The History of Bethesda Game Studios

(clicking) (dramatic music) - So I played Daggerfall first and then got hooked and started playing all the other Bethesda games. But Arena at the time, I was like, oh, I don't know, that cover's so goofy, I don't think I could get into that. - You know, after we finished Redguard, the whole team, the whole entire company went downstairs into the basement and we would all package the games up to be shipped out and that was sort of how things worked back then. (whooshing) (game character grunting) - A girl, we've got a daughter, Catherine! (radroaches chittering) - Ow, that hurts! - We had to create gun combat from the ground up, something this company hadn't done since the Terminator games and so that was a big thing. And we knew with gun combat came combat spaces and that meant designers who knew how to make levels. - But I didn't wanna tell him, "Yeah, I'm actually taking pictures of this "so I can blow it up in a video game," which is exactly what I was about to do. - We have a lot of takes of Ron Perlman giving us, "War never changes," in many, many ways. - [Game Narrator] War, war never changes. (gun firing) (beeping) (raider yelping) (guns firing) - Hello friends and welcome to Rockville, Maryland, home of Bethesda Game Studios, creators of the Elder Scrolls series and proud adoptive parents of the Fallout franchise. If you've watched our documentaries in the past you know we like to travel to developers and interview them about the games they've made, but until now we've never had an opportunity to talk to a team while the sausage is still being made. That's why we're here, to talk to the people behind Fallout 76, to dive into the game's design and find out about the challenges and pitfalls they encountered during the games development. To do this we spent over a week at the studio interviewing everyone we could, from design to art, to animation, QA, marketing and more. All to try and paint a picture of how Bethesda Game Studios make their games. So naturally, that also involves a lot of looking back. Many of the folks working on games here at BGS have credits on their older games, too. Games like Skyrim, Fallout 3, Oblivion, Morrowind and even Arena. Games that have each, in their own way, contributed to the story of Bethesda Game Studios and their plans for the future. But before we dive into the studio's exciting future, we've decided to spend some time looking back. We've got quite a lot of ground to cover here, folks, but as it turns out, a lot of Bethesda's history happened in this rather unsuspecting-looking office building behind me. (mystical music) - I had gotten Wayne Gretzky Hockey 3 for Christmas from my then girlfriend, who's now my wife. And I looked at the address on the box and it said Bethesda Softworks and I was like, "Oh these guys, they're doing that Terminator game as well," so I said I'll just drive by the office. And I went to William and Mary in Virginia, this office was on my way, so we're right off of 270 and this is the same building. So I remember, it was Martin Luther King Day, must've been '93, and I drove and just, I knocked on the door, I came in, but most people weren't here, it was a holiday and someone kinda met like, "Who are you? What do you want?" And I was like, "I love your games, "I wanna work here one day." And when there was an opening they finally said, "Hey, we have something," and I jumped, this is where I wanted to be. - [Interviewer] How big was the company then? - Oh! 20-some people? The development staff was maybe 12. And so this is my 25th year, like, in my 25th year. Same building, right downstairs where you came in, that's where I came in. - [Danny] The original Bethesda Softworks was founded in 1986 by entrepreneur and software developer Christopher Weaver. Named after the town of Bethesda where it was founded, the studio developed and self-published a variety of games. Everything from football game Gridiron to some early hockey games and even some Terminator spin-offs. One of Todd's first responsibilities once he joined the team was to port a CD-ROM version of a role-playing game that had been made internally. Ted Peterson, Julian LeFay, and Vijay Lakshman were spearheading the project, a game that would take the first-person dungeon crawling of 1992's Wizardry 7 and evolve it using more modern 3D graphics techniques. That game had been originally conceptualized as an arena combat game but quickly grew into something much, much larger. (tense classical music) - I think I found out about it because I worked at a software store at the time with a friend of mine in Houston, so we were just employees on the floor. I'm trying to think why we found out about it in the first place because I didn't necessarily follow RPGs or read Dragon Magazine or whatever. - [Interviewer] (chuckling) Right. - Maybe it was just the box art, I'm sure that was part of it. There's a lot of literature on the back about how it's, I don't know if the term open world was used at the time, but how it's this limitless thing and you can do this and you can do that and that sounded great to me, I always wanna just make my own story. And in playing it and thinking about it now, I don't think I ever did anything with the main quest, I left that to some other hero. No, I just wanna buy a house and chill, that's all I wanna do. Houses were really expensive in that game, I remember that too. - I saw Arena in the computer game store and looked at the cover and I was like, "There is no chance I'm buying that game." I don't know if we should leave that in this. So I played Daggerfall first and then got hooked and started playing all the other Bethesda games, but Arena at the time I was like, "Oh, I don't know, that cover's so goofy, "I don't think I could get into that." - [Interviewer] It's a strong cover, it's saying something! - It was, it was. - [Interviewer] Maybe it didn't speak to you. - It didn't. (both laughing) - It has massive ambition yet is very, very elegant, in my opinion. It knows what it is. It will feel really simplistic to an Elder Scrolls fan now, but in its day, it had massive scope. It gave you the feeling, despite it being old, of, "This world, I can do whatever I want, "I can go wherever I want," and that the things you found, you felt were unique like, "I found this, only I did, and this was there for me," and, like, it has the time warp. - [Danny] By the time Todd had finished his work on the CD-ROM port of Arena, the Elder Scrolls team was already working on Daggerfall, so Todd was made producer of a Terminator game. You have to understand that back in the mid 90s there were almost as many Terminator games as there were people living on earth. In fact, Bethesda had made a bunch of them themselves! But this Terminator game was going to be different. Terminator: Future Shock was Bethesda's first full 3D game. It had a height map, it had instanced 3D objects, and the game took place across large, sprawling levels set in post-apocalyptic cities. Good design practice, as it turns out. About a half dozen people were working with Todd on Future Shock and as that game was released and Daggerfall was going through its own tough development, many of that team went to help on the Elder Scrolls game. (adventurous music) - Because of the state of the project, I did half the levels as well, I did the sound effects for Daggerfall, so anything you hear in Daggerfall, the little guys, like, yelping, or all the creatures, a lot of them are me. - [Interviewer] Just in a microphone? - Yes. (interviewer chuckling) (Todd yelping) - At the time it just felt bigger and deeper than a lot of other RPGs out there and, you know, oddly enough it wasn't the quests so much in Daggerfall, the story of Daggerfall is kind of thin, it was more about your character and the world you're exploring. All these different dungeons you could go in, how you leveled up, through actions not just experience points, it was just a really different kinda game, it was really cool. - The memory I really have more than anything, because you start off in a dungeon which I thought was always a strength of the series, to kind of keep you walled in, don't show you everything at once. You really get used to that, that darkness and the corridors, you get taught about the fighting system and so forth. I didn't realize it at the time but that's great design. Only give you a few tools, let's give you a hammer and once you've mastered hammering in the nail, like in Karate Kid, then, okay, now we'll show you the wrench and whatever else. So when you finally do make it out of that first dungeon, which is not easy to do without seeing a map of it, you know, you get this whole big reveal and the music changes for the first time, and suddenly it's all these possibilities. - If Arena is the world, Daggerfall pushes on the character system. So if you look at the two character systems, Daggerfall introduces the whole skill system and the way you level up and the way factions feel about you and you have language and you have pluses and minuses. It's a very, very heavy character system, but awesome. A lot of the world stuff stays the same. And it has a very sophisticated quest system, despite how it might express itself if you go back and play it, but it mostly becomes a game about pushing the character system much, much further. - [Interviewer] Before we start, for the sake of our name bars, can you tell us your name and your job title? - Yes, my name is Ashley Chang, I'm the studio director at Bethesda Game Studios. - [Interviewer] All right, you've been here a little while, huh? - I have, I've been here for, oh man, 18 years. - [Interviewer] Okay! - I was one of two people in the marketing department at Bethesda Softworks, this is the old-school, mom and pop Bethesda Softworks. And the first thing I ever did when I joined the company was I was mailing out review copies of Battlespire. - [Interviewer] (chuckling) Okay. - Mailing, mailing them out, by myself, and then calling up all the press going, "Please play this game, please review this game." Todd and I worked on, I was the PR guy for Redguard, a very, very little-known game. - [Interviewer] The long-lost forgotten Elder Scrolls game. - It is! It's an action-adventure game, you should definitely try to find it if you can. And back then the company was so small, after we finished Redguard the whole team, the whole entire company, went downstairs into the basement and we would all package the games up to be shipped out, and that was sort of how things worked back then. - It was a mix of, like, my love of Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider had come out, like real action-adventure mash-ups. More had kind of been going, but really not anywhere in a Daggerfall mix and then there was Battlespire, and a lot of the Terminator team that I had worked with, we were gonna do Redguard, we wanted to do something. I could see where we got with the engine at the time, like 3D was still coming online, that we could do something, we could make a much more rich world. Like, despite Daggerfall's ambition and Arena's ambition, the detail of the world was lacking for me personally. Like, I liked the game flow, like this is what we should be doing, I like the character system, but, like, I wanted Ultima-level detail in the world, I wanna break the bread and I wanna move the bottles and I wanna do all these things. And Redguard was a little bit of an experiment in, like, okay, how detailed of a world can we build? So the way we built the world in Redguard is how we built the world in Morrowind, just on a much, much larger scale. The other thing Redguard does at the time, also coming off of Daggerfall, we felt the world was generic, it was very kind of bland-Tolkien. It had backstory and stuff once you dug into it, but it didn't have something you could look at and say, "Oh, that's a little bit more unique." But that comes in Redguard and then Morrowind builds on that. Redguard was too safe, it missed a technology window, it really should've been a console game, it should've been on the PS2. Redguard did not do very well, it did