The Biggest Lesson Bethesda Learned From Skyrim (And Can Apply to Elder Scrolls VI) | Bruce Nesmith

SPEAKER_04 0:00

I mean, I worked on Oblivion, I worked on uh Skyrim, I worked on Fallout 3, I worked on Fallout 4, I worked on Starfield, I worked on all of these. So what you're doing is you're using feedback from the previous game, and then you try to react to that in the next game. Good time for someone else to take those reins and do things and show me the better way. I'd love to see that. I'm I'm excited to see that.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Are there things that you'd like to see coming up with the next Fail to Scroll 6?

SPEAKER_04 0:28

Probably the number one thing I would like to see, because I think it's actually I'll give you two things.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Welcome to the examined game. Today I'm talking with Bruce Naismith. Bruce has spent basically his entire career working on the full, beautiful back catalog of games that Bethesda Studios has put out. He's worked on every single Elder Scrolls game as either a designer or a writer, culminating in being the lead designer for Skyrim. And he has so much to say about the studio. I love Bethesda. I'm just gonna get out front. So that's gonna be the vibe of this this this uh interview is me just asking questions. What is it like working with Todd, what's going on under the surface to make sure these games come out the way they do. Uh and we talk a little bit about Elder Scrolls 6 uh Sentinel, which literally got announced yesterday, and he shared what he would love to see uh in in that game. And if the reason I'm laughing is I you know I want to tease and be like, and you might be surprised to hear what it is, but I think you'll be really surprised to to hear what it is. It's certainly not what I would have thought of, but actually, when he explains, well, I want to see this, it makes total sense because he's a designer, he's always thinking from the point of view as like, what do we need to do to enhance immersion, make this game really work for the player. I literally just come off the back of this conversation as I'm recording this and I'm buzzing from it because it was just so lovely to deep dive into the inner workings of this company. And if you want to see more interviews like this, then please I would ask that you do support me on my Patreon. You can join for free. It is so easy. You can just click the link in the description, or if you want to become a pay member, get some bonus content, early access to interviews, that would be great as well. Please enjoy. Thank you very much. One of the first questions I always ask is like what folks are playing, if you're playing anything at all right now, gaming-wise.

SPEAKER_04 2:17

No, I've been focusing more on uh my writing. So I have uh there's stuff I will probably be playing in the future, but at the moment I'm not playing a whole lot.

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Do you tend to kind of wind down the gaming when you've like focused on a new project? Just so you're not distracted by it.

SPEAKER_04 2:35

It comes in waves. Uh so also if there's a game out there that's really exciting me, then uh I might you know choose to uh devote some uh significant hours to playing that. Uh so I'm I imagine as the holiday season is coming up here, we'll uh we'll see a whole spade of games. I might pick something out of that to play, but at the moment I'm I'm getting more joy from uh my writing than I am from playing. So I'm not have only been playing casual games at the moment.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

I'm so glad to hear it. It's always nice to hear when a writer is getting joy from writing. It's not a guarantee.

SPEAKER_04 3:13

It is not. It is not.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

Um and what about historically? Do you know off the top of your head what you're sort of most played are over the years of the sound games that you're always going back to?

SPEAKER_04 3:23

Um I tend to gravitate towards uh strategy games. So uh I'm a big civilization fan, so that's uh I'm always playing uh I've played a lot, a lot of hours of that. Um I was a huge Minecraft fan for a while. Uh I like to play uh um a lot of the uh RPGs. Um I also was uh a big uh Assassin's Creed fan. I played a lot of that. Uh so I'm not definitely not above the uh the action genre, but I'm I'm not uh not good enough on the controller to play the really Twitch heavy games. So they have to be a a little more on the casual side for me for that.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

Yeah, I'm I'm very much the same. Um that's a pretty um that's a nice spread of games, I'd say. That's not just one genre that you're um double dipping down on.

SPEAKER_04 4:16

Yeah. Yeah. And I have played uh uh the games that are more shooters, uh, and and I enjoy some of them. Um but it's it's not my first my first uh go-to and probably the only category that I don't do at all are the sports games.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Uh yeah, literally the same. And fighting games, I can't I put down fighting games at the age of 12 and I haven't picked them up again. I just got too angry. They made me too.

SPEAKER_04 4:48

And that's probably true. I have dabbled occasionally with them, but they they don't hold my interest for very long.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

They might have changed since then.

SPEAKER_04 4:56

But well, the combos on the controller and the uh the reflexes that you have doesn't interest me as much as uh the decision-making process. I'm very much drawn to games where you make interesting decisions.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

I always remember the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, like the very final fight, it turns into a like a like a fighting game fight, which was just the most frustrating.

SPEAKER_04 5:22

I did play uh Baldur's Gate uh to the bitter end, though. Actually, technically twice, once by myself and once with friends.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Um what was that like for you seeing a game like that? Obviously, having spent such a long time within this genre. Um I'm guessing it's hard to be surprised.

SPEAKER_04 5:45

Um the surprises come with the little things, not the big things. Um, and I have a long history of the Dungeons and Dragons as well as with uh Bethesda. So for me, it was very joyful to see the DD uh expression of fantasy rules come to life. I think Larry and Studios did a magnificent job of that. Um I also thought that they kind of redefined things a certain way. The Bethesda games have always had the philosophy of let the player play everything. So you can play the entire Thieves Guild, you can play the entire Fighter's Guild, you can play the entire Mage's Guild, et cetera, et cetera. There is nothing that your character can't play. And that's a very good philosophy. I support that philosophy. But I was pleasantly surprised to see how positive it felt to me to make consequential decisions that closed off gameplay in Baldur's Gate, that that also felt good because it was done well. And that I felt like the decisions I made had more meaning in certain ways because uh there were actual consequences. And if I wanted to see those other gameplays, I'd have to go bring up another character and try different paths.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

I also think, I mean, I I'm afraid to say, when I was having those moments with Boulder Escape 3, I was a little bit like, oh, thank God, I don't have to go and do that. I've got enough on my plate with this uh particle path. And actually, but at the same time, I was I was playing um, you know, the Oblivion Remaster recently, and just the joy of like going and knocking on all the doors, all the guilds, um, and just being like, Yeah, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna load up my my quest bar here and just uh go out and attack the world, you know.

