#342 – Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield

Todd Howard is a legendary video game designer at Bethesda Game Studios. He led the development of the Elder Scrolls series and the Fallout series, and an upcoming game Starfield. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get free trial – Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings – InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off – LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free sample pack EPISODE LINKS: Bethesda: https://bethesda.net Bethesda Game Studios: https://bethesdagamestudios.com Creation Club: https://creationclub.bethesda.net PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (05:53) – Simulation (07:49) – NPCs (16:40) – Daggerfall and Arena (24:53) – Bethesda (33:18) – Video game graphics (39:37) – The essence of a video game (44:25) – Redguard (49:25) – Creating open worlds (57:04) – Superintelligent NPCs (1:01:58) – Starfield (1:21:40) – The Elder Scrolls 6 (1:41:01) – Fallout (1:48:09) – Character creation (1:53:11) – Quests & items (2:06:57) – Xbox (2:12:22) – Greatest game of all time (2:22:38) – Day in the life (2:30:32) – Advice for young people (2:34:00) – Fallout TV show (2:38:32) – Indiana Jones game (2:44:44) – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  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. 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.

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  We've got Shopify for e-commerce, Aesleep for napping, InsideTracker for bio-monitoring, and Element for salty greatness. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. Never any ads in the middle. I hate those. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell, anywhere, anything, whatever they enjoy making, whatever they enjoy selling. It makes it easy to reach a huge audience. The whole thing looks super sexy. It's a great-looking online store. And it allows you to take your idea, convert it into a product,

• 1:26Lex Fridman?

  and hopefully spread joy to other people who want to buy that product. And it gives you tools to do day-to-day management of that selling of the product. I've been asked a bunch of times to do merch. Man, there's so much cool stuff because I'm a fan of merch myself. Like, when I'm a fan, I'm a fan of a lot of podcasts, a lot of shows, a lot of people. I just like wearing things that I'm a fan of. It's a kind of cool celebration of a beautiful thing. I just, in general, like celebrating others, and merch is one of the ways to do that. Anyway, get a free trial and full access to Shopify's entire suite of features when you sign up at Shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase Shopify.

• 2:11Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its new Pod 3 mattress. There are very few things in life I enjoy as much as a nap. I am ultra caffeinated at the moment, but shortly, or rather shortly into the past, whatever the expression for that is. English is in fact my second language. I took a nap recently, I guess, shortly into the past, into the recent past, I took a nap that was about 20 minutes, I want to say, and I woke up completely refreshed. I think there's probably a really good science on that of just napping. Is there a book, not on sleep, but specifically on napping, on mastering napping, Master Napper?

• 2:55Lex Fridman?

  If there isn't a book, I'm gonna write one. It will forever be remembered and it'll be a short one. I really enjoy napping and my favorite thing to nap on is an Eight Sleep bed because it cools it down with a warm blanket and it's just, it's heaven. Check it out and get special holiday savings of up to $400 when you go to asleep.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data that comes from my own body and gives me wisdom that only large scale raw data can provide. The signal that's pulled off from that data using machine learning algorithms. And we're talking about blood data, DNA data, fitness tracker data,

• 3:39Lex Fridman?

  all kinds of data. I'm actually going to a Neuralink event very shortly. And that event is about extracting data from your mind. Long-term vision of brain-computer interfaces, two-way communication between computers, maybe artificial intelligence-enhanced computers and the human mind. That data is extremely powerful to tell you what's going on in your mind and your body. And I think InsideTracker is at the cutting edge of what can actually lead to positive lifestyle changes using that data coming from the person, personalized to that person. All right, get 200 bucks off InsideTracker's Ultimate Plan

• 4:19Lex Fridman?

  or 34% off the entire store when you go to insidetracker.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element Electrolyte Drink Mix, spelled L-M-N-T. I drink a lot of Element. There's some guest that was on recently.

• 4:41Lex Fridman?

  I might have been Grimes or Liv, I'm not sure exactly. But they said they're a huge fan of Element. Who was it? But they said, um, we had like a debate about favorite flavors and went to drink and how much to drink. And they discovered that I drink like way too much Element. From their perspective, from my perspective, never enough. So it makes me feel great in terms of diet. It makes sure that I get enough hydration, it makes water taste great. 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.

• 5:23Lex Fridman?

  Try it at drinkelement.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now to your friends, here's Todd Howard.

• 5:53Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:57Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  You could like Truman Show, just get in the ocean and go to.

• 7:10Lex Fridman?

  Just keep going, keep going.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:12Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  And then as we do it, we learn they're gonna find a way. So just don't try to pen them in. Usually we leave like this developer test cell.

• 7:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:44Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 7:59Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:57Lex Fridman?

  Why does it land? What do you, what do you, and did you anticipate it would land?

• 9:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:12Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 9:27Speaker 01

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

• 9:37Speaker 01

  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, um, you know, sneaking in in the middle of the night or those kinds of things. The more that we can do, the more reactive and interesting the characters appear.

• 10:09Lex Fridman?

  And these state machines, how big are these things? Are these individual to the individual characters? It's just fascinating how you design state machines. Is it just a, just a giant?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  I would think of the AI as one big one. Yeah.

• 10:25Lex Fridman?

  Oh.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  For, for sort of everybody.

• 10:29Lex Fridman?

  So there's an AI.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  There's a manager for all the people.

• 10:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  And one of the things that-

• 10:34Lex Fridman?

  People manager.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 10:37Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  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's 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.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:40Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's really fascinating. It's something that people had, they were wondering about to what degree it's possible to run the world without you. So there is a feeling to role playing games that you're the central, you're 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 eight billion people on earth and you forget that they have lives. It's actually a sobering realization that they all have really interesting life stories and they have their worries, they suffer in different, complicated ways.

• 12:23Lex Fridman?

  And yet, when you play a role playing game, there's a, I mean, both computationally and 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?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  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 verisimilitude of what you're in for that moment. But you you buy it all. I always say like, you know, we gotta do the little things so

• 13:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:49Lex Fridman?

  Okay, but still you're simulating stuff that's close to you. It is a bit of a simulation going on.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Yes.

• 13:57Lex Fridman?

  And so that creates some interesting dynamics, then.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  And the stuff that we're looking at in the future, you know, our plan is to push that even more to think about how these things exist in the world first. And we do some of this, but even more so in the future to say, how do these things exist? Take like a faction in the world. What is their role in the world as opposed to just their role is for the player to join it, go through a bunch of quests and become the head of the faction. You know, think a little bit deeper about the simulation and what would the mages guild be doing in a fantasy world? Or the fighters guild be doing in a fantasy world versus just sign up, do quests, get gold?

• 14:44Lex Fridman?

  And so that when you show up to that mages guild, it's a bustling guild full of stuff going on.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  It's not just that it's bustling, it's that they feel rooted in it. They don't feel like a storefront for come here, do quests, get experience.

• 15:00Lex Fridman?

  Is that one of the essential components of randomly generated worlds? So when I think back to Daggerfall, it's gigantic world. When I first played it, I thought like, I mean, you're just struck by the the the immensity of it.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:17Lex Fridman?

  The the immensity of the possibility. When you're young and you look into your future, it's it's wide open and you could do anything. And that's what Daggerfall felt like. The openness was gigantic.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Daggerfall is interesting, coming off Arena, where Arena does the same thing, but Daggerfall in many ways is bigger, despite focusing on an area because of how the density of, okay, this is how much physical game space 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.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:40Lex Fridman?

  We'll talk about Starfield. So just for people who don't know, and how dare you for not knowing, but with Daggerfall, we're talking about the Elder Scrolls series that started, 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 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.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  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 Iliic Bay area. Arena does it all. It just changes the scale in terms of, you know, one block on the map equals this much space.

• 17:38Lex Fridman?

  There is something that, I mean, I'm speaking to anecdotal experience, but I just remember it feeling wide open, Daggerfall.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  It definitely was, yes.

• 17:47Lex Fridman?

  In the way Arena didn't. I don't remember. Maybe, maybe because Arena...

• 17:54Lex Fridman?

  It was so cool to have the, just the role playing game aspect. You're focused on the items and the character development.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Daggerfall has a lot more depth, particularly in the character system. That's what it introduces, all of the skills and those kinds 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 are you 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.

• 18:47Lex Fridman?

  Were you able to like look up the sky in Daggerfall?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:50Lex Fridman?

  My memories.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  It's full 3D, yeah.

• 18:52Lex Fridman?

  So that's what full 3D means? And then you can go outside the city?

• 18:56Speaker 01

  You can walk outside the city. 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, eight bit. Here comes a little flat coming at the camera.

• 19:06Lex Fridman?

  So before we go to the end, uh, 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, uh, when's the first time you remember the thing that made you fall in love with video games?

• 19:28Speaker 01

  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 80 was brought into the classroom and there was a Star Trek game. And I was enamored with it.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  And they were gonna 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, uh, you know, by sixth, seventh grade, I had written my own much better Star Trek clone.

• 20:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, of course.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Apple II. And 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 what 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.

• 21:11Lex Fridman?

  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 the 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?

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Well, it was a way of experiencing things that I couldn't myself. So, you know, if you're playing Dungeons and Dragons at the time too, where you, uh, you really feel, even pen and paper, these are like, they, 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. 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.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  And so whatever I was creating was something that I was excited about at the time. I made Raiders of the Lost Ark games.

• 22:24Lex Fridman?

  Like with graphics and everything?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was usually, you know, made a Miami Vice game, made a Gru the Wanderer game, made a Traveler game. I made, 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 for, just things like that where it became kind of this limitless, what can I make this do? And I had some friends who were doing the same thing, and then you get into who can impress each other. And I was kind of middle of the pack, I would say. And that, but again, this was the time where they're bringing computers into the school

• 23:09Speaker 01

  and the Apples come into the school and the teachers are learning it because they have to teach the students. But then I was, I would say I was part of a group of students that were like way past that. And it was very much of a self-taught, you know, how do you make this thing dance?

• 23:28Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 23:52Speaker 01

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

• 24:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:37Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  And they turned me down. And I was like, fuck them. I'm just gonna go make video games. So, thank you, Circuit City.

• 24:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I remember Circuit City. I think they went bankrupt, actually.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Well, they were based in Richmond. I was going to school close to there and so.

• 24:53Lex Fridman?

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

• 25:00Speaker 01

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

• 25:12Speaker 01

  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 gonna drive by and knock on the door, which is what I did. So I drove by and knocked on the doors, Martin Luther King Day, 93. And someone came out and met me and said, well, maybe, and I said, well, I'm in college. I'm talking about when I'm out of school. Like, okay, well, contact us then. And I will say I was, I was, I would contact them every once in a while.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  I did work for a small software company right out of school, down in that area of Williamsburg, and still would contact Bethesda. Arena had just come out. So then we're in 94, Arena had just come out and I loved it. So I was into sports games. I liked the hockey stuff. They were doing a basketball, they did a basketball game.

• 26:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'm just looking at, they did a lot of, they did like six sports games, six, Bethesda, at least 10 games, six of them sports games and NCAA basketball, Hockey League Simulator.

• 26:30Speaker 01

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

• 26:54Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  In his office, like, oh, can I see that? And I love sports, right? So I still play Madden to this day. I love it.

• 27:00Lex Fridman?

  So there's an alternate reality where.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  I made sports games?

• 27:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  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 of type of music, like you don't play every type.

• 27:14Lex Fridman?

  But I think of open worlds as fundamentally different.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Well, sure.

• 27:19Lex Fridman?