very, very poorly for a lot of reasons. We made some bad decisions, we made some games that weren't out best stuff, and the company really got very, very small. - [Danny] Despite the success of the earlier Elder Scrolls games, these spinoffs, Battlespire and Redguard, had struggled at retail and put the company in a precarious financial position. In an effort to avoid bankruptcy, the organization restructured. A new company was formed, ZeniMax Media, which would act as administrative entity over the games development and publishing wing. A few year later, publishing and development were separated. Bethesda Softworks became the publishing arm, while the development staff had a new name, Bethesda Game Studios. All these entities would live under the same roof. In fact, they still do today, but only thanks to the incredible success of their next game. (epic music) - We needed to do Morrowind, do the game that we're here to do, and it's kind of like, this is our last shot, like if this one doesn't work, we're not here. I think the failures of the previous games made Morrowind what it was. Because that's where you say, "Well, we just gotta do what we think is right "and what our audience wants "and we already think we're not gonna be here, "so fuck it, let's just makes the game "that we think we should be making." - Well, there's a contingent of fans out there who believe, and I actually have met a few even today, saying that it's the best game that they've ever played, it's the best game we've ever made, and it's been downhill since then. - [Interviewer] (chuckling) Right. - Like, Morrowind's the greatest game, and a lot of it is because of the tone, the flavor, the art direction, the character, the story in that game, and it was very unique, very, very unique for its time. - I thin kthe main idea behind Morrowind was stranger in a strange land. You are in an alien world and so how do we show that? We had a lot of different influences and the concept artist who did the work there did just crazy, amazing, weird ideas and it was awesome. You know, and we borrowed from a lot of things, you know, it felt a little bit like, what would Star Wars be if it was, you know, a fantasy game? And then combining the culture of dark elves from all these different influences and how they lived in giant bug shell-shaped houses and wore bug shells as armor and lived in this, essentially desert, how did that shape who they were? How did it shape how they built things? How did it shape what you as a player got to explore? It became a mix of a lot of really different and interesting things. A lot of it's based off of, you know, giant fungus or just strange thorny roots that grow in the Ashlands. So it was doing something weird and then playing of the idea of scale, so it's a little bit like Alice in Wonderland. Imagine taking things like mushrooms and scaling them up as giant trees. How does it feel now to run around that world? Well, it's pretty cool, I haven't done that before, that's interesting. So I think things like that stand out a lot, they make the world feel really different and not like something you've seen before. - Well, we knew we had to do it, I think, let me put it that way. The company really wanted to make Morrowind then, but it was such a, the ambition and scope were so big, obviously from the final product, that it took a while. And the team was only about 40 back then. - Microsoft approached us and they were doing the original Xbox and it was very PC-like, this would be great, we'll have an RPG. The other thing is, you need to go back to RPGs of that time, which are like Final Fantasy and other things. And it is, well, we don't really do the RPG that a console crowd wants, can we translate the menus? Can we keep the experience the same? Can we do a console RPG that we would wanna play? - And a game like Morrowind, you know, back then, the Japanese RPGs were what everyone loved, the Final Fantasies, that was what an RPG was. Western RPGs weren't really, you know... - [Interviewer] Cool? (Ashley laughing) - You could say that, but nobody was making them like we would. This is gonna be a first-person experience, this is gonna be an open world, you're gonna be able to go wherever you want, like Morrowind's not gonna hold your hand at all, you can break you game in Morrowind and we're not gonna, like, Morrowind literally tells you what you've done, you're about to break your save, are you sure you wanna go? And we go ahead and let you say yes! We let you say yes we let you break your game intentionally, that's how open that game is. - It was fantasy, open world, and the idea that you could just sort of wander anywhere and do anything, very, very unique at the time, a streaming system. How the NPCs, how they tried to make it so you could ask any NPC any question, which was great in theory. In practice, ah, but the ability to just sort of wander around and do whatever you want in that game. And I remember the first time I came across one of the ruins in that game and the feeling of exploration was just, you, literally, your mind was transported into another world in a way that, I love video games and gaming, but it was so unique to me for its time, it was just amazing. - So Morrowind comes out, is a much bigger success than even we, it's beyond what we need, it's a much bigger success that we anticipate, it's huge, and it's really huge on Xbox. I believe it became the second best-selling title behind Halo, it crushed because people were hungry for, "Oh my gosh, have you seen this thing?" So that really made it as far as us as a company and as a studio, and that was going into a Oblivion where, hey, the console part is huge. - [Interviewer] Right. - The audience that wants this is much bigger than we think. - [Danny] Morrowind, in many ways, is responsible for everything Bethesda has done since. Not only was it adored by those who play it, but it established the creative process through which BGS would make their open world games. The team had good tech, good art, good engine, good storytelling. It was the foundation of a team that still exists today. A team that would gain confidence with each project they took on. And though this team was working under the same roof as their parent company, the financial success of Morrowind gave them just enough slack on the leash to go for something even bigger. - Morrowind on is like the second phase of Bethesda. You have like the pre-Morrowind, you got the Arena, Daggerfall success, some bad things happen and the company's kinda uh, and it really got, there were six or seven of us. And then ZeniMax Media is formed to sort of recapitalize and, "Hey, what do you guys wanna do?" That's the other part that really needs to be mentioned, like that business side, to keep us independent and say, "Hey, what do you need to make Morrowind, "what you really want?" Without that, you know, we probably couldn't have pulled it off. And then so Morrowind on was like the second phase of the company. - You know, we all worked together, we all moved on to Oblivion afterwards which was, again, a big investment for the company. The company, were like, "There's a new generation of consoles coming, "we don't know what the spec is, "we're gonna make this big game, "it's gonna be a big AAA investment for the company, "and you're gonna wait four years, is that okay?" (eerie music) (sword clashing) (game character grunting) (booming) Actually, that was a very interesting four years for us because we were traditionally a PC developer all along, even though Morrowind was on Xbox. It took us a while to really pivot and it's hard for developers to do this. If you're traditionally a PC developer and you start making console games, like, it takes a different mindset. Oblivion was sort of our learning curve, that was our project to learn how to make games for consoles, how to make games run fast and look good within the constraints that consoles have. - I remember one of the high-level goals, not officially but we had been talking, if Morrowind was the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the books, you know, there's a lot of text, then Oblivion will be the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. You know, much more visceral, a different aesthetic, more colorful, more accessible in a lot of ways. - We were working on it for the Xbox 360 at the time, which was not actually out so we were working on hardware that was not done yet. So anytime you're trying to make a game, you don't know what the game is yet and you don't know what the hardware is, that combination can prove stressful (chuckling). That and then just how do we take a huge, open-ended role-playing game that's traditionally been on PC? They put Morrowind on console, but sort of the next evolution of that, the controls and the feel, and what things do you leave in, what things do you take out to make it have the most appeal but still keep the depth. - It kinda swings more traditional fantasy, you know, so in Oblivion it's more castles and lots of shiny armor, a beautiful world. Like we wanted to do forests, we wanted lots of NPCs, lots of people, they all have full schedules, they'll eat, they'll sleep. - [Danny] Oblivion was a very intentional pivot to something more accessible and it wasn't without a backlash. Some fans of Morrowind saw it as a dumbing down of their favorite RPG. Many elements of the game were simplified. There seemed to be less, less skills, less weapon types, less factions and diseases. Having voice acting for every line of dialog meant less speech options. Morrowind was an incredible RPG sandbox but with the dawn of HD graphics, Todd and the team had to pick their battles. They wanted a bigger world, they wanted far more detail. They wanted a more simplified interface that would work on consoles. They wanted to bring fantasy into the mainstream and that meant paring back. But the team was still small and this work required to make the Oblivion the game they wanted to make wasn't without its challenges. - So the forests for Oblivion were really interesting. We used SpeedTree, we were, I believe, the first video game company to use SpeedTree. - [Interviewer] No way! - Yeah, and it worked incredibly well for us, it was great. But what we ended up doing is we used all the SpeedTree assets and we'd bake 'em out and we'd put 'em in the game and we created a procedural generation system. So we generated each area of the game and made it and it turned out it wasn't so good. So all the artists then basically did like a terraforming pass where we'd go over the procedurally-generated work and make it hand-crafted and it took two years to do. - [Interviewer] Right. - It was an insane undertaking and we really had to ramp up the team of environmenters to come do that. - Like we knew what we needed to make, we knew the number of towns, but, like, okay, this town has how many buildings? How many NPCs? How many interiors? How many exteriors? Like, all the details. So it used to be, well, we needed a town, somebody make it and then the artist would go off and make it and the designer would help design it and then you'd have your town. So it was really from that to now it's very much more designed out as far as how big the town is, how many buildings are in it, what it's made up of. The way we designed dungeons, some of them are for quests and some of them were more randomized and then we had the Oblivion realm so it's like, okay, making dungeons is obviously a big part of this and it sort of separated there. And then figuring out how we were gonna make all the Oblivion realms, I remember that as a key part on the schedule, like, we had our game and our date and we knew what we were doing but the Oblivion realms we still hadn't quite figured out what they were. - [Danny] During this stage at BGS there was no delineation between designers. Level designers were also quest designers. And as the game got more complex this was beginning to cause issues. Elements of the game were getting trimmed in an attempt to make the Xbox 360 launch date, and in some cases, to even fit the game on the disc. - So in the shipped game