SPEAKER_04 7:42

Well that's the thing. They were they were both fun. They were just fun in different ways. And that to me was was part of the surprise. I would have expected to fall on one side or the other as if they were things that you couldn't have both. And the lesson learned is you can have both. You know, I can enjoy this game over here that does it this way, and enjoy this game over here that does it that way.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

Um I think a little bit about that as well in relation to you know, the whole like, can you murder hobo a place, you know, and can I still enjoy RPG if it doesn't give me the right to kill everybody? Um but it's always been a bit of a litmus test for me whether I'm gonna really enjoy something. However, I was talking with Cara Patel, the director of avowed, sort of realizing it's like that's something I'll do like once at the very start of the game, and then I'll continue to go and be extremely civilized for the most part. But I think just knowing that I can kill someone and take everything out of their pockets.

SPEAKER_04 8:45

The uh the information that we had at Bethesda was that it's actually fairly rare for someone to play the bad guy. They like to do maybe an individual bad thing every now and then, but to actually play the evil path is is pretty rare. Not to say nobody does it, but it's it's a very small slice of the people who play. But the fact that it's available to you that that exists enriches the experience. So knowing that you could kill an NPC that is not doing anything wrong gives a certain uh life to the game experience, makes it feel more real, makes it once again feel like choices have consequences. Um not necessarily that you're gonna do it, but the the option there actually creates its own sense of space in the game.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

I suppose it's the power of knowing I'm not gonna kill you is uh I wanted to. Yeah. Which I love that. I think some of my best moments, uh, yeah, where I'm like, you're really pushing me here, but it's like, you know, and then usually there there is, there's one or two senseless murders in in any playthrough, you know.

SPEAKER_04 10:03

There's some there's a character that you decide you just don't like. And maybe the the uh designers wrote them that way intentionally, and so you have the freedom to do that. By I think one of the things that both games like the Elder Scrolls games and Fallout Games and uh Baldur's Great 3 give you is that sense of freedom. I have choices, I can I can make my own decisions to do things my own way. Those games may have expressed it differently, but the foundational aspect is freedom. And that is what is uh so appealing in a lot of the open world games in particular and RPGs uh more specifically, is that sense that I'm in control. I don't just you know, old school shooters, you know, the more modern shooters, not so much, but the old school shooters, you very much had to go up here, kill that guy, then go over there, kill that guy. The decision-making process wasn't yours. You were in charge of tactics, you weren't in charge of strategy. And the open world games, that's a completely different thing. You're actually in charge of the big picture. Go do what you want to do. You're in charge, it's your game. And that feels good. Players really enjoy that, they gravitate to it.

SPEAKER_00 11:26

I'm curious, is that for you I and this is fast becoming my most overused term on this podcast, but have you always had a sort of a north star? That's the overused phrase, north star, um, with your work that you're always striving for? Is it is it like what can I do to give the player the absolute feeling of of freedom, or is it something else, or is it actually a multitude of things?

SPEAKER_04 11:53

Um it's hard to say that that would be a North Star because those tend to be set by the game directors. That's something Toward sets. That's not something I said. I implement that uh that vision, that view. So I definitely support it, but I don't get to determine it. And that that would be true for other studios as well. Whoever the studio head is sets that particular thing because that's a very, very big picture thing you're talking about. Um I like to encompass player freedom more on the side of things like character creation, which is one of the things I did have a lot more say in. Uh, can I create any kind of character I want to create? How open is that? How empowered does the player feel to direct his character in a particular way? Or when I'm writing a quest, do you have multiple options for how to accomplish something? Now, this is what Laria did so brilliant brilliantly, by the way, uh, you know, better than uh most Bethesda games, in my opinion, uh, is I get to make these choices and that uh is something I want to give to the player. I want to make sure I have multiple ways to do things. Um and all too often when you're creating content that can't be done or can't be done well because it takes more time and effort to do that. So a particular quest or adventure scenario could take twice as long to create and to debug and to polish. If it has three branches, then one that just had is linear. So as a studio, you have to make the very difficult choice. Do I give you two quests or do I give you one with choices? What's the better bang for the buck? And uh that's no guaranteed answer there. That's not a right answer question. That's a well, some people would like to have more quests. Well, some people would like to have more choice within their quests.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

Either way, they're gonna let you know about it as well, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:08

Are you understanding?

SPEAKER_04 14:09

Yes, yes. They do not sit by quietly.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

How will we ever know?

SPEAKER_04 14:16

Uh Well, the trick is no matter what you do, somebody is going to complain. And, you know, the the people who are upset tend to voice their opinions. The people who are happy you don't hear from them as much. Uh so you kind of have to read the tea leaves through the negative comments. Uh if you get more complaints about something versus something else, then you know which way the wind is blowing there. But there is there's not a thing you can do that won't get somebody saying you did it wrong. You know, when you're selling to 10 million people, you know, the the classic you can't please everybody all the time is definitely in place.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

Do you think that your way that you approach feedback or play feedback? Do you do do you sort of find a way to work back from like your earliest games where obviously you weren't necessarily potentially being exposed to a multitude of comments through the internet versus now where it's just like a tidal wave of information coming at you? Is there a specific way that you've always gone about passing out uh player feedback in a way that's actually going to be helpful for the game, even if you know that there's still going to be people who think that you should do it their way?