  No, like source of happiness, entertainments, storytelling, world, gaming than than Madden. I mean, it just, because I love both. I love both worlds, but.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  So I think all those things have validity. And actually, one of the first things I worked on when I started at Bethesda was NCAA basketball, rode to the final four, two. 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.

• 28:22Lex Fridman?

  You loved.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:33Lex Fridman?

  Oh, it used to be floppy disks. That's probably one of, what was the.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  We would burn them in the basement. We had the disk replicators.

• 28:41Lex Fridman?

  Right, so Arena was not released on floppy.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  It was, yeah, it's, I believe it's six floppy disks.

• 28:50Lex Fridman?

  Six floppy disks.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Maybe it was eight.

• 28:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  But in those days, the number of floppy disks was very, very important to what

• 29:00Speaker 01

  the money you were making. So, you know, if you wanted 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.

• 29:15Lex Fridman?

  By the way, I played Arena.

• 29:21Lex Fridman?

  So that, that was, of course, attained

• 29:27Lex Fridman?

  legally, as one does.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Alternate means?

• 29:29Lex Fridman?

  By alternate means.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:31Lex Fridman?

  On floppy, on floppy disks. And that was, um, that was such an incredible, as, 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 escaped 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, 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.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Was Arena?

• 30:09Lex Fridman?

  It was Arena, yeah. I, I think Daggerfall is what I really, kinda, really played.

• 30:16Lex Fridman?

  Especially because, like you said, the character development was really rich, but just like that you can be, feel like you've traveled to this whole other world. That's less about entertainment, like a shooting game.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:29Lex Fridman?

  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 adventure game, so.

• 30:49Lex Fridman?

  So you joined, you made it.

• 30:54Lex Fridman?

  What did you work on first there?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  I worked, well, everyone did a bunch of stuff, so I worked on the basketball game, really just to get it out the door. And Terminator: Future Shock. So we were doing Future Shock and Daggerfall at the same time. They were developing a new engine, so it was one of the first 3D engines, the X-Engine. There were a bunch of guys from Denmark, actually. There was a big Danish demo scene in those days in the PC. And so, a bunch of the top programmers there, "Well, look, this is not big. This is not a big company. Maybe there's 20 people in development." And we were doing both Daggerfall and the new Terminator. And so Daggerfall was a bit more, again, behind the Terminator game.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  So I was one of the main people on the Terminator team. And, I don't know, things kind of worked out. I very quickly, I don't know why, like, I quickly became the producer and I was making levels and doing all these things. And it was awesome. And 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.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:43Lex Fridman?

  What's an instanced object?

• 32:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:02Lex Fridman?

  So that allows you to build a bigger world.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  It allows you to build a bigger world much faster and not, 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, et cetera, et cetera.

• 33:17Lex Fridman?

  So you're there very much feeling the computational constraints of the system when you're creating these open worlds.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  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 might 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.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:33Lex Fridman?

  How much trade off is there now in how much effort you put into

• 34:40Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  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...

• 35:12Speaker 01

  You know, traditionally, our games are, you know, we're okay with 30 frames a second as long as it looks really good and the simulation's running and all of those things. So we'll sacrifice some of that fidelity for the player experience in the kind of things that I do. But from like a manpower standpoint, the graphics programmers work on graphics, the artists work on art, and we have, 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

• 35:53Speaker 01

  not, we still relatively compared to our industry and what we're doing, have smaller teams.

• 36:01Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:18Lex Fridman?

  It's the outdoor scenery. So what does it take to create the feeling, especially of that, being outdoors, of nature, and just like, lost in the beauty, whatever it is when you go hiking and you feel the awe of it? How do you create that awe? Is that graphics? What is that?

• 36:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  How does the wind sound? How are the trees moving? How are the clouds moving? 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. Then you watch like the weather roll in.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  I think that's just part of being, being that character, being that person in that space.

• 37:52Lex Fridman?

  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 I for hours walk around Skyrim. Just, and then answer questions and so on. That just feels, that's a completely stress-free environment. It's just, you are, just like you said, in this moment in time. It's so incredible. It feels as incredible as going hiking or something like that. But in another, totally different place, 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.

• 38:33Lex Fridman?

  So graphics is a part of that, but also letting it, the temporal aspect of that, like the wind, the rustling sound and look and all of that.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:57Lex Fridman?

  What about the rendering, the openness of it? Like, how do you, is that?

• 39:00Speaker 01

  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. Hard drive speed is really prioritized, like they're so blazing fast. You take Skyrim and Oblivion and the fallouts of that 360 era. It's a, and it was a lot of time spent on, how do we get all this data streaming in? As you move and then levels of detail so you can see all the way. But not, you know, crush the processor.

• 39:37Lex Fridman?

  You know what, let's even step back, because you mentioned tone, you mentioned tone a lot. What do you mean by tone?

• 39:42Speaker 01

  It's all of it together. If you look at,

• 39:47Speaker 01

  I think you can flip through, let's just take fantasy. You know, you can sort of look at a couple of images or things and know, how does Lord of the Rings different from Game of Thrones? That is different than, you know, a Thurian like Excalibur? Or your, you know, SyFy Channel,

• 40:13Speaker 01

  you know, series of the month kind of thing.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  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 Starfield, 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.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:12Lex Fridman?

  So just to linger on this, so tone starts at, or the defining the tone starts at creating a realistic experience. Like you feel like I could walk into this and this feels like life.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  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?

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Like a place that you believe that has some grounding in our reality, whether that's historical or near future, or that it's grounded in some semblance of the reality that you and I understand so that it can feel, it's also making it feel a little bit welcoming. Like, okay, I understand this.

• 42:02Lex Fridman?

  Is that art or science? So like, what, how do you know when it feels welcoming and everything fits and is grounded?

• 42:08Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, it's, I guess it's personal taste. Some people like things that are weirder, that have more fantastical from the get go. Even a game like Morrowind, where we get into some more fantastical things, it intentionally starts a little more grounded. You know, there's a very classic medieval looking town that you come into, but you look just beyond it there are mushroom trees and giant insects and things like that.

• 42:36Lex Fridman?

  So in Skyrim, when you put a dragon in it, what are your thoughts about dragons and tone? How does that fit into tone?

• 42:44Speaker 01

  That's a great question. The...

• 42:49Lex Fridman?

  It's a ridiculous question, but yeah, I just love dragons. I want to bring it up.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  No, no, no. These are the things that we debate with.

• 42:57Lex Fridman?

  Do we include a dragon? Why didn't you include a dragon in Daggerfall? That's what I want to know.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  I think there's dragon, there's dragonlings. They're hard to do. Dragons are hard to do. So when you start Skyrim and say, hey, look, you know, dragons are going to be a theme, you start visually, you think, you know, they're, you know, you can make the argument that dragons existed. Okay, what would they look like? How close to dinosaurs would they be? Or what would they? And ours are less, I believe they're less fantastical looking in general. They look like beasts that could exist in that world. And then how we introduce them, it's kind of a little bit of a slow, 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.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  It says back to you like, hey, no, these are, this is, have you heard this? Someone saw a dragon.

• 43:50Lex Fridman?

  That's what Dagofall, is there, isn't there mentions of dragons or something? Cause I remember, I remember being sure that there's dragons in Dagofall as I'm playing it and I'm searching.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Pretty sure, well.

• 44:02Lex Fridman?

  Is there a dragon in Dagofall?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  There's dragon wings in Dagofall to my memory. Look, I guess someone will probably correct me like, actually, there is a dragon here. But I'm pretty sure they're sort of, they're not. And then game I did Redguard, which we bring back a dragon, it takes place beforehand. So we have a dragon there in that game. And that was unique to that at the time.

• 44:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, just a brief tangent on that. I thought Redguard was a really, really good game. I played it as a, I mean, again, you don't, you know, you forget stuff, but I remember getting, I guess it was the first in the Elder Scrolls series to put it into that world, but it was like an adventure game. It reminded me of another game I really love, like Prince of Persia.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  That was the, one of the inspirations. Prince of Persia is one of my favorite games.

• 44:54Lex Fridman?

  Okay, I apologize if I'm forgetting, but you can like jump in buildings and stuff like there's a jumping, there's a dynamic like airy nature. Like it's a like parkour type of situation.

• 45:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it was an incredible game. Why, why do you think, let me ask sort of a dark question. Why do you think that game was a flop? One of, one of the few.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Not a dark question. It was, well, a lot of reasons.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Game, game that I love and really got us going on a handcrafted world. So we're coming off of Dagofall. Morrowind is sort of in design. And then, you know, part of our development teams broke up to do different things. The game that did Battle Spire and Redguard was my game.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  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 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. 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 predate Xbox. Right? Where it's much more like constantly Tomb Raider had come out. So you see those influences of Tomb Raider on that game. And 3D effects cards had just come out. And so, okay, we can do.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  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?

• 46:39Speaker 01

  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 a really bad shape. And I felt really, like, personally responsible. Like, they let me do this creative thing. It didn't do what we needed it to do. And now we're in a very, very bad situation. Company almost went out of business. And that's when it got reformed with Zenimax Media. And Robert Altman came in and we were starting Morrowind. We had just sort of started. And it was sort of that whole experience that made you sort of realize, someone says to you, okay, you're gonna get another shot.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  And that's where you're 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, this Daggerfall is so big. But the impact of playing it, I think, is in many ways equal, but different.

• 47:53Lex Fridman?

  Just you personally psychologically, did you have doubt about yourself from the performance of Red Guard? Like, do I even, do I know what it is?

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Of course, of course.

• 48:03Lex Fridman?

  Where do you get the, how'd you overcome that?

• 48:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:27Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Well, no, I think Red Guard's a great game.

• 48:39Lex Fridman?

  Alright, so you were sure, even if it wasn't-

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Okay, so if you're gonna debate like, do I like that game? It's about finding an, okay, so I really love Red Guard.

• 48:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  And the people who play it, it won a bunch of awards and, 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 gonna be conservative again. I'm gonna 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. We'd rather do that and land where we land than be very, very conservative in what we're putting out there.

• 49:25Lex Fridman?

  You've mentioned, just referencing this game, on Reddit AMA, that a long time ago during Red Guard, the lead programmer made me, made all the buildings hop up and down after you played for 10 minutes, just to mess with me. Just a curious tangent, what's involved with programming an open world game? So we talked about, we will talk about design and so on, but specifically the programming. Cause I think this question came from, what are some interesting sticky bugs that you've encountered throughout your life? In creating these games, and this is one of them that you mentioned. So what are some of the challenges of- Programming these open world games.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  I mean, there are different flavors of them, right? Your GTAs will have different issues than, you know, the Ubisoft games versus our games. They can sort of, you know, speak to ours, which is you want to build systems, right? Because they're going to, they're going to 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.

• 50:51Lex Fridman?

  So there's like a, what are the major systems? Is there like the physics of the game, the engine of how like stuff? Yeah, like, yeah, the physics, the motion and maybe how light is rendered and all that kind of stuff.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Right, so you have the rendering, right? Of like, okay, this is how I'm going to 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 going to give to a renderer, which is the thing, you know, that draws the pixels on the screen. So there's a, most of the engine is, 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?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  We put a big premium on the ones that can be interacted with and touched, whether it's flowers, whether the trees move, whether you can sleep on the sofa, sit in this chair, pick up all this stuff, bake bread, blah, blah, blah.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  You then have the AI, which loops in the stuff we talked about earlier in terms of processing everybody, and combat systems, which is a lot of what people end up doing. Combat systems on top of that AI. How do they react to those types of things? And then, how do they look at the things that can be interacted with? One of my favorite things is when NPCs will go pick up weapons in the world, which 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, but I love that stuff.

