Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield

Lex Fridman Podcast #342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. 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 Six, 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. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Shopify for e commerce, Asleep for napping, Inside Tracker for bio monitoring, and Element for salty greatness. Jew wisely, my friends. 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For all the crazy exercise and mental and physical stuff I do, diet stuff I do, it's just really important to make sure your electrolytes are done correctly. Get a simple pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement dot com slash lex. This is the 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 game? How can a video game character escape to outside the video game? Are these things you don't consider when you design the game? Actually, we do 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 anticipate you piling all those crates up and getting over a wall. That they didn't expect. Right, so it's not a designed doorway out. It's a accidental unintended doorway out, and it's a it's a happy bug. You could like Truman show, just get in the ocean and go totally. Just keep going, 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 pin them in. Usually we leave like this developer test cell area in the game that we don't anticipate anyone will find, and and they ultimately find it. Usually has crates of all the weapons in the game and things like that. The little hints you drop now will just drive people mad, which is something I enjoy deeply. So Skyrim NPCs have at times hilarious dialogue. What does it take to build a good NPC dialogue? The main thing is to make them reactive. A lot of times when you write characters for movies or things like that, you want to make that character interesting for themselves, right? What's their story. And there are 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, 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 Carl's 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 it would land? There's a slight snarkiness in that particular read of it, and you're asking her to do something and. She's reacting to you. 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, think of as a small state machine that just says okay. This is what's happening. Here's a random list of things I could say to that, and then some of that plays out in ways you don't anticipate. But we look at the things. What are the players doing that we could have the characters respond to that they don't expect? You know jumping on tables or stealing stuff or. 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 the people manager. Right, right. Nice. One of the things that makes what we do particularly unique is, and this is a trade off for what people are seeing because a lot of it's not on the screen but we're using cycles to run this which is. We're thinking about everybody in the whole world all the time. The ones that are further away at a much less tick rate they go into low but we know if they want to walk across the world and we're running every quest. At the same time, whereas in other open world games you start an activity, the rest of the world is going to shut down, so that they can really make that as impactful. We're I really prefer that the rest of it's going on. It's more of a simulation that we're building. So when those things collide, that's where it gets the most interesting. And so we'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 they were 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 and the whole world rotates around you as it does in normal life like when we walk around there's a. When you forget yourself, you start to take yourself very seriously. Like you are the center of the world, you forget that there's 8 billion people on Earth and you forget they have lives. That's actually a sobering realization that they all have really interesting life stories and they have their worries they suffer in different. Complicated ways, and yet when you play a role playing game, there's a you 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, our level designers did this. How do they build Disney World in these places? So it still exists. For you, the player, so it is fairly you know when you're going to come in, this is what you're going to see, the shops are in the front, you're going to do this. It's just for us to make it far more believable and get some more emergent behavior. That not just make that sort of the versimilitude 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, you know, 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 bustling that they feel rooted in it. They don't feel like a storefront for come here, do quests, get experience. Is that one of the essential components of randomly generated worlds? So when I think back to Daggerfall as gigantic world, when I first played it, I thought like. I mean, you're just struck by the the the immensity of it. Right, the immensity of the possibility when you were young and you look into your future. It's it's wide open, you can do anything, and that's what 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 wander outside the city, we're going to be generating things and you kind of get used to that game flow different than we've done before and. Fun in a different kind of way. 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. 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 to anecdotal experience, but I just remember it feeling wide open. Daggerfall. It definitely was in 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, and it's very very elegant. If you look at the first one where it's just an XP based system, do this get XP level up. Very classic role playing game. Daggerfall digs deep into who's your character, how you're going to develop it, what are your skills, there's advantages, there's disadvantages, and the environment going full 3D. From Arena, which is actually like a two and a half D Doom style engine, that I agree with you that Daggerfall feels like there's more possibilities when you're playing it. Were you able to like look up the sky in Daggerfall? Yep, my memory. So that's what full 3D means, and then you can go outside the city. You can walk outside the city. You can do that in Arena too, but it looks more fakie, right? It's all going to be a flat plane. Here comes things and then a dungeon entrance is a you know eight bit. Here comes a little flat coming at the camera. So before we go to the end, in the middle, so from Starfield to Fallout and the Elder Scrolls series, let's go to the very beginning. What's the origin story? You know what? Let's even go before then. What's 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. 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 eighty 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, it's like I need to figure out how to make this stuff. And so I was a you know self taught programmer and my whole goal. Was to write my own video games, and you know by sixth seventh grade I had written my own much better Star Trek clone for the Apple two. And I really enjoyed programming on the Apple two 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 ten or twelve. 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 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 are playing Dungeons and Dragons at the time too where you. You really feel even pen and paper these are like like they feel somewhat in quotes real to you as you are playing them you are very invested in your character and what you are doing. And then I loved the games the wizardry in Ultima that were able to bring that to a computer so I could you know do it on my own time it was very very. Real to me I'd sit in my bedroom and then go to bed and think about it and then oh no I have to go to school I want to come home and figure out how to how to do this problem in the game. And so whatever I was creating was something that I was excited about at the time. I made Raiders of the Lost Ark game. Like with graphics and everything. Yeah so it was usually you know made a Miami Vice game made a Gru 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 two of pulling it off graphically whether that was editing character sets to get graphics in different formats. Or how can I enable the secret double high res mode it had or just things like that where it became kind of this limitless what can I make this do and I had some friends who were doing the same thing and then you get into who can impress each other and I was kind of middle of the pack I would say. And then but but again this was the time where they're bringing computers into the school and the apples come into the school and the teachers. Are learning it because they have to teach the students but then I was I would say was part of a group of students that were like way past that. Um and it was very much of a self taught. You know how how do you make this thing dance. I'd like to ask a strange question so at that time a lot of people consider you one of if not the greatest game designer creator of all time. You were middle of the pack then. Did you have a sense that this would be your life and you would also be creating you know the greatest games ever. Not not in the slightest. 