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 in the world.

- Okay.

But still you are 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,

our plan is to push that even more,

to think about how these things

exist in the world first...

Now, 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.

Think a little bit deeper

about the simulation

and what would the Mages

Guild be doing in a fantasy

world or the Fighters

Guild be doing in a fantasy

world versus just sign

up, do quests, get gold.

- And so that when you show up

to that Mages Guild, it's

a bustling guild full

of stuff going on.

- It's not just that it's bustling,

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, has a 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 is, there's a different kind

of gameplay experience when

you just wander outside

a city in Daggerfall,

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

wander outside the city,

we're gonna 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 we're,

with Daggerfall we're talking

about the Elder Scrolls

series that started,

sort of talking about the

big titles within the series.

Started with Arena in '94,

Daggerfall fall 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,

just changes the scale

in terms of one block

on the map equals this much space.

- There is something that, I mean,

I'm speaking to anecdotal experience,

but I just remember it

feeling wide open, Daggerfall.

- [Todd] It definitely was. Yes.

- In the way Arena didn't.

I don't remember...

Maybe because Arena, it

was so cool to have the,

just the role playing game aspect.

You're focused on the items

and the character development.

You...

- Daggerfall 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 gonna 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, that I agree

with you that Daggerfall feels like

there's more possibilities

when you're playing it.

- Were you able to like look

up the sky in Daggerfall?

- Yep.

- My memories...

- It's full 3D, yeah.

- Yeah, it's, 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 fakey, right?

It's all gonna be a flat plane.

Here comes things, and

then a dungeon entrance

is a 8 bit,

here comes a little flap

coming at the camera.

- So before we go to

the end, in 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.

When'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...

What'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

I think if you were a kid

growing up, then it was

such a newness to playing

things like that.

And 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 gonna 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.

- Yeah, of course.

- Apple II.

And I really enjoyed programming

in the Apple II then...

And that I think was the

right level of like complexity

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 what

I wanna 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?

Like 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?

like 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

& 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 wanna 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 Game.

- Like with graphics and everything?

- Yeah, it was, so it was usually...

Made a Miami Vice game, made

a Groo the Wanderer game,

made a Traveller game.

I made, and, 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,

and that, 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 was,

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?

- 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 have a 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 I,

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,

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.

- [Lex] Nice.

- 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, 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 and Mary

where I went to college,

and I was at this point committed,

like this is what I wanna do,

so I'm just gonna 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, what...

And I, well I'm in college,

I'm talking about when I'm outta school.

I'm like, well, okay,

well, contact us then.

And I would say I was,

I would contact them

every once in a while.

I did work for a small

software company right outta

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 the 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 released 10 games,

six of them sports games

and NCAA Basketball,

Hockey League Simulator.

- Hockey League Simulator. Yep.

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 'cause

they were struggling.

And 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.

- Absolutely.

I wanted to make like the

ultimate college football game.

Well it's always, like it's like music.

You probably listen to lots type of music.

Like you don't play every type...

- But I think of open worlds

as fundamentally different...

- [Todd] Well, sure.

- No, like source of

happiness, entertainment,

storytelling, world, gaming than Madden.

I mean it 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 I wanna 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 which 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 started there and...

- You loved.

- 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 discs.

That's probably one of what was a...

- We would burn 'em in the basement.

We had the disc replicators.

- Right. So Arena was

not released on floppy?

- It was, yeah. It's, I

believe it's six floppy discs.

- Six floppy discs.

- Maybe it was eight.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- But in those days, the number

of floppy discs 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 discs.

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 (laughs)

legally, as one does.

- [Todd] Alternate means?

- By alternate means on floppy discs.

And that was such an incredible,

as you probably have seen,

interacted with a large number of people,

it's a whole world.

It's a world that you

escaped to in the way,

like your favorite book

like Lord of the Rings, you,

it was just some, it was

unlike anything else.

It was incredible.

It's probably, I mean,

of course as people say

is the first game you play

is the most, is the one

that really sentimentally

means the most to you.

That I think the first

role playing game I played

and it was just, changed everything.

- Was Arena?

- Was Arena. Yeah.

I think Daggerfall is what I

really kinda really played.

Especially because, like you said,

the character development was really rich,

but just like that you can be,

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...

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 XnGine.

There were a bunch of guys

from Denmark actually.

There's like a big Danish demo scene

in those days in 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 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 like 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 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,

like it's a large open

world post-apocalyptic

landscape height map with

instance objects all over it.

And that is still a lot of

how we build our worlds.

- What's an instance object?

- It's, some games every

wall or building is kind

of 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, more...