• 52:40Lex Fridman?

  And that's integrated into a larger system? The ability to pick up, the NPC picking up? So it's not like a little quirk that's hardcoded in? It's part of a bigger system?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  They have their own AI for scanning the environment, and that's one of the rules. Hey, is there a weapon that is better than the one I have? I'm gonna go get it. Now, we do lock off if it's in a chest, and that's treasure we left for the player. But it's in particular, because what you don't want, we actually had this problem. It started in Oblivion, I believe, which we set up a 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 all of the enemies are armed to the teeth, and there's no treasure for the player because the enemies went and took all the good weapons. And he's like, okay, they don't take those. They take the ones that are dropped by other NPCs or the player.

• 53:29Lex Fridman?

  That's such a fascinating world of designing the experience for the NPC, because in part, that experience is, defines the experience of the player. So how they interact with their environment defines how the player experiences their environment. Is there a room for further and further development of the AI that controls the NPC?

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Sure, we're always iterating on it. And again, as we look in the future...

• 54:01Speaker 01

  It's more about us finding those more reactivity to the player and also understanding their roles in the world. So they're not just there. They're not just there for the player as a signpost for the player.

• 54:17Lex Fridman?

  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 push and pull, the unpredictability. Is there something, I don't know if you've been following, but the quick, amazing development of language models, the neural network, natural language processing systems, dialogue systems. Do you think there's some possibility of using sort of these incredible neural nets that can have open-ended dialogue, basically chatbots?

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Yep, I've seen some incredible demos. I do think it's coming. I don't know when.

• 54:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  And there's a little bit of a question, like, what's ready for real deployment and release versus, hey, let's use that to generate some things that is then static that we're giving to the players versus it's generated on the fly. But it's definitely coming. It's definitely coming. And I think you'll see it in the types of games that we do. It has great, you know, application.

• 55:27Lex Fridman?

  I love the idea that you'd be using that to design different NPCs and then testing if they're, if they're good enough. If they're like a little too crazy, you don't want like the super.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  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? Is it being done on a server? Is it baked into the game? There's like different flavors of it.

• 55:57Lex Fridman?

  So there's still computational challenges, like how do you actually make that happen?

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:02Lex Fridman?

  Well, what about, oh, in terms of creating the feeling of an NPC? Oh, what's the role of voice actors?

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Awesome. Yeah, we, we work with a ton of voice actors and they bring so much to it. And, and that's the thing.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:46Lex Fridman?

  So part of the actual experience of the recording will help define the characters and the tone of the game.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  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, you're going to be someone else now. Sorry, that got cut.

• 57:04Lex Fridman?

  Do you ever try to sort of imagine that people fall in love with the characters, with the NPCs?

• 57:11Speaker 01

  I do.

• 57:13Lex Fridman?

  Like, and do they get really attached to the?

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I've done it in games.

• 57:17Lex Fridman?

  These are like close friends, right? Like you can, like you miss them.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. I 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 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,

• 58:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:09Lex Fridman?

  So that, that relationship status of it's complicated, that, that they're, they're existing in that gray area is complicated. We're not dating, we're just.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:24Lex Fridman?

  Now you're in.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  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 we've committed to each other in some way, but I just did something that really made you angry. And as opposed to just drifting out of that status, you're in a temporary, I don't like what you did state.

• 58:46Lex Fridman?

  Wow. So some greater degree of complexity in the relationship with a companion.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  A little, a little bit.

• 58:51Lex Fridman?

  A little bit, a little bit.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  I don't want to oversell that part, but my point is, I think those things where you meet a character in a game and you do spend time with them, a companion in a game, and it leads to romance. 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 or that's not real. That's not like, you're not getting a lot out of that. Like, well, you haven't really experienced it in the way that you can. Because these moments that I spent in games, not the ones I made, other ones when I was growing up or even now, those are, that is important time to me.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 59:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's a, it's, I mean, from a, 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 heartbreak 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. Is when you leave a game, it's almost like leaving a romantic partner. Because it's like you spent so much meaningful time together.

• 1:00:29Lex Fridman?

  And there's a sense in which it was, uh, it was ephemeral, like you.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:37Lex Fridman?

  This, this is not, this doesn't.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Didn't happen.

• 1:00:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it didn't really happen. It was good. It was like you went to Vegas, you got drunk and stuff. But like, and now life goes on. I wonder if there's a way to sort of always carry that with you. I mean, I guess with words you can kind of share with others like.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  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 in games.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  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 seventies.

• 1:01:14Lex Fridman?

  Like every game you play.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:17Lex Fridman?

  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 a video game, it will actually tell you what is the first game.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  But you know what?

• 1:01:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Kids today, they will have that.

• 1:01:32Lex Fridman?

  They will have that.

• 1:01:35Lex Fridman?

  And see.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  You could look back and see, oh my God, I put a thousand hours in Diggerfall.

• 1:01:39Lex Fridman?

  What is the first?

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  And my last save was nineteen ninety seven.

• 1:01:44Lex Fridman?

  Last save. Um, man, I don't know. Golden Axe, maybe? I'm trying to think, what was the first game I ever played?

• 1:01:53Lex Fridman?

  No, it's probably Commodore sixty four games. Yeah. Um, yeah, arcade games. Okay.

• 1:02:00Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned Starfield. What is Starfield? And what's the origin story of this game?

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  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 love, there was a pen and paper RPG I loved, Traveler. It was one of the first games I made for the Apple II. Didn't, I never finished it, right? I'm just doing it on my own. And I love this game. Starflight was one. Star Control 2 was a game that I loved. Sundog was a big one in the Apple II days that a lot of people don't know that I loved. And so, a lot of us in the studio felt it was time to do something new.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  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 to do that.

• 1:03:04Lex Fridman?

  And that's a brave move. So Fallout is post-apocalyptic on a single planet. You know, Elder Scrolls series is on a single planet. So this is going out into the open world of many star systems, many planets. I saw that it's thinking about 100 star systems and 1,000 planets available to explore. What is that world of stars and planets like?

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  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? 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

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  these planets and make them look, you know, I'll say reasonable as opposed to, you know, fractally goop?

• 1:04:30Lex Fridman?

  What's the, what's the technical definition of goop? Fractally goop?

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Fractally goop, you've probably seen a lot of like simulations, whether they're space things or landscape things where they're using fractals and just the landscape does not look real, it just is like highs and lows and it's muddy. And so we did find a way, we came up with a way, had prototyped of, 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, you know, we could, we could do this.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  And so there was a big design kind of problem to solve in terms of, well, what's fun about landing on a planet where there's potentially nothing? Cause there's a lot of planets and moons, if you kind of, right? In reality that, well, there's nothing on 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

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:45Lex Fridman?

  So you're

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Long answer. I don't know if I answered your question.

• 1:06:49Lex Fridman?

  There's no, the questions are stupid and the answers are brilliant. So that's how this works. So this is the world's most immense simulator of the human condition of loneliness. Cause I can't imagine a more lonely experience.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  I mean, you put it that way. I don't know if that was the goal, but.

• 1:07:06Lex Fridman?

  Just on a planet alone, I just, that must be, I mean, a deep embodiment of what loneliness is like. I mean, it's the, um, both the awe and like when you hike alone. There's a, there is 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.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  Is it the line from the moon landing? Beautiful desolation.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  It's Buzz Aldrin, is it?

• 1:07:37Lex Fridman?

  Beautiful desolation, is that what you said?

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 1:07:39Lex Fridman?

  Beautiful desolation. Well.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Something like that.

• 1:07:42Lex Fridman?

  But that's just words. There's a feeling to it and you want that feeling to be real. You're just here, there's some resources here. I just feel like it'll 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 doesn't really care about me.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:08:04Lex Fridman?

  That's the, that's the experience. So you, you want to create the whole planet and you want to have many of them.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  You know, validate and know about, even though it's a huge number. But once you, once you're building a system that can build a planet, I mean, a planet is sort of infinite space. We go back to the dagger fall analogy, right? If you have systems to build that much space, doing 100 planets or 1,000 or 10,000 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 is the 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

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  hundred-ish systems we have.

• 1:09:16Lex Fridman?

  What are the, what are the levelings? What do you mean by level?

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  It would be like when you look at a map in a game and says, this is the area for low level players. This is level one.

• 1:09:24Lex Fridman?

  Oh, got it, got it.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So we do that on a system basis. Star system.

• 1:09:31Lex Fridman?

  I read that space travel is considered dangerous in this game. Can you explain?

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  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'd jump and get stranded, which on paper was a great, like, it's a great moment when you get stranded and you have to press this beacon and you don't know who's going to come. Turns out that's not like, it just stops your game. We found you'd 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 just, you know, it's a fun killer.

• 1:10:18Lex Fridman?

  That's too realistic of a simulation of the human condition.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. The idea was, well, it's for, 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. 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 space suit. Obviously, a lot of different space suits and buffs for, you know, the gases, the toxicity or the temperature on, on various planets.

• 1:10:54Lex Fridman?

  Are there robots?

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:55Lex Fridman?

  Those companions, are they robots by chance?

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  One of the companions, the robot, Vasco, yeah.

• 1:11:02Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so they have, they have, they have a name and a personality and so on and...

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  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 me in terms of...

• 1:11:20Lex Fridman?

  I'm offended right now, you calling robots generic and you...

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  No, no, no, the ones we use, the ones we, we use. We made them more generic. We didn't, we didn't say actually...

• 1:11:28Lex Fridman?

  Sorry, I'm very sensitive about this.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  I understand. If you were to chart the future, you would say robots would have a much bigger role in our future than we are presenting. But that was a tone thing, so we, most of our robots are there as utility robots, and there are some combat ones as well as enemies.

• 1:11:48Lex Fridman?

  So it's a deeply human world?

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Very much, yes.

• 1:11:51Lex Fridman?

  In, in terms of tone? So have you talked to Elon about this, about this game of their...

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 1:12:00Lex Fridman?

  How much of reality, like the work of SpaceX, is it an inspiration for the decisions made in this game?

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  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 meet NASA. It's like the most amazing, and here we're building the next gen, like see the, the dragon stuff before it was, you know, other people saw, like just, I was really in awe. You know, this giant machine that looks for imperfections on the surface of these giant, you know, fuselage, I just, you know, whenever, and because, you know, we're in DC,

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  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 Elon really impresses like we're reaching the edge of physics on a lot of this stuff where how hard it is to leave orbit, the gravitational pull. And like, so the engineering that has gone into that our space program, what he's doing now, I just marvel at. I don't understand, right? I'm not at that level, but I marvel

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  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, is someone, what is that? I call my, we had 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

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  of this thing? And the next day, we found out it was in the news. It was the SpaceX launch in Florida. And I'm seeing it from Delaware, Maryland area. It was one of the most, it was incredible. It's just even just that, I am in complete awe of.

• 1:14:30Lex Fridman?

  Is there some aspect to that that you can replicate the majestic nature of that in the video game?

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  I wish I had 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, 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, we have other ships come and go from the starports when you're there. So you'll be in a city and then you hear this, you hear the engine, you look up and a ship is taking off or coming. There's nothing for you to do, but. It's, I think it's awesome.

• 1:15:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah. And then that's all about creating the soundscape, the feel.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  it's not all just like jump in and combat.

• 1:15:30Lex Fridman?

  Do you ever think about the fact that science fiction seems to make,

• 1:15:36Lex Fridman?

  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 can't anticipate. It, it kind of fuels people's imagination of what is possible.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:16:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, uh, is, is that the one that you do interface this like, uh?

