LEX FRIDMAN PODCAST, TODD HOWARD, 29 DE NOVIEMBRE 2022

 

01🚀 SIMULATION AND NPCS

01🚀P: "Is it possible that we are currently living inside a video game that the future you designed? can you give hints as to how one would Escape if this was a video? Again, how can a video game character escape to outside the video game? Are these things you don't consider when you design the game?"

02🚀Todd Howard: "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  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."

03🚀P:"Right, so it's not a designed doorway out it's  accidental unintended doorway out and it's a it's a happy bug."

04🚀TH: "you could like trim and show just get in the ocean and go until...

05🚀P: "just keep going and keep going..."

06🚀TH: "Right."

07🚀P: "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." 

08🚀TH: "And then as we do it we learn. They're going to find a way, so just don't try to pen them in. Usually we leave like this developer test cell 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."

09🚀P: "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?"

10🚀TH:  "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 the player definitely cares about, but the best characters are the ones that react to you  so you'll find a lot of people love our guards and the guards are written almost purely to be reactive: hey nice tie, I like your jacket, do this cool watch ,you know, hey what'd you do and so that hey, you're the man as you walk by that makes them interesting, or the way they react to something that you do. Lydia in Skyrim, who everybody loves, I'm sworn to carry your burdens that's a generic line that all of the you know house Carls have and it just kind of lands when she says it."

11🚀P: "why does it land what do you  and did you anticipate with land?" 

12🚀TH: "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." 

13🚀P: "What about  the trade-off between maybe the randomness and the scripted nature of the dialogue,like is there any room for randomness of the dialogue tree?"

14🚀TH: "Oh absolutely, we tend to write them in Stacks with, you know, it's a  very small, I think it was a small state machine that just says okay , this is what's happening, here's a random list of things I could say to that, and then some of that plays out in ways you don't anticipate, but we look at the things what are the players doing that we could have the characters respond to that they don't expect, you know, jumping on tables or stealing stuff or, you know, sneaking in the middle of the night or those kind of things. The more that we can do, the more reactive and interesting the characters appear." 

15🚀P: "And these State machines, how big are these things? are these individual to the individual characters? that's just fascinating how you design State machines, is it  just a giant..."

16🚀TH: "I would think of the AI as one big one yeah  for sort of everybody."

17🚀P: "So there's an AI..."

18🚀TH: "There's a manager for all the people and one of the things..."

19🚀P: "People manager."

20🚀TH: "Right, nice, one of the things that makes what we do particularly unique is, and this is a trade-off for what people are seeing because a lot of it's not on the screen but we're using Cycles to run this, which is we're thinking about everybody in the whole world all the time, the ones that are further away at a much less tick rate they go into low, but we know if they want to walk across the world and we're running every Quest at the same time. Whereas in other open World Games you start an activity the rest of the world is going to shut down so that they can really make that as impactful, we're  I really prefer that the rest of it's going on it's more of a simulation that we're building, so when those things Collide that's where it gets the most interesting, and so we're running all of those people and understanding where they want to go, and their cycles, and what they want to do, and the ones that are closer to you we just update a lot more, it's one way to think about it."

21🚀P: "I mean, that's really fascinating, that's something that people had, they're wondering about to what degree is possible to run the world without you, so there is a feeling to role-playing games that you're the central , you're at the center of the world , the whole world rotates around you as it does in normal life like when we walk around it there's a when you forget yourself, you start to take yourself very seriously like you are the center of the world, you forget that there's eight billion people on Earth and if you gotta have lies that's actually a sobering realization that they all have really interesting life stories, and they have their worries, they suffer in different complicated ways and yet when you play a role-playing game there's a, I mean, both computationally from a storytelling perspective you wonder if the world goes on without you like if you come back , if you take a break and you come back, is there still a bustling town that now has a history since you have last visited, so to what degree can you create a world that goes on without you or goes on at the same time as youdo your thing whatever the heck you're doing?"

22🚀TH: "We don't prioritize the stuff you can't see so it's more like an amusement park if you study like the design or level designers did this how do they build Disney World in these places, so it still exists for you the player, so it is fairly, you know, when you're going to come in, this is what you're going to see, the shops are in the front, you're going to do this, it's just for us to make it far more believable, and get some more emergent Behavior that not just make that sort of the versamillitude of what you're in for that moment, but you buy it all . I always say like, you know, we got to do the little things so that you buy the reality of the virtual world you're in, so we want to do something crazy, you know, when a dragon lands or a death claw comes out of the Wasteland or those kind of things that you it has the impact to you as the viewer that it would to the people in the world."