- Allows you to build a bigger

world much faster and not

every single version of that building

is in its own unique

architecture that is gonna 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 where 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 it, there's a ton of work that goes

into it now because

just rendering this cup

to the perfect shine of

material and roughness

and how does the global

illumination off this wall gets...

It's a ton of work.

But you can pretty much

do what you want now,

if you wanna 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.

- 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...

Our, traditionally our games

we are 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 in

the 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 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, 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.

- 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.

We just like 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 doesn't have to have that

moment of, wow, this is,

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, just

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.

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 like the weather roll in.

I think that's just part of

being, being that character,

being that person in that space.

- Yeah, the,

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 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

and 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.

It's, 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 'cause 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 as 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 one like Excalibur

or your Syfy channel

series of the month kind of thing.

And so finding that,

what's gonna make it kinda

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 fly around

and shoot each other and 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, admittedly,

things can get even a little

bit crazier the longer

you're developing Fallout content.

- So just to linger on

this, so tone starts at,

or 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,

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.

- Is that art or science?

So like what, how do you

know when it feels welcoming

and everything fits in this ground?

- I don't know. I mean it's,

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,

there're 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?

- [Todd] That's a great question. The...

- It's a ridiculous question, but yeah,

I just love dragons, I wanna 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 wanna know.

- I think there's dragon wings.

They were hard to do.

Dragons are hard to do.

So when you start Skyrim, say, hey, look,

dragons are gonna 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'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 that says back to

you, like, hey, no, these are,

this is, have you heard this?

Someone saw a dragon.

- Well that's what Daggerfall,

isn't there mentions of

dragons or something?

'Cause I remember being

sure that there's dragons

in Daggerfall as I'm playing

it and I'm searching.

- I'm pretty sure, well...

- [Lex] 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

sort of, they're not...

And then 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 as...

I, again, you don't

just, you forget stuff.

But I remember getting,

I guess it was the first

in the Elder Scrolls series

to put it in into that world.

But it was like an adventure game.

You remind me of another

game I really love like

Prince of Persia.

- That was one of the inspirations,

Prince of Persia's one

of my favorite games.

- Like, okay, I apologize

if I'm forgetting,

but you can like jump in

buildings and stuff...

Like there's a jumping, there's a dynamic,

like airy nature,

like it's a like park type situation.

Yeah, it was an incredible game.

Why do you think, let me,

that's sort of a dark question.

Why do you think that game

was a flop? One of the few-

- Not a dark question. Yeah, it was.

Well, a lot of reasons.

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 part

of our development teams

broke up to do different things.

The games, Battlespire

and Redguard was my game,

and I wanted to do something

a little more Ultima

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've had a

much better home on say

PlayStation or Xbox, it

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.

And 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, you know?

And 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 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.

Company almost went out 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 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 like 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,

like 'cause 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?

Like do I even, do I know what it is to...

- [Todd] Of course, of course.

- Where do you get the,

how do you overcome that?

- I don't know.

I would say this honestly,

I enjoy it so much,

like I'm so heads down like

that becomes for better

or worse like my life.

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 like 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.

- [Lex] Right? So you were

sure even if it wasn't-

- Okay, so you're gonna 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 and it, like,

critically was a pretty good game.

Did not sell.

And the reason for that, again,

like we probably made this

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 you've mentioned,

just referencing this game,

on a 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 on a curious tangent,

what's involved with

programming an 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?

Because they're gonna 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.

- 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

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.

But 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 like 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

a, 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 was set 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 the designing

the experience for the

NPC because in part,

that experience is, defines

the experience as a player.

So how they interact with

their environment defines

how the player experiences

their environment.

Is there a 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 sign post 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 chat bots?

- 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 though.

You'd be using AI to design different

NPCs and then testing

if they're good enough,

if they're like a little too crazy,

you don't want like the super...

- Right.

But if we go back to it being reactive,

some of that bot stuff, it's

pretty, 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 like different flavors of it.

- So there's still

computational challenges,

like how do you actually make that happen?

- Right.

- Well what about, oh,

in terms of creating the

feeling of an NPC, oh,

what's the role of voice actors and...

- 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 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?

- [Todd] I do.

- Like, I mean 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.

- [Todd] A hundred percent.

- Isn't that part of the thing?

- Actually, like whenever I'm

playing a game and there is,

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,

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.

- 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 previous stuff,

you just work your way up.

They like you more, more,

more and now you're in a relationship.

And when you make 'em 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

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 outta 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?

- 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,

and it leads to romance,

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 come at 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.

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, those are,

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's

to them, it's like, no,

this is really, really special.

- Yeah, it's, I mean from

a game design perspective,

I wonder if you can honor

the time you spent together

with the game, because

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.

'Cause 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 ephemeral,

like it, this is not, this...

- [Todd] Did it happen?