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  It's the interfaces and then the, you know, the way he looks as child's more like a holographic, almost AR, VR kind of thing, or digital billboards, or trying to predict human behavior. There's a, 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, I don't know.

• 1:16:46Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think it does. And it's interesting. I mean, I suppose you're trying to create the most realistic, sticking to the tone, the most immersive, realistic world and almost by accident, you create the thing that is possible. Because you want it to be realistic in some deep sense, so. Accidentally can become the possible and then that places that idea in people's heads. I mean, if humans are ever to become a multi-planetary species, we need, we need to play games. We need to read sci-fi to help imagine that that's possible, to look outside of Earth, to look outside, look up on the stars, that we can actually travel out there.

• 1:17:30Lex Fridman?

  I don't know, there's power to sci-fi to do that. I guess you shouldn't feel the pressure of that.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  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, hopefully, it might inspire some young people who are headed in that direction of like, oh, I thought about getting into space and space exploration and being an engineer or doing these things. And I played this game and, you know, it really sparked that interest in me. So I'm going to go take that as a field and maybe that's the person who goes and does some of these things.

• 1:18:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, because in the next couple of decades, likely a human being will step foot on Mars, which are the first steps towards us becoming multi-planetary.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  And if you read some of the stuff they're doing with the James Webb Telescope and them being able to look for signs of life on other planets is 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 almost have a dream in mind, like in our lifetimes, that we discover life on another planet.

• 1:18:47Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  The numbers are, would say so, yes.

• 1:18:58Lex Fridman?

  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 prokaryotes to the eukaryotes. So like the, the complex life, it could be that a lot of our universe is just filled with bacteria.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  I believe, if I'm understanding it right, that there's two ways they're gonna 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. There's only certain ones that are created if you have a society there. 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 in that telescope. You have to like, look at that planet over a long period of time. But in theory, given enough time, given the amount of space out there, we would find one.

• 1:19:59Lex Fridman?

  That would be a cool thing in this short life of ours to find out definitively that there is an industrial intelligent civilization out there. Before you contact them, so like die, end your life, not knowing the rest of the story, but just know that it's out there. That's a cool, and then if you have kids, be like, well, this one's on you. F this, I'm out.

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  I know 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 definitively other life out there.

• 1:20:40Lex Fridman?

  I mean, both things, if there isn't life out there, that's also a huge responsibility. Both are super exciting. If we're alone, it's super exciting because there's a responsibility to preserve whatever special thing we have going on here. This, whether you call it the flame of consciousness or whether it's consciousness or intelligence, that's the 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

• 1:21:25Lex Fridman?

  that builds bigger and better weapons all the time.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  We have Space Force.

• 1:21:28Lex Fridman?

  Space Force. It will both protect us and destroy all our enemies.

• 1:21:36Lex Fridman?

  This is 100% a video game we're living in. Okay, back to dragons. So blink once if you know when Elder Scrolls 6 is coming out, but are not going to tell me.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  I have a vague idea.

• 1:21:53Lex Fridman?

  Okay, vague idea.

• 1:21:56Lex Fridman?

  So like if you have the quantum mechanical interpretation that allows for multiple universes, in the universe where you didn't blink, what would that, Todd, tell me about the year it's coming out? Would it be 2025?

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Trick question.

• 1:22:11Lex Fridman?

  Or 26?

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  I've been asked that question

• 1:22:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  many ways, but never like that.

• 1:22:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I thought I would try to sneak it. I mean, there is, of course, no answer because

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  I wish it was soon. You know, like, we don't, we want them out too, you know? And I wish they didn't take as long as they did, but they do. And, look, I mean, if I could go back in time, would never have been my plan to wait as long as it's it's taken for it.

• 1:22:44Lex Fridman?

  So you love that world, the Elder Scrolls world?

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  Look, it's a part of why I've spent more time there than anything else in my life, probably, right? So I deeply love it. We all do. It's a part of us. And, you know, when you aren't doing it for a while, you really do miss it. And when I look at what we're doing, have planned for that game, and I was in a meeting yesterday, I was like, I just want to play all this right now. 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.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  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 going to 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.

• 1:23:57Lex Fridman?

  What, what are some elements that changed the way, like, how do you make a game that's playable for 20 years?

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  Well, we're trying to figure that out.

• 1:24:07Lex Fridman?

  There is some elements, I should pause on that, you know, part of me, I'm of course asking jokingly, I'm excited for it. But I think Skyrim is an amazing game still, you know, I really enjoy it still.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know what? The content, the, um, even if, think if you step away from it for a while, then play what I'll put, say, the vanilla version without mods. If you go and haven't played it in a while, there's always a new way to play it. But then if you look at the mods and what creators are doing to it, we think that is just awesome. It's something that we've always supported. We're going to 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-

• 1:24:53Lex Fridman?

  How do you create a world that's moddable? So you, you think of designing the game from the start as, that enables mods?

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  Yep, absolutely. So 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, because if you're like a developer in-house, you can deal with some kluginess 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. But we have, look, we have people that have been doing it for 20 years with us.

• 1:25:28Lex Fridman?

  What's involved with modding? I'm actually quite newish at this.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:25:32Lex Fridman?

  And I'm almost afraid to ask because now that you explained to me, I fear I will spend a very large amount of time creating mods.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  Well, we have an editor. You can download on Steam, the creation kit for our games. And then it loads up the world and you could do something really, really small. Like change the color of the weather and it creates a little plugin file. We call it, you know, a modification to the game. And then you can run your game with that. It's on console now, the mods, not the editing. And it's just been incredible. Our community there has been amazing what they do with the games.

• 1:26:09Lex Fridman?

  So a lot of it is the visuals.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  A lot of people do visual things because it's the easiest thing to do first or they'll build a new space. There's some great things with like, I love the Kajit follower mod for Skyrim. It's awesome. The, 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. Cause it's just awesome.

• 1:26:47Lex Fridman?

  What about, is there any possibility in doing a mod for the, some of the AI stuff?

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:27:22Lex Fridman?

  Well, I've, I've built bots that play the driving games, but they do that by just taking, reading the screen and doing basic, not basic. It's actually pretty complicated, but computer vision, doing the control, but you're basically simulating the human player. To do that for Skyrim or for one, some of the open world games, that's literally you have to create AGI to be able to,

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:27:46Lex Fridman?

  to play. Those open, well, maybe not. Maybe you can create a super dumb, like just a two-handed sword and just keep swinging until.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  There, 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 a starfield.

• 1:28:09Lex Fridman?

  And then just running, they're all.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  Well, it, 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 it crash? What's the memory growth? What's the, get a report. Here are all the places where the frame rate wasn't up to snuff. And then we do have one that will play on its own. It's heavily scripted, but it lets us test. 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, did we break anything? Cause you don't want to waste like QA's time. Like you guys broke it again within five minutes. So, yeah.

• 1:28:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So that's for, that's for like, uh, broken stuff.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:53Lex Fridman?

  I wonder if you can build a bot that estimates the quality of the experience.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh. Okay. Can you do that?

• 1:29:00Lex Fridman?

  But just like the number, like how boring or not boring, the boring meter.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  How many times you die?

• 1:29:07Lex Fridman?

  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 struck there. Cause you always want to be in fear of death.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  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. And you gotta put the player right in the middle of that.

• 1:29:32Lex Fridman?

  But I've sometimes put down games from frustration only to return again, stronger.

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  Dark Souls. Yeah.

• 1:29:42Lex Fridman?

  So I mean, that's, I mean, the challenge, that's part of it. It's, well, I don't know. Actually Skyrim, I don't, I'm one of those. I mean, I'm sure there's all kinds of humans that you've interacted with about what they enjoy. But to me, I could enjoy Skyrim on every, on any difficulty at the level. It doesn't, all of it. So it depends. The open world nature of it is what's really compelling. Not necessarily the challenge of the particular quest and so on. But I'm not sure if that's the same experience for everybody.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:30:36Lex Fridman?

  So can we actually, thinking about Starfield, 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?

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  Great question.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  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, with an Elder Scrolls, you know, you're going to do it. It's a matter of when. So, okay, what's the tone we're going for, right? Where's 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, 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?

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  Is there a big ticket feature or two that make it really unique? And then when we're finishing one game, we start

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  prototyping. Sorry, before that, we start concepting. So we'll do concept art. And for one reason or another, I usually have the beginning of the game worked out. Like, I like to think about, okay, how's the game start? What's the player do first? We do music early. You know, so take Elder Scrolls 6. We forgot 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.

• 1:32:22Lex Fridman?

  Where's it set again?

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  Um, yep. And in Tamriel and

• 1:32:29Lex Fridman?

  Ah, damn it. Well, at least we know we narrowed it down that that would be epic if it was like a portal into another dimension. Anyway.

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  Then I like to do music. So we've already done a take on the music for Elder Scrolls 6.

• 1:32:45Lex Fridman?

  So you can sit there with the like the the concept art and the music.

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  Music. Yeah, no, no, the music. We put in the teaser for it. This was 2018. We've taken that further, obviously. And again, we're working on the world. You're then doing concepting and design for the world. And then once we we're wrapping up one game, we can really start prototyping. The new one and you're usually building kind of your initial spaces. And so we do like to do like a first playable, a smaller section of the game. That we can sort of prove out and show to people, hey, this is how it feels different. This is what it looks like. This is what's unique about it. Then we turn that into a larger chunk when more of the team comes on, when the other game is done.

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  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 kinds 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.

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  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 into another.

• 1:34:38Lex Fridman?

  In terms of story, like on that level?

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  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 than, and then how is another character referencing that? And how is that intersecting with the skill system and the interface? Like, the skill system and the interface is the party host.

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  If you think about a game, most games, particularly what I like to do, is that's your person that says, welcome, do this, go here, check this out. And the skill system and the way it reacts on the HUD, the interface of the game, is sort of leading you to the next thing. And once you get that flow down, and the 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 till really that last year. Before that, the game flow is 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 were working on a lot that last year.

• 1:35:56Lex Fridman?

  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 ideas?

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  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 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."

• 1:36:46Lex Fridman?

  How do you get the... What about the combat system? That does seem to be an important part of a lot of games.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  You start it in the beginning, yeah, every time. Yep. So usually when we're making that first playable, it's an area you can go through, some amount of dialogue, some amount of combat.

• 1:37:02Lex Fridman?

  How do you get the combat right? What's the secret to a great combat system?

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  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, it has to feel really good in your hands. So there's a lot of animation time, right? And changing animations so they're impactful and they happen at a rate that the player feels like they're really doing it. And then ultimately, it's the illusion that the enemies are smart, but they really are there for you to kill them, right? So they do a lot of things to just let themselves get killed. They're not near as smart, near as smart as we can make them, because it turns out that is not fun.

• 1:37:56Lex Fridman?

  Right. So there's a balance between... But there's a... That is, I guess, a kind of AI. And it's a very intimate interaction with an AI. 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 wrong.

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  Yep. All the games do it. You know, it's not unique to what we do in terms of how they handle combat scenarios. And there's some games that just do it extremely well in terms of even in multiplayer where you're playing bots and most people don't know it. Or how a multiple enemy scenario is really, you know, they don't all shoot you. They trade off. They're gonna wait. And 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.

• 1:39:00Lex Fridman?

  Is there a science to it? Is it, is it art? Is it like?

• 1:39:06Speaker 01

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

• 1:39:09Lex Fridman?

  So it's like an iterative process where you try different things. You have different ideas.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  There's a lot of, there's a lot of

• 1:39:13Lex Fridman?

  Animation.

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  There's a lot of timing, animation work, HUD work also. How does the ridicule change?

