Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield | Lex Fridman Podcast #342
blink once if you know when Elder Scrolls 6 is coming out but are not going to tell me the following is a conversation with Todd Howard one of the greatest video game designers of all time he has led the development of the Fallout series and the Elder Scrolls series including Arena Daggerfall Morrowind Oblivion Skyrim and the future Elder Scrolls 6 and a totally new world in an upcoming game called Starfield many of these have won Game of the Year Awards and have been some of the most celebrated and impactful games ever made to me Skyrim is quite possibly the greatest game ever this is a Lex Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Todd Howard is it possible that we are currently living inside a video game that the future you designed can you give hints as to how one would Escape if this was a video again 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 because in the kind of games that we make we want it to be as open as possible so you know 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 you know 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 you know 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 you would try everything and usually you're going to find a door or a space where the designers didn't uh 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 uh accidental unintended doorway out and it's a it's a happy bug you could like trim and show just get in the ocean and go until just keep going and keep going right but the more realistic the game becomes the harder it is to find that door the the bigger the world the bigger the open world and then as we do it we learn they're going to find a way so just don't try to pen them in usually we leave like this developer test cell yeah area in the game that we don't anticipate anyone will find and 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 from movies or things like that you want to make that character interesting for themselves right what's their story and there's some characters like that that the player definitely cares about but the best characters are the ones that react to you so you'll find a lot of people love our guards and the guards are written almost purely to be reactive hey nice tie I like your jacket do this cool watch you know hey what'd you do and so that hey you're the man as you walk by that makes them interesting or the way they react to something that you do Lydia in Skyrim who everybody loves I'm sworn to carry your burdens that's a generic line that all of the you know house Carls have and it just kind of lands when she says it why does it land what do you what do you and did you anticipate with land there's a slight snarkiness in that particular read of it and you're asking her to do something and she's reacting to you what about the the trade-off between maybe the randomness and the scripted nature of the dialogue like is there any room for randomness of the dialogue tree oh absolutely we tend to write them in Stacks with you know it's a it's a very small I think it was 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 um 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 um you know sneaking in in the middle of the night or those kind of things the more that we can do the more reactive and interesting the characters appear 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 just a giant I would think of the AI as one big one yeah oh so for for sort of everybody so there's an AI there's a manager for all the people and one of the things people manager right nice one of the things that makes what we do particularly unique is and this is a trade-off for what people are seeing because a lot of it's not on the screen but we're using Cycles to run this which is we're thinking about everybody in the whole world all the time the ones that are further away at a much less tick rate they go into low but we know if they want to walk across the world and we're running every Quest at the same time whereas in other weapon World Games you start an activity the rest of the world is going to shut down so that they can really make that as impactful we're I I really prefer that the rest of it's going on it's more of a simulation that we're building so when those things Collide that's where it gets the most interesting and so we're running all of those people and understanding where they want to go and their cycles and what they want to do and the ones that are closer to you we just update a lot more it's one way to think about it I mean that's really fascinating that's something that people had um they're wondering about to what degree is 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 the whole world rotates around you as it does in normal life like when we walk around it there's a when you forget yourself you start to take yourself very seriously like you are the center of the world uh you forget that there's eight billion people on Earth and if you gotta have lies 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 level designers did this how do they build Disney World in these places so it still exists for you the player so it is fairly you know when you're going to come in this is what you're going to see the shops are in the front you're going to do this it's just for us to make it far more believable and get some more emergent Behavior that not just make that sort of the versamillitude of what you're in for that moment but you you buy it all I always say like you know we got to do the little things so that you buy the reality of the virtual world you're in so we want to do something crazy you know when a dragon lands or a death law comes out of the Wasteland or those 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 in our plan is to push that even more to think about how these things exist in the world first then 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 Mages Guild it's a bustling Guild full of stuff going on it's not just that it's bustlings that they feel rooted in it they don't feel like a storefront for come here do quests get experience is that one of the essential components of randomly generated worlds so when I think back to Daggerfall as a gigantic world when I first played it I thought like I mean you're just struck by the the the the immensity of it right the immensity of the possibility when you're young and you look into your future it's 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 this is how much physical game Space will 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 you know 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 you know starfield's a bit more like Daggerfall and if you want her outside the city we're going to be generating things and you kind of get used to that game Flow different than we've done before and fun in a different kind of way we'll talk about Starfield so just for people who don't know and how dare you for not knowing but where 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 in 96. I didn't look up the years before this this is depressing or or awesome um 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 you know one block on the map equals this much space there is something that I mean I'm speaking anecdotal experience but I I just remember it feeling wide open Daggerfall it definitely was the way Arena didn't I don't remember maybe 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 um 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 um Daggerfall digs deep into who's your character how you're going to develop it what are your skills there's advantages there's disadvantages and the environment going full 3d from Arena which is actually like a two and a half D Doom style engine um that I agree with you that Daggerfall feels like there's more possibilities uh when you're playing it were you able to like look up the sky in Daggerfall yep my memories yeah so that's what full 3d means and then you can go outside the city you can walk outside and says you can do that in Arena too but it looks more fakey right it's all going to be a flat plane Here Comes things and then a dungeon entrance is a you know 8-bit here comes a little flat coming out the camera so before we go to the end uh in the middle so from Star fields of Fallout and the Elder Scrolls series let's go to the very beginning what's the origin story you know what let's even go before then what's uh when's the first time you remember the thing that made you fall in love with video games well I think it's partly you know 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 um Nintendo comes along so it was always part of you know I think if you were a kid growing up then it was such a newness to playing things like that I remember being in fifth grade when the TRS-80 was brought into the classroom and there was a Star Trek game and I was enamored with it and they were going to start teaching some rudimentary programming like okay would you like to know how this is made and I was I was hooked I was like I need to figure out how to make this stuff and so I was just you know self-taught programmer and my whole goal was to write my own video games and uh you know by sixth seventh grade I had written my own much better Star Trek clone for this yeah of course Apple II um and uh I really enjoyed programming on the Apple II then and that I think was the right level of like complexity you know at that age where you could kind of you were always learning but you could still understand a lot of the problem set for like this is when I when I get on the screen and I was also into art so I did a lot of Art and I did a lot of programming and I was always making games that was my hobby from the time I was you know 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 what like um 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 uh Dungeons and Dragons at the time too where you uh you really feel even pen and paper these are like 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 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 I made a Raiders of the Lost Ark games um like with graphics and everything yeah I was so it was usually you know made a Miami Vice game made it grew The Wanderer game made a traveler 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 um and that but but again this was the time where they're bringing computers into the school then 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 um and it was very much of a self-taught uh you know how do you make this thing dance I'd like to ask a strange question so at that time a lot of people consider you one of if not the greatest game designer creator of all time you were middle of the pack then uh did you have a sense that this would be your life and you would also be creating you know the greatest games ever not not in the slightest um no I don't think anybody but I was very much like that was my dream at a at that age but you don't think that that's a job you know and the as I got older I was really going through college and I to come even the computer classes then weren't where I wanted them to be so I still kind of doing my own stuff um 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 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 think they went bankrupt actually 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 uh Bethesda softworks at the time so I had gotten Wayne Gretzky hockey three for Christmas uh from my girlfriend at the time who's now my wife um 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 and Mary where I went to college and that was at this point committed like this is what I want to do so I'm just going to drive by and knock on the door which is what I did so I 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 said well I'm in college I'm talking about when I'm out of school I'm like okay well contact us then and I will say I was I was I would contact them every once in a while I did work for a small software company right um out of school uh down in that area of Williamsburg and still would contact Bethesda Arena had just come out so then we're in 94 Arena had just come out and I loved it so I was into sports games I like the hockey stuff they were doing a basketball they did a basketball game yeah I'm just looking at they did a lot of they did like six sports games six but that's the last 10 games six of them sports games and and CAA basketball Hockey League simulator simulator yep so there was really like sports Gridiron which is like the first kind of physics-based football game at the time um 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 um when I started Bethesda I remember the owner had John Madden's Oakland Raiders Playbook nice in his office like can I see that um and I love sports right so I still played Madden to this day I love it so there's an alternate reality where I made sports games yeah yeah absolutely I I wanted to make 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 type of music like you don't play every time but I think of open worlds as fundamentally different really sure no like source of Happiness entertainment storytelling World gaming than than matter I mean I just because 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 want to watch get really into Game of Thrones yeah so I think all those things have validity um and actually one of the first