KINDA FUNNY PODCAST-TODD HOWARD-22 DE JUNIO 2023

01🚀How did you and the team put together a tight 45-minute presentation on a game this size?

TH- It takes a lot of time. We've been fortunate enough to be able to give a lot of cool demos over the years; Fallout 4 was always a highlight for us to do that. We did a decent-sized Starfield demo last year, at- I'll say "E3,"- the Xbox Showcase, and I think at that time maybe it was twelve-thirteen minutes for Starfield at the end. That had been the longest demo that Xbox had shown, and it got a great response. Going into it this year, we knew, hey, we wanna give everybody a really deep-dive look at the game, and what's the best way to do that? So we're really fortunate to have that opportunity to do that, following the Xbox Showcase with Starfield Direct.

The response really was incredible; hearing so many people, and the feedback- everybody kinda rooting for us, and loving what we've shown- you never know, right? We're heads-down here in the studio. It had been a while since we had really come out with that much stuff; you never know how people are gonna react. It's a new IP, it's incredibly ambitious... we're taking a lot of risks. We're really happy with the response. It's a lot of fuel to us, here. I will say, what actually makes me the most proud of it is, by doing it in that format, we could highlight a lot of people on the team that fans don't know or haven't seen before. There are hundreds more that we couldn't show in it, and their passion for the project... they've all put so much into this game and we just hope people love it as much as we do.

02🚀At one point in the demo, you were basically a space pirate. Could you talk about the sort of exploration and discovery outside of the main story like that?

TH- Sure; I think if you look at all of our games, that kind of feeling is what we want. Where you can look at the scope of the game and the sort of palette or menu of things you could do, and then say, "What if?..." and then, "I'm gonna go do these things." And I think that idea of being a space pirate- there's a whole faction for it, by the way, with the Crimson Fleet- or being a smuggler, having contraband and shielded cargo, or taking over things: those are all things we think about as well, and we want to find the best ways to enable that, while not feeling separate, while fitting in as part of the game itself. You see that in the video, I think, when you arrive at Jemison where they actually do a contraband scan that you pass, in that case. A lot of really cool systems, and we do so many of them... What we really work on is, how do all the systems come together and collide, and create some really cool moments where the players have that agency? To go and do what they really wanna do in the game.

03🚀Xbox has made a big push for accessibility and making sure everyone can play; is there something about the game's accessibility settings that stands out this time around?

TH- I think Xbox has done an incredible job there, with everything they've done with accessibility, and their controller in particular. One thing we're really leaning in on with this game is having a large font mode, which really is important in an RPG, where there's a lot of stuff to read. It comes into play with accessibility, but also with various monitor sizes. I'm noticing that it's really helpful when I play- there's a lot more handheld devices coming out, where you can stream these games or sometimes play them natively, and it really helps us there as well. That's one in particular that we're really leaning in on.

04🚀 You mentioned handhelds, can you share with us: is it Steam Deck compatible? Or is that something you can share later down the road?

TH- We'll talk about that later down the road, yeah.

05🚀What are some of your favorite, or the more unique parts of the new trait and background systems for character creation in this game?

TH- We've done a number of games over the decades that have various character systems, and I think we've learned a lot in terms of, "How does it feel when you start a game? What are those first choices like, before you understand what the actual rules of the game are?" That's always a trick to get right. And then, "How much depth does it have if you're playing for twenty, fifty, a hundred, or five hundred hours?" I think we've hit a real sweet spot with Starfield, with giving you that flavor right out the gate, where you are gonna pick some starting skills with your background, but that also has flavor. People wanna role-play. They don't want to just see it as a list of numbers. "I'm a chef, but what can a chef do? How does that factor into dialogue, or other choices in the game?" So that's the backgrounds.

The traits are a bit of a throwback to Fallout; they're optional, they come with positives and negatives. You saw some of that in the Direct, with the adoring fan, and some other ones; the parents is a really great one that we all love. It lets you, if you're gonna start over, play the game in a different way.

06🚀On the top of the skill tree, there's also ranks; can you elaborate on that a bit?