SPEAKER_04 15:31

Well, it's interesting for player feedback. Um there's really a small handful of pathways there. We don't we can't get the player feedback on the game we're creating right now. Because there isn't there isn't time to do that. So what you're doing is you're using feedback from the previous game. So for example, feedback from Fallout 3 informs Fallout 4. But when you're making Fallout 4, you don't have the luxury of sending out the partially developed code to people to play or even bringing them into the studio to play, see how they feel, and then making course corrections. That's a that's a very slow and expensive process, and you don't have that luxury. So you have to look at, okay, what was popular in Fallout 3, what was not popular in Fallout 3. Um and then you try to react to that in the next game in the sequel. You can also look at what was popular, not popular in other products that are comparable to yours, and try to try to work from that. And usually you get those from uh the community managers within your own studio who are able to aggregate information for you from things that they're hearing, from journalists who do a lot of the hard groundwork to find out what the opinion is, um things like that. Uh help you to help inform you as to what's working. Uh also when you're working with a company like Microsoft, they can give you statistics on things that help, like how many people completed this quest line versus that quest line. Um and did they do this first and do that first? So, for example, from that, we were able to determine that in Skyrim at least, a significant number of people did not follow the main quest. They came out of the original dungeon and took uh it turns out they took a left because there's a big mountain range to the right. They they took a left and just went off and did their own thing. You know? And so you find out that way, okay, this means that people like to be able to control their own destiny. They like to be able to say, I want to be able to say what I'm playing. You know, your main quest may be cool. I'm not ready for it yet. May never be ready, but most of them end up playing it eventually. Um, I want to go explore the world. That's what's interesting to me. Huh, okay. Well, a significant number of people have to explore the world. Let's give them more world to explore. Let's enhance ways in which they can explore the world. Let's make sure the world is filled with things to see and do and find. So you end up having to sort of read between the lines on a lot of things. Something as simple as, well, a large percentage of people didn't start the main quest leads to this whole thing about exploration.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

I love hearing that process, and it makes me think, especially with say something like Skyrim, which I have so you adored.

SPEAKER_00 18:46

Um you're looking at what people gravitate towards, and what that means is probably more focused on that right and less focus on less popular elements. However, my guess is there's going to be unpopular elements that are really popular amongst a very hardcore uh contingent of players, and that's that's where the tension comes, right? Or that's where they can be.

SPEAKER_01 19:21

And and I guess this is something that just comes down to individual preference.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

But again, what I think I, you know, I I played Marrow and I played Oblivion. Um, I absolutely loved them. And then there was just something about Skyrim, which I know it's had feedback from people saying, like, well, it feels like it's it's my view is that it's more accessible. That's how I would describe Skyrim. And it gave me more ability to kind of get really deep into that world. Um, whereas it feels like a lot of the time people want that genre to go backwards might seem a little too strong a word, but for it to stay a certain way, right? Um, I'm curious on your feelings on that. Making a game like Skyrim, which is to my mind sort of basically knocked it out of the park in terms of making an immersive deep RPG that is playable by a huge wave of people without being so dumbed down that it's not an RPG anymore. I guess if I had a question, I'd be like, how did you do that? Which is a big, which is a big, it's probably the biggest question I've ever asked.

SPEAKER_04 20:27

So if I had an actual blueprint on how to do it, I would be one rich son of a bitch. A lot of it comes down to we had the same team that had worked on Oblivion. The studio had not really changed dramatically. So we were able to deal with institutional knowledge at a high level that had been retained, uh, which allows us to not make mistakes and build on successes. Um that was that was definitely key to it. Uh I think also we gave a high priority to making sure that the world was full. There was nowhere that you went where there wasn't at least something fun to see, if not something fun to do. You know, and it and it can be just little things. It can be a little vignette on the side of the road. It doesn't have to be a huge big adventure. But, you know, the visual storytelling was fantastic. And, you know, I go back to that sense of freedom once again. We accelerated that in Skyrim compared to Oblivion. Uh it it makes the world feel rich when there's a variety of experiences. The same experience over and over and over again doesn't cut it. So, you know, you have a a wealth of uh enemy types, you've got a lot of different treasure types and loot types. You're allowed to pick everything up in the world. When you go see the forests, they look like forests. Then you can see the mountains, they look like mountains. And you go to ice fields and they look like the ice fields. So you get a variety of environmental experiences. Um each of the cities had its own characters, so they felt very different. You felt like you're experiencing something new. Um and the characters, you know, the characters all felt like they had some personality to them so that you weren't just seeing cookie-cutter versions of uh people. So that depth, which we were able to accomplish, like I said, by having people who knew what they were doing and could hit the ground running. You didn't have to train people in what it meant to make an Elder Scrolls game. Um, you know, you throw that all in a mixing bag and add a nice good helping of luck. And uh you come out with a game like Skyrun, you know, and it wasn't easy. I mean, it was it was hard. That's not not to say that we just coasted through by no means. There were all there was a lot of challenges involved in making that game, but all that together is what uh what allows you to make a fantastic game. And if you look at the history of AAA studios that do sequels, you'll see that repeated. You'll see the best game in a sequence frequently was able to maintain a particular staff, particular percentage of the staff was able to maintain a vision and was very player-centric forward. You're not playing my game, I'm making your game, kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

Is there more to say on that?

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Because that feels to me like quite a prolific statement of what you just said there. You're not playing my game, I'm making your game.

SPEAKER_04 23:55

Well, one of the things that I've always felt, and it the the studio felt it too, but once we've made a game, it's not ours anymore. It's yours. So I've actually had uh I once upon a time had a developer actually complain to me that the people playing his game, it wasn't anything that Bethesda produced, were playing it wrong. And I immediately told him, they're not playing it wrong. They cannot play it wrong. It's their game. It's not yours anymore. However, they are choosing to play it is the right way to play it. It may not be how you think it should be played, it may not be an efficient way to play it, it may be problematic from other points of view, but it is right purely by the fact that it's their game. And that's their choice to make. And if you embrace that on the developer side, you find yourself making all different kinds of content, both artistically and design and for programming in terms of the systems that are available, so that everyone can play the game the way they want to. You know, you like hitting things with something big and heavy? You can do that in Skyrim. You want to be a sneaky archer guy? You can do that in Skyrim. You know, you want to uh be the tough wizard and have all kinds of magic? You can do that in Skyrim. So these are all, and that's just the character slice. You know, I already talked about the environment and other things. But you get to play the game because it's your game, it's not my game anymore. I gave it to you.

SPEAKER_00 25:38

I think the way you phrased that just made me really appreciate, you know, that that because it's something I obviously never think about. I said, well, obviously I'm gonna go and grab the bow and arrow, and that's gonna be me for the next like however many dozens to hundreds of hours. But the fact that there's you know, we talked about with Baldur's Case 3, there's really overt choices around story and things like that that you're you are locking yourself out of. But um it's it's I it's like I I I play an RPG, it's a given to me that there's a dozen a dozen other playstyles that I'm not even gonna touch.