things I worked on when I started Bethesda was NCAA basketball road to the final four two so that was kind of an external project it was came in like hey you 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 they're doing sports like this I have to work here yeah um so it 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 um oh it used to be floppy disks that's probably one of what was the reason we would burn them 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 disks six floppy disks maybe it was eight yeah but in those days the number of floppy disks was very very important to what the money you were making so you know if you want to do a big huge game like well that's just too many discs so the CD-ROM became this this jumping off point for the whole industry where oh it's unlimited data by the way I played Arena uh so that that was uh of course attained um legally as one does alternate means by alternate means right uh on floppy on floppy disks and that was um that was such an incredible as as you as you probably have seen interacted with a large number of people it's it's a whole world it's a world that you escape to in the way like your favorite book like Lord of the Rings you it was just some it was um it was unlike anything else it was incredible it's probably I mean of course as people say it's the first game you play is the most uh is the one that really sentimentally means the most to you that's I think the first role-playing game I played and it was just changed everything was Arena it was Arena yeah I think Daggerfall is what I really kind of really played um especially because like you said the character development was really rich but just like that you can uh be feel like you traveled to this whole other world that's less about entertainment like a shooting game right and more about a world it felt like it's a world like like uh 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 um like an arcade fun entertaining Advent Adventure game so uh so you joined you made it uh what did you work on first there I worked well everyone did a bunch of stuff so that I worked on the basketball game really just to get it out the door and Terminator future shock so we were doing Future Shock and Daggerfall at the same time they were developing a new engine so it was one of the first 3D engines the X engine the word um there were a bunch of guys from Denmark actually it was like there's like a big Danish demo scene in those days in the PC and so a bunch of the top programmers there one look this is not big this is not a big company maybe there's 20 people in development um 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 it was awesome uh and I 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 you know 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 you know landscape height map with instanced objects all over it and that is still a lot of how we build our worlds what's an instanced object it's you know some games every uh you know wall or building is kind of unique in its data whereas we would just build you know 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 once you build a bigger World much faster and not um you know not every single version of that building is in its own unique architecture that is going to take up memory and processing speed etc etc so you're they're very much feeling the computational constraints of the system when you're creating these open ones and you know what that's the thing then you see some of it now but in those times I do feel like every year the technology moved and maybe it's because same thing we're like that my age at that time where every year somebody was coming up with some new method or some new game system and it was every year that Innovation Innovation Innovation and then you know 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 and material and roughness and how does the global illumination off this wallet gets a ton of work but you can pretty much do what you want now if you want to put the time in whereas then okay you can't do everything you want so pick your battles really carefully and it technically you couldn't do what you want if that makes sense how much trade-off is there now in um how much effort you put into the the realism of the graphics versus the story and actually not even how much effort you put in but is there um 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 you know we could make a game that you know our traditionally our games are you know we okay with 30 frames a second as long as it looks really good and the simulation is running and all of those things so we'll we'll sacrifice some of that Fidelity for the player experience in in this the kind of things that that I do um but from like a Manpower standpoint the graphics programmers work on Graphics the artists work on Art and we have a you know 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 you know 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 um 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 yeah 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 all is that Graphics what is that it's a lot of Graphics it's a lot of mood we just talk about it in terms of tone and those are again going back to my previous comment the graphics are very very important to us because and we always push them because when you're doing the kind of things we do where you step into a virtual world it 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 how does the wind sound how are the trees moving how are the clouds moving um I enjoy strolling and watching the sunset you know 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 um then you watch like the weather roll in um 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 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 um 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 some something like that but in another a totally different place like an like uh Iceland or something like that this this this whole other surreal ethereal place it's uh yeah it's incredible how you kind of create that so Graphics is a part of that but also letting it uh the temporal aspect of that like the when the the rustling sound and look and all of that the soundscape is really really important in the sky we spent a lot of time on the sky because it's taking up much more of the screen than a lot of people give credit for 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 if you know nowadays it's getting more common like frankly the systems are built better for it um hard drive speed is really prioritized like they're so blazing fast um he takes Skyrim and Oblivion and the fallouts of that 360 era it's a 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 you know 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 know 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 um you know uh ethereum like Excalibur or your you know Sci-fi channel uh you know series of the month kind of thing um and so finding that what's going to make it kind of unique and usually I lean on something that is grounded in reality for what it is and then have lesser kind of Fantastical things at least at the start and then they they kind of build so even when we do star field I mean it's a science fiction game there are laser guns and spaceships that fly around shoot each other and blah blah blah blah but it's grounded in you can look at it and say okay this is kind of an extension of things as we view them today in space 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 uh 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 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 and everything fits in his ground no 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 you know there's a very classic medieval looking town that you come into but you look just beyond it or mushroom trees and giant insects and things like that so in Skyrim when you put a dragon in it what are your thoughts about dragons and tone how does that fit into tone that's a great question the it's a ridiculous question but yeah I just love dragon so I want to bring it up no no these are the things that we we debate um with do we include a dragon why didn't you include a dragon in Daggerfall that's what I want to know I think there's Dragon there's Dragon Lings they're hard to do dragons are hard to do so when you start Skyrim say hey look you know dragons are going to be a theme you start to start visually you think yeah they're you know you can make the argument the 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 um and then how we introduce them it's kind of a little bit of a slow you know role in Skyrim and that the people in the world are reacting to the dragons appearing and that's somewhat you know mirrors you want something that mirrors the player experience as well it says back to you like hey no these are this is have you heard this someone saw a dragon well that's what Daggerfall is there isn't there mentions of dragons or something because there are members I remember being sure that there's dragons in Daggerfall as I'm playing it and I'm searching pretty sure to my memory look I guess someone would probably correct me like actually there is a dragon here um but I'm pretty sure they're sort of they're not yeah and then game I did Red Guard which um we bring back a dress takes place beforehand so we have a dragon there in that game and that was unique to that at the time yeah uh just a brief tangent on that I thought redgar was a really really good game I played it as a and again again you don't you know this you you forget stuff but I remember getting um 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 it reminded me of another game I really love like Prince of Persia that was the ins one of The Inspirations one of my favorite games like maybe 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 that like Park yeah that was our situation um yeah it was an incredible game what why do you think let me ask sort of a dark question why do you think that game was a flop one of the one of the few years not a dark question yeah it was um well a lot of reasons um game that I love and really got us going on a handcrafted world so we're coming off a Daggerfall Morrowind is sort of in design and then you know part of our development teams broke up to do different things this game would did battle spire and Red Guard was my game um 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 you know it's it's a 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 um and really see what we could do with the engine but it's very much I think plays like it would have had a much better home on say Playstation or Xbox this is predates Xbox right where it's a much more like constantly Tomb Raider had come out so do you see those influences of Tomb Raider on that game and 3D effects cards have 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 it I think it missed kind of a technology window as well as ultimately not what people wanted from us you know um and I felt I was really kind of the company let me make that game and it it was a big flop battle Spire hadn't done well the company was in really bad shape and I felt really like personally responsible like they let me do this creative thing it didn't do what we needed it to do and now we're in a very very bad situation a company almost went out of business and that's when it got reformed with xenomax media and Robert Altman came in and we were starting more when we had just sort of started and it was sort of that whole experience that made you sort of realize someone says okay you're 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 Red Guard Morrowind is a large-scale handcrafted but if you were to put it you know pixel per pixel with Daggerfall you wouldn't even see Morrowind like because Daggerfall is so big but the impact of playing it I think is in many ways equal but different just you personally psychologically did you have doubt about yourself from from the performance of Red Guard like do I even do I know what it is of course of course where do you get the how do you overcome that I I don't know I would say this honestly I enjoy it so much you know like I'm so I'm so heads down like that becomes For Better or Worse like my life yeah um and it's just something that I want to play so much it becomes like there's a little bit you get a little obsessed with it no but I mean you love Red Guard 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 red guard's a great game right so you were sure even if okay like do I like that game it's about finding an odd Okay so I love Red Guard yeah and the people who play it it won the bunch of awards and it you know 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 going to be conservative again I'm going to swing for the fences and we've had you know there'll be some rough edges in swinging for the fences and shooting for the moon but we'd rather do that in the land where we land than be very very conservative and what we're putting out there you've mentioned just referencing this game uh on a Reddit AMA that long time ago during Red Guard the lead programmer made me made all the buildings up up and down after you played for 10 minutes just to mess with me uh just a curious tangent what What's um involved with programming in open world game so so we talked about we will talk about