• 1:39:22Speaker 01

  What are the little sound effects?

• 1:39:25Lex Fridman?

  What about like the, the game of fire like that is fun?

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  Again, that goes back to the winning, you know?

• 1:39:31Lex Fridman?

  So winning is fun?

• 1:39:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:39:33Lex Fridman?

  Death is not?

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Yes. Let the wookiee win.

• 1:39:37Lex Fridman?

  I like how you have to dumb down the AI to make it fun for humans. Because if, if you didn't, it would just be just slaughter nonstop for, for all humans. That's good to know. What about things like,

• 1:39:54Lex Fridman?

  you said cooking, like crafting, making potions and poisons and smithing weapons and armor, cooking? How do you get that right? What's, what's interesting there? It's such an interesting like? You know, a lot of games don't have that kind of thing. So what role does that play?

• 1:40:14Speaker 01

  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 in some kind? So breaking it down of their components. So when you walk around a world like that, again, we like the simulation. We like, we like the forks and the spoons and the cups and all that. Okay. How can I use those to create? So I love how it works, starts working in Fallout 4, where, okay, all these things I find, there is, they have some value in creating or crafting

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  outside of a cup is worth one gold piece or one cap.

• 1:41:02Lex Fridman?

  By the way, I have to be honest, I haven't played Fallout 4. I played Fallout 3. I thought that was a legendary game. Been, uh, can you make a case for Fallout 4? Then I should, or should I just wait till Fallout 5? And when does that come?

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  I think you should play Fallout 4. Love to hear your thoughts.

• 1:41:16Lex Fridman?

  All right.

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  It's a different game.

• 1:41:18Lex Fridman?

  Skyrim is too. I mean, it's a...

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  We, we try to make them all different. They all, they all have...

• 1:41:22Lex Fridman?

  They are fundamentally different.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  They all have their own tone. Yeah. So Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 intentionally a very different tone.

• 1:41:27Lex Fridman?

  Oh, really? Interesting. So what, what's that world like? What's, uh, the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout? If you could just briefly take a stroll into that world tone wise?

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:42:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  You know, it winks at the camera sometimes, often actually, and...

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  That when you're in that world, it just has this its own unique flow and vibe outside of anything else kind of in that genre.

• 1:42:43Lex Fridman?

  So Elder Scrolls has, or at least Skyrim, has some humor.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  Has a little bit.

• 1:42:48Lex Fridman?

  But Fallout leans into it a little more.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  A little bit more, a little bit more. Yeah, yeah, it does. It's like ironic humor. It's the duck in cover. It's a get under your desk if the bomb comes and everything will be fine. It's that type of humor.

• 1:43:01Lex Fridman?

  So the funny thing is, I do think Fallout 3 is one of the greatest games ever.

• 1:43:07Lex Fridman?

  You've said that, quote, "When we started Fallout 3 in 2004, we obviously had big ideas of what we could do with it, and I talked to a lot of people, from ex-developers to press folks to fans. What made it special? What are the key things you'd want out in a new one? The opinions, and I'll put this mildly, varied a lot. But they would all end the same, like a stern father pausing for effect, but do not screw it up. How do you not screw up a game? You have not screwed up many games, yet.

• 1:43:43Speaker 01

  I mean, back to the Fallout one.

• 1:43:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, look, I remember that we were met with a lot of skepticism in terms of, oh, what are they gonna do with this? It was a beloved kind of isometric, turn-based, role-playing game. You know, awesome for when it came out. And actually, it was announced, we had finished Morrowind but not announced Oblivion. But because we'd acquired the rights, we had to announce it. Because I think Interplay was a public company? I don't remember. I just remember we had to announce it, and we're thinking there, well, you're gonna, we're gonna piss off all the Elder Scrolls fans 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.

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  So I do remember, you know, there was a lot of concern with all of our fans and fans of Fallout at the time. And so...

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  I think it was pretty rewarding for us that that game found the audience and success that it did. It's one of my favorite projects that I've ever, ever worked on. And because it was so fresh for us and we had a very clear, like, even before we had the rights, like, this is the game we're gonna make. Like, 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.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  So I just remember enjoying making that game so much because it was, everything we were doing was new.

• 1:45:35Lex Fridman?

  Which, which asked of the world creation, was there some innovation, like technically, that was happening?

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  The world creation, like, it was, you know, obviously a different look, even though some of us, very few of us, had worked on the Terminator things. 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 it had the same tone.

• 1:46:09Lex Fridman?

  Are there some favorite things to you about that world that just kind of connect you?

• 1:46:14Speaker 01

  Fallout 3, I love, again, I usually start with the beginning. I love the beginning. I love the character generation. If you go, if you played it a lot, or you're developing it, it starts to feel really long. But the first time you play it, or second, I just think it's awesome. And this idea, it's a hard thing to say, okay, we want, we want you to feel like you're a 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 experienced a part of that. So it's a very different, when you step out, I think it really...

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  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 vault.

• 1:47:06Lex Fridman?

  And you feel like you have a sense of your past.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  Right. And I need to find my father.

• 1:47:15Lex Fridman?

  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 condition.

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  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 were you doing before this moment?

• 1:47:33Lex Fridman?

  Can you pick your traumas and stuff?

• 1:47:37Lex Fridman?

  That's a mod.

• 1:47:38Speaker 01

  If you want to make a mod, you want to make a mod, go for that.

• 1:47:40Lex Fridman?

  And then also make a mod for like a therapist.

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  But a lot of it, you know, is in your head. So you're going to, you're going to do that. You're going to pick this background and do these things. And you're sort of like, this is who I was. And we intentionally with Elder Scrolls kind of make it as much of a blank slate. You know, Elder Scrolls is a little bit more of a blank slate game to who you are, which has a lot of positives and fallout for us has been more of a, this 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.

• 1:48:09Lex Fridman?

  Now, this might reveal something about me and speaking of childhood trauma, but I, but I, but I feel like there's a lot of, a lot of the meaningful experience of a role playing game. It's not just the development of the character throughout the game, but the initial character creation. Like you said, is there something to that process that you found to be powerful? Like the design of that process, because you think so much about that beginning. What, how much should be controlled? How much should be defined? The interface itself, the visual appearance of the character too?

• 1:48:51Lex Fridman?

  Cause I feel like that you're loading in, you start to load in the world that you're about to enter by creating that character. Right?

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, we think about it a lot. It's a really, really good comment and question. And it's more than, it has to set the whole stage, has to like pique your interest for the world you're going to enter.

• 1:49:15Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:49:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:50:01Speaker 01

  So some people, I'm gonna get this comment, Elder Scrolls, like, "Oh, you simplified it." No, 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 made a horrible mistake. And so, okay, I'm gonna start out like that, to me, is a really, really bad experience. So...

• 1:50:26Lex Fridman?

  Also like life itself, but yes, go ahead.

• 1:50:29Speaker 01

  But like life is, okay, so you can then...

• 1:50:32Lex Fridman?

  Fix it in game.

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  Right. I wish, I wish I had learned archery. Well, I'm gonna start tomorrow.

• 1:50:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  So you can do that. Like, the Skyrim character system, you know, 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, it sounds weird, but you mostly want that beginning character generation to be visual, which you then can also change in the game, and some starting skills that get you off to the type of play that you want, but if you discover you don't like that type of play as you play, you can move your character along. So we have...

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  Moved away post Oblivion to a classless, meaning you don't have a strict character class, Warrior Mage Thief, whatever, in our games.

• 1:51:29Lex Fridman?

  And that's continuing for the... Are you thinking of Elder Scrolls 6? You're already thinking about that kind of stuff? So you think of early on, like you said, the first few experiences in the game, you're already thinking through them?

• 1:51:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, we know what the first few hours are like. We know what the character system is basically like.

• 1:51:52Lex Fridman?

  So tonally, what's the difference to you between Oblivion, Morwen, Oblivion, Skyrim, and Elder Scrolls 6? Like, to me, man, stuff blends together.

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:07Lex Fridman?

  But Oblivion, that's when you can make spells and stuff.

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  You could do it in Morwen as well. Oblivion has some more guardrails on it. Morwen's where you can really go. And Dagofall.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  I don't remember if you can make spells in Arena. I think you can. Someone will correct me. You definitely can in Dagofall, it gets crazy. In Morwen, you can somewhat. And then we start putting guardrails on it because people started breaking the game in certain ways.

• 1:52:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it was about to break the game. Like, you always want it to be.

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  Well, there's like one people love in Morwen where you can make these recall stones. And you could teleport to different areas, which you really need in that game. It breaks so many quests.

• 1:52:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:53Speaker 01

  And so as we, any quest, we would do 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.

• 1:53:11Lex Fridman?

  So a tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent. How do you create a compelling quest? Because there's all kinds of personalities of humans that play these games, right? Because I like the grind.

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  Well, there's, look, there's multiple flavors of a compelling quest.

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  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 you'll go through a more handcrafted experience that the designers have done a really, really good job on the space. It has some twist or surprise in the middle. And then the ending has some, 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 where all of that was far more open-ended.

• 1:54:07Speaker 01

  The how I am going to accomplish this task is completely up to me and I'm going to find some ingenious solution. A silly, 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. It's a very simple, you can give a simple story setup for that. And we're not telling the player where to get those. And they think, now where could I get those? And I actually find those to be just as rewarding as the really handcrafted, well-done, little

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  bit more linear with an interesting choice at the end, if those objects are in the world in some believable way, that there's usually some challenge at getting them.

• 1:55:02Lex Fridman?

  How do you place objects in a world in an interesting way? Because it's a big part.

• 1:55:08Speaker 01

  We have a level design. You cannot, people, if they only knew how much we spend, we have a clutter group, a group of people who clutter.

• 1:55:17Lex Fridman?

  What's cluttering?

• 1:55:18Speaker 01

  Clutter is all the stuff around. It's like interior decorators for treasure and stuff and trash. And they go through every space and they clutter it. Our level designers think about it a lot. These also become landmarks for the player when you're walking through a space and oh, this is the place with this. And there is a logic to making a good level. As they say with, even if you walk by like a little T intersection, that becomes like a decision point in the player's head. Like, oh, I didn't go down that way. But the more you do that, it looks easy on paper. But when you're playing a game, you actually kind of want to limit those. Because he's trying to keep track of all these decision points.

• 1:56:03Speaker 01

  Then they get lost. And yes, we have maps, but anytime the player's going to check a map in a place like that, I feel that it's more of like a backstop for certain players. If we, if they need to check the map, I feel like we've kind of failed.

• 1:56:18Lex Fridman?

  Got it. So it's, there's a, there's a momentum to it. It just pulls, pulls them in.

• 1:56:23Speaker 01

  And you know, look, you played a lot of games. You played a lot of levels where you're just like, I'm a little confused or I don't know. 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 mazy. As long as you know where you're going, as long as you know you made those choices, then it feels fine. But as far as the treasure and all of the loot, it is really an art. We will not do enough clutter and then we will over clutter. And then there's too much stuff everywhere. And then we declutter every single game. I wish we got better at it. It would save us a lot of time.

• 1:57:02Lex Fridman?

  But you're constantly going by feel like this is not, this is too much. It's not enough.

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  Right, right. Because the other thing is, look, it creates, 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, 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.

• 1:57:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:57:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  But you feel like a dope.

• 1:57:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  You've probably experienced this.

• 1:57:39Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:57:46Lex Fridman?

  And you feel good. I got it.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  And then it's finding like, oh, I stuck my head in this corner and, you know, I picked this lock and I opened this locker and, oh, there was this, there was this thing I've been waiting for.