23🚀P: "Okay, but still you are simulating stuff that's close to you , it is a bit of a simulation going on" 

24🚀TH: "Oh absolutely yes."

25🚀P: "And so that creates some interesting Dynamics then." 

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

27🚀P: "And so that when you show up to that Mages Guild, it's a bustling Guild full of stuff going on."

28🚀TH: "It's not just that it's bustlings that they feel rooted in it , they don't feel like a storefront for come here do quests get experience."

29🚀P: "Is that one of the essential components of randomly generated worlds, so when I think back to Daggerfall as a gigantic world when I first played it, I thought like, I mean, you're just struck by the the the the immensity of it..."

30🚀TH: "Right."

31🚀P: "The immensity of the possibility when you're young and you look into your future, it's wide open and you can do anything and that's what Daggerfall felt like the openness was gigantic."

32🚀TH: "And Daggerfall is interesting coming off Arena , where Arena does the same thing but Daggerfall in many ways is bigger despite focusing on an area because of how the density of okay  , this is how much physical game Space will do for these Villages and towns, and it does feel endless even though you're looking at a map that has constraints, and Daggerfall actually was a touchstone for us going into Starfield for how we do the planets , because there is, there's a different kind of gameplay experience when you just wander outside a city in Daggerfall, then, you know, follow a quest line and go throug, go to this place and it's completely handcrafted and everything around every corner we've kind of placed like Skyrim, you know, starfield's a bit more like Daggerfall and if you want her outside the city, we're going to be generating things and you kind of get used to that game Flow , different than we've done before and fun in a different kind of way."

02🌟STARFIELD

01🚀Todd Howard: "We had always wanted to do something where you explore space, you know, the explore space role-playing game.  

So take the kind of games that we make and give it a little bit of a different spin and, you know, the other games that I loved. There was a pen and paper RPG, I love Traveler. It was one of the first games I made for the Apple II, I didn't uh I never finished it right, I'm just doing it on my own and I love this game Starflight was one, Star control 2 was a game that I loved, Sundog was a big one in the Apple 2 days that, a lot of people don't know that I loved. And so a lot of us in the studio felt it was time to do something new, you know, we're going between Elder Scrolls and Fallout and going back and forth and, I mean, we love that but hey, we've always wanted to do this, explore the Galaxy science fiction gam, you know, now is the time to do that."

02🚀P: "And  that's a brave move so follow us post-op 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 a hundred star systems and a thousand planets available to explore. what is that world of stars and planets like?

03🚀TH: "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 kno,  kind of craft and you would have a very limited set of those. If you go back to tone like, well that's probably the wrong tone and how can we say yes like I want to land on that ice ball? so it started, we started the game right after Fallout 4 so 2016 and the first thing we did was can, you know, how can we have a system to generate these planets and make them look, you know, I'll say reasonable as opposed to, you know, fractally goop?

04🚀[ About what goop means][...]you've probably seen a lot of like simulations whether they're space things or landscape things where they're using fractals and this the landscape does not look real just, this is like highs and lows and it's muddy and so we did find a way, we came up with a way had prototyped of building tiles like large tiles of landscape the way we would usually build them, we kind of generate them offline, hand do some things and end up with these very realistic looking tiles of landscape, and then built a system that wraps those around a planet and blends them all together. And we had pretty successful results with that and so, we thought yeah we could, we could do this and so there was a big design kind of problem to solve in terms of well, what's fun about landing on a planet where there's potentially nothing, because there's a lot of planets and moons, if you kind of right in reality that well, there's nothing on them except resources and so we spent a lot of time figuring out okay let's just lean in on that can a be a lonely experience as long as we tell the player here's what's there, here are the resources that are there, go find the,  but I equate it to that moment of we said about listening to the wind go and watching the sunset and I do think there's a certain Beauty to landing on a strange Planet being somewhat the only person there building an outpost and we are modeling all of the systems because that's how we like to do things so you can watch whatever that gas giant or Moon it will rotate and go and Sunrise,Sunset and all of those things that you would expect and it's , it's all really happening and most people probably won't notice or appreciate all of that but 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.