design and so on but specifically the programming because 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 you know the Ubisoft games versus our games I can sort of you know speak to ours which is you want to build systems right because they're gonna 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 um 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 that you know the audience you know that draws the pixels on the screen so there's a most of the engine is how are you going to bring in that data and give it to the renderer to 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 make bread blah blah blah you then have the AI which Loops in the stuff we talked about earlier in terms of processing everybody and combat systems which is a lot of what and the people end up doing combat systems on top of that AI how do they react to those types of things and then how 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 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 um but I love that stuff and that's integrated into a larger system the ability to pick up the npcp accountable so it's not like a little cork that's hard-coded in it's part of a bigger system they they have their own AI for scanning the environment 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 because what you don't want we actually have this problem you start in Oblivion I believe which is a separate level hey let the enemies go pick up the you know weapons if they're better so we make a level and go in and wow all of the enemies are armed of 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 Yeah by other NPCs or the player that's such a fascinating world of EX or the design of the experience for the NPC because in part that experience is uh defines the experience of the player so how they interact with their environment defines how you how the player experiences their environment is there room for further and further development of the AI that controls the MPC 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 to as a signpost for the player but they're reacting to the player but what about you know some of the richest experiences we have with people is like the chaos of it the pull the push and pull the unpredictability is there something I don't know if you've been following but the the quick amazing development of language models uh the neural network natural language processing systems dialogue systems um 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 yeah um 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 um versus yeah it's generated on the fly but it's definitely coming it's definitely coming and I think you'll see it in in the types of games that we do it has great you know application I love the idea that you'll be um using that to design different uh NPCs and then testing if they're if they're good enough if they're like um a little too crazy you don't want like the the super right but if we go back to it being reactive some of that bot stuff you know it's pretty it's incredible it's then Translating that into voice and then is that being done by the client as 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 uh what's the role of voice actors and awesome yeah we we work with a ton of voice actors and they bring so much to it and and that's the thing um they you know we can write some stuff and and the best ones get in there and make it so much better or even ad-lib things and so we 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 experiences of recording will help Define the characters and the tone of the game all 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 is actually working we want you to do it you're going to be someone else now sorry that got cut do you ever uh try to sort of imagine that people fall in love with the characters with the NPCs 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 missed them 100. actually like whenever I'm playing a game and there is you know if there's like a friendship option or make friends or a romance thing I I find those moments really I enjoy them I find them pretty impactful emotionally to what we're doing and so um we've done a little bit of it it's one of the things that we actually have pushed in Starfield so we have a number of companions but for them we go you know I won't say super complex romantic but but more complex relationships than we've had in terms of not just some you know state of they like you or they don't like you but they can be 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 that relationship status if it's complicated that that they're they're existing in that gray area is complicated we're not dating we're just well it's in a lot of games you know previous stuff you just work your way up they like you more and more and more and more and now you're in a relationship now you're in and you and when you make him upset you drift out of like it never happened you know you drift out of it whereas we wanted one where okay we can be in a relationship and yeah um we've committed to each other in some way but I just did something that really made you angry yeah as opposed to just drifting out of that status you're in a temporary I don't like what you did State wow so some greater degree of complexity in the relationship with the company a little a little bit a little bit a little bit we're talking about I don't want to oversell that part but sure 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 you know myself and others and I find a lot of players those moments are really really impactful and special to them because they did put in the time that's another thing that I always come at it with which is I think people don't play video games they sometimes think like oh that's I don't know that's a waste of time but 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 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've had they have had those experiences and we hear from them and how important it is to them it's like no this is this is really really special yeah it's uh it's fun I mean from from a game design perspective I wonder if you can honor the time you spent together with the game because um you know sometimes there's a hard break at the end of the game like when you're when you when you leave a game there's a yeah it's a really complicated relationship actually because when you leave a game it's almost like leaving a romantic partner because I think you spent so much meaningful time together and there's a sense in which it was uh it was ephemeral like it right this this is not this didn't happen it didn't really happen it was good it was like you went to Vegas he got drunk and stopped for 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 kind of share with others like this 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 play right when 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 know what yeah kids today they will have that they will have that and see you could look back and see oh my God I put a thousand hours in Daggerfall what is the first and my last save was 19. um man I don't know golden ax maybe I'm trying to think what was the first game I've ever played uh no it's probably a Commodore 64 games yeah um yeah arcade games okay you mentioned Starfield what is Starfield and what's the origin story of this game we had always wanted to do something where you explore space you know the explore space role-playing game so take the kind of games that we make and give it a little bit of a different Spin and you know the other games that I loved there was a pen and paper RPG I love traveler it was one of the first games I made for the Apple II I didn't uh I never finished it right I'm just doing it on my own and I love this game starflight was one star control two was a game that I loved um Sundog was a big one in the Apple two days that a lot of people don't know that I loved and so a lot of us in the studio felt it was time to do something new you know we're going between Elder Scrolls and Fallout and going back and forth and I mean we love that but hey we've always wanted to do this explore the Galaxy science fiction game you know now is the time uh to do that and uh that's a brave move so follow us post-op apocalyptic on a single Planet uh you know Elder Scrolls series is uh on a single planet so this is going out into the open world of many Star systems many planets I saw that it's uh thinking about a hundred star systems and a thousand planets available to explore um 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 them where you're Landing in a very controlled small world space that we you know kind of craft and you would have a very limited set of those if you go back to tone like well that's probably the wrong tone and how can we say yes like I want to land on that ice ball so it started we started the game right after Fallout 4 so 2016. and the first thing we did was can you know how can we have a system to generate these planets and make them look you know I'll say reasonable as opposed to you know fractally goop you've probably seen a lot of like simulations whether they're space things or landscape things where they're using fractals and this the landscape does not look real just this is like highs and lows and it's muddy and so we did find a way we came up with a way um had prototyped of 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 we could do this um 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 because there's a lot of planets and moons if you kind of right in reality that well there's nothing on them except resources and so we spent a lot of time figuring out okay let's just lean in on that can a be a lonely experience as long as we tell the player here's what's there here are the resources that are there go find them but I equate it to that moment of we said about listening to the wind go and watching the sunset and I do think there's a certain Beauty to landing on a strange Planet being somewhat the only person there building an outpost and we are modeling all of the systems because that's how we like to do things so you can watch whatever that gas giant or Moon it will rotate and go and Sunrise Sunset and all of those things that you would expect and it's it's all really happening and most people probably won't notice or appreciate all of that but um I think it gives them the ability to say I want to go do that and see that on that place as long as we tell them hey the quest leads over here here's where the handcrafted content is that you would expect and then here's more of the open procedural Planet experience see your long answer I don't know if I answered your question there's no all right questions as stupid and the answers are brilliant so that's how this works so this is the world's most immense simulator of um The Human Condition of loneliness because 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 just a deep embodiment of what loneliness is like I mean both on like when you hike alone there's a there's a deep loneliness to that it's like uh 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 will hit people at a certain moment like it does for me with Skyrim like holy shit I'm here alone and then and whatever cruel nature that's out there it doesn't really care about me exactly Dusty that's that's the experience so you you want to create the whole planet and you want to 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 we wrap it in so we can name them all and and have a finite set even though it's a very very large number but a set that we can you know validate and 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 a hundred plants or a thousand or ten thousand or a million planets is not it's just you just press you just change the number and press the button but you can't you can't name them all you can't control like when you're getting in really big numbers hey what is what does this system way out here feel like if you take your ship and jump that far we do level the systems when you go to system you'll see oh this is like a level 40 system and us being able to at least control that scale is how we kind of ended up with the 100-ish systems we have what are the what are the levelings what do you mean by level levels it could be like when you look at a map in a game it says this is the area for low-level players this is level one 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 because it's a game like we don't really kill you when you fly out in space but it has a tone of there's some effort involved and we've dialed it back as we've been making the game whereas we used to run out of fuel you jump and get stranded which on paper was a great like it's a great moment when you get stranded you have to press this Beacon you don't know who's going to come um turns out that's not like it just stops your game we found you'll be playing the game and I ran out of fuel okay I guess I'll just wander these planets trying to mine for fuel so I can get back to what I was doing it's just you know it's a fun killer that's too realistic of a simulation of The Human Condition yeah I know the idea was well it's very you know games do that if you had like a hardcore you're right a hardcore survival mode that's the kind of thing you would do maybe we'll do it in the future um but it's more of like a tone how they build their ships do they have all the right things for safety we