- Yeah, it didn't really

happen. It was good.

It was like you went to Vegas,

you got drunk and stuff,

but like, 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

and 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

video game it will actually

tell you what is the first game you...

- But you know what, kids

today, they will have that.

- They will have that. (laughs) And see...

- But you could look

back and see, oh my god,

I put 1000 hours in Daggerfall.

- What is the first-

- And my last save was 1997.

- Last save... Man, I

don't know, Golden X maybe.

I'm trying to think

what was the first game

I've ever played.

No, it's probably

Commodore 64 games. Yeah.

The 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,

the explore space role playing game.

So take the kinda games

that we make and give

it a little bit of a different spin.

And the other games that I loved,

there was a pen and paper

RPG I loved, Traveller.

It was one of the first games

I made for the Apple II.

Didn't ever, I never finished it, right,

I'm just doing it on my own.

And I loved this game.

Starflight was one, Star

Control II 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.

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.

Now is the time to do that.

- And that's a brave move.

So Fallout's post-apocalyptic

on a single planet.

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 100 star systems

and 1000 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 one 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 'em, 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.

If you go back to tone like, well,

that's probably the wrong

tone and how can we say yes?

Like I wanna 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, I'll say,

reasonable as opposed to fractally goop.

- 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's just,

this 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.

Long answer, I dunno if

I answered your question.

- There's no, the questions

are stupid and the answers

are really, 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.

- I mean, you put it that way.

I don't know that was the goal, but...

- Just on a planet alone, I

just, that must be, I mean,

a deep embodiment of

what loneliness is like.

I mean it's the both the on the,

like when you hike alone, there's a,

there is 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?

It's 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.

You just hear, there's

some resources here.

I just feel like it'll hit

people a certain moment like

it does for me with Skyrim.

Like, holy shit, I'm here alone.

And the, and whatever cruel nature

that's out there doesn't

really care about me.

- 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, 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 1000

or 10,000 or a million

planets is not, it's just, you just press,

you just change the

number, 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?

- Maybe 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 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 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 like,

it just stops your game.

We found you'd be playing

the game and ran outta 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,

it's, a few 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,

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, can you...

- One of the companions

is the robot Vasco. Yeah.

- Okay.

So they have a name and a

personality and so on and...

- Vasco does, and then

there's a whole bunch of,

I call 'em generic robots.

So you like we use them for

utility, you know, okay,

people, 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 calling robots generic and bad...

- No, no, no.

The ones we use, the ones we use,

we made them more generic.

- Sorry, I'm very sensitive about this.

- 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 the tone thing.

So we, most of our robots

are there as utility robots

and there are some combat

ones as well as enemies.

- So it's the deeply human world.

- Very much. Yes.

- In terms of tone.

So have you talked to Elon about this,

about this game, is there-

- A little bit?

- How much of reality,

like the work of SpaceX is 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,

like just I was really in awe.

This giant machine that

looks for imperfections

on the surface of these giant

fuselages, just whenever,

and because we're in DC, go

to the Air 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,

like we are 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 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 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, someone, what is that?

And I call my, we had,

with 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.

- Is there some aspect

to that you can replicate

the majestic nature of

that in the 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 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 star ports when you're there.

So you'll be in a city and then

you hear, (imitates engine)

this and you hear the engine,

you look up and a ship

is taken off or coming...

Like there's nothing for you to do.

But it's, I think it's awesome.

- Yeah. Yeah.

So then that's all about creating

the soundscape to 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.

Like it's not all just

like jumping 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 kind of anticipate,

it kind of fuels people's

imagination what is possible.

- Maybe, 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 he way looks

as child's more like a

holographic almost AR VR kind

of thing or digital billboards or trying

to predict human behavior...

There's like, 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 dunno.

- Well I think it does

and it's interesting.

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 can become the possible.

And then that places that

idea in people's heads.

I mean if humans are ever to become

a multiplanetary 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

and 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, one of our,

hopefully it might

inspire some young people

who are headed in that

direction of like, oh,

I thought about getting

into space and space

exploration and being an engineer,

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 of decades,

likely a human being will

step foot on Mars, which are

the first steps towards us

becoming multiplanetary.

- And then 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 recent stuff I read

say they think in 20

years they will.

So it's actually quite

encouraging to think,

almost a dream of mine,

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 are, 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.

- Well I believe, if I'm

understanding it right,

that there's two ways they're

gonna look at planets,

when they can look at, 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.

So there's only certain

ones that are created

if you have a society there.

And that they can start

looking on these types of,

and these types of star

systems and 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 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 there's

consciousness or intelligence,

that's a special thing.

Preserve it, have it expand.