SPEAKER_04 26:09

Um they don't interest you, and that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 26:12

But but the the the the depth of what has to go on just for me to sort of feel the uh feel that I have my choice uh respected is it's it's it's it's it's quite something.

SPEAKER_04 26:25

I'll give uh a little shout out here. Um are you familiar with uh Viva la Dirt League uh guys? Viva La Dirt League is a uh a comedy troupe out of Australia that does uh videos, and one of their core sets that they do is about video games. And they have poked fun at Skyrim in particular for oh geez, 10 years or more. I mean, they poked fun at Bethesda games for a long time. They also hit on other kinds of games and they have a lot of other different scenarios, but one of the things that they poked fun at was they have all these characters come into their pretend game called Skycraft, you know, World of Warcraft and Skyrim gliding heads there, and they all said, I'm fed up with always playing the stealth archer. I've just I gotta play something else. So they all go off and they play different characters, and then they all come back again and they're all stealth archers. I have, I I have seen them, I looked them up, I yeah, they're they're definitely big in my hour of Yeah, you know, and they allocate your it's just better, you know, and and that goes a little against what I was just saying in terms of everybody can do their own thing, but it also supports it because they all went and did their own thing. They just haven't all come back for the for the joke to coming back to the most popular uh archetype, which is the stealth archer.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

I mean, it always blows my thinks someone's, God, someone's gonna go through this game is like an absolute bruiser. Sounds terrifying, you know, just punching their way through it.

SPEAKER_04 28:01

You find out about that when you go down and watch your QA people because they have to play all the archetypes. So even if you know playing a uh, you know, carry a big stick and hit everything fighter isn't their top thing, they're forced to play the game that way and give you feedback on how it worked. And so you get these save games and these builds that are outrageous. And in order to look at the situation you're looking at, you play through that save game a little bit, and it's like, dang, this build works really well. It's not my play style, but yeah, if I want to run up and hit somebody, you know, that monster just died. And I didn't take hardly any damage. It works. So the, you know, the the QA guys make that uh a very real possibility for someone like me, who I also tend to gravitate towards the uh stealth archer or the stealth mage. Um, because you get to see all these different character types that they manage to uh make work and show you where the problems are so you can fix them.

SPEAKER_00 29:13

I mean, I'm sure you've talked about this a lot, but I just got to ask, because I'd love to hear it one-on-one in case you've got any follow up questions. But I just want to hear about what is what is the alchemy that happens when you start a really good sort of symbiotic relationship with someone like Tod Howard, where you two are sort of working together to try and, you know, put put this to put this together.

SPEAKER_04 29:37

Um the reality of working in a large studio is let's say for Skyrim, let's call it 150 people. Okay. We had a lot of people who were in other studios or who were contractors, but let's look at the core, maybe 150 people. They're gonna have a lot of different opinions. They're gonna be pulling in all kinds of different directions. And your job is to listen and then filter through and decide what fits the direction that someone like Todd Howard has given you. And then when someone like me has strong opinions about something, my job is to go to Todd Howard and try to convince him that I'm right. Well, part of what Todd has historically, you know, for Skyrim and Fallout 3 and everything, been very good at is putting himself in the seat of your typical player. As a developer, I sit in an ivory tower. It's inescapable. I have more experience with a wider set of games than your typical player does. Um, I have way more gaming experience than your typical player. Um, I think more deeply about games, definitely, than your typical player. And he's able to cut through that and see, oh yeah, they're looking for a little bit of joy here. Don't get in the way with your your math and your complex decision here. They want to just shoot that thing over there. Let them shoot it, you know, or they just want to be able to uh romance that other character. Just let them do it. Let's let that happen. He's always very good at that uh for me, because I would tend to try to make things a little more complex. And he was more than willing to say, no, no, that's not what the players are going to want. They're gonna want something simple and more digestible here.

SPEAKER_00 31:31

Is it important that you stay in that ivory tower, though? Like, is it okay for you not to have objectivity as long as, say, Todd does, and that those two things then work quite well together?

SPEAKER_04 31:44

It works better if everybody can be in both places. So my ivory tower is a requirement. I have to think deeply about the game. I have to think about issues players don't think about. Otherwise, I'm not doing my job well. But I have to be able to pull myself out of that, turn the camera around, as it were, and look at it through the lens of somebody who is a typical player. And on the flip side, and I say it's on the flip side, it's not like I was universally one thing and Tato is universally another. We were he also thinks very deeply about games, and I also was able to think from the player, we just had a bias in that direction. But uh he also needs to be able to see things at a more complex and deep level, and he does. But if you just have one point of view or the other, you cannot service the game. You really you really have to be able to do both. But if you find that you have a bias, it's good to find other people who have a counter bias to bounce your ideas off of them so that you can get the well-rounded opinion. You know, just to put a third perspective in there, um one of the art one one of the lead artists had a real objection to the Detect Life spell. He said, Look, this spell is cool, it does this really functional thing, but do you realize it ruins all the art? We take all this care in making these uh creatures and people and whatnot and making them highly detailed and look really great, and all you see is this smudge when you turn on that spell. Okay, well, in Oblivion, that it just stayed on for long periods of time. Look what we did in Skyrim. We made it a really expensive to maintain spell, so the way to use that spell properly was to just keep it on for a second. Or are they, oh, there they are, and then pull it off. Otherwise you just burn through your magic on it, then you know the spell's gone anyway for a while. So now we had our cake and it too, because we listened to what the artists were saying, because they had a perspective we hadn't considered before, that we were degrading the visual quality of the game in service of what we felt was good gameplay.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

Do you have any examples of that where the blind spot kind of stayed on? And you actually it goes out there, and you're like, oh, actually, I I think we might have missed a beat there.

SPEAKER_01 34:17

Um in Skyrim. Boy, I have to think back for that one.