do get into environmental things on the planets you know in your spacesuit obviously a lot of different spacesuits and Buffs for you know the gases the toxicity or the temperature on on various planets are there robots yes those companions are they robots by chance can you one of the companions the robot Vasco yeah okay so they have they have uh they have a name and a personality and so on and Vasco does and then there's a whole bunch of I call them generic robots they're you like we use them for utility you know okay people we actually dialed them back because if you think about well you know a lot about this more than uh me in terms of I'm offended right now you're calling robots generic no no the ones we use the ones we we use we made them more generic we didn't so we didn't feel sensitive about this I understand um if you were to chart the future you would say robots would have a much bigger role in our future than we are presenting um but that was a tone thing so we most of our robots are there as utility robots and there are some combat ones as well as enemies so it's a deeply human world very much yes in in terms of its own uh so have you talked to Elon about this about this game over 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 you know visiting SpaceX and walking in there it was it's like the Avengers Mitch NASA it's like the most amazing and here we're building the next gen like see the the dragon stuff before it was uh you know other people saw it like just I was really in awe you know just giant machine that looks for imperfections on the surface of these giant you know fuselah just you know whenever and because you know we're in DC go to the air and space museum a lot and so whenever I look at those kind of things or you know 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 you know and one of the things that Elon really impresses like we're reaching the edge of physics on a lot of the stuff where how hard it is to leave orbit the gravitational pull and like so the engineering that has gone into that rspace program what what he's doing now um I just marvel at I don't understand oh 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 I was outside for some reason it was dark and I saw this crazy light in the sky and I thought it was like a helicopter and then it didn't go away and I'm like someone what is that I call my we had 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 of is there some aspect to that that you can replicate the The Majestic nature that in in the video game the answer to that you know I think some of it we were doing when you're standing on a planet and you see you see the other moons go by yeah and then you realize I could get my ship blast off and land there and build myself a home I think that's pretty cool there's a minor thing we do which is we um 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 this when you hear the engine you look up and the ship is taking off or come out that's great there's nothing for you to do but it's I think it's awesome yeah yeah and 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 um it's not all just like jump in and combat do you ever think about the fact that science fiction seems to make a 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 cut anticipate it it kind of fuels people's imagination what is possible maybe I don't know I don't know I can't 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 uh is that the one that you do interface this like uh it's the interfaces and then the you know a way looks his child's more like a holographic almost AR VR kind of thing or digital billboards or trying to predict human behavior um there's that 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 I don't know well I think it does and it's interesting I mean I suppose you're trying to create the most realist 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 multi-planetary species we need we need to play games we need to read sci-fi just help imagine that that's possible to look outside of Earth to look outside look up on the stars then we can actually travel out there I don't know there's power to sci-fi to do that I guess you shouldn't feel the pressure of that I don't know if I'd make the leap now that's all that what we're doing might now maybe you know one of our you know hopefully it might Inspire some young people who are headed in that direction alike Oh I thought about getting into space and space exploration and being an engineer doing these things and I played this game and you know 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 a likely a human being will step foot on Mars which are the first steps until we're just becoming multi-planetary and if you read some of the stuff they're doing uh with the James Webb Telescope and them being able to look for signs of life on other planets it's quite fascinating and you know recent stuff I read say they think in 20 years they will so it's actually quite encouraging to think I was 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 the big difficult leap is from the precarious to the eukaryotes so like the the complex life it could be that a lot of our universe is just filled with bacteria I believe if if I'm understanding it right that there's two ways they're going to look at planets when they can look at you know they can read hey this planet has this kind of gas they can now look at the ones that are created by potential life forms and then the ones that are created the byproducts of Industry so there's only certain ones that are created if you have a society there um and that they can start looking on these types of in these types of star systems and these planets but it takes a lot of time because you have to book time on that telescope you have to like look at that planet over a long period of time but in theory given enough time given the amount of space out there um we would find one that would be a cool thing in this short life of ours to find out definitively that there is an 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 uh 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's there is a definitively other life out there I mean both things if there isn't life out there that's also a huge responsibility both are super exciting for a loan it's super exciting because there's a responsibility to preserve whatever special thing we have going on here this uh whether you call it the flame of Consciousness or whether it's Consciousness or intelligence that's a special thing preserve it have it expand but if there's others out there I mean that like that Sparks that drive for exploration of reaching out to the stars and meeting them most of them probably want to kill us so but luckily we have the military-industrial complex on Earth that builds bigger and better weapons all the time space force it will both protect us and destroy all our enemies [Laughter] uh this this is 100 a video game we're living in okay back back to dragons so blink once if you know when Elder Scrolls 6 is coming out but are not going to tell me I have a vague idea okay big idea so like if you have the quantum mechanical interpretation that allows for multiple universes any in the universe where you didn't blink uh what would that Todd tell me about the year it's coming out would it be 2025 trick question or 26. someone asked that question yeah many ways but never like that yeah I thought I would try to speak um I mean there is there is of course no answer because I wish it was soon yeah like we don't we want him out too you know um 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 it's taken uh for it so you love that world the oldest Girl's World look it's it's part of why I'm spent more time there than anything else in my life probably right so um it's deeply love it we we all do it's a part of us and you know when you aren't doing it for a while you you really do miss it um and when I look at what we're doing uh have planned for that game and that was a meeting yesterday I was like I just want to play all this right um but it you know we're going to make sure we do it right for everybody and we do have to approach it people are playing games for a long time you know Skyrim's 11 years old still probably our most played game and so we don't see it slowing down and people will probably be playing it 10 years from now also so you have to think about okay people are gonna play the next Elder Scrolls game for decade two decades and that does change the way you think about how you architect it from from the get-go what what are some elements that changed the way like how do you make a game that's playable for 20 years so we're trying to figure that out but there are some elements I should pause on that you know pardon me I'm of course asking jokingly I'm excited for it but I think Skyrim was an amazing game still you know I really enjoy it still yeah and you know what the content the um even if I 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 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 want to support the people who are doing on their own so they can be professionals on their own um and how you create a world that's modable so you you think of Designing the game from the start as that enables mods yeah absolutely so if it starts with us like everything we're doing okay a modder a content creator is going to have to do it use our tools now we do clean them up for release you know you because if you're like a developer in-house you can deal with some clergyness when you're putting stuff together when you put it out for people we do clean a lot of it up and there's still a lot obviously a learning curve there um but we have look we have people been doing it for 20 years with us um what's involved with modding I'm actually quite newbish at this okay and I'm almost afraid to ask because now that you explained to me oh I I fear I will spend a very large amount of time creating mods well we have an editor uh 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 plug-in file we call it you know a modification to the game and then you can run your game with that um it's on Console now the 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 the the visuals a lot of people do visual things because it's the easiest thing to do first or to build a new space there's some great things with like I love the Khajiit follower mod for Skyrim it's awesome um the uh there have been quest lines those things just take a really really long time and so someone is going to do that that's almost like it takes them a long time it's more than a hobby and we're always looking at ways that we can make it like hey they can turn a career into it because it's just awesome what about is 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 there's so many more things they can do well I've I've built Bots that play um the the driving games but they do that by just taking um 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 um to do that for Skyrim or for what some of the open world games that's literally you have to create AGI to be able to yep 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 look there's some bot stuff out there that does it we have we have some very very dumb Bots that we use to run through the world to test it that will Deploy on a whole bunch of servers just to you know we do it every day we run through every space we're doing Starfield and then just running they're all out there well it does it very quickly it loads up every place every 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 a crash what's the memory growth what's the get a report hear all the places where the frame rate wasn't up to Snuff and then we do have one that will play on its own heavily scripted but it lets us test you know 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 because you don't want to waste like qa's time like you guys broke it again within five minutes so yeah yeah so that's for but that's for like uh broken stuff right I wonder if you can build the 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 the question I mean I I feel like there's a balance to be stuck there because you always want to be in fear of death again 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 yeah you gotta put the player right in the middle of that but I've sometimes put down games from frustration only to return again stronger Dark Souls yeah so I mean 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 quests and so on but I'm not sure if that's the same experience for everybody do you play the survival mode there's a survival mode in Skyrim it was a creation Club thing it does like some Hunger it does hot and cold it does some other systems that make it you know in our minds a more believable it was actually a creation Club thing made by an external Creator who is now full time with us so can we actually thinking about uh star field thinking about Elder Scrolls six 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 um well usually it starts with I mean honestly lunchtime conversations with a number of us hey we we think we want to do this this is what it's going to be like I mean look within Elder Scrolls you know you're gonna do it it's a matter of when you say okay what's the tone we're going for right where is it set so we usually start with the world and then we're always overlapping so while we're making