TH- What we've given ourselves, and to the player, there is a lot of flexibility. We have the visual, right; I actually love these patches/badges that can go on a spacesuit and how they unlock. And then they're tiered, as opposed to being a strict tree you have to go down; you can say, "I want to focus in technology," and then the different tiers of skills will open up. It gives you flexibility within that. There's five of them, you saw that in the direct. What we're finding here, what you always want, is when people are talking about the game, that they're saying, "Did you know?... Did you know you can do this?" or they're comparing characters, and those character builds, and those stories feel very unique for each person in that conversation.

07🚀Scientists say one of the best places to look for alien life may actually be under the ice on Europa, so I put it to you Todd: fishing, or no fishing?

TH- Well, it depends on your definition of "fishing." Is it collecting fish? Killing fish? Or is it specific to having a rod?

08🚀Is there some kind of rod I can put into a lake and pull out an alien fish?

TH- That is one thing we don't have. Look, I'm excited to say no to things. If I'm smart, I'm really here to lower expectations. They're a little high. [Laughing]

09🚀 If there's any concern I've heard about Starfield, it's about hand-crafted versus procedural, particularly when it comes to having a thousand planets. When I get to them, is there gonna be something to do that's really worth my time?

TH- That's the million-dollar question when it comes to a game like this, one that we honestly struggled with early in the project. We wanted to do the [thousand] planets because we like to give you that choice. Where do you wanna go? You feel like you would want that choice in a game like this. So at first was: technically, could we pull it off? And we did, technically; [we] draw these planets, make them feel believable on the screen. Obviously it's procedural- there's no way we're going to handcraft an entire planet. What we do is we handcraft individual locations, and some of those are placed specifically- obviously the main cities and other quest locations- and then we have a suite of them that are generated, or placed, when you land, depending on that planet.

I'll also say that, for us, we view it as giving you, when you look at a system, here's the menu of things you could do. ...About 10% of those planets have life on them. We're pushing it to the edge of what [scientists] think, what planets are in that Goldilocks zone, versus planets that have resources. It is a moment, when you land on some of these barren planets- and again, we will generate certain things for you to find on them- but if you look at a planet, you see the resources, it has things you want- I love the Buzz Aldrin quote, "the magnificent desolation," I think there's a certain beauty to landing on those and feeling, "I'm one of the only people, or the only person to ever visit this planet." It's a difficult design thing, if you add too many things, if it's generating abandoned bases or towers or things to find, it starts feeling too game-y in some of those locations. I think we've dialed that in pretty well, depending on the planet that you're on. We hope everybody enjoys it for what it is, but it is an exploration different than we've had, where you're landing, you're exploring around that landing spot, and then you're probably going somewhere else.

10🚀You seemed to highlight biome diversity on certain planets, which makes me wonder about the size of some of these planets, and about the diversity of them with different hazards and whether we'll need to prepare to land on some of them?

TH- There's a lot there, but we do have a lot of biomes. We do look at temperature, we look at the radiation, we look at all of those things on a planet so that your suit and your protection- you can get certain ailments if you're not ready, and certain weather things can come through- with all of that, there are obviously planets that might have one type of biome, and there are planets that have a whole bunch. And their creatures and plants and everything go with the biomes, so there's a whole part of the game where surveying a planet, discovering all of the flora and fauna and resources- planets also have traits, usually geological things that are inherent to that planet, and uncovering those- and if you fully survey a planet, that data is actually worth a lot money- credits in the game- that you can sell.

There's a whole part of the game that's really just doing that, and it's a little more... zen-like. You can get on a planet where the creatures there, some of them can be aggressive, where it can get dangerous if you're exploring the planet. You can watch the creatures- we've actually had a problem at times with the predator creatures going and killing all of the more peaceful creatures, so you're coming across- why are they all dead? And you realize there's something dangerous in the area. I would say this: we do everything that you mentioned and we really try to mix it up and spend a lot of time balancing that so it is fun minute to minute, but you also know what you're getting into.