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. The even the computer classes then weren't where I wanted them to be so I still kind of doing my own stuff. And I ended up getting a business degree and then interviewing for some jobs like finance jobs. Well I guess I should do this to make money and I can keep doing this on the side and I remember I actually got to like the final level of like this corporate finance job at Circuit City. Nice and they turned me down. And I was like fuck them I'm just going to go make video games. So thank you Circuit City. Yeah I remember Circuit City. 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 Bethesda softworks at the time. So I had gotten Wayne Gretzky hockey three for Christmas from my girlfriend at the time who was 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 I was at this point committed like this is what I want to do so I'm just going to drive by and knock on the door. Which is what I did so I I drove by and knocked on the doors Martin Luther King Day ninety three. And someone came out and met me and said well maybe what and I said well I'm a 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 out of school. Down in that area Williamsburg and still would contact Bethesda Arena had just come out. So then we're a ninety four Arena had just come out and I loved it so I was in a sports games I like the hockey stuff they were doing a basketball they did a basketball game. Yeah I'm just looking at they did a lot of they did like six sports games six Bethesda ten games six of them sports games. And NCAA basketball hockey league simulator simulator yeah. So it was really like sports gridiron which is like the first kind of physics based football game at the time. And there's a famous story with Electronic Arts trying to do Madden and then hiring Bethesda before my time to make Madden because they were struggling. Um when I started at Bethesda I remember the owner had John Madden's Oakland Raiders playbook. Nice in his office like who can I see that. Um and I love sports right so I still play Madden to this day I love it. So there's an alternate reality where. I made sports games yeah yeah absolutely. 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 is fundamentally different. We sure. No like source of happiness entertainment storytelling. World gaming than than Madden I mean it 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. So I think all those things have validity and actually one of the first things I worked on when I started Bethesda was. NCAA basketball rode to the final four too. So that was kind of an external project 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 and they're doing sports like this I have to work here. So started there and you loved. I loved it yeah so when I came in. It had just come out and they were doing the CD ROM version so CD ROMs aren't even out yet. Oh used to be floppy disks that's probably one of what was a we would burn them in the basement we had the disk replicators. Right so Arena was not released on floppy it was 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 we're making so you know if you want to do a big huge game like well that's just too many disks 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. So that that was of course attained. Legally as one does alternate means. By alternate means right on floppy on floppy disks and that was 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. 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 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. Was Arena yeah. I think Daggerfall is what I really kind of really played. Especially because like you said the character development was really rich but just like. That you can be feel like you travel to this whole other world that's less about entertainment like a shooting game. Right and more about a world it felt like it's a world like like a 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 adventure adventure game so. So you joined you made it. What did you work on first there. I worked well everyone did a bunch of stuff so I worked on the basketball game really just to get it out the door and Terminator Future Shock so we were doing Future Shock and Daggerfall at the same time. They were developing a new engine so it was one of the first three D engines the X engine there were 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 well look this is not big this is not a big company maybe there's twenty 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 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. 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. Instanted objects all over it and that is still a lot of how we build our worlds. What's an instanted object. It's you know some games every. 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 allows you to build a bigger world much faster and not. You know not every single version of that building isn't its own unique architecture that is going to take up memory and processing speed etc etc. So you're there very much feeling the computational constraints of the system when you're creating these open. 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. Three D 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 wall like it's a ton of work. But you can pretty much do what you want now if you want to put the time in whereas then okay you can't do everything you want. So pick your battles really carefully and. Technically you couldn't do what you want if that makes sense. How much trade off is there now in 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. 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 thirty frames a second as long as it looks really good and the simulation's running and all of those things so we'll we'll sacrifice some of that fidelity for the player experience in in 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 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 the outdoor scenery so what does it take to create the feeling especially of that. Being outdoors of nature and just like lost in the beauty whatever it is when you go hiking and you feel the awe of it how do you create that awe is that graphics what is that. It's a lot of graphics it's a lot of mood we just talk about it in terms of tone and those are again going back to my previous comment. The graphics are very very important to us because and we always push them. Because when you're doing the kind of things we do where you step into a virtual world it does have to have that moment of wow. This 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 it feels as incredible as going hiking or something something like that but in another a totally different place like an like. Iceland or something like that this this this whole other surreal ethereal place it's yeah it's incredible how you kind of create that so graphics is a part of that but also letting it. The temporal aspect of that like the wind the the rustling sound and look and all of that. The soundscape is really really important and the sky we spend a lot of time on the sky 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 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 you take Skyrim and Oblivion and the fallouts of that three sixty 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 a Thorian 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, um fantastical things at least at the start. And then they they kind of build so even when we do Starfield, it's a science fiction game there are laser guns and spaceships that fly around shoot each other and blah blah blah blah 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 are developing Fallout content. So just to linger on this, so tone starts at or defining the tone starts at creating a realistic experience like you feel like I could walk into this. And this feels like life. What's their technology level like even for a fantasy world like is magic how prevalent is it or are they making weapons and things and armor? Is it for utility? Is it for decoration? How do they live their lives? Does this feel like a place that you believe that has some grounding in our reality whether that's historical or near future or that it's grounded in some 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 its 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, you look just beyond it there. 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? It's a great question. The. It's a ridiculous question but yeah I just love dragons I