one game as we're you know getting in the throes of it or wrapping it up you know probably by the midpoint of one game we've had enough conversations to understand what the next one's going to be what are the big ticket like where's it set what's the tone is there a big ticket feature or two that make it really unique and then when we're finishing one game we start um 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 um we do music early you know so take Elder Scrolls six we figure out where it's set what's the tone what are the big features we discussed the beginning of the game which we've had for a very long time where's this set again um yep and uh damn it well at least we know we narrowed it down that yeah that would be epic if it was like a portal into another dimension anyway I like to do music so we've already done a take on the music uh for Elder Scrolls six so you can sit there with the like the the concept art and the music no no the music we put in the teaser for it this was 2018. um 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 um 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 going to 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 you know can run a year two years maybe more and then you kind of have a finalizing final six months to a year on a game which is okay we've built everything now um and usually it needs a lot of glue where we have a lot of very different elements that maybe aren't clicking together the way you want outside of the regular polish for levels and features and we're shaving and gluing and sticking things together so that it's not the schizophrenic game experience that things flow from one end to another in terms of story like on that level it's really no usually the story The designers have done a really good job it's more about game features you know and then how they interact with the story or hey I went from this experience to this experience or picking flowers and Alchemy feels like a different game then 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 in it and once you get that flow down and the the rate at which the game is giving you activities then you're in like what we we describe as a game Flow what is 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 a skill tree the characteristics of the role-playing aspect of it when is that set the idea is 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 going to 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 because every character needs some amount of that but okay well how how important is cooking how important is alchemy how important is these other type of activities and then how do you balance them where when you load up the skill menu it isn't automatically give me plus 10 damage how do you get the what about the combat system that does seem to be an important part of a lot of games you started in the beginning yeah every time yep so usually we're making that first playable it's an area you can go through some amount of dialogue some out 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 hands there's a lot of Animation time right and changing animations so they're impactful and they they happen at a rate that the player feels like they're really doing it and then ultimately it's the illusion that the enemies are smart but they really are there for you to kill them right so they do a lot of things to just let themselves get killed they're not a near Smart near smart as we can make them because it turns out that is not fun foreign 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 because 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 ever if anything feels off it's it's gonna feel it wrong yep all the games Do It um you know it's not unique to what we do in terms of how they handle combat scenarios um and there's some games that just do it extremely well in terms of um even in multiplayer where you're playing Bots and most people don't know it um or how a multiple enemy scenario is really you know they don't all shoot you they trade off they're gonna wait I was like I'll just wait my turn because we don't want to overwhelm them but he feels like you feel like you're overwhelmed when there's six enemies but you know a good game will no they're gonna they're gonna take their time is there a science to it is it is it art is it like oh my God yes yes I mean it's it's all of that so it's like an iterative process where you try different things there's a lot of there's a lot of Animation there's a lot of timing animation work hard work also how does the reticule change um what are the little sound effects what about like the the gamify like that is fun again that goes back to the winning you know the winning is fun yes death does not yes Let The Wookie win I like how you have to dumb down the AI to make it fun for humans um because if if you didn't it would just be just Slaughter non-stop for for All Humans that's good to know what about things like um he said cooking like crafting making potions and poisons and uh smithing weapons and armor cooking how do you get that right what's what's interesting there such an interesting like um just you know a lot of games don't have that kind of thing so what role does that play you know I think we really cracked it in a way I like with Fallout 4 actually where when we'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 sometimes so breaking it down to their components so when you walk around a world like that again we like the simulation we like we like the forks and 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 there is 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 played Fallout 3 I thought that was a Legendary game I've been uh um can you make a case for Fallout 4 that I should or should I just wait till Fallout five 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 uh we try to make them all different they all they all 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 what what's that world like what's uh 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 what makes Fallout tick is the 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 um and it does an amazing job of sort of weaving you know the drama and darkness of a post-apocalyptic world with B-movie humor um you know it Winks at the camera sometimes often actually and that when when you're in that world it just has this this its own unique flow and and Vibe outside of anything else kind of in that genre so Elder Scrolls has or at least Skyrim has some humor that's 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 so 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 uh the greatest games ever uh 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 in a new one the opinions and I'll put this mildly varied a lot but they would all end the same like a sternfather pausing for effect but do not screw it up how do you not screw up a game you have not screwed up many games yet I mean back to the Fallout one yeah yeah that was look that I remember that we were met with a lot of skepticism in terms of oh what are they going to do with this it was a beloved kind of isometric turn-based role-playing game you know awesome for when it came out um 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 because I think interplay was a public company I don't remember um 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 because we're announcing a Fallout game we're probably gonna piss off the hardcore Fallout fans because we didn't make the original and clearly we'll probably make a different kind of game so I do remember you know there was a lot of concern with with all of our fans um 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 that it did um is one of my favorite projects that I've ever ever worked on and because it was so fresh for us and we we had a very clear like even before we had the rights like this is the game we're gonna make like we're this is the kind of thing we're gonna do and we had done more when then 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 you know 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 um I just remember enjoying making that game so much because it was everything we were doing was new which which as did the world creation uh was there some Innovation like technically that was happening the world creation like it was you know obviously a different look even though some of us a very few of us had worked in the Terminator things um the vat system the skill system and we loved the original game so much so you felt this responsibility to bring it back in a big way and reintroduce it in a way that you know as much as we could scratch the same itch when you when you played the original game that had the same tone are there some favorite things to you about that world that just kind of connected 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 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 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 and then 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 ball 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 Elder Scrolls like a life story like like childhood trauma and stuff back to the human I mean you'd have to like look you do some of that stuff but they go through menus you know pick your background we're doing that in Starfield hey pick your background what are you doing before this moment can you pick your traumas and stuff yeah thank you we'll go for that and then also make a mod for like a therapist but a lot of it you know it's in your head so you're gonna you're gonna do that you're gonna pick this background and do these things and you're sort of like this is who I was yeah and we intentionally with Elder Scrolls kind of make it a as much of a blank slate you know I'll just goes a little bit more of a blank slate game to who you are which has a lot of positives and and Fallout for us has been more of a this is this this was your life before here's who you were go be who you want to be but this is the background it's a little more strict now this might reveal something about me and uh speaking of childhood trauma but but I but I feel like there's a lot of 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 um 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 because 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 uh 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 going to 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 because what you what game players want to is I'll play it and then I'll make a new character but sometimes they do that because they realize they made the wrong type of character and as a designer you don't want that to happen so some people let me get this comment Elder Scrolls like oh you simplified it like no no no we moved those choices into the gameplay so that you don't you know make this character in the beginning and then eight hours later realize you make a horrible mistake and so okay I'm going to start out like that to me is a really really bad experience so also like life itself [Laughter] but like life is okay so you can then fix it in game right I wish I wish I had learned archery well I'm gonna start tomorrow yeah um so you can do that like the Skyrim character system uh it was really designed around that all you pick is like what's your race and that gives you some things but there's nothing you can't get then on your own mostly that 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 you know Oblivion to a classless meaning you don't have a strict character class Warrior Mage thief whatever um in our games and that's that's continuing for the are you like thinking of Elder Scrolls six you're already thinking about that kind of stuff so you think of early on the the like you said the first few experiences in the game you already think it's in them yeah we know what the first few hours are like we we know it's a character system is basically like and so tonally what's the difference to you between Oblivion Skyrim Morrowind oblivious Skyrim and uh Elder Scrolls like I could to me man stuff Blends together yeah uh but Oblivion that's when you can make spells and stuff you could you could do it in Morrowind as well Oblivion has some more guard rails on it morrowind's where you can really go and Daggerfall I don't remember if you make spells in Arena I think you can someone will correct me you definitely can a dockerfall gets crazy Morrowind um you can sum up and then we start we start putting guard rails on it because people started breaking the game in certain ways yeah was about to break the game like you always wanted to be well there's like one people love in Morrowind where you can make these uh recall stones and uh you could teleport to different areas but you really need in that game it breaks so many quests yeah and so as we any any Quest we were then we would do this this exercise of Designing a quest and then someone would say and then I recall away okay the quest is broken and then one day someone says can we just get rid of that spell effect everyone's like yes please and so it allowed us to make better content so uh the tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent how do you equate a compelling Quest because there's all kinds of personalities of humans that play these games right because I like the grind well there's look there's there's multiple flavors of a compelling quest uh you