• 1:57:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What about like rare and rare items?

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  That's an art, even more so of an art.

• 1:58:04Speaker 01

  I will say we have a ways to go there in terms of finding the right drop rate for special items, we call them, your epic, rare, legendary. You look at games, like so many games do it. And there are ones that you just play and love because they have it down. Destiny 2 is great at it. Diablo, a series I love, you know, sort of famelessly Diablo 3, which I think is great. And they did an update and mostly just changed the loot drops. And it's like this whole new experience. And there's a really, real art to it. I think that we're still learning. We're still learning a lot and have to, we're trying to, you know, get better at it because it's one of those things where it drives you through the game.

• 1:58:49Speaker 01

  It's fun to get the treasure.

• 1:58:52Lex Fridman?

  Diablo and Skyrim have this interesting quality of being extremely popular. And there's a lore around like rare items. So it changes the dynamic of like, you could afford to have really rare items.

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:59:09Lex Fridman?

  And then, and then somebody finds it and that becomes like a thing. I mean, as you release a game, there's, 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?

• 1:59:25Speaker 01

  For us, 100%. Because we've been classically with most of our stuff, single player, that that watercooler 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 is where a lot of our community has been sharing their stories and here's what you can do.

• 1:59:56Lex Fridman?

  Has there ever been a temptation to create? Um, not a single player game that's gigantic, that's.

• 2:00:04Speaker 01

  Well, we did Fallout 76. We have Elder Scrolls Online, not, not a game I created, but it, and look, that started as more classic MMO. Know the folks, they're part of our company who made that game. And it's insanely, insanely popular.

• 2:00:19Lex Fridman?

  It is. Okay. So I should try it out.

• 2:00:21Speaker 01

  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 be 10 years for that game as well. And they, this is, you know, great community around that.

• 2:00:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's a, I haven't played, uh, cause there's a, there's a mobile Fallout game, right? I need to play that. I was thinking of playing Diablo mobile too.

• 2:00:49Speaker 01

  I mean, you can debate the monetization, but I would not, it's, I think they did a fun, it's really fun.

• 2:00:54Lex Fridman?

  On Fallout?

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  Diablo.

• 2:00:55Lex Fridman?

  Oh Diablo?

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well Fallout, I definitely recommend that one. Fallout Shelter, completely different game.

• 2:01:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:00Speaker 01

  Diablo Immortal is, uh, I was very, very impressed. That had a lot of fun.

• 2:01:04Lex Fridman?

  On the mobile?

• 2:01:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:01:05Lex Fridman?

  What's the challenge of designing a game for mobile versus the PC and console?

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  Well, obviously the screen size, right?

• 2:01:13Lex Fridman?

  Is that what you feel first? What, what's the, what's the fundamental change in the, in the philosophy of the design? Does it, does it constrain, does it change the tone of the game?

• 2:01:25Speaker 01

  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 of things that you approach on mobile. Now, I can give you sort of the classic mobile gaming thing and then what we do.

• 2:01:42Speaker 01

  You know, a classic mobile gaming is really for short play sessions.

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  Cause.

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  For the amount of people you're gonna get, the the number that have the amount of time to sit there for a long time and play it, like a console game or a PC game is is lower because people are playing mobile games on the move or whatever. And how it onboards 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 gonna learn it. People don't care. So really understanding how they get into the game. Those two things are really the magic to mobile gaming. We have found, though, with our games, 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 will play it for hours a day.

• 2:02:37Lex Fridman?

  So it's a, there is a more, I don't know, addicting element to the mobile? Because I guess you can spend more time with it.

• 2:02:44Speaker 01

  And 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.

• 2:03:01Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:03:11Speaker 01

  It's true. It's true.

• 2:03:13Lex Fridman?

  The kids, the kids of the kids these days will probably be talking while be doing like virtual reality.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  Like, I love mobile games, though. 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 that did Hearthstone. You should really play it. If you like, do you like card games?

• 2:03:33Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:03:34Speaker 01

  Do you like superheroes?

• 2:03:35Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  It's genius. You don't like superheroes?

• 2:03:37Lex Fridman?

  No, I don't like superheroes. I never understood, listen, this never, this is growing.

• 2:03:42Speaker 01

  Who doesn't like superheroes?

• 2:03:43Lex Fridman?

  Growing up in the Soviet Union, what, I don't understand the, this, 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 suspend, 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.

• 2:04:07Speaker 01

  I think I get it.

• 2:04:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But the rest, the rest, at least the America, the Western world disagrees with me, so.

• 2:04:14Lex Fridman?

  Even Batman, you have little ears, but that's fine.

• 2:04:21Lex Fridman?

  Well, back to Starfield. 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?

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  Keeps you honest.

• 2:04:38Lex Fridman?

  Do you try to keep in your own brain a deadline, for the team a deadline?

• 2:04:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, all the time.

• 2:04:44Lex Fridman?

  And when you set that deadline early in the development, do you try to set deadline? Like, that's really tough to reach?

• 2:04:53Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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 have first playable, we want to be done with prototyping or designed by this date, we want to have first playable this date, we want to have this. But, look, you know, things happen. Pandemic happens, people go home, it throws everything off. Or, you know, what you needed to do, because we're not just like making a game and then moving everybody on, 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 Fallout 4 at the time, because we can't, you know, hey, we really shouldn't move the people on Fallout yet, because we're doing these things in Skyrim, and we should.

• 2:05:38Speaker 01

  So, it just sort of keeps you honest for where you're at.

• 2:05:42Lex Fridman?

  Does it get super stressful as you get closer? You try to avoid announcing anything? Is there a temptation to announce?

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  Well, I've done it all ways, right? I've announced, you know, Starfield, we're pretty, you know, loud with a release date that we then had to delay. So...

• 2:05:58Lex Fridman?

  Was that tough?

• 2:06:00Speaker 01

  It was. It was. But it was the right thing to do. And...

• 2:06:04Lex Fridman?

  How do you know it's the right thing? Like, when you sat down and looked at it, like, this is not ready?

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  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 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 fans, to the game, to the team, to the company, we're part of Xbox now, to everybody, was we should really, we should really move it

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  and give it the time it needs.

• 2:06:57Lex Fridman?

  So you mentioned part of Xbox. Microsoft bought Bethesda and XMAX for $7.5 billion.

• 2:07:09Lex Fridman?

  Well, what's it like joining the Xbox team? You've, I think, written about it. What's, what are the, what are the exciting aspects of that?

• 2:07:20Speaker 01

  You know, when your company goes through a change like that, no matter what it is, even if it's somebody that you've worked with for a long time, you never know what you're in for. You hope. And I had worked with them for, since we started doing console 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, had a great experience with them. And then on the 360 with Oblivion. And so I guess the point is, we felt that we had a very good relationship with everybody there. And we understood what their culture was, but you never really know. And, and I mean this honestly, it's been

• 2:08:03Speaker 01

  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, the way they'll invest in the players, the risks they'll take, the thoughtfulness from Phil Spencer on down has been, you know, feel really, really lucky. And then a game like Starfield where, look, we've had a lot of success with, 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. There's a lot of responsibility there to make sure we deliver for everybody.

• 2:08:46Lex Fridman?

  Is there a chance that Starfield is exclusive to Xbox?

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  It is, it is exclusive.

• 2:08:51Lex Fridman?

  It's officially ready?

• 2:08:52Speaker 01

  Yep. Yes.

• 2:08:54Lex Fridman?

  So you're, I get it. So extra pressure, also creating a new world.

• 2:09:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's new, but keep in mind, for us, that exclusivity is not unique, even though we've done PlayStation stuff, and I think the PlayStation 5 is just an insane machine. They've done a great job, and we've had great success on PlayStation. We were traditionally a PC developers in the beginning. We transitioned to Xbox, became our lead platform, like Morrow's basically exclusive to Xbox, Oblivion was exclusive to Xbox for a long period of time, Skyrim DLC was exclusive. So we've done a lot of, like, our initial stuff is all Xbox. So we get into development and saying, we're focused on Xbox, and it's not abnormal for us in any way. It's been kind of the norm. And from a development side, I, you know, I like the ability to focus.

• 2:09:46Speaker 01

  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 my standpoint, it's just awesome.

• 2:10:00Lex Fridman?

  What's the difference in creating the console versus the PC? I also have to admit, I've never, is this shameful? Actually, you should recommend to me. I've never played Skyrim or any, any of the games you've created on Xbox.

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:10:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and on console. I played, I mean, I've played very little Xbox.

• 2:10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. I mean, look, there's the obvious interface part, between mouse and keyboard, and then a controller. But when you're looking at hardware, PCs, it's tough, right? Because you're looking at, well, you know, what are their driver versions? What kind of monitor they have? What is the actual refresh rate of X, Y, and Z? We're used to it. But if, you know, anyone will tell you, give me the hardware that I know I'm writing it for. You know this. And the Series X is just a incredible machine. And now that-

• 2:10:55Lex Fridman?

  You know what it is. You know-

• 2:10:56Speaker 01

  You know what it is. 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.

• 2:11:07Lex Fridman?

  Is there a case to be made? Did you get people that enjoy, people that do both PC and Xbox?

• 2:11:12Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 2:11:12Lex Fridman?

  That enjoy Xbox more? Like that, if they have the choice.

• 2:11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:16Lex Fridman?

  That they enjoy it?

• 2:11:17Speaker 01

  I think that depends on, and look, now that you can kind of cross, you can take your save and go between and all those things.

• 2:11:25Lex Fridman?

  You can?

• 2:11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you, depends on if.

• 2:11:30Lex Fridman?

  Forge Games. So Forge, Skyrim?

• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  If you have the Game Pass PC version of it versus Steam, not, not via Steam right now, not via Steam.

• 2:11:40Lex Fridman?

  Got it. And so there's the Game Pass. So I'm like learning about this. So there's a Microsoft game. So this can be on Game Pass. And then you can, if, yeah, if you can take it from PC through Game Pass.

• 2:11:49Speaker 01

  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?

• 2:11:56Lex Fridman?

  Exactly.

• 2:11:57Speaker 01

  Right? Like the actual physicality of it is what determines where I want to play.

• 2:12:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:02Speaker 01

  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 at my PC at work all day. Like, I play a lot of video games. So when I get home and I want to play something, I was like, I am a sofa screen controller person.

• 2:12:22Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask you a ridiculous question. So you've created some of the greatest games ever. I think there's, there's a, the question will 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.

• 2:12:35Speaker 01

  Have you read the book on Tetris?

• 2:12:36Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 2:12:37Speaker 01

  You should read it, particularly for someone who grew up in Russia.

• 2:12:40Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:12:49Lex Fridman?

  I would love, I would love to find out more, but I think I would put personally, I would put Skyrim.

• 2:12:55Speaker 01

  I'll take that. Good answer.

• 2:12:56Lex Fridman?

  At number one for me, uh, which is tough, however you put it, because you could also make the case out of the Elder Scrolls series. Like, what do you actually value more? If you put Tetris and Super Mario up there, then like, the credit goes to Morrowind maybe over Skyrim? I don't, 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? There are just games that.

• 2:13:32Lex Fridman?

  Inspired the world, impacted the world, shook the world in terms of what video games are able to do.

• 2:13:38Speaker 01

  Well, first, I'm just sort of like, hearing you say that you think Skyrim is the best game of all time is quite,

• 2:13:46Speaker 01

  like, thank you. And it's, you know, incredible thing to hear. And, you know, when I think about, well, a couple of answers. There's ones that are like, personal to me. Ultima 7 is probably.