SPEAKER_04 34:23

Uh yeah, I can give you one. I I'll I'll give you a couple things. My personal one is the level limit. When creating the system where you had all the different skills that would go to 100, it implied mathematically a level limit of 81. And I didn't think anything of that. Most of the games that Bethesda produces are designed to, you've played all the content roughly around level 50. That's what we shoot for. It's a very rough measurement, by the way. And it depends a lot on player style. You know, some players take longer than that, some players could rip through it quicker than that. But yeah, we're shooting for around 50. So 81. Oh, what do I care? I was wrong. The players didn't want to finish playing their character 81 and start a new one. They had a character they loved. Why couldn't they keep playing? And so you see, in one of the DLCs, we actually gave you the ability to go beyond level 81. Um it wasn't my favorite mechanic the way we did it, but it worked and it allowed people to uh exceed the character limit of 81. So the idea of freedom of play, I had a blind spot that freedom of play should also extend to continuing to play your character ad nauseum. I didn't see that. Um another one that we did fix was uh Todd had this vision for how the constellations would reflect your skills. And he he was looking at the art and wanting it to be a reflection of uh wanting the art to drive some of how the skills related to one another, you know, to form these. And I was like, no, you know, you're going up, you're looking at these. Why can't we just put a list out? It's far more functional. People are just gonna get confused by these constellations. It's it's just not gonna work. I'm not seeing it. And I held that all the way through production. And the game gets out there, and people loved the constellations. They thought they were fantastic. So I was clearly wrong. I was dead dog wrong on that. Um but fortunately, Todd being the studio director, he got to make that call. He said, no, this is what we're doing. So we we did the better thing in that particular case.

SPEAKER_01 36:55

I love those examples. I mean, then if each uh game is trying to learn from the previous, I'm curious to what you think about what. And i I wonder if how soon during the making of Skyrim or after Skyrim are people thinking about the next Zelda Scrolls game.

SPEAKER_00 37:18

Not in terms of like, oh, when are we going to start making it or pre-production development, all of that, but when you're starting to get an inkling of a feeling from the game that you're working on, you've just worked on, you're saying, well, actually that'd be pretty cool to try, or I'd love to try and implement this because we didn't have a chance to do it as well as I would have liked to this previous game.

SPEAKER_04 37:36

Well, you do tuck a couple of those in the back of your head, but they they rarely come to fruition. Usually coupled will, but for the most part they don't. One of the truisms that I had beaten into me at Bethesda, and I I am now a uh a deep advocate of you have to make the game in front of you. You cannot waste time and effort making the next game. You have to make the game in front of you. If you don't make the game in front of you as amazing and great as it as it can be, there will be no next game. So you don't cripple yourself by saying, well, the next game's gonna have to have this. No, you put it all out there. This game has everything you think you can get in there that will make it a great game. The next game will have to take care of itself. And then when you're doing the DLC, this DLC has to be the best to fit in with that. You know, I'm not don't worry about the next game. You worry about the next game when the next game arrives. And then some of those ideas that you have may not be relevant anymore for one reason or another. Um, some of them may be, but the odds of them surviving are not very high because usually there's other things going on. Those ideas are really cool, but the technology wouldn't let you have them, or there are other things getting in the way that made them unreasonable. If they're unreasonable in this game, they have a higher chance of being unreasonable in the next game, also for probably the same reason.

SPEAKER_01 39:12

Are there things that you'd like to see coming up with the next fail to scroll six?

SPEAKER_04 39:23

Probably the number one thing I would like to see, because I think it's actually I'll give you two things. Um because they've been missing or short in previous games because we just didn't have the the bandwidth to do them. I'd like to see a much better implementation of mounts. And it's been a common complaint. I'm not alone in that. But it turns out mounts are tricky. They're really tricky. There's a lot of hard decisions to be made in those. Um but you can ride a horse, but that's all you can do in Skyrim. That's it. You just ride the horse. Well, I I should be able to do some other things with the horse too, like maybe fight on the horse or have it fight with me, or you know, stuff like that. Um the other one is a very strange one, uh, which they've been sort of nibbling at for a while, is you don't climb up and down ladders. It seems simple, it seems stupid, but you don't climb up and down ladders. Uh, which really limits the art team in terms of how they can do multi-layer things. You know, all the ladders in Skyrim, you click on the ladder, poof, you're at the top. Or you have to climb a stair. But to do ladders, you have to deal with a whole host of questions, which are programmers very legitimately put in front of us and said, You give me answers to these, I'll tell you how much programming time it's going to take to make them. And, you know, that cause problems right there. Okay, so I'm halfway up a stair, uh ladder, and NPC decides to climb down it. What happens? The NPC has to have AI that will adjust for that. Does the player go through the NPC? Is he blocked by the NPC? Does the NPC stay on the ladder? Does the NPC go back up and know to wait and then come back down? Well, you can see how coding that would be a that would take some effort. That's not trivial. You know? What happens if somebody shoots me while I'm on a ladder? Okay, well, I have to have animations for climbing the ladder, both up and down. Now I have to have an animation for falling off the ladder. Okay, well, animations also take work. Okay. Um, so I get hit on the ladder, but I don't die or anything like that. So I'm on the ladder. Do I have a reaction, which we we like to do? What happens there? And then all this has to apply to NPCs. How do NPCs make the strategic decision to go up and down the ladder? What happens if I shoot one of them when they're on the ladder? Do they ignore it? Do they react to it in an AI sense? And I'm just scratching the surface of some of the problems they brought up. So it seems simple, and other games have climbing ladders, but we chose to put our efforts into other things to make them better rather than deal with that. So I'd like to see uh Bethesda finally come around to making ladders a reality where you're actually climbing them and make the world feel a little more immersive.

SPEAKER_00 42:33

And of that whole horses and ladders.

SPEAKER_04 42:36

Yes. I mean, they seem like simple things, but they go to the whole, let's make the world feel more immersive.

SPEAKER_00 42:43

I think what you hearing your answer to that, it kind of, you know, what you were talking about about being in the tower over here and having to be there to think about all those things. Because obviously, if you ask a player, what do you want to see from Hell Scrolls 6? They'd be like, well, it'd be nice to like fly dragons. I guess that kind of is passed, but you know, like I want to be able to blow up castles and uh, you know.