there's an arena in the Imperial City and the original plan was there was going to be an arena in every city and I had done the majority of that work and we ripped it all out because we realized we need to focus on one to make it better. That was painful, that was 800 lines of dialog, that was all the scripting work. And it was definitely the right decision, absolutely. It was fun to do all the fighting and fight and become a champion, but I actually really enjoy when I play it, just betting on a fight and watching and finding all the weird bugs with that. Like, I would set it up so the two combatants, there would be a nord woman and an elf guy and they would, I look at the script they were always really evenly matched, and, invariably, one team would always win, and it was supposed to be random, and I didn't know why! And I wasn't taking into account some of, like, the racial abilities, like nords are stronger, so this guy was beating the crap out of this person and I didn't, I had to figure out all that stuff. - [Interviewer] The Khajiits were always losing. (both laughing) - So for us for Oblivion compared to Morrowind, the biggest thing is scale. Morrowind's actually kind of a small game, and if you actually look at the draw distance it's foggy pretty much right in front of the player. We didn't have LOD, there were no mountain views in Morrowind, so for Oblivion it was, hey, you're in this giant valley, you can see the mountains everywhere, and that's what started the whole, hey, if I can see it, I can go there and explore it, that really happened in Oblivion. That initial view when you come out of the dungeon from character generation and see the world and see the water and see the ruins reflect in it, we spent a lot of time on, like, the framing of that, how the water looks, how the mountains look, to know that, hey, welcome to this world, go do whatever you want in it. - Elder Scrolls games are like kitchen sink games. There are so many systems, so much crafting, there's magic, there's all these different systems that have to interact together. There's cities you can explore that are teeming with people. - How are you? - There hasn't been a nuclear annihilation yet, you know what I mean? Everything's still there, everything's still beautiful. - So we started getting into this when we realized that the guards are the best reflection, we started doing this in Oblivion, the guards are the best reflection of the character. So they comment on you, they comment on what you're wearing, your accomplishments, like, hey, I heard you did this thing, or, like, and it gets really tough with stuff like the Thieves' Guild, they're like, "Did I see you sneaking out of that house?" - But the voice cast in general had not been figured out other than let's bring folks back from Morrowind who we like. Michael Mack, the voice of the redguards and so forth. - Cast a few more people to fill in the space or change up the cast from before. - And all in all, it's 10 or 11 actors for what I think started out as 60, 70,000 lines of dialog and eventually we had to trim that down to 40, 50 or something like that it shipped with. Because it physically, at the time, we could not fit it on the disc, it was just too much, something had to go. - I don't see any good options here. - One actor per race, gender, and some were ever shared. The nords, I think the male nord and the male orc are the same guy, and originally they were gonna be different and we had to combine 'em, it was just pure disc space whereas now you could just, you know, we could just tack on another archive you could download, it's all down to your local hard drive space on your console or whatever you're playing on. So it's a lot of ground covered by very few people so days and days and days and days and days of just imperial male with Wes Johnson, our local voice actor. - In fact, I always forget his name, but one of our voice actors, I see him like once every two months at the Dunkin Donuts down the street. I swear to God, I always mean to say hi to him, I can never remember his name, it's so embarrassing. - [Interviewer] And he goes, "Halt!" - And he's great (laughing). And I'm like, next time. (rain falling) (sword clashing) (booming) (game character yelping) - [Danny] Oblivion's four-year development cycle was tough on the team. They had doubled in size trying to keep up with the workload causing them to missed the Xbox 360 launch by 4 months. But this delay probably only contributed to Oblivion's success. By the time the game arrived on store shelves, console players were foaming at the mouth to get their hands on this game. The scale of Oblivion was something that had never been seen on a consoles before. And while some of the Morrowind fans may have felt that the game had been overly simplified, Oblivion struck a chord with gamers in a way that no RPG ever had before. Not only was it a red letter day for the open world console game, but it had tapped into a love of the fantasy genre that had never had its mainstream moment. You could argue the release of Lord of the Rings films had helped, or perhaps they had just tapped into the same thing. Oblivion was a costly venture for ZeniMax Media. Four long years and a lot of money went into the development of this game, so they wanted a backup. Something else for the team to work on as Oblivion wound down. Something they could use all this technology on but perhaps in a different genre. - Looking toward Oblivion, which was a four-year gap, three-and-a-half years, about four years, you realize, this is gonna take a while. You know, there wasn't pressure, but hey, we should probably get more than one thing going 'cause these things take a while, what would you like to make? And we made a list, you know, it was basically, post-apocalyptic, we had some other worlds, you know, science fiction this, I could go through the list but you never know if we'll make 'em so I don't wanna spoil it. I actually made this logo for the post-apocalyptic game, it was called Apocalypse Road. It was like a road sign that said Apocalypse. And I had written Fallout, it's Fallout. And they said, "You want Fallout?" Yeah, but that's, you know, we don't have that. And somebody here knew someone at Interplay and said, "I think, you know, they're having a rough time, "they're not using it, we might be able to acquire it." And I was like, "Oh my God, that would be a dream. "If you could get that, I'm tellin' you, "this would be perfect here." It fits what we do, it's different but the vibe of the game, it would fit with our style of game. And, maybe, it was probably a while, it was a year, he comes back and says, I remember, I actually got a sticky note from Todd Vaughn on my, I can remember it vividly, just a sticky note on my desk when I came back said, "Got you Fallout, it's yours." It was just like, when does that happen? (eerie music) - Yeah, Fallout was incredibly exciting for everyone here because it was new, new to us. We'd all played the Fallout games before, I think most people here are fans of Fallout 1 and 2, and it was exciting to, hey, we've all been a fantasy group, right? We're makin' fantasy role-playing games. Let's jump in to a post-apocalyptic world, what's that gonna be like? - [Interviewer] You a big fan of those older games? - Oh my God, I loved 'em! I think it's genius stuff, you know? All the credit to Tim Cain and Jason Anderson, all those guys who did that game. That's the other thing, why don't you make your own post-apocalyptic thing? I said, well, we could, we could do all this gameplay, but there's this shtick with it, with Vault-Tec and the world, the 50s, that's the sauce. Even though, I know there was a lot of fan angst, understandably so, I would've been the same way. - If you ever get a chance to work on a video game, work on a Fallout game, you can do practically anything in a Fallout game. - [Interviewer] (chuckling) Right. - And just the breadth of the storytelling, the breadth of the art direction, the tone and the humor, I mean, it's unlike anything else. When we got it and we started Fallout 3, that was just, for me personally, I was excited, I was very, very excited to be working on that game. (old patriotic music) - When it was time for Bethesda to pick a location for their Fallout game, they chose Washington, D.C. and they did so for a number of reasons. First of all, thematically, it just kind of works, right? This is the center of government in the United States, there's a pretty good chance that if a nuclear war happens, this is gonna get hit. Second of all, it gave them creative distance from those earlier Fallout games which we set, of course, on the west coast of the United States. And third of all, this was 20 miles from Rockville, Maryland where Bethesda's based. This nuclear apocalypse happened in their own backyard. - Well, this is how we make our games. Like, when we first decide on a game, we start with a map. And so we started with a map of D.C. and started mapping out the locations and where everything is gonna be. - So I remember Matt Carofano, the lead artist, this was after 9-11, he went down to D.C. to take reference photos. So he's walkin' around the capitol in different areas, lookin' up, lookin' down, takin' photos, and security comes up like, "What're you doing? "You can't do that." And they stopped him. He was like, "I'm just taking pictures," and they're like, "No, you're not." So a lot of the artists did go downtown and being right here it was much easier to do. - So I went down and took a lot of photographs of the capitol, which turns out is not a good idea to do, I do not recommend doing this. I asked one of the police officers, "Hey, I make video games, can I take pictures?" The cop went, "Yeah, take as many pictures as you want," and while I'm taking pictures of the capitol I realized I'm taking pictures of a very angry guard in the capitol and he came out and told me I had to leave immediately and didn't want any questions asked. But I got enough reference to build the capitol but I was very careful about not wanting to do that again, because it's security risks but, hey, I just wanted to make a cool video game, but I didn't wanna tell him, "Yeah, I'm actually taking pictures of this "so I can blow it up in a video game," which was exactly what I was about to do. - And a lot of the concept art for that game was, like, a ruined capitol building which, you know, back then and even now is a little iffy, it's a little shaky and I remember that we bought ads in the Metro and we used that concept art, so you're walkin' through the D.C. Metro and you're seeing like this massive piece of concept art on an ad of, like, this decayed, destroyed, nuked capitol building. And I was like, are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, I guess. (both laughing) - We knew that the game was set in Washington D.C., we know what the overall story is, and then we start with the map, and looking at where in Washington, D.C. the player is gonna go. So one of the first things you realize when you look at any map, you have a lot of real estate to cover and you want your quests to take the player all over the place. That sort of naturally involves going into easier zones, more difficult zones. And then we start come up with, because we want to tell the story, but we tell the story through the quests. So for us it was coming up with those quests and how they all fit together and what feels good and what are the core combat beats. When we started talking about Fallout we knew that we wanted to do something structurally different and so that structure was a main quest and miscellaneous quests but no factions. - [Danny] Oblivion had over a dozen joinable factions but there were four main ones: the Thieves Guild, the Mages Guild, the Fighters Guild, and the Dark Brotherhood. And each of these had exhaustive quest lines that took the team significant time to design. So they made the decision to drop factions quest lines, instead incorporating factions like the Enclave and Brotherhood of Steel into the main quest. Perhaps one of the reasons they cut it was a particularly significant