05🚀P: "See your long answer..."

06🚀TH: "I don't know if I answered your question."

07🚀P:  "There's no all right questions as stupid and the answers are brilliant so that's how this works so this is the world's most immense simulator of um The Human Condition of loneliness because I can't imagine a more lonely experience."

08🚀 TH: "I mean you put it that way. I don't know that was the goal."

09🚀P: "But just on a planet alone I just that must be, I mean, just a deep embodiment of what loneliness is like, I mean, both on like when you hike alone .there's a there's a deep loneliness to that it's like uh it's humbling that this thing will last much longer than you it's been here way before you."

10🚀TH: "Is it the line from the moon landing beautiful desolation? it's Buzz Aldrin."

11🚀P: "Is it beautiful desolation, is that what you said? I think so beautiful desolation well something like that but that's just words,there's a feeling to it and you want that feeling to be real , you just hear there's some resources here, I just feel like it will hit people at a certain moment like it does for me with Skyrim like holy shit, I'm here alone and then and whatever cruel nature that's out there it doesn't really care about me."

12🚀TH: "Exactly."

13🚀P: "Dusty, that's, that's the experience, so you want to create the whole planet and you want to have many of them."

14🚀TH: "We have, we do have many but once you build that system I think the numbers become, I mean honestly, a little bit. We wrap it in , so we can name them all and and have a finite set even though it's a very very large number, but a set that we can 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 Daggerfall analogy right, if you have systems to build that much space doing a hundred plants or a thousand or ten thousand or a million planets is not, it's just you just press, you just change the number and press the button but you can't, you can't name them all, you can't control like when you're getting in really big numbers, hey what is what does this system way out here feel like if you take your ship and jump that far? we do level the systems, when you go to system you'll see oh this is like a level 40 system and us being able to, at least, control that scale is how we kind of ended up with the 100-ish systems we have.

15🚀P: "What are the levelings what do you mean by levels?"

16🚀TH: "It could be like when you look at a map in a game it says this is the area for low-level players this is level one."

17🚀P: "Yeah yeah."

18🚀TH: "So we do that on a system basis, star system."

19🚀P: "I read that space travel is considered dangerous in this game, can you explain?"

20🚀TH:  That's more of that goes back to a tone thing right when you actually play the game because it's a game like we don't really kill you when you fly out in space, but it has a tone of there's some effort involved and we've dialed it back as we've been making the game whereas we used to run out of fuel, you jump and get stranded which on paper was a great like, it's a great moment when you get stranded, you have to press this Beacon, you don't know who's going to come turns out, that's not like it just stops your game, we found you'll be playing the game and I ran out of fuel okay, I guess I'll just wander these planets trying to mine for fuel, so I can get back to what I was doing, it's just, you know, it's a fun killer.

21🚀P: "That's too realistic of a simulation of The Human Condition."

22🚀TH:  "Yeah, I know the idea was well, it's very, you know games do that if you had like a hardcore, you're right a hardcore survival mode. That's the kind of thing you would do, maybe we'll do it in the future but it's more of like a tone , how they build their ships, do they have all the right things for safety? we do get into environmental things on the planets, you know, in your spacesuit obviously, a lot of different spacesuits and Buffs for ,you know, the gases, the toxicity or the temperature on on various planets."

23🚀P: "Are there robots yes those companions are they robots by chance, can you...?

24🚀TH: "One of the companions the robot Vasco yeah."

25🚀P:"Okay, so they have a name and a personality and so on and..."

26🚀TH: "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..."

27🚀P:"I'm offended right now you're calling robots generic."

28🚀TH: "No,no, the ones we use, the ones we use we made them more generic we didn't."

29🚀P:"So we didn't feel sensitive about this."

30🚀TH: "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."

31🚀P: "So it's a deeply human world."

32🚀TH : "Very much, yes."

32🚀P: "In terms of its own. So have you talked to Elon about this about this game over there?"

34🚀TH: "A little bit."

35🚀P: "How much of reality like the work of SpaceX is an inspiration for the decisions made in this game?"