know some of them have very good upfront storytelling you just like the story and the NPC that's giving you this task and then uh you'll go through a more handcrafted experience that the designers have done a really really good job on the space it has some some twist or surprise in the middle and then the ending has some you know multiple options that the player feels like they had they got to 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 that this was like this sounds very basic it's going to sound quite cliche and silly go find me five danger cards 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 I think now where could I get those and I've actually find those to be just as rewarding as the really handcrafted well done a little bit more linear with an interesting choice at the end if those objects are in the world in some you know believable way that there's usually some challenge at getting getting them how do you place objects in a world in an interesting way because 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 people who clutter like we like clutter is all the stuff around just like interior decorators yeah for Treasure and stuff and trash and um 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 um as they say with even if you walk by like a little T intersection that becomes like a decision point in the player's head like oh I didn't go down that way but the more you do that it looks easy on paper but when you're playing a game you actually kind of want to limit those because he's trying to keep track of all these decision points then they get lost and yes we have Maps but anytime the player is going to check a map in a place like that I feel that it's more of like a backstop for certain players if we if they need to check the map feel like we've kind of failed got it so it's just there's a there's a momentum to it just pulls pulls them in and you know if you played a lot of games you played a lot of levels where you're just like I'm a little confused or I don't know and you play other levels where like man I just I yeah it was great I went through it it was well balanced I knew where I was going and it's not you don't want to ever be Maisy 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 um 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 your constant's gone by feel like this is not as too much it's not enough right right because the other thing is look it creates um people want to pick everything up they want to click everything so if you have too many things of importance in a room it's like it actually makes you feel a little tight as a player you're like well I need I'm basically an idiot if I don't pick all this stuff up you probably felt this way 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 going to leave that ammo canister there yeah but you feel like a dope yeah you've probably experienced it yes but also you have a you have a joy from if there's not many items and you found the one and you got it right and you feel good I got it and then it's finding like oh I stuck my head in this corner and you know I picked this lock and I open this locker and oh there was this there's this thing I've been waiting for yeah what about like rare and rare items that's an art even more so of an art um I will say we have a ways to go there in terms of finding the right drop rate for special items we call them in your epic rare legendary you look at games like so many games do it and there are ones that P you just play and love because they have it down you know Destiny Destiny 2 is great at it Diablo a series I love you know sort of famously Diablo 3 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 um I think that that we're still learning we're still learning a lot and have to we're trying to you know get better at it because it's one of those things where it drives you through the game it's it's fun to get the treasure in Diablo and Skyrim have this interesting quality of being extremely popular and there's a lore around like rare items so it's a it changes the dynamic of like you could afford to have really rare items yes and then and then somebody finds it and that becomes like a thing I mean as you release a game there's a there's a I mean a lot of people play and they start sharing stories and so on it's so interesting because that's part of the game experience is the stories of others right for us a hundred percent because we've been classically with most of our stuff single player that that water cooler shared experience we would have a thing like we call them did you know moments like we gotta have a bunch so you meet someone they do what are you doing and then they say did you know if you go here and do this what did you know and that to us uh is aware of a lot of our community has has been sharing their stories and here's what you can do has there ever been a temptation to create um not a single player game that's gigantic that's what we did Fallout 76. we have Elder Scrolls Online not not a game I created but and look that started as more classic MMO know the folks they're part of a company who made that game um and it's insanely insanely popular it is okay so I should try it out they do some great storytelling quests like the actual mechanics aren't the same as Skyrim but the world is awesome they've just done an incredible job you know it's about to uh be 10 years for that game as well and they this is you know great Community around that yeah it's uh I haven't played because there's a there's a mobile uh 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 Phenom it's really fun Diablo Diablo well follow I definitely recommend that one fallout shelter completely different game yeah Diablo Immortal is uh I was very very impressed with I 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 what's the what's the fundamental change in the in the philosophy of a design does it 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 um 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 um you know a classic Mobile gaming is really for Short play sessions because for the amount of people you're gonna get the the number that I 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 because people are playing mobile games on the move or whatever and how it on boards you because obviously most of them 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 going to learn it people don't care so really understanding how they get into the game those two things are really the magic uh to Mobile gaming we have found though with our games you know particularly fallout shelter people will sit there for an hour or two like they will just sit there and play it like large numbers of people who play it for hours a day so it's uh there is a more I don't know addicting element to the mobile because I guess you can spend if you look at you know if you look at kids these days they can stare at their phone for hours that's all they do that's where they watch everything so it's also like a demographic thing the younger audience they would rather sit and stare at their phone than play it on a big screen I would just love to sort of list out throughout human history the evolution of sentences that began with if you look at kids these days is true it's true the kids the kids of the kids these days will probably be talking about be doing like virtual reality like I love mobile games though I I play a ton of them 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 oh yeah yeah do you like superheroes no it's genius you don't like superheroes no I don't like superheroes I never understood listen this never this is like super girl growing up in the Soviet Union what I don't understand them all right well I don't understand you're wearing a costume it's it's it's silly to me I can't so you have to uh suspend um like you have to be able to immerse yourself and for some reason there's something about costumes it doesn't get me but then again I'm like into elves and Dragons so I don't understand and I'm fine I get it yeah but the rest the rest at least the America the Western World disagrees with me so uh even Batman you have like little ears but that's fine um uh well back to uh Elder Scrolls star field so one thing I didn't ask you about when you look at the timeline of five six seven eight years whatever it is to create a game what's the role of the deadline internally not publicly enough to be honest do you try to keep in your own brain a deadline for the team a deadline yeah all the time and when you set that deadline early in the development do you try to set deadline like that's really tough to reach no we try to make it like hey this is our best guess if you make it tough to reach it's sort of you know you're going to miss it it's arbitrary we really try to you know keep ourselves honest because it will let you know where you're at right when I first playable we want to be done with prototyping or design by this date we want to First playable this day we want to have this but look you know things happen pandemic happens people go home it's throws everything off or you know what you needed to do because we're not just like making a game and then moving everybody on you know what you needed to do like Skyrim was so popular we kept people on that game for longer so it delayed a little bit we were doing with Fallout 4 at the time because we can't weren't you know hey we really shouldn't move the people on The Fallout yet because we're doing these things in Skyrim and we should so it just sort of keeps you honest for where you're where you're at does it get super stressful as you get closer you try to avoid announcing anything is there a temptation to analysis well I've done it always right I've I've announced you know Starfield we're pretty you know loud with a release date that we then had a delay so um was that tough it was it was but it was the right thing to do and uh how do you know it's the right thing like when you when you sat down and looked at it like this is not ready it's not an exact science but you can look at what needs to be done and the amount of time you have and you know we've done it in the past where we can get it done we we believe we can and so you're fighting that personal belief that you can get something done but there's a lot of things that go into release date with marketing and Publishing and you know we've reached a point where on Starfield where it was it was pretty clear to us even though you want to say you can get it done that the risk involved with that to the to the fans of the game to the team to the company we're part of Xbox now to everybody was we should really uh we should really move it and give it the time it needs so you mentioned part of Xbox Microsoft bought bethesdin and as nmx for 7.5 billion dollars well what's it like joining the Xbox team you've you've um I think written about it what's what what are the 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 um and I had worked with them uh for since we started doing console stuffs with Morrowind was you know they came to us came to me and hey you should make this game for the Xbox and so when they were making that console um 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 uh what their culture was but you never really know and and I mean this honestly it's been awesome that the culture inside of Microsoft and Xbox that that people see from the outside is the culture inside the way they talk about players the um the way they'll invests 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 with the games that you talked about but we've never been kind of the platform seller you know the game for a platform for a period of time and so you know there is a lot of pressure there'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 it is exclusive it's officially right yep yes so you're I get it so extra pressure also creating a new world yeah it's new but keep in mind for us that exclusivity is not unique even though we've done PlayStation stuff and I think the PlayStation 5 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 transition 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 so we've done a lot of like our initial stuff is all Xbox so we get into development and saying we're focused on Xbox and it's not abnormal for us in any way it's been kind of the norm and from a development side I you know I like the ability to focus so our ability to focus and say and have help from them you know the top engineers at Xbox to say we are going to make this look incredible on the new systems is like from from my standpoint it's just awesome what's the difference in creating the the console versus the PC I also have to admit I've never um is this shameful actually you should recommend to me I've never played Skyrim or any uh any of the games you've created on Xbox really yeah and on Console I I played I managed to play very little actually yeah sure I mean look there's 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 you know what are their driver versions what kind of monitor they have what is the actual refresh rate of x y and z um we're used to it yeah but if you know anyone will tell you give me the hardware that I know I'm writing it for you know this um and the the series X is just a incredible machine and now you know what it is you know you know what it is and and now that we're part of Xbox getting you know the