But if there's others out

there, I mean that, like,

that sparks that drive for exploration,

of reaching out into the

stars and meeting them.

Most of them probably

wanna kill us. (laughs)

So, 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.

- [Todd] Right.

- It will both protect us

and destroy all our enemies.

(laughs) This is 100% a

video game we're living in.

Okay, back to dragons.

So blink once if when Elder

Scrolls VI is coming out,

but are not going to tell me.

- Okay. I have a vague idea.

- Okay. Vague idea.

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 up.

Would it be 2025?

- That's a trick question.

- Or '26.

- I was asked that question in many ways,

but never like that.

- Yeah. I thought I would try to sneak it.

And I mean there is of

course no answer, because...

- I wish it was 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.

- Well look, it's part of who I am,

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 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.

But it, 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.

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 decades, two decades.

And that does change the way you think

about how you architect

it from the get go.

- What are some elements

that change the way...

Like how do you make a game

that's playable for 20 years?

- I know we're trying to

figure that out... (laughs)

- There is some elements,

I should pause on that.

Part of me, I'm of

course asking, jokingly,

I'm excited for it.

But I think Skyrim is

an amazing game still.

I really enjoy it still.

- Yeah.

And you know what the content, the,

even if think 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 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?

- Yep, absolutely.

So it starts with us, like

everything we're doing okay,

a modder, a content creator's

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

kludginess when you're putting

stuff together, when you

put it out for people,

we do clean a lot of it up,

then there's still a lot,

obviously a learning curve there.

But we have, look,

we have people been doing

it for 20 years with us.

- What's involved with modding?

I'm actually quite noob-ish at this.

And I'm almost afraid to ask,

'cause now that you

explain to me I'll, 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 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,

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...

- 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 is gonna do that.

That's almost like, it

takes 'em 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 the, 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,

doing the control.

But you're basically

simulating the human player.

To do that for Skyrim or for one,

some of the open world games...

That's literally, you have

to create AGI to be able

to play the, those open, well, maybe not.

Maybe you can create a super dumb,

like just a two-handed sword and just keep

swinging until everybody...

- There, 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 with Starfield.

- And them 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 like the first one

or two main quests.

Like it'll just play it.

That way we know, do we break anything?

'Cause you don't wanna

waste like QA's time,

like you guys broke it

again within five minutes.

So, yeah.

- So that's for like broken stuff?

- [Todd] Right.

- I wonder if you can

build a bot that estimates

the quality of the experience.

- Oh my gosh. Okay.

Can you do that?

- But just like the number,

like how boring or not boring,

the boring meter.

- How many times you die.

- How many times you die.

Death, is death boring or

exciting? That's a question.

I mean, I don't feel like

there's a balance to be

struck 'cause you always wanna be in fear

of death, against...

- 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

slash 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.

- [Todd] Dark Souls. Yeah.

- So I mean there that

that's, I mean the challenge,

that's part of it.

It's, well, I don't know,

actually Skyrim, I don't,

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 every,

on any difficulty at the

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.

Was that Creation Club thing.

It does, like, some hunger.

It does hot and cold.

It does some other systems

that make it, in our minds,

a more believable, and 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 find

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.

We say, okay, what's the

tone we're going for? Right?

Where's it set? So we

usually start with the world.

And then we are always overlapping.

So while we're making one game,

as we are getting in the

throes of it or wrapping it up,

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 too

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.

Like 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

figured out 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?

I'm just kidding. (laughs)

- Yep. And, in Tamriel and...

- Ah, dammit.

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,

with like the concept art and the music.

You can feel it?

- Music? 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 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 kind 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,

can run a year or 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 this schizophrenic

game experience that things

flow from one into another.

- In terms of story, like on that level?

- It's, no usually the story,

the designers have done a really good job.

It's more about game features and then

how they interact with the story or hey,

I went from this experience

to this experience

or picking flowers and

alchemy feels like a different

game than, 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 who 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 until

really that last year...

Before that, the game

flow was just, it's not,

it doesn't even exist

in the way that you see

it in the final game.

And that's what we're working

on a lot that last year.

- So at which point is

like the set of skills

of skill tree, the characteristics

of the roleplaying 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.

- Start in the beginning 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 'em.

Right?

So they do a lot of things to just let

themselves get killed.

They're not near as smart,

near as smart as we can make them.

'Cause it turns out that is not fun.

- Right?

So there's a balance between,

but there's a, that is,

I guess, a kind of AI, and it's a very

intimate interaction with

an AI, 'cause it's like

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 of it,

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 one's like, right,

I'll just wait my turn 'cause

we don't wanna overwhelm 'em.

But it feels, like 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...

- Yes, yes. I mean it's all of that.

- So it's like an iterative process

where you try different things,

you had different ideas?