SPEAKER_04 43:04

They want to fly dragons. Yeah, I mean that's that's probably the number one thing they would want to do. Um, flying in general, let's talk about flying in general. That also poses enormous problems. Part of being able to make a successful scenario is being able to make sure that the player has to address the puzzles or the challenges that you put in front of them. This is what makes dungeons so appealing, because they control the space so well. As a designer, I can say, well, you're gonna have to go up the steps of that uh uh to that temple to defeat the bad guy at the top. That's your pathway through it, which means you're gonna have to defeat the guys at the bottom, or you're gonna have to find the keys that will unlock the door, you know, things like that. I can form a progression. The minute you allow for freedom. Flying in your outdoor scenarios, suddenly there's no boundaries. And that can create enormous problems for keeping a scenario functional. You know? Okay, what if the creature on the ground, the opponent on the ground, doesn't have a ranged weapon? They're just dead. I mean, they can't do anything. They're just dead. You know? I can fly right over the canyon wall and go right to the where the boss is. I can skip all this cool adventure and the stories where they have to rescue the resistance leader and have him tell you that you need the plans or we're not. All that's gone. You just short circuited all of that. And some of that's fine in terms of freedom of expression for the player, but some of it also just breaks things. And that's why teleporting was removed from uh between Morrowind and uh Oblivion, because teleporting also broke so many things. It just completely broke adventures left, right, and center.

SPEAKER_01 45:06

Does um having worked on the series for so long, do you still get the privilege of being excited about what's to come?

SPEAKER_04 45:15

Well, yeah, I think the day that uh Elder Scrolls 6 comes out, I will be uh right at the front of the queue downloading a copy and uh wanting to play it. Because I haven't gotten to play a uh an Elder Scrolls game that I didn't work on. So yeah, I you know, you know, some of the greatest games ever made, and by the time they came out, I was already sick to death of them. I already put in three, four hundred hours into them. Uh and that's not counting their early years when they were just broken. Because every game starts broken.

SPEAKER_00 45:53

Um yeah, how does that feel then, knowing that this is this is the first one in the series coming at me? Okay, I just I'm I'm I'm a player. I'm just nothing but a player for it.

SPEAKER_04 46:02

If I had only ever done one Bethesda game, it would probably chafe at me a little bit, but I've done a lot of Bethesda games, so I'm just excited. I mean I'm just happy. I mean, I worked on Oblivion, I worked on uh Skyrim, I worked on Fallout 3, I worked on Fallout 4, I worked on Starfield, I worked on all of these. So now I get to do one where everything feels fresh and new, and I get to see how someone else does things in a new way. Um, because no matter how much you try to keep things fresh as a human being, you you're limited that way. So it's a good time for someone else to take those reins and do things and show me the better way. I I'd love to see that. I'm I'm excited to see that.

SPEAKER_00 46:47

Your only job is to play it. So Yep. You you you can be the snarky Redditor and you can be your tons of something.

SPEAKER_04 46:56

Well, I I could tell you right now, there will be a stealth mage somewhere in that game.

SPEAKER_00 47:04

It was really um touching watching. I don't know if you saw it, I mean, because this liter came out yesterday, right? The the the they had the naming it sentinel, and then this this 40-year kind of anniversary uh piece, you know, that Todd Todd Howard does to camera, just going through the entire era of um I I'm extraordinarily sentimental about Bethesda because it's been with me since like my childhood, you know. Um and it's one of those things where I can't when it I you know, I'll be totally honest. If I do a piece of content where it's like any mention of you know Fallout or Elder Scrolls or Bethesda, a bit like with Bioware, you yeah, you're gonna get you you sort of have to sift because like you said, the people who leave the comments, the loudest people are usually the ones who want to make a criticism or something. And it's hard not to want to feel and actually sometimes when I interview someone like myself, people be like, You should have, you know, told them off, or you should have da-da-da-da. And it's like it's difficult for me because I'm like, it's just it's just not how I feel about this company, you know, and whether that's a strange way to feel about a company or not, I I don't know. It's kind of you know, the coming out of the vault moment uh for Fallout 3, the the first time I I come off that boat in in Morrowind, those experiences are so burnt into my retinas um that I can't help but feel very warmly about what you all have done over the decades.

SPEAKER_04 48:36

Well, and I don't know if you were aware of it. Many, many people were, but there was huge pushback when Bethesda got the Fallout license to do Fallout 3. There was a lot of people who were obsidian fans who were like, Bethesda's gonna screw it up, they're just gonna make it Skyrim. Uh, we want Fallout the way we remember Fallout. Um, these guys should never have had it. And there was a strong vocal community that just hated that we were gonna make that game. And we had to prove them wrong. And fortunately we did. You know, it's uh because Fallout 3 was embraced even by a lot of our skeptics, uh, although there's always gonna be you know a set of diehard people to say uh uh you know Fallout 2 was the greatest Fallout game ever. Um but we tried our best to just not engage, you know, which is kind of what you're saying you did as well. Um because you you you're not going to win that argument, you're not gonna persuade hearts and minds. Uh all you can do is make the best game you can make and let that be your statement. And that's what those would do.

SPEAKER_01 49:56

I mean it feels like that's what they do every time, right? It's interesting, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:04

I mean, with that that example of Fallout 3, do you when that initial burst of negative feedback comes through, does that help kick up the butt to kind of buck up your ideas, or are you kind of like, no, we we good. We we knew already that we were gonna have to take this really seriously, um, or else you wouldn't have taken it on board in the first place?

SPEAKER_04 50:28

Well, to a certain degree, it's a stake in the heart. I mean, anytime somebody says that the thing you're doing is, you know, filling your blank for all the cuss words and the bad things, you know, is awful, is bad. You feel like it's a statement about yourself. And so you you have to divorce yourself from that. So we you can't help but take it a little bit personally. Um it does make you want to prove them wrong. It does make you want to say, I'm going to show you that this will work, that we can respect the franchise and make it better and make it our way rather than the old way. Um so you do. You you want to do that. But you don't do it in the the negative in your face way. You do it in the I want to show you that I can do this. It's it's it's it's uh it's a me-centric thing at that point, not a I'm against you centric thing.