people who built it to show you how to make it really really dance is it's 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 yeah they they enjoy it I think that depends on and look now that you you can kind of cross you can take your Save and Go between and all those things you can yeah if you depends on if for which games so for this Cairo if you have the Game Pass PC version of it versus Steam not not via steam right now and so there's the GamePad so I'm like learning about this because there's a Microsoft gate so this is going to be on Game Pass and then you can if 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 want to lean back on a sofa exactly right like the actual physicality of it is what determines where I want to play do I want to 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 want to play somebody else like I am a sofa screen controller person let me ask you a ridiculous question so you've created some of the greatest games ever I I think there's there's uh the question would be what's the best game of all time all right all right just give me a second Tetris all right yeah that's interesting have you read the book on Tetris no you should read it particularly someone to grew up in Russia yep 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 um I would love uh I would love to find out more but I think I would put Personnel put Skyrim I'll take that good answer at number one for me uh which is tough however you put it because you could also make the case out of the uh 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 I don't know where the biggest leaps are um but overall I think it's Skyrim but uh for you if you're not allowed to pick any of the games you were involved with what are some interesting candidates for you that are just games that inspired the world impacted the world shook the world in terms of what video games are able to do well first I'm just sort of like hearing you say that you think Skyrim's the best game of all time is quite like thank you but and it's you know incredible thing to hear um and you know when I think about a couple answers there's ones that are like personal to me Ultima seven it's probably yeah can you talk about Ultima like you you said that as an inspiration I've never crossed that world well which it was what kind of game is it it's a role-playing game you know Circa 1992 93 94 and Ultima Online first you know really visual online World in that way um but for me that was a virtual fantasy world where I had you know you could bake bread you could pick all this stuff up I mean anyone who's played ultimas and plays our stuff can see the kind of uh touchstones and callbacks to that or inspirations and the other thing that I loved about Ultima was actually the peer they were all different right that they iterated and there weren't necessarily what I'll call A plus one sequel outside of Ultima 7 part two clearly a plus one sequel but they each had their own tone um I love like the boxes you know it's something that we get into as well I love this idea that a game also is this tangible thing oh when you but when you buy it you know the cardboard boxes and the way they were designed and Ultima 7 is black and Ultima Eight's the fiery gate and the paintings on them and I just you know if you break your heart a little bit that that culture is a big gone a little bit a little bit and that's also why I like you know 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 want to see nice you know in the same way you want to see nice album art I want to see nice cover art for our games and we spend a lot of time in them so that you take a look at Elder Scrolls and Mormon Oblivion and Skyrim we want those boxes to look good next to each other going back to the video games yeah you know I always mention Tetris because I think it's you know obviously I love Virtual Worlds and those kind of things but for the time and what an interactive like video game sort of the simplest form I 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 um it's just so elegant it's like to me the like this very pure game that only works because it's a video game and I think mobile games figured out some of the magic of Tetris the simple uh some of them have yeah yeah and but tatters did it a long long time ago right you could you can really create that immersive experience without but for me you know the ultimate civilization yeah um as far as you know a grand strategy game um 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 I probably the best game makers in the world still um they know who they are they know what they want to do um always in awe of what they create I gotta ask about the a game I haven't played but people put up there as one of the great Zelda breath of the wild have you got 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 played other zeldas than the open walls you've created but it is also an open world it is uh uh it's my favorite Zelda because obviously like open World stuff and the 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 can strain you a little bit more Zelda says here's the whole thing and you are constrained by the actual um 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 because it truly is yes what about I mean I just like asking about some open world uh a very different one is the world of either Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption both love I would put GTA 3 Grand Theft Auto 3 up there with the landmark kind of Usher in the open world when that comes out on the PlayStation 2. even though there was GTA one and two this was an all new thing with the mobster storytelling uh 3D version I guess it was it was then Vice City is kind of a fast follow which uh could be my favorite one um I loved all the Grand Theft Auto I think they're really phenomenally well made games same with red dead I think Red Dead Redemption one could be my favorite story like it highly recommend finishing that game so you like both the story you like the grittiness of that because they have they have a bit of the like I guess if you like to fall Fallout there's the humor the I don't know I don't know what it is it's the light-hearted humor of it but also the brutality of human nature is in there too but it's like uh and also some of the fun they create with the music when you drive and stuff like that they create they create a world there's a tone there's a very strong there's a very strong tone um you know the satire on the world is just so well done the gameplay is great um I think they've just done a a phenomenal job is there any others that pop to mine portal portal yeah that's that's another weird creation I could just sit here and list games forever well first of all I'm enjoying this hearthstone's a game I love I love all time like sports college football NCAA Football was my favorite it's like I would say this is a great role oh you would actually keep getting a rule it's a role-playing game because I have all these characters I have like you know 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 the series and I know the folks at EA and they will say I have bugged them when is this going they're doing it so it's finally coming back nice what would you say is the is the is the greatest sports game of all time hmm well it's NCAA football you have to pick the year versus Madden oh yeah yeah but there's more teams you get to College you know fight songs there's more pageantry and the players turn over they're only there for Four Seasons so you have to the the the so you know it's that 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 if you like European football soccer Fifa is 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 re like we're racing games Forza put up there I love Forza um play them all when you are 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 that's a really difficult task when people know how it should work then you're going to balance it for single player the multiplayer parts of it um they get very very competitive and you know in many respects you're forced to put out a new version every year and I say forced in quotes because they're you know you count them as big updates but it's a very it's a much more difficult development process than I think um 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's been years where it feels like less was done and more was done but I I enjoy it every year yeah yeah uh what is a perfectly productive day in the life of Todd Howard look like so uh maybe not perfectly but just like a perfectly average productive thing uh what what are you a morning person evening person is it chaos is it pretty regular uh I'm in a good I'm on a good flow right now I'm still doing a lot of stuff so there's things I'm like executive producing and then you know Starfield I'm directing so I sort of view that as that's an everyday thing um fortunately I get to do a lot of stuff from look at the TV show we're making and um this Indiana Jones game that's being developed at machine games we have to look at that um but you know the best really day or before I feel is fulfilling is um get to play some of a game the game will say star field 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 what's the Real Player experience we want what are all the pieces in front of us where you you know the actual tangible pieces as opposed to the beginning the pie and 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 because 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 at the end of the day like now that feels great so brainstorming about specific big picture both big picture and and very specific detail of a game that's not working something's not working you want to fix it that kind of stuff because you feel like okay you've made tangible progress on the actual build of the game it was 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 the above artists voice over so internal to the studio it's you know a lot of programming a lot of art you have design which breaks into some you know Quest design writing systems design who are like doing all the treasure and the loot and the syst and the skill systems yeah 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 um I can't remember if I mentioned art a lot of artists um QA staff as well they're hugely valuable in saying hey we broke your game in these magical ways what are you gonna do about it is the loot design team still hiring how do I apply it seems like the most tough always I mean that all of this seems like a super fun it is you know what it's the best then you have audio um and it it by far is is the greatest job you could possibly have and so if you're into like technology it's great if you're in the storytelling and creativity and art it's great and it's really the gaming you know the combination of that and like like I mentioned to you offline I think of video games I mean to me he's brought thousands of hours of happiness and so when you're designing the game whatever you're doing you have a part to playing a thing that's going to bring like Millions hundreds of millions of Hours of Happiness to people and you know crazy right it is and I'm gonna I'm gonna play play you saying that back to our team because 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 um like I would notice things in the video game and it's like huh okay like there's a if it feels good but you don't get that signal it the the creator doesn't get that signal I wish they did um I guess you could get that signal by you know why is Lex stuck in this room like digging through the loop we do get we do now get a lot of good data on what the players are doing enjoying a knot well we 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 um we can tell for some data where people are dropping off or having a you know 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 uh longing loneliness with stuff all the above yeah of course the big one I like to say is the video games give you is pride outside of other you know if you watch movies or things like that like yeah but you never think like look what I did yeah 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 uh that I've played and when we get to see a player feel that um it's really really special the other one is there is a you know there is an escape or to be someone else that's more powerful in what in our games that you are in real life that gives you a confidence or a perspective um we're doing one next week but we've done a number of Make-a-Wish visits kids who could wish for anything and they want to come and I want to see the next game and meet the creators and see how you do it and they come with their family um 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 would into it and it's just that to me is like been been involved with that foundation for a number of years and it's been really good you know reminder of how lucky we are and in general for young people that sense of accomplishment is hard to find I mean yeah where they they don't not everybody has it in the outlets that real life provides well that's the thing I mean the world is cruel to when you're young nobody takes you seriously you don't get like that's why you everybody always wants to grow up and get all the scripts as possible it's the hardest it's hard and then video games allow you I mean to build that sense of confidence a sense of Pride and something