Todd Howard is a legendary video game designer at Bethesda Game Studios. He led the development of the Elder Scrolls series and the Fallout series, and an upcoming game Starfield. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Bethesda: https://bethesda.net
Bethesda Game Studios: https://bethesdagamestudios.com
Creation Club: https://creationclub.bethesda.net

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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:55 - Simulation
2:51 - NPCs
11:42 - Daggerfall and Arena
19:55 - Bethesda
28:19 - Video game graphics
34:38 - The essence of a video game
39:27 - Redguard
44:27 - Creating open worlds
52:06 - Superintelligent NPCs
57:00 - Starfield
1:16:42 - The Elder Scrolls 6
1:36:03 - Fallout
1:43:11 - Character creation
1:48:13 - Quests & items
2:01:58 - Xbox
2:07:24 - Greatest game of all time
2:17:40 - Day in the life
2:25:34 - Advice for young people
2:29:02 - Fallout TV show
2:33:34 - Indiana Jones game
2:39:46 - Meaning of life

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Blink once if you know when Elder Scrolls VI is coming out, but are not going to tell me.

The following is a conversation with Todd Howard, 1 of the greatest video game designers of all time.

He has led the development of the Fallout series and the Elder Scrolls series, including Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and the future Elder Scrolls 6, and a totally new world in an upcoming game called Starfield.

Many of these have won Game of the Year awards and have been some of the most celebrated and impactful games ever made.

To me, Skyrim is quite possibly the greatest game ever.

To support it, please check out our sponsors

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 1 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?

Because in the kind of games that we make, we want it to be as open as possible.

So when you start a game, you're always testing it.

Like, hey, what are the rules of this world?

We try to do games where we say yes as much as possible.

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 a accidental, unintended doorway out.

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.

Usually we leave this developer test cell area in the game that we don't anticipate anyone will find and they ultimately find 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?

A lot of times when you write characters for movies or things like that, you wanna make that character interesting for themselves, right?

And there's some characters like that that the player definitely cares about, but the best characters are the ones that react to you.

So you'll find a lot of people love our guards, and the guards are written almost purely to be reactive.

And so that, hey, you're the man as you walk by.

That makes them interesting, or the way they react to something that you do.

Lydia in Skyrim, who everybody loves, I'm sworn to carry your burdens, that's a generic line that all of the House Carls have.

And it just kind of lands when she says it.

What do you, and did you anticipate it would land?

There's a slight snarkiness in that particular read of it, and you're asking her to do something, and she's reacting to you.

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?

We tend to write them in stacks with, you know, it's a very small, think of it as a small state machine that just says, okay, this is what's happening.

Here's a random list of things I could say to that.

And then some of that plays out in ways you don't anticipate.

But we look at the things, what are the players doing that we could have the characters respond to that they don't expect?

You know, jumping on tables or stealing stuff or sneaking in in the middle of the night, or those kind of things.

The more 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.

1 of the things that makes what we do particularly unique is, and this is a trade off for what people are seeing, because a lot of it's not on the screen, but we're using cycles to run this, which is we're thinking about everybody in the whole world all the time.

The ones that are further away at a much less tick rate, they go into low.

But we know if they want to walk across the world.

And we're running every quest at the same time.

Whereas in other open world games, you start an activity, the rest of the world's going to shut down so that they can really make that as impactful.

I really prefer that the rest of it's going on.

It's more of a simulation that we're building.

So when those things collide, that's where it gets the most interesting.

And so we're running all of those people and understanding where they want to go and their cycles and what they want to do.

And the ones that are closer to you, we just update a lot more.

It's something that people had, they were wondering about to what degree it's possible to run the world without you.

So there is a feeling to role-playing games that you're the central, you're at the center of the world and the whole world rotates around you, as it does in normal life.

Like when we walk around, there's a, when you forget yourself, you start to take yourself very seriously.

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 the design, our level designers did this, how do they build Disney World in these places?

So it is fairly, you know, when you're going to come in, this is what you're going to see, the shops are in the front, you're going to do this.