- Yeah, there's a lot 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 like the

gamify, like that is fun?

- That goes back to the winning, you know.

- So winning is fun?

- Yes.

- Death is not?

- Yes, let the wookiee win.

- 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, like,

a lot of games don't

have that kind of thing.

So what role does that play in-

- I think we really

cracked it in a way I like

with Fallout 4 actually,

where when you're doing

Elder Scrolls, we have like

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 of some kind.

So breaking it down to their components.

So when you walk around a

world, like that, 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 works, 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 with

Fallout 4 and I should,

or should I just wait till Fallout 5?

And when does that come?

- I think you should play Fallout 4.

Love to hear your thoughts.

- All right.

- 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.

Yeah.

So Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 intentionally

a very different tone.

- Oh, really? Interesting.

- Yeah.

- 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 like 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.

It winks at the camera

sometimes, often actually.

And that when you're in that world,

it just has this, its

own unique flow and vibe,

outside of anything else

kind of in that genre.

- So the Elder Scrolls has,

or at least Skyrim has some humor.

- [Todd] 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.

It's the duck and cover,

to 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

the 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.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Yeah that was, look,

that, 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 the public company.

I don't remember.

I just remember we had to announce

it and we're thinking

there, well, you're gonna,

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 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,

is one of my favorite

projects that I've ever,

ever worked on.

And because it was so fresh

for us and we had a very clear,

like even before we had the rights,

like, this is the game we're gonna make,

this is the kind of thing we're gonna do.

And we had done Morrowind, 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 you?

- The world creation.

Like it was obviously a different look,

even though some of us,

very few of us had worked

on the Terminator things.

The VATS 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,

as much as we could,

scratch the same itch

when you play the original

game that had the same tone.

- Are there some favorite things

to you about that world that

just kind of connect you?

- 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 it,

I think it 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.

- That, and you feel like you

have a sense of your past.

- Right? And I need to find my father.

- We should, isn't it

possible to have that sense

with like the Elder

Scrolls, like a life story,

like childhood trauma and stuff,

back to the human condition.

- I mean you'd have to, like 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 you doing before this moment?

- Can you pick your traumas and stuff?

(both laughing)

That's a mod.

- [Todd] If you wanna make

a mod, yeah, you go for it.

- That and then also make

a mod for like a therapist.

- But a lot of, you know, is in your head.

So you're gonna do that, you're

gonna pick this background,

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 a,

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.

What, 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 like pique 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 you, what

game players want to is,

I'll play it, oh, 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 you get this common

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 over,

like that to me is a really,

really bad experience.

So...

- Also like life itself.

But yes, go ahead.

- (laughs) But like life

is, okay, so you can then...

- [Lex] 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, you know,

is 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.

It 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...

Do you, are you like thinking

of Elder Scrolls VI,

you're already thinking

about that kind of stuff?

- [Todd] Yep.

- So you think of early on, like you said,

the first few experiences in the game,

you're already thinking through them.

- Yep.

Yeah, we know what the

first few hours are like,

we know what the character

system is basically like.

And...

- So tonally, what's the difference

to you between Oblivion,

Skyrim, Morrowind,

and Oblivion, Skyrim and Elder Scrolls VI?

Like to me, I mean stuff blends together.

But Oblivion, that's when you

could make spells and stuff.

- 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, gets crazy,

Morrowind, you can

some, and then we start,

we started 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 could

make these recall stones

and you could teleport to different areas,

which you really need in that game.

It breaks so many quests.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And so as we, any quest we would then,

we would do this exercise

of designing a quest,

and then someone would say,

and then I recall away,

oh okay, the quest is broken.

It's like, 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?

Because 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 gotta do something, they

made an interesting choice.

But the best ones for

me are actually were 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 will like,

this sounds very basic,

it's gonna sound quite

cliche and silly, it's like,

go find me five daedra hearts or whatever,

like find me X of something

that's hard to get.

That's a very simple set...

You can give a simple

story set up for that.

And we're not telling the

player where to get those.

And they think, 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, oh, if they only

knew how much we spend on,

we have a clutter group, a

group of people who clutter,

like we, like...

- 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 kinda wanna 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.

So it's just, there's a momentum

to it, just pulls them in.

- 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, I don't play...

And you play other levels

where like, man, I just, yeah,

I, it was great, I went through

it, it was well balanced,

I knew where I was going and it's not,

you don't wanna ever be

maze-y, 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, it's not enough.

- Right.

Because the other thing

is, look, it creates,

people wanna pick everything up.

They wanna 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 need,

I'm basically an idiot if I

don't pick all the stuff up.

You probably felt this way.

- [Lex] Yeah, yeah. For sure.