that's why when people talk uh down to video games like it's a culture and so on I it's it's not it misses out on that really deeply meaningful thing especially with like single player there's some darker aspects to multiplayer that people create communities and you know it can it can go off the rails a bit but the actual experience of the game um especially one we used to stick with for a while that's that's really beautiful um do you have uh advice for those same Young Folks given that your life is an interesting one given what kind of degree you got end up being a Legendary game designer do you have advice for young folks in high school maybe College I don't have a career or a life they can be proud of well you have to find something that you love so much that uh 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 uh foreign will come it won't be a straight path and do not ever underestimate yourself it's going to 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 going to be resilient and 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 want to do when you do it for other reasons I just don't think it's going to work out the same did you have low points uh in your life dark points or your mind went to a dark place whether it's uh struggling to get a job and uh but does the soft works or maybe with the Red Guard flop or uh 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 it's 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 you know when I started Bethesda I don't know my father had moved near nearby to the office I I was moving and uh you know I slept on his 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 want to do um when the company almost went out of business it was well I hope it doesn't I feel somewhat responsible but hey let's okay that's a Learning lesson let's go I think I was pretty resilient to it all fallout 76 like really bad launch and okay what do we do wrong what can we learn let's go at it now it's a now it's a success but those kind of ups and downs for the length of developments that we have you know people don't see them but we have them you know all the time and so it's that sort of belief that you know with the team having done it time and time again to know that now we're gonna 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 you know 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 uh on Fallout with Amazon what's that like worlds that you created in the digital realm becoming going on the screen yeah people asked you know I can remember 10 years ago after Fallout 3 was a hit you know the movie Producers coming and hey we think this would make a great movie and taking a lot of meetings and I think every you know most people would jump at that like sweet and I sort of paused and like I don't know what is this gonna do I felt like they're like synthesizing about great people like well-known creatives like you know it's gonna get synthesized into this two-hour I don't know I'm not I'm not seeing the great thing here yet so you know I think the Advent of television in terms of what it's become you know in nowadays with big budget TV series it kind of came up again and met with people and uh Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy who do Westworld and I always love the work he did uh writing Interstellar and the dark movies I just Nolan's involved with this yeah he's the yeah he's the he's the EP and he's big director incredible yeah and uh he he's the ep's directed the first few episodes um and and when I connected with him uh Jonah was like Hey you know you're my you're the person I want to do this so I met with people kept saying like you know just let me see if he wants to do it and I was to my joy he was like oh yeah fall three is one of my yeah sign me up there was like no how do we get this done and at that time he was sort of he was at HBO and it was you know we were trying to figure out it was put a little pause on it um and uh you know got to visit the sets reading scripts and things like that it's all new to me um 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 cute I've never made a TV show you know those are all the best you know no one ever does it uh wanting it to not be great but they've just done their attention to detail and obsessed there's obsessive with what's on the screen and the storytelling and how it looks the whole the whole thing yeah I think obsession is really uh a prerequisite for greatness what they did uh HBO did with Chernobyl like the attention and he's doing uh The Last of Us now that showrunner if you really care and you really put a lot of effort into the details I was stunned that they I mean I don't want to spoil but when people see it I think you'll just be like wow it's the um the other thing we're approaching it is very different where when it was people would say want to make a movie they wanted to you know tell the story of Fallout 3 or then tell the story of Fallout 4. and for this it was hey let's do something that exists in the world of Fallout it's not retelling a game story it's basically you know an area of the map and like let's tell a story here that fits in the world that we have built doesn't you know break any of the rules um Can reference things in the games but isn't a retelling of the games it 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 um can watch the series and so yeah there's some similarities or interesting differences between the creation of a game and a TV show they notice from the sort of story perspective well for them you know it's much more character driven like you can do all these things with the world and stuff that we already have um it's the main characters who they are what their motivations are that really is the engine right there's no uh finding the right actors to do those yeah because you're not there's no interaction there's no um you don't get to enter that world they have to do the work for you the NPCs are on the show yeah I can't wait to see how it turns out you also mentioned Indiana Jones that's a weird that's a different one how do you work with a like a with a famous protagonist like uh when the character is known how do you work with that well it's different it's different like Indiana Jones is different where like the name he it is the the kids Indiana Jones not a world it's him right you can talk about the world video Jones but at the end of the day it's about this character um and Raiders still my favorite movie of all time no debate it's the best movie ever um best movie ever ever on a tangent what do you love about it uh well you know I saw it obviously when I was younger and I believed it I believe this happened and when they found the ark I literally I 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 um love the character love the story um the opening is the greatest movie opening ever and I just love everything I love everything about it what was the opening is this one what it's the temple and then the ball rolls and tries to crush him oh that's the that's the opening of Raiders yeah he steals the I think you're uh you're deeply fantastic what's the opening of Raiders um so I've always wanted to it's one of those things like what's on your bucket list like I want to make an Indiana Jones game and I had pitched Lucas I met some people there and pitched them back in 09 this Indiana Jones game concept and they wanted to publish kind of the deal fell apart they wanted to publish it and we were a publisher and so we we didn't do it and I didn't really have the team to do it I just was going to figure that out after we agreed to a deal and well you know we made Skyrim so it worked out and then you know fast forward uh 10 years plus and uh you know 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 ah I have this idea that I pitched a long time ago and they loved it and again the internal team that I had not only didn't have the time they probably weren't as good a fit as machine games who's done the Wolfenstein series who is the perfect fit for this game with storytelling and how they record it and they are it's awesome they're just doing an incredible job uh with that game that's people are going to be uh if you like Indiana Jones it is it is a definite Love Letter to Indiana Jones and everything with it can you say if it's a little 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 um it does a lot of different things that you know weave myself and and yurich and the folks in machine games have wanted to to do in a game so it's it's a it's a unique thing before I forget who do I um how many humans do I have to kill I mean dragons to have to kill to get myself somehow into uh Elder Scrolls six it's a mod if anyone wants to create mods of me and is that is that possible yeah it has possible uh while maintaining realism somehow if you don't want you don't want a person in a suit and tie it doesn't make you put you in both put you in Fallout you can wear that yeah please put me so follows there's also culture of uh 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 um what's the programming language for mods is it mostly their use our internal scripting language that's built into the tool okay I'm almost afraid to explore that world because you will never never turn back how long you've created so so many incredible games is there uh what does the future hold do you is there so so going through this process do you still have the energy the passion the drive I keep creating I cannot imagine doing anything else um I'd like to do it as long as possible I will say though as I've done it um you know soon it'll be 30 years at Bethesda I've learned that to appreciate the developments a little bit more you know that the the time it takes I should re I should prioritize all of us enjoying the development process more than I did in the past it was like you know just wanted to the end of this all that mattered yeah um and the more you do it you realize no I'm I'm spending the majority of my life in in Tamriel and the Wasteland and Fallout so you know 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 like you said at this point 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 you know whatever people do you're gonna have harder times and sometimes people would say you know be out of you know 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 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 big asking big questions of why am I here I feel like that's good practice for answering the same question for this video game we're in what do you think is the meaning of life Todd Howard that's a very I can say what motivates me that's a good start having a curiosity you know the ability to not assume a lot and be curious about the world around you it's it's more it's you know 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 um so that curiosity is just is about I I'm noticing the the world noticing the world around you yeah look there's someone just an anecdote someone says uh 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 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 like really enjoy them it takes time so like Skyrim had its 10th anniversary and so when I went back into it I think I got to see it for what it is my younger son got really into it if you know a few years back on the switch that's what we noticed people age up into it right so when there's so popular is you know some people come into you know they're now becoming you know teenagers and oh okay I'll finally play Skyrim and uh you know he got obsessed with it not and he wasn't usually I say hey check out my games ah shut up Dad we don't we're playing this other stuff um and he got like obsessed with Skyrim like we're having like deep Elder Scrolls lore conversations at dinner um and you know 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 yeah and then I kind of when the 10th anniversary came out like oh I'm gonna I'm gonna check out a bill I have to check at the build out but I hadn't played it in so long and it was like it does it has this flow we're like oh my God I just played for four hours I need to I need to turn it off uh yeah I mean there's something about enjoying enjoy video games of the people you love too or the the 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 I want to know when to have them so that when they're old enough that's exactly when Elder Scrolls 6 comes out I wanna can you give me a hand when I should have kids all right never mind you are a genius yeah how to ask that question the number of times uh yeah you told anecdote that your that your son asked you the same question um but but of course it's all for good fun uh take as much time as is needed it's uh Skyrim is still an incredible game it has an impact on millions of people's as as do all of your games it's uh thank you for everything you've done for the world thank you it's a huge honest you will talk with me there it's this has been an honor and uh you know it has to be said like it's I have a huge team of people I've worked with for some of them for 20 years um and um 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 uh silly kids like me and uh millions of silly kids like me so I really appreciate everything thank you thanks Dad 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 come snow after fire and even dragons have their end thank you for listening and hope to see you next time