It's just for us to make it far more believable and get some more emergent behavior that not just make that sort of the verisimilitude of what you're in for that moment, but you buy it all.

I always say like, you know, we gotta do the little things so that you buy the reality of the virtual world you're in so we wanna do something crazy, you know, when a dragon lands or a death law comes out of the wasteland or those kind of things that you, it has the impact to you as the viewer that it would to the people in the world.

Okay, but still you're simulating stuff that's close to you.

And so that creates some interesting dynamics then.

And the stuff that we're looking at in the future, you know, our plan is to push that even more.

To think about how these things exist in the world first.

And we do some of this, but even more so in the future, to say how do these things exist, take like a faction in the world?

What is their role in the world, as opposed to just their role is for the player to join it, go through a bunch of quests and become the head of the faction?

You know, think a little bit deeper about the simulation and what would the 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 mage's guild, it's a bustling guild full of stuff going on.

It's not just that it's bustling, it's that they feel rooted in it.

They don't feel like a storefront for, come here, do quests, get experience.

Is that 1 of the essential components of randomly generated worlds?

So when I think back to Daggerfall, as gigantic world, when I first played it, I thought like, I mean, you're just struck by the immensity

When you're young and you look into your future, it's wide open, you can do anything.

And Daggerfall's interesting coming off Arena, where Arena does the same thing, but Daggerfall in many ways is bigger, despite focusing on an area, because of how the density of, okay, this is how much physical game space we'll do for these villages and towns.

And it does feel endless, even though you're looking at a map that has constraints.

And Daggerfall actually was a touchstone for us going into Starfield for how we do the planets, because there's a different kind of gameplay experience when you just wander outside a city in Daggerfall than 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 going to be generating things, And you kind of get used to that game flow, different than we've done before, and fun in a different kind of way.

So just for people who don't know, and how dare you for not knowing.

But with Daggerfall, we're talking about the Elder Scrolls series that started, so we're talking about the big titles within the series, started with Arena in 94, Daggerfall in 96.

I didn't look up the years before this, this is depressing or awesome.

So all of these games brought hundreds, probably for some of them thousands of hours of joy for me.

So Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim.

So I don't remember Arena being that open world.

It just doesn't have all the number of villages and places that Daggerfall has, while Daggerfall focuses on the Iliac Bay area, Arena does it all.

It just changes the scale in terms of, you know, 1 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.

I don't remember, maybe because Arena, it was so cool to have just the role-playing game aspect.

You're focused on the items and the character development.

Daggerfall has a lot more depth, particularly in the character system.

That's what it introduces, all of the skills and those kind of things.

Arena, it's actually, it's a game I love.

If you look at the first 1 where it's just an XP-based system, do this, get XP, level up.

Daggerfall digs deep into who's your character, how you're going to develop it, what are your skills, There's advantages, there's disadvantages.

And the environment going full 3D from Arena, which is actually like a 2 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 look up to the sky in Daggerfall?

It's all gonna be a flat plane, here comes things, and then a dungeon entrance is a, you know, 8 bit, here comes a little flat coming at the camera.

So before we go to the end, and the middle, so from Starfield to Fallout and the Elder Scrolls series, Let's go to the very beginning.

You know what, let's even go before that.

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, you know, Space Invaders at the Pizza Place and then Pac-Man really...

It's interesting about video games and what Pac-Man did for video games, where it popularized them in a way that was just insane at the time.

Had a song, had a cartoon, had all of the things.

So it was always part of, you know, I think if you were a kid growing up then, it was such a newness to playing things like that.

I remember being in fifth grade when the TRS-80 was brought into the classroom and there was a Star Trek game and I was enamored with it and they were gonna start teaching some rudimentary programming like okay would you like to know how this is made?

It's 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

And I really enjoyed programming on the Apple II then.

And that, I think, was the right level of complexity at that age where you 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.

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

What was to you involved in making games?

Was it from a graphics perspective, like what shows up on screen?

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, you know, if you're playing Dungeons and Dragons at the time too, where you really feel, even pen and paper, these are like, they feel somewhat in quotes real to you as you're playing them.