- And like 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 like

rarer and rarer 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 'em, your epic, rare, legendary...

You look at games,

like so many games do

it and there are ones

that you just play and love

'cause they have it down.

Destiny, 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 have to,

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 and...

- Diablo and Skyrim have

this interesting quality

of being extremely popular,

and there's a lore around like rare items.

So it's a, it changes the

dynamic of like you could

afford to have really rare items.

- [Todd] Yes.

- And then somebody finds it

and that becomes like a thing.

I mean, as you release a game, there's a,

I mean 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,

like where we call 'em

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 aware of

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...

- Well, we did Fallout 76.

We have Elder Scrolls Online.

Not 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.

- It is? Okay.

So I should try it all.

- 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.

It's about to be 10 years

for that game as well.

And they, it's just great

community around that.

- Yeah, that's, I haven't

played that '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...

- On Diablo.

- Oh, Diablo?

- On the, yeah, well,

Fallout, I definitely recommend that one.

Fallout Shelter.

Completely different game.

Diablo Immortal is, I was

very, very impressed with that.

Had a lot of fun.

- On the mobile?

- Yep.

- 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 things

that you approach on mobile.

Now, I can give you sort

of the classic mobile

gaming thing and then what we do.

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 'em are free.

So the tutorial, 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,

typically 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

who play it for hours a day.

- So it's a, there is

a more, I don't know,

addicting element to the mobile?

'Cause I guess you can spend more time...

- If you look at, 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.

- (laughs) 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 the game,

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.

- [Todd] 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.

I don't understand the, this, 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...

- Costumes?

- Yeah, 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 America,

the western world disagrees with me.

So...

Even Batman, you have like

little ears, but that's fine.

They just, well, back

to Elder Scrolls and Starfield.

So one thing I didn't ask you about,

when you look at the

timeline of 5, 6, 7, 8 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?

- [Todd] Yeah. All the time.

- And when you set that deadline

early in that 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're gonna miss it.

It's arbitrary.

We really try to keep ourselves honest,

'cause it will let you

know where you're at.

Right.

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, 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,

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 the Fallout 4

at the time 'cause we can't,

weren't, hey, we really

shouldn't move the people

onto 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?

Are you trying to avoid

announcing anything?

Is there a temptation to announce it?

- Well, I've done it always. Right?

I've announced Starfield,

we're 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.

And...

- 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 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 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 it was, we should really,

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.

(laughs) 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 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, feel 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 there is a lot of pressure there.

There's a lot of responsibility

there to make sure

we deliver for everybody.

- Is there a chance that

Starfield is exclusive to Xbox?

- It is exclusive.

- It's officially already?

- Yep. Yes.

- So you're, (laughs) 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's 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 like the ability to focus.

So our ability to focus and

say, and have help from them,

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 play, I managed to

play very little Xbox.

- Yeah, sure.

I mean, look, there's the

obvious interface part,

between mouse and keyboard

and then a controller.

But when you're looking at hardware, PCs,

it's tough, right?

Because you're looking at, well,

what are their driver versions?

What kind of monitor do they have?

What is the actual refresh

rate of X, Y, and Z?

We're used to it.

But 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

an incredible machine.

And now-

- 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...

Did you get people that enjoy,

people that do both PC and

Xbox, that enjoy Xbox more?

Like that if they have

a choice, 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...

- [Lex] You can?

- Yeah. It 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. And so there's the Game Pass.

So I'm like learning about this.

So there's a Microsoft, so this can 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, like, for me,

like what's my physical mood?

Do I wanna lean back on a sofa?

- Exactly.

- Right?

My 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

on my PC at work all day.

Like, I play a lot of video games.

So when I get home and

I wanna play something,

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

will be what's the best

game of all time?

All right. Just gimme a second.

- Tetris.

- Tetris? All right.

Yeah, that's interesting.

- Have you read the book on Tetris?

- No.

- You should read it.

Particularly someone

who grew up in Russia.

- Yeah, that's a, 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.

Well, 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 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 answers,

there's ones that are like personal to me.

Ultima VII is probably.

- Yeah. Can you talk about Ultima?

Like you said that as an inspiration.

I never crossed that world.

- [Todd] Well...

- What kind of game is it?

- It's a role playing

game, circa 1992, '93, '94.

And it Ultima Online first

really visual online world

in that way.

But for me, that was a virtual

fantasy world, where I had,

you could break bread, you

could pick all this stuff up.

I mean anyone who's played

Ultima 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 bought the cardboard

boxes and the way

they were designed and Ultima VII is black

and Ultima VIII's the fiery gate

and the paintings on them...

And it just does...

- 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 take a look

at Elder Scrolls and

Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim.

We want those boxes to look

good next to each other.