• 2:14:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, can you talk about Ultima? Like, you said that as an inspiration. I've never crossed that world.

• 2:14:07Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:14:08Lex Fridman?

  Which, what kind of game is it?

• 2:14:10Speaker 01

  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. 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 touchstones and callbacks to that or inspirations. And the other thing that I loved about Ultima was, truly, the period, 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 2, clearly a plus one sequel.

• 2:14:54Speaker 01

  But they each had their own tone.

• 2:14:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:15:06Lex Fridman?

  Oh, when you buy, when you buy it.

• 2:15:08Speaker 01

  You buy, you know, the cardboard boxes and the way they were designed and Ultima 7 is black and Ultima 8 is the fiery gate and the paintings on them. And I just, you know.

• 2:15:18Lex Fridman?

  Does that break your heart a little bit that that culture is a big gone?

• 2:15:22Speaker 01

  A little bit, a little bit. And that's also why I like,

• 2:15:27Speaker 01

  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. Want to see nice cover art for our games. And we spend a lot of time in them so that, you know, take a look at Elder Scrolls and Morrowind Oblivion and Skyrim. We want those boxes to look good next to each other. Going back to the video games, you know, I always mentioned Tetris because I think it's.

• 2:16:01Speaker 01

  You know, obviously, I love virtual worlds and those kind of things, but for the time and what an interactive like video games for the simplest form. I sort of think you can put Tetris in front of just about anybody. And they'll enjoy it. It's got some moment of challenge and 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.

• 2:16:34Lex Fridman?

  And I think mobile games figured out some of the magic of Tetris, the simple.

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  Some of them have, yeah.

• 2:16:41Lex Fridman?

  And but Tetris did it a long, long time ago.

• 2:16:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:16:44Lex Fridman?

  You can really create that immersive experience without.

• 2:16:48Speaker 01

  But for me, you know, the ultimate civilization.

• 2:16:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:52Speaker 01

  As far as, you know, a grand strategy game.

• 2:16:58Speaker 01

  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. They know who they are. They know what they want to do. Always in awe of what they create.

• 2:17:19Lex Fridman?

  I gotta ask you about a game I haven't played, but people put up there as one of the greats, Zelda Breath of the Wild. Have you got any chance to play?

• 2:17:30Speaker 01

  A lot of it, yes, yes, it's fantastic. It's fantastic.

• 2:17:33Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about? I mean, it's a very different experience. I played other Zeldas than the open worlds you've created, but it is also an open world.

• 2:17:40Speaker 01

  It is. 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 constrain you a little bit more. Zelda says, here's the whole thing. And you are constrained by the actual

• 2:18:03Speaker 01

  player abilities you haven't earned yet, not some arbitrary barriers. And so I think this did a phenomenal job. It's a magical game.

• 2:18:13Lex Fridman?

  It really feels open.

• 2:18:14Speaker 01

  It's because it truly is. Yes.

• 2:18:17Lex Fridman?

  What about, I mean, I just like asking about some open world. A very different one is the world of either Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption.

• 2:18:29Speaker 01

  Both love. I would put GTA three, Grand Theft Auto three up there with the landmark kind of usher in the open world. When that comes out on the PlayStation two, even though there was GTA one and two, this was an all new thing with the mobster storytelling.

• 2:18:45Lex Fridman?

  Is that the first 3D version, I guess?

• 2:18:47Speaker 01

  It was. It was. Then Vice City is kind of a fast follow, which

• 2:18:52Speaker 01

  could be my favorite one.

• 2:18:55Lex Fridman?

  So you like?

• 2:18:55Speaker 01

  I loved all the Grand Theft Autos. 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, highly recommend finishing that game.

• 2:19:12Lex Fridman?

  So you like both the story? Do you like the grittiness of that? Because they have, they have a bit of the, like, I guess if you like the fallout, there's the humor, the, I don't know, I don't know what it is. It's the lighthearted humor of it, but also the brutality of human nature is in there too. But it's like, and also some of the fun they create with the music when you drive and stuff like that. They create, they create a world. There's a tone.

• 2:19:38Speaker 01

  They do.

• 2:19:38Lex Fridman?

  There's a very strong tone.

• 2:19:39Speaker 01

  There is a very strong tone. You know, the satire on the world is just so well done. The gameplay is great. I think they've just done a phenomenal job.

• 2:19:53Lex Fridman?

  Is there any others that pop to mind?

• 2:19:55Speaker 01

  Portal.

• 2:19:56Lex Fridman?

  Portal. Yeah.

• 2:19:59Lex Fridman?

  That's that's another weird creation.

• 2:20:02Speaker 01

  I could just sit here and list games forever.

• 2:20:04Lex Fridman?

  For one, I'm enjoying this.

• 2:20:07Speaker 01

  Hearthstones, a game I love. I love all types, like sports, college football, NCAA football was my favorite. It's like, I would say this is a great role.

• 2:20:13Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you would actually keep getting.

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  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, I like college football. They 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 coming? They're doing it. So it's finally coming back.

• 2:20:33Lex Fridman?

  Nice. What would you say is the is the is the greatest sports game of all time?

• 2:20:42Speaker 01

  Well, it's NCAA football. I have to pick the year.

• 2:20:45Lex Fridman?

  And see versus Madden?

• 2:20:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, but there's more teams. You get the 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 so, you know, it's the there's it's more dynamic.

• 2:21:04Lex Fridman?

  So you like variety versus.

• 2:21:05Speaker 01

  So what was the last one? 2014, maybe it was?

• 2:21:11Lex Fridman?

  And you don't like FIFA and?

• 2:21:14Speaker 01

  I like, look, FIFA is incredible. Just look, I'm a college football fan. They they give you that fantasy. If you like, if you like European football slash soccer, FIFA is incredible. I love that game, too.

• 2:21:25Lex Fridman?

  Have you been paying attention to the game design of that world of those worlds?

• 2:21:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the thing people, I think with those kind of games, it is really like, or racing games, Forza put up there. I love Forza. Played them all. When you have to recreate something that's real in the real world, say it's cars or it's sports games, everybody knows how it should work.

• 2:21:48Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 2:22:16Speaker 01

  People understand and how hard those teams work and know a lot of people who do it. And I think they just do. I've enjoyed them all. I buy Madden every year.

• 2:22:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, every single year. Yeah, they do refresh it. There's a feeling of freshness. I don't know what that is.

• 2:22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, there have been years where it feels like less was done and more was done, but I enjoy it every year.

• 2:22:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Yeah. What does a perfectly productive day in the life of Todd Howard look like? So maybe not perfectly, but just like a perfectly average productive day. What are you, a morning person, evening person? Is it chaos? Is it pretty regular?

• 2:22:58Speaker 01

  I'm in a good, I'm in a good flow right now. I'm still doing a lot of stuff. So there's things I'm like executive producing and then, you know, Starfield I'm directing. So I sort of view that as that's an everyday thing. Fortunately, I get to do a lot of stuff from,

• 2:23:15Speaker 01

  look at the TV show we're making and this Indiana Jones game that's being developed at Machine Games. We have to look at that. But you know, the best really day or where I feel it's fulfilling is,

• 2:23:31Speaker 01

  get to play some of a game, the game we'll say Starfield, get to play some of Starfield, look at the problem set of what it is doing and then get in a room with the other developers that I work closely with and we solve that problem together. So that's the most rewarding thing when you can say, okay, what do we want this to do? What's the, 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 like, the beginning, the pie in the sky part is always fun, but it's like anything is possible. That's fun, but it's not rewarding in the same way because you haven't solved something. Whereas these are the elements you have to play with.

• 2:24:17Speaker 01

  How do we make this all work together? And you come out of it, the end of the day like, now that feels great.

• 2:24:25Lex Fridman?

  So brainstorming about specific, big picture, both big picture and very specific detail of a game that's not working, something's not working, you want to fix it, that kind of stuff.

• 2:24:36Speaker 01

  Because you feel like, okay, you've made tangible progress on the actual build of the game. Or something you played in the beginning of the day, didn't feel great. You've figured out a solution with a group of people, like it's always with a group. And then the next day, you're like, yeah, that was, that worked out.

• 2:24:53Lex Fridman?

  Who's on the team? Is it designers, engineers?

• 2:24:56Speaker 01

  All the above.

• 2:24:57Lex Fridman?

  Artists, voiceover?

• 2:24:59Speaker 01

  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 skill systems.

• 2:25:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:14Speaker 01

  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. Can't remember if I mentioned art, a lot of artists. QA staff as well, they're hugely valuable in saying, hey, we broke your game in these magical ways. What are you going to do about it?

• 2:25:32Lex Fridman?

  Is the loot design team still hiring? How do I play? That seems like the most fun job.

• 2:25:38Speaker 01

  Always.

• 2:25:39Lex Fridman?

  I mean, all of this seems like a super fun job.

• 2:25:41Speaker 01

  It is, you know what? It's the best. Then you have audio. And it by far is the greatest job you could possibly have. If you're into like technology, it's great. If you're into storytelling, creativity and art, it's great. And it's really the gaming, you know, the combination of that.

• 2:26:00Lex Fridman?

  And like I mentioned to you offline, I think of video games as, I mean, to me has brought thousands of hours of happiness. And so when you're designing the game, whatever you're doing, you have a part to play in a thing that's going to bring. Like millions, hundreds of millions of hours of happiness to people. It's crazy, right?

• 2:26:22Speaker 01

  It is, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna play, play you saying that back to our team. Cause you know, people forget, your head's down, you're trying to solve these problems. And then you do forget how many people it touches.

• 2:26:35Lex Fridman?

  Like even tiny decisions, you make tiny little things you create. Yeah, it's weird. I wish there was a way to like, I would notice things in a video game and it's like, huh? Okay, like it feels good, but you don't get that signal. The creator doesn't get that signal. I wish they did. I guess you could get that signal by, you know, wise luck stuck in this room, like digging through the loot.

• 2:27:02Speaker 01

  We do get, we do now get a lot of good data on what the players are doing.

• 2:27:06Lex Fridman?

  Enjoying and not that.

• 2:27:07Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 2:27:27Lex Fridman?

  Do you ever think about making people feel like human feelings when they play? Like designing, like make them feel fear or excitement, anger, longing, loneliness.

• 2:27:43Speaker 01

  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. And that feeling of like accomplishment and pride in what you did, where you overcame. You talked about going back to a game that like, those are real feelings of like accomplishment. That I've felt in games that I've played and.

• 2:28:19Speaker 01

  When we get to see a player feel that, 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 aren't in real life that gives you a confidence or a perspective.

• 2:28:42Speaker 01

  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 and it is like the greatest thing that we do. And it reminds you of like how important it is. And the other really awesome thing is that you can see like the family change by the end of the day. Like they don't, they didn't even realize what it meant to their child or what went into it. And it's just, that to me is like been been involved with that foundation for a number of years

• 2:29:25Speaker 01

  and it's been really good, you know, reminder of how lucky we are.

• 2:29:31Lex Fridman?

  And in general, for young people, that sense of accomplishment is hard to find.

• 2:29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, where they they don't, not everybody has it in the outlets that real life provides.

• 2:29:45Lex Fridman?

  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 old as quickly as possible.

• 2:29:57Speaker 01

  It's the hardest, it's hard.

• 2:30:00Lex Fridman?

  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 down to video games, like it's a culture and so on, it's, it's not, it misses out on that really deeply meaningful thing.

• 2:30:16Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 2:30:16Lex Fridman?

  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, especially one where you stick with for a while, that's, that's really beautiful. Do you have advice for those same young folks?

• 2:30:38Lex Fridman?