design challenge that they hadn't figured out yet, gun combat. The original Fallout games were turn-based, using a system known as V.A.T.S to aid the player in combat. So the team pooled together a group of designers to help get this turn-based style of combat into their 3D FPS. This group was known as a strike team. So, by the time the public saw the game for the first time, first-person V.A.T.S had been realized, but it was something that BGS struggled with throughout development. - Well, one of the big things with Fallout, we had to create gun combat from the ground up, something this company hadn't done since the Terminator games. - I had grabbed Emil and said, okay, we need something, it's like Knights of the Old Republic meets crash mode in Burnout. We were like, how do we put these two things together? We messed with some really phase-based stuff but then it kinda came together. But I would tell you, that was one during the development everybody questioned. - [Interviewer] Really? - Well, you can either go like, is this a superpower? Is this just a glory shot? Like, what is the actual, what should the player be feeling or what's the use of it? - We went from Oblivion, which had, you know, it was a very robust RPG, it was still very sort of hardcore, we were making the bridge to a more general player-friendly game but it was still pretty hardcore. And Fallout had guns and our combat in Oblivion was, like, you swung and you're in some kind of distance and you hit, right? And then when you have guns you have all sorts of different combat mechanics you have to take into account, very technically, high-technical requirements that are had by many projects that have done first-person shooters much, not only in experience but better than we could ever do it. So we were trying to find that balance between how are we gonna keep players who love our role-playing games and also make a decent first-person shooter, because those two things don't often mix and that sort of was V.A.T.S. V.A.T.S was, you know, part of Fallout, it worked very well within the lore of Fallout and we were able to make it so, hey, you're not so great at twitch-shooty, you can hit that button, pause the game, see what you want, select targets, just like Fallout 1 and 2, right? - [Danny] It would take BGS another Fallout game before they'd get the feel for this aim-down-sights combat down. But one of the improvements they'd made over Oblivion came from the team's new structure. Designers were now split into two pools: level designers and quest designers. This allowed for the design of better combat spaces, more varied locations, and a lot more variety when it came to quests. It meant that instead of one person taking creative leadership of a chunk of the game, designers were working together to solve problems. What this resulted in was a game packed full of memorable moments. So we decided to ask the team about some of their favorites. Vaults full of Garys, tunnels full of snakes, and much, much more. But seeing as we have to start somewhere, how about we start with the start? - I always loved the vaults. Probably every Fallout we do you'll be coming out of a vault. I like the emerging into the world. And it was an initial idea, I'm usually designing the very beginning of a game. Like, okay, it's like this, you live your whole life in the vault and that snapshot of your life as you go through it and then the emerging, I love the beginning of Fallout 3. - [Interviewer] Right. - And if you go back, if you've played it a bunch, it's a little bit like, I just wanna get, a lot of people feel like the game hasn't started, but I love the, like, when you step out, you do feel like you lived your life in a vault. (wind whistling) (eerie music) But if it was just the view, like, you see that clip and you look at the view and you're like, "It's okay, it's not bad, it's okay," but it's the fact that, the stuff you did beforehand that make you really feel like the character you're playing. Anytime there's sort of dissonance with that emotion or, or I know more than the guy on the screen or whatever, then we're trying to like massage it back. - Actually, we learned from Oblivion, this is when we have a controlled area in the beginning that's your characters gen, we're trying to teach you things, get your character made, and then that's the point where we get to set you loose into the game world. And we want it to be sorta overwhelming. How amazing is this? What am I gonna do? And we want that vista to be really impressive, so a lot of work goes into how much you can see? Where does your eye lead? Do you think you're gonna run down to the ruins? Can you see the LOD for the Red Rocket station? And how am I gonna go explore this world? So we try to lead you into it but then let you go wherever you want and there were lots of discussions about how the game looked in terms of being a dystopian, post-apocalyptic wasteland, but I think a lot of it really was we wanted this oppressive feeling in the game, we wanted it to feel bad and that you are the hero who's gonna come help make this world better. And it was a big jump from the lush forests of Oblivion to a blasted nuclear wasteland with dead trees everywhere. A lot of the environment artists joked, "Hey, we're not allowed to use the color green "unless it's in the HUD." There's no live plants, there's no grass, it's all dead, it's all brown. - Everyone's dead so you don't want it to feel like too lit, but you also don't want people just stumbling around in the dark, so you have to find like this fine line of, like, just enough flickering lights that you can navigate and see all the monsters, find the quest items. So you have to play through every quest to adjust the lighting, like where are the people standing, make sure they have a nice light on 'em and they're not just, like, a really bright background and they're in the shadow. And then it'll move 'cause something'll change in the quest and you just have to keep playing it and keep adjusting it all the time. - Before class, eh? - Get out of my way you stupid Tunnel Snakes! - I can show you a real tunnel snake, Amata. - Adam Adamowicz, our concept artist who passed away a few years ago. Yeah, he had drawn this concept art. We knew that we wanted, like, I had had the idea of, there's this greaser gang and they're the bullies and it's a very 50s type of, you know, greaser gang thing and he had down a concept art, a concept image with that exact logo, Tunnel Snakes. - Tunnel Snakes Rule is awesome. And, by the way, if you ever see, if you're ever online somewhere and you see a guild or a thing that says Tunnel Snakes Rule, that's us, to a T every time. (interviewer laughing) Anytime someone here is making a faction or guild or a clan, or whatever in another game, everyone at the studios knows, yeah, it's Tunnel Snakes Rule. (gun firing) - Ah, Gary! - Gary! - Gary! - That's a classic example of something I had nothing to do with. It was just the level designers just doing something, they had, "We need a vault, we need an experiment, go!" - They did all these vaults and they had this one with all the Garys. And the level designer comes to me, he's like, we had, it was a big deal, we record all the VO and we have to lock it. And he's like, "We have this vault with all the clone Garys, "I wanted to record some more lines, "just the guy saying Gary," I'm like, "They do what?" He says, "They just say Gary." I'm like, "That's the fucking stupidest thing I ever heard." - I remember when we added it, I remember it being, I'm always assembling the scripts before they go off to VO. I think at the time, I always think things are stupid at first, I'm like, this is stupid. All right, fine, whatever! - So you want us to reopen the archives, get him to record Gary over and over? And he's like, "Trust me." - (laughing) Gary! (gun firing) - And they go in and they do it and it, I tell you what, before that, that is one of the worst levels you'll ever play, can you imagine it without the? But then it goes in and there's a couple, oh my God, I was so wrong, it's great, I'm like, "Perfect, I love it, it's hilarious!" - Gary! (gun firing) - (laughing) Gary! - Gary! - We had this nice tower kit that I'd been working on, I was like, "Ah, this'll be really cool." And the designer knew, hey, we want this to be this group of people who thought they were above all of the way this horrible wasteland would live so literally we put them above all the wasteland, so they had this really tall tower out in the middle of nowhere and it turned out to be the perfect view for, all right, let's nuke Megaton, if you choose to do that. (rumbling) (booming) - The verticality was interesting, it gave us some advantages like, you know, you could have Allistair Tenpenny at the very top in a very unique position where he's like sniping people in the wasteland. But the real challenge there was just all the permutations of, you know, do I let the ghouls out? Who do I save? Who don't I? Because we had this goal in Fallout 3 that the player can do anything, if the player wants to kill a quest giver, they can kill a quest giver. We talked about Megaton, if you tell Lucas Simms, the sheriff, that you're gonna disarm the bomb and so you have the good quest, and you shoot him and kill him, but then you disarm the bomb, like, who rewards you? His little son actually come up to you like, "My dad's dead but he wanted you to have this," like... - Every Fallout game I do what I call a profanity pass where I go through all the dialog and I rip out probably 50% of the profanity, 'cause it really doesn't need it. But in the case of Fallout 3 in Little Lamplight, we have the character of Mayor MacCready who we decided we want this kid to be the most foul-mouthed, like, we were gonna through 80% of the F-bombs on this kid. - And he comes, the voice actor we got, I don't even know what the kid's parents were thinking, but he just did a great job and it comes across as a kid who's trying to be tough and he's the mayor and he's in charge and, oh God, it's little moments like that. (eerie music) - [Danny] Fallout 3 was a success for Bethesda Game Studios and as they moved onto their next Elder Scrolls project, a corporate level decision was made to make a sequel to Fallout. Fallout: New Vegas was made by many of the developers who worked on the original games. The game was put together in 18 months and so launched in a pretty buggy state, but fans generally appreciated the way in which Obsidian evolved the first person Fallout. They tightened up the gun combat, added back factions, and created a wonderfully immersive world packed full of interesting stories. There aren't many New Vegas posters lining the halls of BGS and in talking to the team here, it sounds like they weren't overly involved in the production at all. - We were very hands-off with that. We had, I think, you know, it was corporate level decided we should do this and we wanted to support them as best we could but we knew they were capable folks and they were doing their own thing. I think we had like one or two meetings with them just to, like, go over some high-level stuff and like what are the ground rules? What should we be doing? But we were busy working on our own stuff here so we knew, that was one of the things, we knew that, like, listen, if they were gonna do this, we were not gonna really have the time to work on it with them because we're doing our own stuff. - [Interviewer] How much support did you give Obsidian when it came to New Vegas? Was that very much just their very own thing that was going on or? - It pretty much was their own, we were pretty knee-deep in Skyrim at that point and there really wasn't a lot of help that we could give them. Interesting enough, of all the people, I was probably the one on the team that worked on New Vegas the most, actually, but they did a heck of a job where we literally gave them like this, here is the engine and the tech, Godspeed. And we gave them all the source, it was basically, we gave them all the raw assets from Fallout 3, like, here's everything, you know, they gave us a great pitch, a