11🚀There's iconic creatures across the Elder Scrolls and Fallout, will Starfield have any specific creature that we'll come across and say "Wow, that was the bad one?"

TH- There's a few a bad ones- there's one really bad one- but you have to play it. [Laughs]

12🚀Is there a land vehicle or an alien mount you could ride around in?

TH- There is not... We've seen this with our other games, we want to design it so it feels good on foot. But we do have the boost pack- you saw some of that in the video- you have skills for the boost pack. The boost pack almost acts like a vehicle; it's super fun, where you can fly through- and then the low gravity planets are just... really something special in the game.

13🚀Will we have the option to play the game solo, without any companions or crew members, or is that going to be a necessity? Can crew members decide "I don't wanna do this anymore," and leave on their own?

TH- First, the companions are awesome; our team's done a really great job with them, and there's a lot of great depth there with the main companions. But we do support where, if you don't wanna do that, there's traits that really make you that "I wanna play by myself..." and then there's also skills that go into that, that give you special perks and bumps if you are solo. Them leaving on their own, they can get angry with you, and then the relationship that you have with the companion can change based on the decisions you're making in the game.

14🚀If I get mad at my companions, can I space them and make them walk the plank on my spaceship?

TH- [Laughs] You can leave them behind. You can tell them where to go, you can assign them to outposts, you can assign to ships that you're not using and things like that.

15🚀Are the Constellation companions the only ones that are able to be romanced?

TH- The four main Constellation ones are the ones that support full questlines for them and romance.

16🚀Could my crew on my ship be all robots?

TH- Technically... yes. There's Vasco... and then there's... a few other things. Not to the extent of the humans, obviously.

17🚀I think one of the challenges of making a game like this is that people are going to ask some dumb questions like that, and for every one thing you can do, there's still going to be a hundred other things you can't do because we're not there yet technologically.

TH- That's what we in the studio, right? When you're doing a game like this, or the games that we've done, we ask all the same questions. It's, "How do we say yes as much as possible?" [Those questions] aren't actually- "Should you [be able to] fish?"- took us a while, we finally added it to Skyrim, right? That's what's great about these kinda games, role-playing games in general; that they're not defined by a certain feature set.

18🚀I want to talk about music; how do you integrate it into a huge, open game and have it hit at the right moment?

TH- Actually music is one of the first things that we start with when we make a game. We do concept art and we start writing the music. I think the music for Starfield, the work that Inon Zur has done there, is just incredible as could be. My favorite game music. We did that very early. When we're working on the game, we're looking at the concept art, the music is giving us a feeling of what this world feels like, what this experience feels like. How we do that in an open game, is there is a whole system behind, like, what is happening? What's the mood right now? And it's pulling from a collection of tracks that fit that mood, and then segueing between them.

It might be easy to say, "Oh you're just going to do this all the time," but the trick, we find, is actually when it has time to breathe. When the music actually subsides for a bit, so that when it does come on, and we're trying to hit a certain mood, that it's impactful. I've also noticed, and I'm happy to hear from all of you, that sometimes the music can come on and it puts you in a mood. You're hearing this music and you're like, "I'm feeling I should do the following now," and it puts you in a certain mood that you weren't in before. We get some of that sometimes; not intentional, but it's not a bad thing.

19🚀Is there any kind of space radio that we'll be able to listen to as we're exploring?

TH- There is one... but it is pretty much local to a certain location, not something you can dial into when you're away. But there is a little bit of that, I would say.

20🚀Todd, have you ever wanted to be the radio host for one of your games? "Put me behind the microphone!"

TH- [Laughs] No, I don't think that's for me. You know, the last DJ we had, in Fallout 4, is Brendan Hunt, who everyone knows as Coach Beard on Ted Lasso. He's incredible in the game.

21🚀Back on Starfield, and the ships specifically: if I "acquire" a ship without buying it, are they also upgradeable?