  Given that your life is an interesting one, given what kind of degree you got and being a legendary game designer. Do you have advice for young folks in high school, maybe college? How to have a career or a life they can be proud of?

• 2:30:54Speaker 01

  Well, you have to find something that you love so much that it's never going to feel like a job. And don't do it for money. Don't do it for, find something you love and

• 2:31:10Speaker 01

  the rest of it will come. It won't be a straight path.

• 2:31:15Speaker 01

  And do not ever underestimate yourself.

• 2:31:21Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 2:31:59Lex Fridman?

  Did you have low points in your life, dark points, or your mind went to a dark place? Whether it's struggling to get a job and, but does the soft works? Or maybe with a Red Guard flop or

• 2:32:20Lex Fridman?

  where you kind of started to doubt yourself or any of that?

• 2:32:22Speaker 01

  Well, I think what's weird, looking back, I was so, I was always so like in love with doing this that I didn't view them as. Like dark per se. Looking back, I was like, oh, that was, I just wanted to, okay, let me find a way to make this work.

• 2:32:44Lex Fridman?

  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 dissolve.

• 2:32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, when I started Bethesda, I don't know, my father had moved nearby to the office. I was moving and, you know, I slept on a sofa, like, I didn't care. Like, I don't need a bedroom. I'll just, I'll sleep on the sofa and work there. That's all I want to do. 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 did we do wrong? What can we learn? Let's go at it. Now it's a, now it's a success.

• 2:33:32Speaker 01

  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, nah, 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.

• 2:34:01Lex Fridman?

  And you're getting into new spaces, first of all, new worlds of Starfield, but also new, I saw the TV show you're working on. On Fallout with Amazon. What's that like? Worlds that you created in the digital realm, becoming, going on the screen?

• 2:34:21Speaker 01

  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 will make a great movie. And taking a lot of meetings and I think, 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 gonna like synthesize, I met great people, like, well-known creatives, like, 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.

• 2:34:56Speaker 01

  You know, I think the advent of television in terms of what it's become, you know, nowadays with big budget TV series, it kind of came up again and met with people. And Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, who do Westworld. And I always loved the work he did, writing Interstellar and The Dark. Like, movies, I just love.

• 2:35:17Lex Fridman?

  Was Jonathan Nolan involved with this?

• 2:35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's the, yeah, he's the, he's the EP.

• 2:35:21Lex Fridman?

  That's epic. Westworld is incredible.

• 2:35:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:23Lex Fridman?

  Okay, this is awesome.

• 2:35:25Speaker 01

  And he's, the EP, he's directed the first few episodes. And, and when I connected with him, 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, Fallout 3 is one of my, yeah, sign me up. I 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. And, you know, got to visit the sets, reading scripts and things like that. It's all new to me.

• 2:36:08Speaker 01

  But I, they're doing such an incredible job. Like, I think if you like this world, you are gonna be just blown away. Keep in mind, I've never made a TV show. You know, there's all the best, you know, no one ever does it, wanting it to not be great, but they've just done, their attention to detail and obsess, they're just obsessive with what's on the screen and the storytelling and how it looks, the whole, the whole thing.

• 2:36:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think obsession is really a prerequisite for greatness. What they did, HBO did with Chernobyl, like, the attention to detail.

• 2:36:45Speaker 01

  And, and he's doing The Last of Us now, that showrunner.

• 2:36:49Lex Fridman?

  If you really care and you really put a lot of effort into the details, you can basically.

• 2:36:55Speaker 01

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

• 2:37:00Speaker 01

  I don't want to spoil, but when people see it, I think it'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 three, or then tell the story of Fallout four. 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. 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.

• 2:37:41Speaker 01

  So it adds to it while also people who don't, haven't played the games, who can't experience like how crazy cool Fallout is. Can watch the series and so.

• 2:37:52Lex Fridman?

  Are there some similarities or interesting differences between the creation of a game and a TV show? They noticed from the sort of story perspective?

• 2:38:02Speaker 01

  Well, for them, you know, it's much more a character driven. Like you can do all these things with the world and stuff that we already have. It's the main characters, who they are, what their motivations are, that really is the engine.

• 2:38:18Lex Fridman?

  Right. There's no.

• 2:38:19Speaker 01

  Finding the right actors to do those. Yeah.

• 2:38:21Lex Fridman?

  Cause 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 like, with a famous protagonist? Like, uh, when the character is known, how do you work with that?

• 2:38:48Speaker 01

  Well, it's different. It's different. Like Indiana Jones is different where like the name, he, it is the, like it's Indiana Jones, not a world. It's him, right? You can talk about the world of Indiana Jones, but at the end of the day, it's about this character. And Raiders, still my favorite movie of all time. No debate. It's the best movie ever.

• 2:39:10Lex Fridman?

  Best movie ever.

• 2:39:11Speaker 01

  Ever.

• 2:39:12Lex Fridman?

  On a tangent, what do you love about it?

• 2:39:16Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I saw it, obviously, when I was younger and I believed it. I believed this happened. And when they found the ark, I literally, I could not believe that they found it. So, and I have found over my life,

• 2:39:31Speaker 01

  it's still really watchable every time. I enjoy it every single time. Love the character, love the story. The opening is the greatest movie opening ever. And I just love everything. I love everything about it.

• 2:39:47Lex Fridman?

  What was the opening? Is this when the?

• 2:39:49Speaker 01

  What? It's the temple and then the ball rolls and tries to crush him.

• 2:39:52Lex Fridman?

  Oh, that's the?

• 2:39:53Speaker 01

  That's the opening of Raiders. Yeah, he steals the idol.

• 2:39:56Lex Fridman?

  I think you're, you're deeply offended.

• 2:39:59Speaker 01

  What's the opening of Raiders? So I've always wanted to, it's one of those things like, what's on your bucket list? Like, 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.

• 2:40:17Speaker 01

  And they wanted to publish, it's kind of the deal fell apart. They wanted to publish it and we were a publisher and so we didn't do it. And I didn't really have the team to do it. I just was 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 10 years plus and, 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, oh, I have this idea that I pitched a long time ago. And they loved it. And again, the internal team that I had not only didn't have the time, they probably weren't as good a fit as Machine Games,

• 2:41:00Speaker 01

  who's done the Wolfenstein series, who is the perfect fit for this game with storytelling and how they record it. And they are, it's awesome. They're just doing an incredible job with that game. People are going to be, if you like Indiana Jones, it is a definite love letter to Indiana Jones and everything with it.

• 2:41:20Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:41:28Speaker 01

  I could go back. I would just say it is a mashup. It is a unique, it isn't one thing intentionally. So it does a lot of different things that, you know, we've, myself and Yurik and the folks at Machine Games have wanted to do in a game. So it's, it's a, it's a unique thing.

• 2:41:52Lex Fridman?

  Before I forget, who do I, um, how many humans do I have to kill? I mean dragons do I have to kill to get myself somehow into Elder Scrolls 6? So mod, if anyone wants to create mods of me, is that, is that possible?

• 2:42:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's possible. Uh, while maintaining realism somehow. You don't want, you don't want a person in a suit and tie. Doesn't make sense.

• 2:42:17Speaker 01

  You put you in Fallout, you can wear, you can wear that.

• 2:42:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly. Please put me, so Fallout, there's also a culture of.

• 2:42:25Speaker 01

  You do a mod where you replace the mysterious stranger.

• 2:42:29Lex Fridman?

  There you go. That's a to do task.

• 2:42:32Speaker 01

  Top mod, right there.

• 2:42:34Lex Fridman?

  And you will have my deep gratitude and more, dear stranger, for doing so.

• 2:42:41Lex Fridman?

  What's the programming language for mods? Is it mostly?

• 2:42:44Speaker 01

  They use our internal scripting language that's built into the tool.

• 2:42:48Lex Fridman?

  Okay, I'm almost afraid to explore that world because you will never, never, never turn back.

• 2:42:55Lex Fridman?

  How long, you've created so, so many incredible games. Is there, uh, what does the future hold? Do you, is there sort of going through this process? Do you still have the energy, the passion, the drive to keep creating?

• 2:43:11Speaker 01

  I cannot imagine doing anything else. I'd like to do it as long as possible. I will say though, as I've done it, um, you know, soon it'll be 30 years at Bethesda.

• 2:43:26Speaker 01

  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 that's all that mattered.

• 2:43:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:49Speaker 01

  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 got to enjoy this. This is like incredible. We don't get that many shots. So.

• 2:44:10Lex Fridman?

  So the actual process of creating the struggles along the way of stuff not working, like, like you said, at this point, it was 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.

• 2:44:24Speaker 01

  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, it's, 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?

• 2:44:44Lex Fridman?

  So if life is a video game, which it most likely is, what do you think is the meaning of life? From having created so many games, where the character has to try to figure out, I mean, there's bigger questions than just solving the quest. You're big asking the big questions of why am I here? I feel like that's good practice for answering the same question for this video game we're in. What do you think is the meaning of life, Todd Howard?

• 2:45:14Speaker 01

  It's very.

• 2:45:23Speaker 01

  I can say what motivates me.

• 2:45:27Lex Fridman?

  That's a good start.

• 2:45:29Speaker 01

  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?

• 2:45:59Lex Fridman?

  So that curiosity is just is about noticing the the world.

• 2:46:04Speaker 01

  Noticing the world around you. Yeah, look, there's so much anecdotes. Someone says, everybody has two lives.

• 2:46:13Speaker 01

  And the second one starts when you realize there's only one.

• 2:46:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:46:27Lex Fridman?

  Are you able to be inside the worlds that you've created and be able to notice them? Like really, like really enjoy them?

• 2:46:35Speaker 01

  It takes time. So like Skyrim had its 10th anniversary. It's when I went back into it. I think I got to see it for what it is. My younger son got really into it, you know, a few years back on the Switch. That's what we noticed. People age up into it. Right? So one of the reasons it's so popular is, you know, people come into, you know, they're now becoming, you know, teenagers and, oh, okay, I'll finally play Skyrim. And, you know, he got obsessed with it. And he wasn't usually I say, hey, check out my games. And they're like, ah, shut up, Dad. We don't, we're playing this other stuff. And he got like obsessed with Skyrim, like we're having like deep Elder Scrolls lore conversations at dinner.

• 2:47:18Speaker 01

  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. And then I kind of, when the 10th anniversary came out, like, oh, I'm gonna, you know, check out a bill, I have to check out the build out, but I hadn't played it in so long. And it was like. It does. It has this flow. We're like, oh my God, I just played for four hours. I need to, I need to turn it off.

• 2:47:51Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yeah, I mean, there's something about enjoying, enjoying video games with 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. So I want to, can you give me a hint when I should have kids? All right, nevermind.

• 2:48:26Speaker 01

  You are a genius at how to ask that question.

• 2:48:29Lex Fridman?

  The number of times, uh, yeah, you told the anecdote that your, that your son asked you the same question. But, but of course it's all for good fun. Take as much time as is needed. It's Skyrim is still an incredible game. It has an impact on millions of people as, as do all of your games. It's, uh, thank you for everything you've done for the world.

• 2:48:49Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:48:50Lex Fridman?

  It's a huge honor that you would talk with me.

• 2:48:52Speaker 01

  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. And, um, it's really all of us together.

• 2:49:06Lex Fridman?

  Keep doing a great job. Guys and gals, I can't wait to see what you create next. It really, really does have an impact on silly kids like me and millions of silly kids like me. So I really appreciate everything.

• 2:49:19Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:49:19Lex Fridman?

  Thanks, Dan. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Todd Howard. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Tolkien. So comes snow after fire and even dragons have their end. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.