great story, and it was pretty exciting, actually, to see someone else do their take on it and it was obviously well-received as well, but I thought they did a great job with that game. (majestic music) - [Danny] The team at BGS has a monthly hands-on meeting where their new studios in Austin and Montreal are dialed in. They begin each meeting with a list of new employees and recognition of their anniversaries. - This is in Montreal, Jason, a year, Sebastian, one year, Katja, four years, Jared, four years, Jarod, four years, five years, sorry. Gabe's five years, and Nate and Emmet, five years, so a lot of people. (crowd applauding) - [Danny] It went on for quite a while, the top Bethesda Birthday that month going to quest designer Brian Chappy Chapin, who celebrated 17 years. The average tenure at BGS is pretty high. This has meant that as they moved from project to project, the team has become more battle-hardened and more trusting of the process through which they make their games. Bethesda has a process. They overlap projects so that as one game is being finished, another is being spun up. They always start with the map. They add new technology help to build the world. Then they write stories, add in new tent-pole ideas, and create strike teams to focus on problematic areas. Crucially, they've gotten better at finishing games and pulling less out of them at the last minute. This is a process that used to terrify the studio, but through experience, they've become a lot more comfortable with. - I don't know, let's say seven, eight months before release, it's a serious mess. - [Interviewer] Right. - Always. Hey, we wanna push 'em in this direction but things just don't click together as much as you want and then you start shaving. There's tricks you have to nudge the player this way or, hey, let's cut this or let's change this into this, or let's make this expose itself and become, you know, more of a thing. And then when you ship it sometimes, there's something you miss, you realize, ugh, this is the one everyone's drifting toward and that wasn't our intention. - Three months before we ship there's this pocket where things are in the game, you're in alpha transitions into beta, and the game is done and, like, people are like, "Yeah, this doesn't feel right, it sucks!" And you're like, I know, but we always get it, like we know that it sucks, that's our job at that point to make it not suck, to make it fun. Like it's a, you know, it's finally, the giant block of granite has been delivered to the sculptor, thank you, it's sitting in there, now I'm just chiseling away little by little, just give me a little more time, it's getting there. And at this point we've been doing it so long we know it'll get there. - Yeah, I think everyone here to almost an obsessive level wants these games to be amazing. We don't, like, hold back, we're putting everything we possibly can into this game. And that, actually, is probably our biggest problem, there's a time when you gotta realize, okay, this isn't gonna be good enough, maybe we should cut this back or pare this back a little bit. But it's not for a lack of trying. Everyone wants everything in this game every time and then the next game it's, "Okay, that was great, what can we do now? "How can we make this better? "We're done, next!" You know, what're we gonna do that can blow that one away, no one will ever wanna play that game again after they've seen this. - [Interviewer] That didn't work for Skyrim. - No, that's good. Our fans are amazing, that they play our games for so long, having the creation kit and modding be such a big part of Bethesda is just really, really cool. I'll often go look at mods and just can't believe what they've done. Mostly on the visual front, like, oh, wow, that's really amazing how they're using some new effects on the games. Or the teams who will go and try to recreate one of our older games in the newer engine, that's like the biggest, I don't know, praise you could possibly get that people want to remake an entire game you worked on in the newer engine just 'cause it'll be a little bit better and cooler and they wanna see what they can do, it's really awesome. - There are a lot of people on the team, myself included, are huge fans of mods and the modding community. And they've been doing it for just as long as we have! The modding community is 15, 18 years old, that's unheard of in the industry, no one, like, there are no fans of, like, not even the Minecraft community is that old, like, there's nothing like that in the industry so we're in a really unique situation. (gentle music) - You know, I talked to Todd a lot about this because it was just kind of Todd and I talking about Skyrim early on, nobody was working on it, they were still working on Fallout stuff. And we both wanted, he and I somehow align on the ideas of what we wanna do in the next Elder Scrolls game. We both wanted something that wasn't sort of the generic fantasy of Oblivion but wasn't as alien as Morrowind was. So we wanted to do something that had a lot more of the local culture, so we picked the nords, we were both excited about doing nords, but wanted to kind of mix in some of the other elements from the other provinces around Skyrim. And then I drew a map and that kind of helped me figure out, well, what is this game? All right, I'll make a map and I'll start figuring out where everything goes and what could be in it. And I pulled references for all the different regions, 'cause early on we told the team, hey, yeah, we're gonna be making Skyrim and everyone was like, "Is it gonna be all snow? "That sounds really boring." So I did a presentation for the whole team that was, "No, it's not gonna be all snow and plus, "there's so many different kinds of snow you don't realize." So we broke apart this sort of arctic environment into tundra, different types of tundra, volcanic tundra, the more open fields tundra, rocky wastelands on the edges, a snow environment, a arctic glacier environment, and then forests, make 'em different, we can have pine forests, we can have fall forests, which we called it 'cause we kinda set the tone of the game in the fall. - What it was, it felt that Oblivion had tipped back to being too generic. It's welcoming, right? But it doesn't have, its character just became, "I'm the next gen role-playing game in forests." And we needed something that at an instant felt a bit more rugged and had its own identity. And the dragons and the shouting, they work into that. - Fallout 3 had a very tight design, it was very, we hadn't done factions, it was a smaller game in a lot of ways than even Oblivion, which allowed us to polish. And we knew that with Skyrim we were gonna go big again. - Skyrim would be the team's fourth bite at their particular brand of open world role-playing game. And with that confidence came the drive to improve on things that they had done before. To plan better so they had more time to add new flavors to their world. - We'll come up with the basic ideas behind each town or each city and say, all right, these are the people who live here, it's kinda based on, you know, if it's Solitude, it's a heavy Imperial presence and we want it to be near a port, come up with some ideas. And then Ray, one of our concept artists, drew that and put it on top of a cliff with an arch over to another rock formation and everyone was like, "Oh, all right, this is really cool, "this is starting to feel really unique." - With the cave kit we tried to do a lot of different things 'cause I already did the cave kit on Fallout 3 so we tried to branch out and make them a lot more organic. 'Cause the way we would build them before it was pretty much LEGO pieces and it would all snap together in 90 degree angles, caves aren't really 90 degree angles so we expanded on that and added all these pieces that you can jam in so things can flow around really natural. It's more work for the designers but then it doesn't just feel like old-school grid RPG thing so I think it made a big difference and sort of laid the ground work for what we did on Fallout 4 which went even further. (peaceful music) - [Danny] Whatever way you slice it, one of the elements that defines Bethesda games is bugs. These games, with all their openness, all their interactive objects and emergent storytelling, are rife with bugs. In the past, bug hunting was something that was done by the entire team as they approached launch but as the studio grew, they were able to put resources into starting a quality assurance department. Now they were hiring people, many of whom were fans of the games, to join their QA department and find bugs for them. And as it turns out, bugs came in all shapes and sizes. - There were some that dealt with menus and then you'd be the person who was just scrolling through menus trying to find typos, trying to find issues with the menus. Then there are the people that had the gameplay access where they were trying to find whether they could run through a wall or whether this collection of spells, if we're using Skyrim as an example, would cause the game to crash. So there were teams that were specifically put on, quest completion and making sure they can get from point A to point B without any issues, just running the specific path. Some would have to divert and do side quests. There were achievement testers that would do the quests or do what they needed to do in order to figure out whether the achievements and trophies were gonna pop properly. - [Danny] Skyrim wasn't the first Bethesda game to ship with bugs, but thanks to capture cards and the growing popularity of YouTube, it was the first to have so many of them immortalized for millions to see. I asked the team about some of their favorites, some you may have seen yourself, and others you probably haven't. - In the DLC for Skyrim, I think it was Dawnguard, there was artwork that was supposed to be a fork and knife. So there's a fork and knife, you weren't supposed to be able to pick them up, they were just supposed to be placed on the table, but there are two in the game, still to this day 'cause they never fixed it, that you can pick up and hold as weapons and you can enchant them and you can, like, decapitate people with an eating fork and an eating knife. Had a blast doing this but the bug part of it, like that part wasn't that big of a deal, but the bug part of it came where if you created a save game and then loaded that game with the fork and knife equipped, it would load you into the artwork somewhere in the game. So, like, you'd just be in the middle of a table place setting. - [Interviewer] The game, like, when you load back in, makes you, like, the plate? - Yeah, you're basically the plate, and you're not, you're not standing on top of the table, you're standing in the table, anywhere where there's a fork and knife if it's in the same load set. So if I'm in that area and there happens to be somewhere later in the level a fork and knife, it will propel me to where the fork and knife are. - So after Skyrim came out, the first thing there's videos going up on YouTube of people throwing buckets over people's heads in towns. - Welcome to the Pawned Prawn. What can I do for you? - You don't look so good, are you feelin' all right? - I have all sorts of interesting items for sale. - Because our system for the AI was literally a line of sight, a pick drawn from the center of the head to whatever they were going for. You put a bucket on their head they couldn't see you anymore, right? No one thought to do that, all our QA, all the hundreds of hours, thousands, tens of hundreds of thousands hours we collectively played that game. - The giants would launch, like, characters into the sky and I didn't know that the bear was being launched. Every once in a while you would see, like, you'd be playing Skyrim before we released, you're like running around, and you would just see a mammoth, like, fly up in the air and then you'd see it, like, drop, and you're like, "What the hell is going on?" Like, little by little, that's how I started asking the animator who animated the giant, like, "Dude, have you seen the flying