TH- They're all upgradeable, they go through the same- we built those ships with the builder that you all saw in the Direct. When you steal one, we do make you register it; if you wanna modify it or use it in those ways, you have to spend credits to go register it. That's for us to keep the economy from kinda spiraling in those ways. You can fly it around, but if you want to mess with it, you register it. Then you go through that whole loop of upgrading it. I will say that that's a very deep system, and one that we expect for late-game. It's not like you start the game and then you're gonna get right into ship building. It costs a lot credits. It is, in a good way, a very complicated system, and one that is more of a longer-term thing in the game.

You can easily upgrade your ship, just go in and say, "I want to improve these weapons, I want to improve the grav drive, or the shields." That's very easy to do. But where you go in that mode and you break it apart and you're building, that is a whole mode unto itself, that is more of a long-term play kind of thing.

22🚀 If I'm going to New Atlantis, and I do have contraband... what happens?

TH- You'll have to wait and see!

23🚀I may have missed this in the Direct, but: you can design the internal layout of your ships, correct?

TH- Yeah, it comes with it; you have these modules, and they come with the inner parts as well. You click 'em together, and you saw there are different modules for different things. That gives the ships a really unique feel. I'll say, when we designed the game originally, when you go into sci-fi, we start with, "What kind of spacesuit do we want? What does that look like? What do the weapons look like?" and it took us a long time on ships. Because there's so many ships in games, how do we do them where they look cool, but they feel believable, where you can draw the line from where we are today to these kinds of ships, while also allowing the player to build them? That actually along with the planets was a big challenge for us, and we all love where it's ended up.

24🚀I really loved the explanations games like Mass Effect came up with to justify faster-than-light communication and travel, has your team come up with anything similar?

TH- Definitely; we say "grav drive" here, but it stands for the graviton loop field array, the way the different bands bend space in front of you, and the more it can bend it, you're actually taking space and you're fold it- you're bring the space towards you- there's some great papers out there on warp drives and quantum physics...

25🚀Not dissimilar to a warp drive, where you contract the space ahead of you, and expand the space behind you, right?

TH- Technically that's what it is, and we do get into, with the game, gravity and how that affects people in this universe. How they bend it. How they feel about that, and so forth. We do a lot of interesting things there, but to your point, we did spend a lot of time originally on, "What is the fiction of this new universe that we're building? And how do we get from today to the tech level of this game? And how does that..." It's still a video game, so I don't want to over-promise or anything, but, "how does that make the reality of this game feel believable?"

26🚀Are there any technical elements of current-gen systems or Creation Engine 2 that you're currently excited about, or anything you're looking forward to in the future?

TH- We're just so happy with the new engine. It took us so long to do. Our tech team, they're wizards led by Chris Rodriguez and Joel Dinolt. What we're able to do in the game, to have all these things looking amazing and running, from all of the items that we're simulating, and people, spaceships, full planets; our lighting model is just awesome. The real-time [global illumination]... we didn't really show this off, but I'd love to in the future, but we have some great volumetric fog, and how that interacts with the lighting. Then you get into the physics, and when we start messing with gravity it gets even crazier.

Our quest system... you know, there are a lot of open-world games now, but I think what really makes ours different is that all these quests are running. It's not like you start a mission and we shut everything down. You can be on dozens of these at once, and that obviously creates a lot of chaos sometimes in our games- we're aware of that- but it also creates these magic moments that we just love and our players love, and I think that's what's really special about it.

27🚀Digital Foundry did a great breakdown on why you went with the 30fps cap, but I want to ask: was it ever under consideration that you do a 60fps performance mode, where you take away some of those features?

TH- We never looked at taking features away; our focus is on delivering all of that. We've seen all those comments. Digital Foundry does an incredible job- I don't think they know how everybody in the game industry watches every single one of their videos- they do a fantastic job. Ultimately, we boil it down to: we wanted the consistency. The game is running great, but we don't want players to ever think about it. We have obviously seen other games that performance modes, and we lean toward consistency overall. We talk to our fans, and hear that from everybody. We're feeling really great, the game feels great in your hands, and I would say- developers know this- there are things that you can do to make that [framerate] look and feel great. Things like motion blur, how fast the game refreshes or reacts to a controller input. All of those things matter to something great, and I can honestly say this is the best-feeling game that we've had.