SPEAKER_00 51:32

It's uh it's do you do you eventually get to a point where you have the thick enough skin, or does it always still niggle a little bit? I mean, I I've certainly never been able to put something out film-wise that I've gotten to the point where I'm not. I think if I didn't care at all, I probably wouldn't be making very good work. But at the same time, God, if you just made yourself that vulnerable every time, you'd go nuts, you know.

SPEAKER_04 51:58

Yeah, no. You have to develop a thick skin. But you cannot be totally callous to it either. And I I think as human beings, you're not going to you're not going to do that anyway. But you have to you have to develop a thick skin in order to survive for more than one reason, because the audience isn't actually the people who are going to give you the worst feedback. It's your coworkers. People you respect and see every day are going to play your adventure and say, This isn't working for me. This part right here isn't fine. And you have to take that criticism the way they intended it, which is it's not about you, it's about the work. This isn't meant to say you suck or we should just get rid of this. This is meant to try and give you the insight so that you can make it better, so you can make it great. But it's hard, I tell you. You know, you hear the comments, and no matter how many years you've done it, you know, the blood leaves your face a little bit, and it's like, okay, okay, I have to do that. But by the time you get back to your office, you have to let all that slide. You have to let that go, and you have to take it in the spirit it was meant. When it comes to the players, you don't get to have that interaction with them. Some of them are well-meaning and are saying this would make the game better. Some of them are just venting, and you just you have to just let that go. You just have to let that go.

SPEAKER_00 53:37

Are there certain things that when when you work on that you take more personally than others? Like are there certain elements of the the game that we like you find much harder to be able to take the constructive feedback?

SPEAKER_04 53:51

It's harder when it's a story you believe in. I did a lot of systems work, so I did a lot of math and spreadsheet stuff and a lot of that. And because it's mechanical, the feedback on that didn't have the emotional weight to it. You know, it's like everything's too cheap, you know, and and and why are why are these weapons over here not hardly doing any damage? Okay. That that just that feels like mechanical. But when you say this character in this story you made just sounds whiny. You know, that's that's a little bit more personal. So I always found that the the quest side, the story side, um, I had to I had to toughen up a little more than I did on the systems side.

SPEAKER_00 54:43

Is there because I I yeah um I read Ed Catmell's book about Pixar, the founding of Pixar, and talking about the importance of Canada, you know. And he said basically after the hit for Toy Story, his objective was always I want to make the first feature length fully 3D rendered movie. And he's like, I did that. Now what? And then he realized his new objective was to basically make sure that the company that he's running maintains its its its quality standard, you know, that it doesn't lose itself. And I think just why why that comes to mind is I feel like if one loses the ability to take on that sort of feedback and receive that kind of candor and to also be feel safe to give that feedback to others, right? Then a company and a game is gonna be in big trouble pretty darn quickly. And in the case of Bethesda, who's holding that? Is that is that like a team collective thing? Is that something that Todd is always pushing? Is it something that you're great at, always motivating the wider team to like you've got to keep telling us what's not working here?

SPEAKER_04 55:56

Well, for many of the years I was at Bethesda, the corporate culture was one of its defining aspects. Um it was basically a no-assholes rule, where you needed to be able to say what you needed to say politely, nicely, uh, and people needed to be able to hear it. And they could do that. I could take feedback from just about everybody, and the way they proposed that feedback was in a way that was meaningful and I could take action on. And that was fantastic. And Todd has an oversized impact on it, or whoever the game director is going to be has an oversized impact on it, and that filters through the various levels of authority in the studio, you know, each having not as much as this the game director, but more than, you know, one of the ranked file as you work your way down. But at the end of the day, all you can do is offer that. The people have to embrace it themselves. Uh, one of the hiring principles that Todd pushed really hard on is he wanted someone who felt like they fit into the culture. And there were cases when we turned down people who are extremely talented, but who didn't fit that culture. Because that's what it was important. Because you can get somebody who is a uh a brilliant, um, I'll pick on my own uh discipline, a brilliant game designer. Uh, but if all they do is cause problems in how they interact with everybody else, you're not getting the benefit of that brilliance. They're actually causing more problem than they are uh contributing benefit. So that becomes part of the premium is we want people who are talented, but they have to fit with the culture. They have to be people who want to work with other people. They have to be people who can express their view and can hear other people expressing that view. And they have to be considerate of others. And for many years, this that was something that really made the Bethesda on its inside uh stand out. And that was evidenced by the fact that we had a shockingly low turnover rate. I mean, that the turnover rate of staff for a few core years there was so low it was actually causing problems because people who had been there for a while were struggling to find ways to be upwardly mobile. I can't get a promotion. Why? None of the people in those roles are leaving. They're just sticking around. Um and uh I mean, that that's a good problem to have, by the way. If you have to have a problem, that's one I'd rather have. Um yeah, that the the culture that that your aspect that you're talking about there is it it's key to a good, productive, long-lived studio. And that is devilishly difficult because you can't mandate it. You try to lead by example, and even then it's hurting cats.

SPEAKER_00 59:11

Did you find when you joined the company like in your early days, did it take you a while to kind of get into the groove of what the the ethos and vibe of the company was, or were you like there with it? And is I mean that maybe that's the reason you get hired, right? Because they know that you're a fit. Um and I'm curious about whatever learning curve you had to go through to become your best. You know, we just want to be our best selves in the work that we're doing, right? And a lot of the time we've got internal obstacles that we ourselves need to like get over so that we can become even better at what we're doing.

