Todd Howard, Director of Skyrim: Why Triple-A Games Are Better When You're Not Playing Safely

[ad_1]

Geoff Keighley: You are on vacation here in Spain.

Todd Howard: A little bit. I can mix it with a great conference like this and take a few days off after the madness of E3

Keighley: We have seen the near future and the distant future of this what are you working on? Now the dust is installed. You went back. How did E3 go for you?

Howard: We felt good. There are always things we want to do better. We are self-critical in this regard. But we felt good in terms of – it was a lot of information that everyone could absorb. A firehose. Here's Fallout 76. Here's a mobile game, Blades. Here is a glimpse of what will happen in the future, with Starfield and Elder Scrolls VI

Keighley: What did you feel people did not get?

Howard: When you're at E3 and you have half an hour to dig all that up, there's a lot of thinking about the information that everyone can assimilate into the moment. There is still time to look into the details of these games, especially Fallout 76. There are a lot of nuances in what we do. Many people try to understand what's in their head. Sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong. They will just have to play it.

Keighley: You had an amazing career. You mentioned driving in the same office for 25 years. People who know your career, know your games, are probably wondering what the average day is for Todd Howard now. You have studios in three places. You have several projects in progress. What is the average day in 2018? How do you spend your time?

Howard: Now that we are doing a lot of projects, I'm going to spend – I've one day created for each project, then the one that's attracting the most people. be careful at the time, I spend more time on it. Fallout 76 and Blades are taking a lot of time right now. I am in more meetings as he has become bigger.

Above: Fallout 4 art

Image credit: Bethesda

Again, I'm working with an amazing team. I did not code in one of our games in 2002? May be? No, 2006. It was probably the last code I wrote. I had a habit of digging. Every project is going on, everyone knows what they're doing. I spend more time in meetings, discussing the game, watching the game together. I prefer to work on a design with other people.

From time to time, there is something that is not really resolved and I'm going to work on it myself, but then I'll start it too. It's very collaborative. One of us will launch: "Hey, here's how it will work." Sometimes it is me and sometimes it is other people.

Keighley: When you started you were producing games, and then you got involved in designing, building worlds and your vision of where the games were going to go . Now that you have two decades, how has your world changed? Do you still get to be very creative?

Howard: Oh, very creative. Because the team has been working together for so long, the managerial part is minimal for me. Which I am very lucky. I became anti-management. I'm probably doing a little more. But we have very good producers. We have different studio heads in each studio. Ashley Cheng, with whom I worked for 20 years, is now the studio head in Rockville. He manages more things from day to day. I can creatively focus on what we are doing now and what we should be doing in the future

Keighley: Tell me about this creative process for you. You have thanked your family for accepting what I am sure – you are very passionate about your ideas, and I am sure that they come to you at any time of day, weekend, or night. . How has this process changed in 20 years? When you get nervous about future games, where do you find your inspiration?

Howard: I have a notebook, but now I'm doing it on my iPhone, in my Notes field. It's still probably the same for me, at the heart. I think of the worlds. I think of the tone. I think oddly at the beginning of the game. "That's the first thing the player sees. That's how it starts." It's a weird idiosyncrasy when it comes to games, but I think about the interface. The interfaces are a lot of the games personality. I tend to think about it again. Something like Starfield, we thought about it for at least 10 years. Conversations We could do it. We could do it. It's a long process, because games take so long

Above: Starfield

Image credit: GamesBeat

Keighley: One thing with Starfield I did not realize at E3 – With Fallout and Elder Scrolls, you inherited these worlds. It's really your first vision of Todd Howard from the first day. You have been there since the original creation of the name, the world, all that.

Howard: It's not just me, but if you look at the team, none of us really did that together. Despite all our games, all our success together – Elder Scrolls, when we started, it was a very generic fantasy. He had his parts. We pushed him to have more of his own identity. We are proud of the work everyone has done there.

Fallout, again, we are not the original creators. All the credit goes to Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky and to all the Interplay people who made this match. We liked it, though. It was something where we felt we could do something special with that. But it goes through our filter. We made it ours. I would say it that way. Every time we make a game, whether it's the one we did, or we watch Fallout, we go back and look at that and re-interpret it. Even if we did it. When it comes to Elder Scrolls VI, you watch Skyrim and Oblivion – I replay all the old games. How do we want it to feel this time?

The difference with Starfield is – that's the difference. There is nothing precedent, whether we have created it or not. This is the part where our ideas were just everywhere on the map. May be? Yes? No? Definitely not? Yes! It took us time to get a coherent idea of ​​what Starfield is. Now this project is working well. That was also why we felt good in announcing it

Keighley: You say you know what it is. How do you define that? How do you crystallize what it is?

Howard: It's usually the experience of the game. What does it make to play it? We have a list of the great features we want. Some of those with whom we are married and others not. It's more of an atmosphere. That's the tone of the game. It's what it feels like to play it. If we have not nailed this – the features can come and go as long as we pay on that vibe.

Keighley: It seems like there are emotional moments for the player, where something happens or they have some experience. How do you articulate that? Do you write it?

Howard: It could be written simply in short sentences, but usually it's a visual presentation. Here is the world. Here are things. When you look at some games, you can see a piece of conceptual art and your mind simply says, "I want to go there. I want to do what this person does. She must register quickly. That's what we feel. At first we will do a series of concepts: maps, world design, things like that.

Above: The Elder Scrolls: Blades

Image credit: Bethesda

Keighley: You have done a lot in your career, but build a new IP from scratch, is this? something that really excites you? It's something you have not done.

Howard: I am very excited. I am very excitable. Even with our other games, we always want to do something new. I like to stay from what I call "more a sequel". I like to play more as a sequel, as a player. I do not like doing them that much. A game that is just the last game with a little extra. Fallout 76 is a very different Fallout game. We are very aware of that. We think a lot of people will like it, because we like it. But many people will probably not do it. We have to balance that. It's an idea we have, and there's a lot of old stuff from Fallout, but it's a whole new experience.

Mobile side, Blades is a simplified version of Elder Scrolls. If you go back to Arena, it's really a glorified dungeon hack. But I love these games, so it was a question of how one could make a very good dungeon adventure game on a phone. It's a whole new challenge. And then Starfield has new challenges. Long answer, but I've always wanted to do something new, even if, at first glance, one feels like "another of those".

Keighley: You mentioned replay old games, old Elder Scrolls, to find inspiration on what to do next. How much do you look for other inspirations, other games? How much do you play all the other games there?

Howard: I play less this year because we ship. I end up watching things on YouTube or Twitch or Mixer. I'm going to watch people play, just to speed up the process. I always play games all the time. I like Fortnite. I play on my phone, my iPad, whatever. I play a lot of Madden football, which may seem strange. It's American football. It's only once in a while that I do some research, where I want to see how someone has done something. I love the art form. I play for pleasure.

I love when time goes very fast. I realize that I have been sitting there for three hours, and it is there that I know that I am really in something. That's when I know with my own games. You are not developing it. You play at work to test it, and you realize you missed dinner. "What happened in the last three hours? I think we are on the now."