mammoths? "Like, what's happening?" Something will aggro the giant, the giant will then hit the ground and because they're always paired with the mammoths, they send them in the air, but I never saw the bear until we released. And so then the game released and then suddenly there's this whole thing where my bear was being launched across the map and then, obviously, spawned that fan video of that bear that keeps flying around and all that. - [Player] Attack bear, please attack bear. Yes! (laughing) - [Danny] As much as we all enjoy a good flying bear, bugs weren't the only element of Skyrim to be immortalized in by internet culture. Emil is responsible for so much of what makes these games special. He's written all the the Dark Brotherhood quest lines, he helped design every lockpicking game Bethesda has ever worked on, he even wrote an entire arena combat mode for Skyrim, with arenas in every city just like the original concept for Oblivion, but just like that it didn't make it in. But despite all of his work on all of these elements, the thing that Emil is probably most famous for is a single line of guard dialogue that he wrote in about five seconds. - Yeah, so, again, I was Dark Brotherhood, guard dialog... - [Interviewer] Are you responsible for arrow in the knee, then, is that what you're telling me? - Yeah, I am, actually (laughing) that is the weirdest thing ever. But yeah, it's just, it was one line of dialog in a stack of hundreds, I don't know, the guys say a bunch of stuff. And for some reason, could never have foretold, to this day I still don't know why, there you have it. Yeah, so weird. - [Interviewer] Presumably you wrote it just one late night. - Yeah, I was just writing a stack of 'em, a bunch of randomized lines like, "I used to be an adventurer like you "then I took an arrow in the knee," you know, "hey, I saw a horker down there," you know, whatever, it wasn't, didn't give it a second thought, like, you know, just trying to get into the mindset of what these guys are like. - I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow in the knee. - [Danny] Something else Emil worked on was the dragon language. The team had wanted to put believable dragons into a 3D Elder Scrolls game since forever, and now that they finally had to the technology to do it, they wanted it to be an integral part of the main quest. - I don't know if this has ever come out, but one of the biggest inspirations for the shouts is actually the power of the voice in the Dune movie. - [Interviewer] Oh really? - Yeah, the Maud'Dib, yeah, 'cause he has that device (grunting) and it blows up the rock. There's a sort of cadence to it, 'cause each shout can be a maximum of three words and so, like, if you find one word, it's an exhale like "Fus," if there's two words it's an inhale then an exhale, it's like "Fus ro!" And then if it's like, "Fus ro dah!" So getting that pattern and that sort of, it feels a little bit musical but you feel a power behind it and then coming up with all the shouts and stuff. - [Danny] For Fallout 4, the team had put together a strike team to figure out how V.A.T.S combat could work and for Skyrim, there were a bunch of strike teams, too. One of them ran for the entire length of the game's development, as it was responsible for one of the most important parts of the game, the dragons. - They're very special because they have to, if you think about draw distance, right? In games you wanna be a fish in a bowl. Okay, when can I unload something or when can I deal with memory issues? But the dragon, you expect to see the dragon from as far as your eye can see, right? Because you can go wherever your eye can see so he's basically like loaded all the time and he's costly, he has the most bones, you know, the most dense mesh. If you think about him, he's a heavy character. - Dragons were tough in multiple ways. Just how did they work? Just with the way the games work and the way we build the worlds, it's very sort of cell-based 'cause technically it has to load a certain number of cells and a certain number of acres and so the technical aspect of well, here's this thing that's in the sky that can go wherever it wants, how's that work? How's it work within the game world for the player? And then once it's within your space, how do you actually fight it? - [Interviewer] Right. - So fighting in the air if you're shooting spells at it, when it's on the ground. So I remember we basically had a strike team and it was one of those things where the whole game, from beginning to end, we were working on dragons. Just sort of, can we do this, and then once we got to a point where, yes, we can make this work, and then, okay, what do we do, what don't we do? Like the quest wouldn't work, where's the dragon? It's over here, there's a bunch of sheep it just killed. That's when we go back and debug it and where's the dragon? 'Cause it uses a radiant AI so it would go off on its own and do its own thing. - [Danny] Skyrim was a massive commercial and critical success. It become one of the most modded games of all time, spawned a huge community of both young and old and has since been released on practically every console known to man. Something the team laughs about themselves, referring to Skyrim as the game that will never die. But the success the game enjoyed was a surprise to most of them. - I would've never guessed that game would be as popular and do as well as it did. We knew it was a fun game, we knew it was awesome, like I knew playing it, you know, at six months I'm like, "I think we have something here "but I don't wanna say it out loud "because I don't wanna jinx it." And yeah and that would've been, for the designers, that would've been their third game now, so that's practically unheard of in the industry, for a team to be together for that long at that point. We started with Morrowind and then Oblivion and then Fallout 3, now we're gonna do it for a fourth time. And it's one of the advantages that we have because of our history and all the games that we've worked on, we can track, how're we doing now compared to where we were on this project with Fallout 4? How do we compare versus Skyrim? How do we compare versus all the other ones? And that's sort of another advantage that we have in the industry that we have all these games and experiences. I call them playbooks, like, we have the Skyrim Playbook, how did we solve this problem in Skyrim? How did we solve this problem in Fallout 4? Like, we need a new game mechanic, okay great, we have 15 years worth, pick one, like which one do you wanna try? (peaceful music) - The first thing is for us is figure out where the hell is this game set? And it wasn't Boston originally. I grew up in Boston and I thought it would be great but I didn't wanna be that guy, I didn't wanna push for it so I'm like. It was set somewhere else and I still have the design doc in my desk, an original design doc. And in that design doc, the one thing, the one holdover is the character of Nick Valentine, was conceived even way back then, he was like the first character they came up with. - [Danny] Emil's design doc focusing on a New York-based Fallout was one idea that the lead's were floating around. They could place this game anywhere, in fact at one stage they had asked Obsidian to remove a line in New Vegas about San Francisco being totally wiped off the map, they wanted the Bay area to at least be an option for future games. The idea for Boston actually came from a lunch meeting between Istvan Pely, Todd Howard, and Emil. And once Beantown was given the thumbs up, Emil headed home with his camera. - I had a friend of mine who was MIT, so the Institute is MIT, obviously, right? CIT in the game. But I had a friend who was an MIT cop, he drove me around, have me a little tour, and he said, "Hey, I don't know if you knew this, "but it's an open campus," it was in the summer, and he's like, "The campus is open, you can walk around, "you can walk through the classrooms, "you can walk through anywhere." And you know the whole cryo hook with Fallout 4? I was wandering on a side tunnel down this corridor at MIT, there's this cryo lab with these giant cryo tanks and I sent these selfies and sent them to Todd, I'm like. (interviewer laughing) Looked pretty funny and then I knew back then, the story just started to take on a life of its own. - I have friends that live there so we toured around the city and I was taking tons and tons of pictures, which should've been a red flag to them, but then the extra big red flag should've been, "And then we're gonna go and check out Fenway Park." That was designed to be that way from the start, like that was the very first thing I worked out on Fallout 4 was starting out building Fenway and from the beginning we knew we wanted those stadium lights and we knew the player was gonna have, like, their first quest pointing towards that. So I always wanted this beacon and I always like to build worlds in a way where you have these landmarks that you can help orient yourself with, too, that way you don't have to, like, pull up the map all the time like, where the hell am I? You can just navigate using what you see. - My childhood bedroom is in the game, my high school's in the game. A raider boss named Bosco, he has a bear. So it was the Don Bosco Bear was my mascot back in high school, so goofy stuff like that, yeah. Fenway Park, well, I mean, you know, Diamond City. We knew that there were the big things that we had to have. You have this quest to get paint for the wall and you can repaint the wall blue or yellow, which is the most sacrilegious thing you could possibly do, I was like, we gotta do this. It was great. Boston Common and the public garden, the swan boats are big and that's why we have Swan, the supermutant behemoth. The Old North Church, we knew that that had to be a significant place. The Old Statehouse which is where Goodneighbor is. The name Goodneighbor comes from Holly Goodneighbor, who was one of the last burlesque dancers in Boston, so Goodneighbor is in an area that was once Scollay Square, which was the original red light district of Boston. - 2011 I think there was the earliest version of that drawing out, how we wanted the market laid out and stuff. I actually laid that out myself and one of the things I wanted was I knew players were gonna be going there all the time, 'cause you're always selling things in games and sometimes people will lay out a city and it's like, the clothing shop is over there, the weapon shop is over there. I was like, that is super annoying and takes 30 hours of additional time in your game, just like running back and forth between those shops. So I was like, let's take all the shops, and we put them right here in the middle so you can just buy and sell everything right there. - Fallout 4 I think, for us, was the first time we really handled a giant city in a much better way. Technically and artistically, it was really hard to jam everything we wanted to into a city, make sure you didn't get lost, and make sure it ran well and it was fun. That was quite a lot of work went into figuring out how to build the downtown city of Boston. We had like key colors that popped out where there was like a certain color of rust and a certain red and a certain blue that you'll see used on everything. Like, the high-tech buildings will have the same blue as the cars, those were very conscious choices that we had. We just wanted these accent colors, so you'd have, you would know where important things are, so you'd have sort of the background of the terrain and ruined stuff is a certain color but then you'd get these pops of color to make it feel a little bit more alive while still being trashed and crappy. Color and lighting have a lot of similarities, too, where I think of it as, like, mothing the player. They see something and go towards it. Yeah, that was intentional, we really wanted to say, here are these bright colors and when I see that, I know I'm gonna go find something that's interesting, that's gonna lead me through this dead wasteland that we're in and just be kind of a guide for the player. - [Danny] The