28🚀I've been playing a lot of Diablo 4, and seeing quests with a very "videogamey" design: "Bandits took my trousers, kill ten of them, bring it to me and I'll give you a new hat." Have you thought about ways to avoid that, and if so, how do you break out of that sameiness?

TH- To show how much I listen, I believe you mentioned that on an earlier podcast. I guarantee Starfield's gonna have some of this. [Laughs]

29🚀It's hard to reinvent the wheel, but it reminds me that I'm in a video game when someone tells me a story like that.

TH- It comes down to making all that content, and our folks have done an incredible job there. There really is a lot of it. We have a lot of specific quests. What you're talking about, the sort of random, one-off ones, I don't think it's mutually exclusive. We obviously have a bunch of that. You could go to a planet, and go to an outpost, and we're going to generate a mission nearby, and you're gonna see some of that. But I think that's okay if you know you're in for it. And those activities, if the gameplay's good, can be fun; but they shouldn't take the place of those more in-depth ones, and we've done a lot of those.

30🚀Speaking of content, you've always been supportive of mods. Is there anything in previous games that you've seen from the community that's impressed you, and moving forward are you excited to put mods into this game?

TH- I think Starfield is gonna be kind of a modder's paradise. It's part of our DNA here, we've been doing it for over twenty years. Our community around that- 'cause we've usually been classically single-player- that has been our community, and people are still modding our games, and playing them, so we're doing a lot of it. One of the things that I'll call out is, it's important for us not just to enable that, but to participate, right? To make it easy for them, to make this not just a hobby, but a career. We've had a lot of great success there. Looking forward to what everyone's gonna do with Starfield, I just cannot imagine.

31🚀I noticed in the Direct that you could exploit alien creatures and plants to generate resources, and I want to know if resources will limit how much you can do with the outpost building?

TH- Like I was talking about with ship building, it is a very deep system, and it does involve a lot of resources to really do what you want to do. You can do all that, you can land on a planet and start building, but to really go crazy? You're gonna need to develop your character skills, you're gonna have to collect those resources, but there is a ton there. You can even actually somewhat connect them between planets, shuttling cargo between them. It's a really cool system, but I will say again, like shipbuilding, one that has a lot of depth. It's not really meant as an early-player kind of system. It's meant to be one that you're gonna play over a long period of time.

32🚀So quick follow up, can outposts be an economic generator for you, as well?

TH- Yes they can.

33🚀As a creator, with the release imminent, where are you emotionally? Is there a certain amount of confidence, or a little bit of imposter syndrome?

TH- You've been through it, Gary. You have something we've worked so hard on; I'll say again the team here, many of us have done this for... decades together, in some cases. We have put just everything that we've learned and a maximum effort into this one. We love it, and our fingers are crossed that everybody feels the way we do about it. We're just really humbled everybody's excitement for it. It's fuel for us over these last few months, to make it as good as it can be for everybody.

34🚀Do you feel any additional pressure given the way people are positioning Starfield as the standard-bearer for Xbox this year?

TH- ... I think I was feeling better before you asked that.

[Laughter]

Look, we're focusing on what we can do, like I said, on this game. I will say Xbox... their support has been incredible on this, with Phil and Matt Booty and the team over there. Obviously we've worked with them for a long time, going back twenty years on Morrowind, but being part of Xbox and their support has allowed us to be this ambitious and take these risks. Fingers crossed.

35🚀Two quick yes-or-no questions: are there black holes, and can Vasco wear a hat?

TH- Pass on the first question, and can Vasco wear a hat? Not currently. But I'm sure that will be a mod.

35🚀Have you ever thought about making a small game, something like Pentiment?

TH- We have the mobile team, we did Fallout Shelter, which I think is our most-played game ever at this point. We do some of that; we have some mobile stuff going that looks really cool that we haven't talked about. We get to dabble in that, but at the end of the day, as a player I like the big worlds that I can get lost in. That's why many of us here wanted to make games. It's really rewarding for us, and we're so thankful for the opportunity and to be here with you guys today.

🚀 Fuente