Going back to the video games,

I always mention Tetris

because I think it's...

Obviously I love virtual worlds

and those kind of things,

but for the time and what an

interactive like video games,

sort of the simplest form,

and sort of think you

can put Tetris in front

of just about anybody

and they'll enjoy it,

and 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...

- [Todd] Some of them have. Yeah.

- And, but Tetris did it

a long, long time ago.

That you can really create

that immersive experience without.

- But for me, the Ultima, 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,

are 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 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 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 obviously

I 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, is it,

I just like asking you

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 III,

Grand Theft Auto III 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.

- 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.

Think they're really

phenomenally well made games.

Same with Red Dead.

I think Red Dead Redemption

1 could be my favorite story.

Like, highly recommend

finishing that game.

- So you like both the story,

you like the grittiness of that?

'Cause they have a bit

of the, like, I guess,

if you like the Fallout,

there's the humor, the...

I don't know what it is.

It's the lighthearted humor of it,

but also the brutality of

human nature is 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.

- They do.

- There's a very strong tone.

- There's a very strong tone.

The satire on the world

is just so well done.

The game plays great.

I think they've just

done a phenomenal job.

- Is there any others that pop to mind?

- Portal.

- Portal, yeah. That's

another weird creation.

- [Todd] I could just sit

here and list games forever.

- Well, I'm enjoying this.

- Hearthstone's a game I love.

I love all time, I like

sports, college football,

NCAA Football was my favorite.

It's like, I would say this

is a great role playing-

- Oh, you would actually

keep getting role... (laughs)

- It's a roleplaying 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

are like college football,

they'd graduate, so you

lose your players and then

they stop making this

series and I know the folks

at EA and they will

say, I have bugged them.

When is this? And they're doing it.

So it's finally coming back.

- Nice.

What would you say is the

greatest sports game of all time?

- Hmm...

Well it's NCAA Football,

you have to pick the year.

- NCAA, versus Madden?

- Oh yeah.

Yeah, but there's more teams,

you got 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 you

know, it's the, there's,

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 and...

- I like, look, FIFA's incredible.

I just, look, I'm a college football fan.

They give you that fantasy...

If you like European

football slash 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 like, or racing

games, Forza, put up there,

I love Forza.

Played 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.

Very, very competitive.

And in many respects you're forced to put

out a new version every year.

And I say forced in

quotes 'cause, you know,

they count them as big updates.

But it's a very,

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. So 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?

So, maybe not perfectly,

but just like a perfectly

average productive,

are you a morning person, evening person?

Is it chaos? Is it pretty regular?

- I'm in a good, I'm in

a good flow right now.

I'm still doing a lot of stuff.

So there's things I'm

like executive producing

and then Starfield I'm directing.

So I sort of view that as

that's an every day 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 MachineGames.

So we have 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?

- And you just, because

you feel like, okay,

you've made tangible

progress on the actual build

of the game, or something

you played in the beginning

of the day, didn't feel great,

you've figured out a solution

with a group of people.

Like it's always with a group.

And then the next day

you're like, yeah, that was,

that worked out.

- Who's on the team? Is

it designers, engineers...

- All of the above.

- Artists, voice over-

- 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 like 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.

I 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 design team still

hiring? How do I apply?

That seems like the most fun job.

- [Todd] (laughs) Always. Always.

- I mean at all of this

seems like a super fun job.

- It is.

You know what, it's the

best, then you have audio...

And it by far is the greatest job

you could possibly have.

So if you're into like

technology, it's great.

If you're into storytelling,

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 is, I mean,

to me has 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.

- And you know-

- It's crazy. Right?

- It is.

And I'm gonna play you

saying that back to our team.

'Cause, you know, 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.

Like 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 Lex stuck in this room?

Like digging through the loot...

- We do get,

we do now get a lot of good data

on what the players are doing.

- Enjoying and not, that kind of thing?

- 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-

- All of the above.

Yeah, of course.

The big one, I like to say,

is that video games give you

is pride, outside of other...

If you watch movies or

things like that. Like, yeah.

But you never think like, look what I did.

- [Lex] Yes.

- And that feeling of like

accomplishment and pride

in what you did, where 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,

there is an escape or to be someone else

that's more powerful in what,

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 reminder

of how lucky we are.

- And in general, for young people,

that sense of accomplishment

is hard to find.

- I mean-

- Yeah, 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

you 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 all this

as fast as possible.

- It's hard. 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.

- [Todd] Agreed.

- Especially with like single player,

there's some darker aspects to multiplayer

that people create

communities and it can go off

the rails a bit, but the

actual experience of the game,

especially one 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 up 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, it's been,

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,

I 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

at Bethesda Softworks

or maybe with Redguard flop or...