location for a Bethesda role-playing game is always a point of interest, but in the case of Fallout 4 many of us had heard that it was set in Boston, years before the game was released. In December of 2013, a Kotaku article revealed the location to be Boston, referencing a voiceover script that had been leaked to their news desk. Communications between the studio and the outlet have been frosty ever since, but I wanted to know how the studio reacted when they first saw the report. - There were some small ones but nothing really bad, there were some VO script leaks, that wasn't pleasant. You know, I was, separate story really, but literally the first time I saw those documents was when they were emailed to me from somebody outside the company. And then you're like, what is this? Where's this coming from? But you know what? I think you gotta let that kinda, you know, roll off the shoulders pretty quickly, like, we have enough to do to worry about that stuff and there's so much going on that the fact that more doesn't leak, like in general, not just us but other people, is kind of surprising. - That was pretty, it was surprising, and obviously we tried to track it down and figure out what happened. And that was, you know what, and that also kind of told us, like, if you're gonna obfuscate stuff related to Fallout, you really have to hide it, you can't simply just give it a codename and call it a day. Like, if you look at the thing you're like, oh, this is a Fallout game. - [Danny] Bethesda Game Studios continue to grow, expanding departments with a focus on improving the general production quality of the games. Technical artists were hired to create bespoke tools for the team, dedicated animators helped to create more complex rigs. They added cinematic cameras to dialogue, upgraded the animation system, and even sharpened up the shooting. - We really, I felt like what happened was, with Havok Animation in particular, when we integrated that into our system, I think Fallout 4 was the beginning of us really catching a groove with that. Like, there's a certain time when you start to learn a new tool when we adopted Havok, there's a time when you're just trying to learn it, so we did that with Skyrim. But I think when we had Fallout 4, we knew it well enough where you're not fighting the tool so much and you're much more in the realm of creating the art, right? I started on Dogmeat and I kind of did the pre-production on Dogmeat and then I passed it on to someone else who actually did an amazing job with it. And then I stayed primarily on scenes, directing any actors we had for mo-cap, focusing on faces. We spend so much time talking in our games and it's the area where I feel like we continually need to push. I did a lot of the mo-cap, I was also the actor for most of the mo-cop. - [Interviewer] Oh really? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, so, like, the salesman, when he first comes in, I did all his stuff, I shot the infamous cryo pod scene where the guy was shooting the spouse. That we did with a couple people here. Yeah, we have like a mo-cap station, I just go downstairs and just shoot it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just get in the suit, I play the audio, and I try to perform to the people's performance, or I grab somebody else and say, "Hey, I need your help, let's go shoot." - You know, it's funny, I grew up with a kid, Jay Giannone, the last time I saw him in person, we were in a fight, me and him and his friends were against me and it was like, it was like this bully-nerd situation, did not end in a good way. And I had known that Jay throughout the years, he'd gone on to be an actor and he'd been in some stuff and I liked the things he'd been in, so I reached out to him, I'm like, "Hey man, how's it goin'? "I know you're an actor, do you wanna be in the game?" So he's actually, he does a couple voices in the game. (guns firing) - [Danny] Before each project Bethesda hosts a game jam where they invite everyone in the studio to prototype something for a new or existing game. It can be anything, big or small. For instance, one of the producers learned how to animate cats during a game jam. Those animations are used in Fallout 4. Another game jam gem came from physics programmer Mike Delaney. He knocked together a system that allowed players to build and furnish their own bases. This system, Workshops, ended up being one of the tent-pole features of Fallout 4, but the truth is that it almost didn't make it into the final game. - The Workshop mode in Fallout was on the cutting block for so long. We were like, "I don't know if anyone "really wants to do this, it's kind of fun though. "Well, I guess we'll just kind keep it in there." It was always kind of, it just refused to die because we just weren't sure, like, does anyone even care about this, you know? And it turned out to be huge, like there's a contingent of fans who hate it and there's a contingent of fans, hardcore fans, who absolutely adore it. - Workshops was the easiest thing for us to cut because we were always so afraid of it. Not, afraid's the wrong word. It was ancillary to the rest of the game. It was a side thing, so we kept it there because it was such an ambitious endeavor, like it became part of the quests towards the end, certain quests you had to do. But we could've easily, had we known and invested more time, it could've been a big part of the main quest, rebuild a town or something. One of physics programmers, Mike Delaney, sat there and was like, "I did this thing and we can trip lights "and turn lights on and move the objects around," and then Todd saw that and was like, "Well, you get to do that for the rest of the project." Well, some parts of the rest of the project. And it built and built and built. - [Danny] One of the conspiracy theories that fans of BGS games love to talk about is the idea that these games all exists in one universe. The way in which the studio creates these games in series means that there are always elements of Elder Scrolls games being brought into the Fallout games and vice versa. But one of the most exciting crossovers ever, was actually left on the cutting room floor. It involved the town of Salem, Massachusetts and a bunch of magic kids. - In the real world, there's a city of Salem, there's another town of Danvers, and there was a rivalry between those two towns with, like, the high school teams with, like, the Danvers soccer team and the Salem soccer team. So we decided, let's do a little bit of a rivalry between Danvers and Salem in the game. We were like, okay, what is the theme of Salem? It's witches. All right, and so what if we have people with mutations that have weird powers? They're kind of X-Men-ish but they're caused by radiation, but they're viewed as witches by the people of Danvers. So there's this sort of, like, they're being persecuted somehow, we'll get that witch theme. We were using the Skyrim code base, which had magic built in. So we had, all right, fireballs and telekinesis or whatever. Well, you know, eventually as we got deeper into Fallout 4's development, that code got ripped out, and so we were like, we don't have this magic stuff anywhere, there are no more fireballs, you can't, oh great. So, long story short, that quest had gone through, I wanna say, four or five variations and four or five designers and it was this close to getting cut. And one of the issues was because our world is compressed, right, Danvers ended up being right next to Salem and it was so close we ended up combining the two. And so there were no two towns that could compete against each other, so we had to like, what do we do? We know we have this museum and then Liam Collins, one of our designers, he was like, I think, one of our newest quest designers at the time, he was given this quest and was like, we gotta do something with it, I don't wanna lose it, I want there to be a quest there, what can we do? And we worked together and it's a very, it's one of the coolest quests in the game and it's such a cool, it has a totally different vibe. It's basically like, what do you do if you have a deathclaw that's trapped in a building? And trying to escape from it and doing some really cool scripted sequences and, like, we know we can trim it, are we gonna trim it out of existence, is it still gonna be fun? And it is, we just had to change the nature of it. (deathclaw growling) (gun firing) (whooshing) (deathclaw roaring) - [Danny] If the team was simplifying quests in some areas, they were making them far more complex in others. Fallout 3 didn't have faction quests, the team decided to scrub them out to make time for other systems that needed building. The system had been re-introduced in Fallout: New Vegas with faction alliances having some impact over the end game. So when it came for BGS to start Fallout 4, they decided to make factions an integral part of the entire Fallout experience. - In Fallout 4, there was a design decision to make all the factions interwoven into the main story. We did not do that in previous games and it kept things simpler, but you often felt like, hey, I played the Mages Guild in Skyrim and they didn't particularly care that dragons were attacking the whole world. But in this game, all the stories kind of combined around this Synth threat, it made things vastly, vastly more complicated. - Oh my God, I joined the Railroad but I wanna kill Synths but then I do this over here but then I join the Brotherhood of Steel and I have Danse as a companion but then I also wanna have Strong, and, uh, it's mind-boggling. - And it worked out really well in that each faction got their own group of people to work on things so they got ownership of it and got to kind of run with it. So even though the Brotherhood of Steel is a little bit evil, I particularly enjoyed that. - From my perspective, Fallout 4 is our most accomplished title to date, like that game was playable far earlier than any other game we've had. We were playtesting it far earlier, we had all our processes and tools and technology and it was pretty rock solid. (gentle music) - [Interviewer] What are some of the things that you're most proud of? - I think there's a comradery and there's a shared history that when you go to that meeting and you see that up there, there's a sense of pride, that, like I can go through a list of like, yeah, I worked with that guy for 20 years, and this person for 18 years, and 16 years, and enough of us. These are the games we would run out to buy, like, we really enjoy the games. More so, we enjoy doing it with each other and if we didn't we wouldn't still all be here doing it. I think, like, it's a lot of work. I spend more time, I've spent more time with the Elder Scrolls and Fallout, or even just Elder Scrolls, than anything in my entire life. Like, anything. My family. Like, if you count up the hours. And that has to mean something to everybody or we won't, we'll do below average work or people will move on or it's just a job. But there's a certain, there's a certain vibe in the studio that I think a lot of us get the sense of, I don't know if you're coming in, I don't know if you do or don't, you're spending limited time. It's sort of that thing like, you can do something, but if you do it with other people, it's just far more meaningful, right? It's like, we're always trying to do too much or, like, have we bitten off more than we can chew? Of course! Like, that's who we are, and we won't always get all the way there, but I'd rather shoot for it and then see where we end up then be safe. - Thank you for joining us on our journey through the history of Bethesda Game Studios. And now that we've suitably indulged our nostalgia, it's time to look forward towards and exciting future. In our next documentary, we talk to the people working on Bethesda's future as we explore the design of Fallout 76, and give you an exclusive window into the studios lofty plans. - So we'll catch up after Bethesda's E3 showcase for an exciting behind-the-scenes deep dive into the new games this studio has been working on. Enjoy the show! (wind whistling) (clicking)