36🚀TH: "I wouldn't say it's for the decisions we made, but, you know, visiting SpaceX and walking in there it wasit's like the Avengers Meets NASA. Ut'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 it like... just I was really in awe, you know, just giant machine that looks for imperfections on the surface of these giant, you know, fuselah, just ,you know, whenever and because ,you know, we're in DC go to the air and space museum a lot and so whenever I look at those kind of things or, you know, you'll visit the space shuttle sort of overcome with how big it is and I go stand back by the engines and think about that thing leaving orbit, you know, and one of the things that Elon really impresses like we're reaching the edge of physics on a lot of the stuff where how hard it is to leave orbit the gravitational pull , and like so the engineering that has gone into that space program what what he's doing now, I just marvel at I don't understand oh right I'm not at that level, but I Marvel at the kind of human Ingenuity and scale. I was on the Delaware Coast last month and I went, I was outside for some reason, it was dark and I saw this crazy light in the sky and I thought it was like a helicopter and then it didn't go away and I'm like someone what is that I call my, we had with some friends hey does everybody see this what is that and we just stood dumbfounded looking at this thing in the sky and like that is a UFO nobody takes their phone out everyone, I'm with like four people everyone is too dumbstruck you would think why don't you take a picture of this thing, and the next day we found out it was in the news it was the SpaceX launch in Florida and I'm seeing it from Delaware Maryland area it was one of the most, it was incredible, it's just even just that I am in complete of."


37🚀P: "Is there some aspect to that that you can replicate the The Majestic nature that in in the video game?"

38🚀TH: The answer to that, you know, I think some of it we were doing when you're standing on a planet, and you see you see the other moons go by yeah and then you realize I could get my ship blast off and land there and build myself a home. I think that's pretty cool there's a minor thing we do which is we have other ships come and go from the Star ports when you're there, so you'll be in a city and then you hear this when you hear the engine, you look up and the ship is taking off or come out that's great there's nothing for you to do, but it's I think it's awesome."

39🚀P : "Yeah yeah."

40🚀 TH: "And then that's all about creating the soundscape to feel seeing it, and like oh that's real that's a ship that or you jump into a system and you see these Freighters and sometimes they contact you like it's not all just like jump in and combat."

41🚀P: "Do you ever think about the fact that science fiction seems to make a it has a way of creating reality, not just kind of predicting it or imagining, it it's almost like the thing you put out there with a video game like this like Starfield that you can anticipate it it kind of fuels people's imagination what is possible."

42🚀TH: "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."

43🚀P: "Yeah I mean uh is that the
one that you do interface this like?"

44🚀TH: "It's the interfaces and then the, you know, a way looks his child's more like a holographic almost AR VR kind of thing or digital billboards or trying to predict human behavior, there's that there's just a lot of future stuff in that movie as it comes to sci-fi. To your other question I don't know, I don't know."

45🚀P: "Well, I think it does and it's interesting, I mean, I suppose you're trying to create the most realist sticking to the tone, the most immersive realistic world and almost by accident you create the thing that is possible because you want it to be realistic in some deep sense, so accidentally can become the possible and then that places that idea in people's heads, I mean, if humans are ever to become a multi-planetary species we need , we need to play games, we need to read sci-fi just help imagine that that's possible to look outside of Earth to look outside look up on the stars, then we can actually travel out there. I don't know there's power to sci-fi to do that, I guess you shouldn't feel the pressure of that."

46🚀TH: "I don't know if I'd make the leap now, that's all that what we're doing might now, maybe, you know, one of our ,you know hopefully, it might Inspire some young people who are headed in that direction alike Oh I thought about getting into space and space exploration and being an engineer , doing these things and I played this game and, you know, it really sparked that interest in me so I'm gonna go take that as a field and maybe that's the person who goes and does some of these things."

47🚀P: "Yeah, because in the next couple of decades a likely a human being will step foot on Mars, which are the first steps until we're just becoming multi-planetary."

48🚀TH: "And if you read some of the stuff they're doing uh with the James Webb Telescope,and them being able to look for signs of life on other planets, it's quite fascinating and, you know, recent stuff I read say they think in 20 years they will, so it's actually quite encouraging to think I was almost a dream of mine like in our lifetimes that we discover Life on another planet."

49🚀P: "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."

50🚀TH: "The numbers are would say so yes."