SPEAKER_04 59:43

Well, I worked for Bethesda before Xenomax bought it in the Daggerfall days. And it was an extremely different studio then. And then I left the company. And when I came back during Oblivion, uh Todd was in charge. But this meant that Todd knew me. He had known me for three years, three plus years, because he had worked beside me. We actually shared an office. And so he knew the kind of person I was. So, in terms of the uh intangibles, I didn't have much trouble hitting the ground running because he knew I would fit in, and so I actually did end up fitting in fairly well. In terms of the tangibles, um, I've been a big fan for a long time of saying it takes at least a year for a studio that's making anything that's complex for a new employee to be able to work on supervised. That's it the stuff you do is just it's complex. It's complicated. There's a lot to it. There's a lot of moving parts, it's a technical challenge, you have to absorb all this knowledge. And until you've been doing it for a year, you somebody's got to be looking at your work constantly and showing you how to do it better or um how to do it at all. You may not even understand the basics of it. And it doesn't just instantly after a year everything's a snap. That just means you need less. And it starts to trail down to where you don't need to have supervision to the same level, and you can actually do things on your own and they'll come out to a quality standard because you understand it. And I'm gonna bet that's true in most studios that make complex games, is there is a long lead up time. And this is also why hiring is so uh critical. Because if it's if I have to spend a year getting to you, getting you to where you can work on your own, I need to have you for multiple years. You need to be a quality where I want to keep you for multiple years, otherwise, I'm just wasting a lot of effort training you for a year, and then you don't turn out to work out for the studio.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:04

I just love hearing that insight.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:06

Um I guess I'm just finally-ish curious. You know, I see the Skyrim, you know, post you got there and the signatures. Some of them I'm always uh, you know, I I often I'm interested in we talked a little bit before there's the relationship that you have with the game, and there's the relationship that the player has with the game, and they'll never be the same, you know, they're so kind of like not opposed, but they're just on two sides of the the same coin, right? Do you do you sort of feel like you can really ever truly comprehend just what games like Skyrim um or or from El Skulls or Fallout really means to to the player? Like, do you feel like you can truly absorb when someone is gushing to you about how much this game means to them and all this stuff? Um is that able to sort of seep in?

SPEAKER_04 1:02:56

I can't live their experience or understand their heart that way. Um, I can accept it, I can intellectualize it, but when I look at the game, I see all its warts and problems as well as all its beauties and successes. And they're not seeing the warts and problems in the same light I am. I mean, some of the problems of Skyline are legendary. People have talked about them. There's no lack of that. But I I see stuff that you don't see. And it never feels fresh to me. That sense of wonder I don't ever get because I started three years before it got released and watched it slowly grow. And so I never got that from nothing to everything that gives you that sense of wonder. That that doesn't happen for me. It doesn't happen for for any developer that's you know there in the early stages of a of a product. Um because all you see it is it's I like to tell people you work on a game for three years, for two years and eleven months of it, it's broken. By definition, it's broken.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:09

Because if it wasn't, it's two years and three, twelve months.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:13

Well, yeah. Put it out for the public to play it. But there isn't a game out there that doesn't have bugs. That's a known thing. Um but yeah, it's uh so that's that sense of wonder that creates what you're talking about with uh uh where people can gush about it. I don't get to I don't get to see that. I get it with other games. Yeah, I can play somebody else's game and go, wow, this is really effing cool. But even at that, as someone who's in the industry, then I fall back to the Ivory Tower syndrome. I think too analytically about games. Any game you put in front of me, I am breaking down in my head. I I can't help it. That's it's you know, it's just part of the uh part of what it means to be a game developer is that you're always breaking things down. You're always seeing them. I was playing a uh uh playing an online game with some friends of mine, and they're like, wow, this the why didn't they do this? And I'm like, well, they can't do that because that would require a whole new animation set. Oh, never mind. And I had to stop myself because I knew exactly what the technical reason was. They couldn't do the thing that they want to do. It's like, no, that's actually way harder than you think it is to do that. And I understand exactly why they took this shortcut on this feature, you know. So I I'm always happy and impressed when people are that ecstatic about the games that you know I've been fortunate enough to be a part of. Uh, but I have to have my own. Experience with other games in order to get that. I I don't get to have it with the games I work on.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:07

And actually, just finally, folks, it's just something came to mind when we talk about you know bugs in games. I'm just curious anecdotally. Because like you said, it's actually the the this you you you know that there are bugs when you're launching it. It's not like you haven't seen these things, it's like the the game's coming out right. Um and then we're gonna do what we can to sort of mitigate as we go forward. Is there anything where you've ever released it and you're just totally aware of this like glaring bug? It's like, well, that's there, and there's just no time to fix it, and it's gonna come up, but almost certainly, although I can't come up with one right now.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:44

Um a lot of that is what the day one patch is for, to be honest. Uh is is to fix those things that that fit that description. Um but I can't I can't think of a concrete example off the top of my head at the moment. So sorry about that.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:06

Maybe you've blocked any revenue uh, I do have an interesting anecdote.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:10

Do you remember the uh do you remember Penny Arcade? Yeah, okay. So they did that great little uh uh card uh comic set. Um at one point and and they would rip games left, right, and center, and deservedly so by the way. We were in their crosshairs more than once and and we earned it. But uh they got involved in making a game and it wasn't a very big game, it was a smaller project. When it was done, they actually made a public apology to the entire development community. It was like, we didn't understand, we get it now. You guys know all these bugs. You're heartbroken, you can't fix them. It wasn't like you decided to foist this off on the public. This this is the reality of making the games, and we didn't get it, and now we get it. And I've always I've always thought that was a great, a great moment when they were able or willing to uh uh admit that they hadn't really understand stood the depths of the difficulty of making video games and exactly what it meant to produce something ships with bugs, whether you like it or not.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:19

That must have been uh very satisfying, because I'm sure it's extremely satisfying. Few few and far between moments.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:26

I don't think yeah, you don't get to hear that very often. So my hats off to those guys if they were willing to say that.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:32

Yeah. Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for your time. I'm really an you're working on really enjoyed this conversation. I appreciate your candor and just uh yeah, it just feels very very apt uh with the the release of the 40-year um anniversary video, you know, and then them sort of naming the title for the next Elder Scrolls six game. And I'm gonna keep my eye open eventually down the line, once the teaser trade has come out, if I'm seeing any reference to ladders being climbed or uh ladders and mouse. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:01

They they weren't they are taking my advice or opinion. So I have no idea if they're actually gonna do that or not, but uh that's that's one of the two of the things I'll be looking for.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:11

Again, you can give that as player feedback and see if they uh see if they give in a patch a few months down the road.