You're very invested in your character and what you're doing.

And then I love the games, the Wizardry and Ultima, that were able to bring that to a computer so I could, you know, do it on my own time was very, very real to me.

I'd sit in my bedroom and then go to bed and think about it and then, oh no, I have to go to school, I want to come home and figure out how to how to do this problem in the game.

And so whatever I was creating was something that I was excited about at the time.

Yeah, so it was usually, you know, made a Miami Vice game, made a Gru the Wanderer game, made a Traveler game.

But every time I was doing it, I wanted to figure out a new method on the Apple II of pulling it off graphically.

Whether that was editing character sets to get graphics in different formats, or how can I enable the secret double high res mode it had, or just things like that where it became kind of this limitless, what can I make this do?

And I had some friends who were doing the same thing, and then you get into who can impress each other.

And I was kind of middle of the pack, I would say.

But again, this was the time where they're bringing computers into the school and the apples come into the school and the teachers are learning it because they have to teach the students.

But then I would say I was part of a group of students that were like way past that.

And it was very much of a self-taught, you know, how do you make this thing dance?

So at that time, a lot of people consider you 1 of, if not the greatest game designer, creator of all time.

Did you ever sense that this would be your life and you would also be creating the greatest games ever?

No, I don't think anybody, but I was very much like that was my dream at that age.

And as I got older, I was really going through college.

Even the computer classes then weren't where I wanted them to be, so I was still kind of doing my own stuff.

And I ended up getting a business degree and then interviewing for some jobs, like finance jobs.

So, well, I guess I should do this to make money, and I can keep doing this on the side.

And I remember I actually got to like the final level of like this corporate finance job at Circuit City.

I was going to school close to there, and so.

So, what's the origin story of you joining Bethesda Softworks at the time?

So, I had gotten Wayne Gretzky Hockey 3 for Christmas from my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife.

I was in college And I noticed that it was, you know, in Rockville, Maryland, and oh, that's on my way home over Christmas break back to William & Mary where I went to college.

And I was at this point committed, like this is what I 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 door is Martin Luther King Day

and someone came out and met me and said well maybe what and I said well I'm in college I'm talking about when I'm out of school.

And I will say I was, I was, I would contact them every once in a while.

I did work for a small software company right out of school, down in that area of Williamsburg and still would contact Bethesda Arena had just come out.

So then we're in 94, Arena had just come out, and I loved it.

So I was into sports games, I like the hockey stuff.

They were doing a basketball, they did a basketball game.

Yeah, I'm just looking at, they did a lot of, they did like 6 sports games, 6.

But that's the, there were at least 10 games.

NCAA basketball, Hockey League Simulator.

So it was really like sports gridiron, which is like the first kind of physics-based football game at the time.

And there's a famous story with Electronic Arts trying to do Madden and then hiring Bethesda before my time to make Madden, because they were struggling.

When I started at Bethesda, I remember the owner had John Madden's Oakland Raiders playbook in his office.

So I still play Madden to this day, I love it.

I wanted to make like the ultimate college football game.

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

You probably listen to lots of type of music.

But I think of open worlds as fundamentally different.

No like source of happiness, entertainments, storytelling, world, gaming than Madden.

Just like when you might watch a movie, you might be in the mood for Lord of the Rings 1 day, and then you want some other, I don't know, competitive show or game show or something like that.

You watch football on TV, but then I want to watch, get really into Game of Thrones.

So I think all those things have validity.

And actually 1 of the first things I worked on when I started at Bethesda was NCAA basketball, Road to the Final 4

So that was kind of an external project, was came in like, hey, you know sports, get this game done, and then went on to, but they were doing everything I loved.

It was like, this is where I have to work.

They're doing like the Terminator science fiction stuff, I love that.

They're doing these open world role playing games, like I love that, and they're doing sports.

So when I came in, it had just come out, and they were doing the CD-ROM version.

So Arena was not released on floppy disks.

days, the number of floppy disks was very, very important to what the money you were making.

So, you know, if you wanna 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.

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