Where you kind of start to

doubt yourself or any of that?

- Well, I think, what's

weird looking back, I was so,

I was always so like in love with doing

this that I didn't view them

as like 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 Bethesda, I don't know,

my father had moved nearby to the office.

I was moving and I slept on

a sofa. Like I didn't care.

Like I don't need a bedroom, I'll just,

I'll sleep on the sofa and work there.

That's all I wanna do.

When the company almost

went outta 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, like really

bad launch, and okay,

what did we do wrong?

What can we learn? Let's go edit.

Now it's a success.

But those kind of ups

and downs for the length

of developments that we have,

people don't see 'em but

we have 'em 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, nah,

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.

- [Todd] Yep.

- 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,

the movie producers coming and hey,

we think this will make a great movie.

And taking a lot of meetings.

And I think, mostly 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 like synthesize,

and 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 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.

- Like Jonathan Nolan's

involved with this?

- Yeah, he's the EP and

he's directed the first-

- That's incredible.

- Yep. Okay.

- This is awesome.

- And he's the EP,

he's directed the first few episodes...

- [Lex] Ah, nice.

- And when I connected

with him, Jonah was like,

hey, you're my, you're the

person I want to do this.

So, and I met with people

kept saying like, can I just,

let me see if he wants to do it.

And it was to my joy,

he was like, oh yeah,

Fallout 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 sorta,

he was at HBO and it was, you know...

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 I, they're doing

such an incredible job.

Like, I think if you like this world,

you are gonna be just blown away.

So keep mind, I've never made a TV show.

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 they're 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.

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-

- I was stunned. They, I mean...

I don't wanna spoil it,

but when people see it,

I think it'll just be like, wow.

It's the...

The other thing we're

approaching it, is very

different where when it

was people would say,

wanna make a movie?

They wanted to tell the

story of Fallout 3 or then

tell the story of Fallout 4, and eh...

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 like,

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 like how crazy cool

Fallout is can watch the series and so...

- Are there some

similarities or interesting

differences between the

creation of a game and a TV

show that you noticed from

the sort of story perspective?

- Well, for them it's much

more character driven.

Like 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.

- [Lex] Right. There's no...

- Finding the right

actors to do those. Yeah.

- 'Cause you're not,

there's no interaction.

There's no, 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, like,

with a famous protagonist?

Like when the character's known,

how do you work with that?

- Well, it's different. It's different...

Like Indiana Jones is different

where like the name...

It is the, like 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. Love it.

- 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.

So, 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...

- I think you're deeply authentic.

- 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 had met some people

there and pitched them back in '09

this Indiana Jones game concept.

And they wanted to publish,

it's 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 MachineGames, 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.

It's, 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 a,

if it's more on the action

adventure like 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 Eric,

and the folks at MachineGames

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?

It's a mod, if anyone wants

to create mods of me...

And is that possible?

- Yeah.

- It's possible?

- [Todd] Of course.

- While maintaining realism somehow.

'Cause you don't want a

person in a suit and tie,

doesn't make sense.

- We could put you in

Fallout. You can wear that.

- Yeah, please, put me, so Fallout is,

there's also 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'll never,

never never turn back.

How long, you've created

so many incredible games...

Is there, what does the future hold?

Do you, is there, so sort of

going through this process,

do you still have the energy,

the passion, the drive,

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.

Was like, just wanted it to

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 of Fallout.

So the moments that we're

all doing this together,

we need to enjoy it.

Like it's a lot of work

finishing Starfield, but, hey,

we gotta enjoy this.

This is like incredible. We

don't get that many shots.

So...

- 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,

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, it's,

you have to 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 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 was 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, right?

- So that curiosity is just,

is about noticing the world?

- Noticing the world around you.

I mean, look, there's so much

to 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 like Skyrim

had its 10th anniversary.

It's 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 notice.

People age up into it, right?

So one of the reasons it's

so popular is as people

come into, they're now becoming

teenagers and oh, okay,

I'll finally play Skyrim.

And he got obsessed with it. Not...

And he wasn't usually, I'd say, "Hey,

check out my games," and

like, "Ah, shut up, Dad."

We don't, we're playing this other stuff.

And he got like obsessed

with Skyrim, like,

we're having like 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 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. (laughs)

- Yeah, I mean there's something about

enjoying 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 want to, can you gimme

hint, when I should have kids?

All right. Never mind.

- You're 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.

It's, Skyrim is still an incredible game.

It has an impact on millions of people,

as do all of your games.

It's, thank you for everything

you've done for the world.

- [Todd] 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

some words from Tolkien.

"So comes snow after fire, and

even dragons have their end."

Thank you for listening and

hope to see you next time.