Channel: Noclip - Video Game Documentaries

Views: 1,806,973

Rating: 4.9320421 out of 5

Keywords: fallout, the elder scrolls, documentary, noclip, todd howard, the elder scrolls arena, daggerfall, morrowind, skyrim, oblivion, fallout 3, fallout 4, fallout new vegas

Id: QKn9yiLVlMM

Length: 88min 38sec (5318 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/PaulAtreidesIsEvil]

I remember when I first saw Morrowind on shelves and drooling from the cover and screenshots on the box. I didn't have internet so it was fucking amazing trying to figure out the game without any online help or discussion. In fact the game still is amazing but back then that game blew your mind.

[u/KazumaKat]

90 mins. No regrets.

That kind of deep dive is really something that this industry needs from time to time, and I'm glad deserving dev studios and entities get to have that through Noclip.

[u/Xenotechie]

For a bit of fun, compare and contrast the Bethesda Softworks presented in this video to the Bethesda Softworks at the time of the making of Oblivion.

[u/bobschnowski]

"So we'll catch up after Bethesdas E3 showcase for an exciting behind the scenes deep dive into the new games the studio has been working on" sounds like they'll at least be touching on another project besides 76

[u/[deleted]]

In case anyone's wondering, there's nothing about Fallout 76 in this video. Only in the next video to be released after the E3 showcase.

[u/Beelosh]

I love when Todd compares making the V.A.T.S. system to "combining Knights of the Old Republic and Burnout Crash Mode". Perfect description!

[u/PretendCasual]

Wow practically 90 minutes and it's not the only one they made for Bethesda. Really excited to watch this later.

[u/cliftonmarshall]

Todd Howard is a seriously impressive dude. Hilarious how the internet just shits on him incessantly when he is so obviously one of the most passionate "big names" in the industry. I don't think I had ever really heard him speak until this.

Loving this video, only about an hour in, though. Danny brings such an awesome, human-driven, focus to his documentaries.

[u/Ynwe]

Damn 1,5 hours? Gonna enjoy this tomorrow. Glad to see that we still get some quality videos around here.