51🚀P: "The challenging question is what it looks like and how much of it is intelligent, so a lot of biologists tell me the big the big difficult leap is from the precarious to the eukaryotes so like the the complex kife it could be that a lot of our universe is just filled with bacteria."

52🚀TH: "I believe if if I'm understanding it right, that there's two ways they're going to look at planets when they can look at, you know, they can read hey this planet has this kind of gas, they can now look at the ones that are created by potential life forms and then, the ones that are created the byproducts of Industry, so there's only certain ones that are created if you have a society there and that they can start looking on these types of in these types of star systems and these planets, but it takes a lot of time because you have to book time on that telescope , you have to like look at that planet over a long period of time , but in theory given enough time given the amount of space out there we would find one."

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

54🚀TH: "I'm out and I'm fascinated by what it would do to the way, I think in a positive way , the way Humanity thinks about itself here like no there's there is a definitively other life out there."

55🚀P:  "I mean both things if there isn't life out there, that's also a huge responsibility both are super exciting for a loan, it's super exciting because there's a responsibility to preserve whatever special thing we have going on here. This whether you call it the flame of Consciousness or whether it's Consciousness or intelligence. That's a special thing preserve it have it expand but if there's others out there, I mean, that like that Sparks that drive for exploration of reaching out to the stars and meeting them most of them, probably want to kill us so but luckily we have the military-industrial complex on Earth that builds bigger and better weapons all the time."

56🚀TH: "Space Force."

57🚀P: "It will both protect us and destroy our all enemies."

03🌟ELDER 6

🚀“I have a vague idea [of when it’s coming], I wish it was soon. We want it out, too, 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, it would never have been my plan to wait as long as it’s taken for it.”

🚀“We’re going to make sure we do it right for everybody. People are playing games for a long time, you know. Skyrim’s 11 years old- still probably our most played game. We don’t see it slowing down, and people will probably be playing it 10 years from now, also. So you have to think about, okay, people are gonna play the next Elder Scrolls game for a decade, two decades, and that does change the way you think about how you architect it from from the get-go.”

🚀[ About creating their worlds]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 does the game start, what does the player do first? We do music early.

🚀So, take Elder Scrolls 6– we figure out where it’s set, what’s the tone, what are the big features. We discuss the beginning of the game, which we’ve had for a very long time. Then we like to do music. So we’ve already done a take on the music for Elder Scrolls 6- the music we put in the teaser for it. This was 2018. We’ve taken that further, obviously

🚀“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. 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.'”

04🌟XBOX

🚀"It is exclusive - Xbox, PC...keep in mind for us that exclusivity is not unique even though we've done PlayStation stuff...we were traditionally PC developers in the beginning, we transitioned to Xbox, [it] became our lead platform, like Morrowind was basically exclusive to Xbox, Oblivion was exclusive to Xbox for a long period of time...our initial stuff is all Xbox, so we get into development saying we're focused on Xbox, it's not abnormal for us in any way..."

🚀"From a development side, I like the ability to focus...and have help from them - 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."

05🌟INDIANA JONES

🚀"Raiders [of the Lost Ark] is still my favourite movie of all time, no debate, best movie ever, I saw it when I was younger and I believed it, I believed this happened, and when they found this Ark I couldn't believe they'd found it."

🚀"I had pitched Lucas, met some people there and pitched them back in '09 this Indiana Jones concept, and kinda the deal fell apart".

🚀"I didn't really have the team to do [it] and you know we made Skyrim so I guess it worked out."

🚀[Machine Games] is the perfect fit for this game with storytelling and how to record it: if you like Indiana Jones it is a definite love letter to Indiana Jones."

🚀"I mean you can talk about the world of Indiana Jones but it's him, it's the character," 

🚀"[ About if it’s an action-adventure]I would just say it is a mashup, it is unique, it isn't one thing intentionally. So it does a lot of different things that we've wanted to do in a game. It's a unique game."

06🌟STARFIELD DELAY

🚀 "It’s not an exact science, but you can look at what needs to be done and the amount of time you have and we’ve done it in the past where [we say] ‘we can get it done, we believe we can’ so you’re fighting that personal belief that you can get something done, but there’s a lot of things that go into a release date like marketing and publishing, and we’ve reached a point where on Starfield, it’s pretty clear to us, even though you want to say we 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 move it and give it the time it needs."

🚀 Fuente.