Todd Howard at George Mason University

welcome to the first in a series of game design speeches that we're going to have here at George Mason welcome to those of you who are game design majors and those are human my classes or anyone else who up the sounded pretty cool are going to get treated to a pretty special talk tonight from taught our so those either for those of you that don't know Todd as making games a long time if you started in 94 94 and he's been with one company that entire time which is a record I think in the game industry he's made a lot of games overs career but in Bethesda they focus a lot on these open-world games and for me with in game design this is one of the most exciting evidence of development because it's pushing the envelope of what it means to be interactive a completely interactive environment with open storylines for the player to go and do whatever they want and kind of reacts to the player and I think Todd is really at the forefront of pushing that technology his last two games both earn game of the Year awards there was Elder Scrolls oblivion to Xbox a lot 3 another game of the year oh I'm sure somebody played it I've been playing it all week I ran around the destroyed ruins of Fairfax today find George Mason University it wasn't their number they do introduce to you Todd our thank you for that Chris I'm incredibly jealous talking to Chris about the the program the explain you have here at George Mason when I was in school I did everything I could to not go to class like what's the easiest route to graduation so I can play games as much as possible you know I would kill if I was in school I would have killed for a program like you guys have here I majored in finance because again that seemed the easiest at the time I was away memory and one of my hobbies hold on I hope I'm not logged into my network at work all that later when one of my hobbies was to crack video games and some of my favorite games to crack were Bethesda's so on my way home I'm from Pennsylvania I saw their address in the box and realized they were off of 270 on my way home from Lewisburg to Pennsylvania and so I just drove by and knocked on the door and said you know this is where I want to work when I graduate from college so it's very much self-taught in terms of doing programming doing art you know there wasn't really a design discipline at that time then you could even study it was just you know try things and see what worked so I've been incredibly fortunate to get the company like Bethesda that did the kind of games that I was interested in and have been there for a really long time and work with an amazing amazing group of people the presentation I'm going to show you is a talk that that I've done before and I'm going to try to you know pepper it with you know or a look at if you're a student who's studying game designer those kind of things you say this is what I want to make a career of you know so there's so designed things in here but a lot of it is you know team management so a project like fallout free you know for the begins we do you're looking at budgets of twenty twenty-five million dollars to make a game a hundred people it's a big production and a lot of what goes into that is your specific role within that group so you may have kind of the greatest game design idea of all time and you're just this little voice you know over here power so you know a lot of it you'll hear me say dirt part of this talk was an industry thing I did earlier in the year is what it's like to be on a big team and how we kind of approach the game as a complete entity not just a specific design idea but putting a big game out there to the marketplace and then so this would be I don't know 20 minutes or so and then all I'll take questions so avoid shouting out during it yeah okay this is what I described making a game like you this is your boss or whoever like the people in the back or the marketplace looking these are babies like so I refer to as you know making a game as this as this great as great leap and so you can have a really stupid idea you know this is a stupid idea but it's all about execution right you know you execute this well and that's that's what's important so there are a lot of constituencies when you this is this is my slide for who you're trying to please your office 20 keys yourself but the game you make then you have you work at a company you know and then you have kind of external people this is outside way off when I made this now it exists the DLC for fall ps3 they will sell George Mason as a DLC since I guess we didn't include that what was the school bill but uh say yeah I can watch that and fall out timeline diverges in 1946 that's my hump so you know who are you trying to please with your age so we came to do fall out people would ask me why do you why do you want to make fall out we were kind of in the middle of oblivion and so close just it's just really awesome and if you look at the sales of the Oval fallouts they didn't you know they didn't sell particularly well but they're sort of everybody remembered them in a really nice way but I had to kind of prove why we should spend all this time and money to make this game and so like people blow up all these charts these were some I find around the office you know what sold bought and franchises and things like that and I turned I find that none of this matter my favorite thing to say at work is you know install base doesn't really matter like all these numbers don't matter that much you you have to believe in what you're doing so if you look at the install base of consoles they don't you know if install ways matter all make more games because like there are tables so if if you if you are making a game so your student you look at like avenues where you can make games with a smaller team or Xbox Live the iPhone I've spent more money on iPhone apps playing games over the last year probably than any platform but that's a really good Avenue so if you have an idea if it fits for that device or whatever it is just get behind you really believe in it and go for the guy on the right takes longer but it ends well so it's the best the game studios that's that's the group up in charge up just about we're about a hundred people right now mixer programmers artists designers some producers as well and so we thrive a mission statement internally which is which is this so you know it you can sort of picture it as it's a lot like this room but everybody's a little bit older that's see now this is what it looks like it's a organized Maternity sorority and we have a lot of fun but a lot of is how we how we treat each other in the office so excellent people then you know excellent change and they really go hand in hand because you're spend a lot of time with these people so we have our excellent people barometer at work which is there's no substitute for self-reliance like we don't have a lot of time to heavily manage people but I think in you know people coming out of school you learn a lot of that because it's mostly on you to be self-reliant and self-governing in the quality of your work and to have a culture for that so that we're not constantly saying can you update this can you make it better it just has to be in the culture with the amount of people we have in these games so knowing that we we're eight people in and we interview it's a bit of an okay pass so we look for people who we you know want to hang out with as well it really is important because the work we're doing is incredibly incredibly subjective you have a lot of arguments about what's fun one of the fun stories of workers we were making this expansion for more when this Bloodmoon expansion could become a werewolf and we had a knock-down drag-out conversation without high how high where will should jump like I mean this was like you were arguing you like you know public health care or something like gross stuff and it carried over into dinner and like a restaurant looks you get and like the waitress like these guys are really angry about how high so you need to be able to come out of conversations like that without a lot of emotional baggage this is one of our pictures we have up to three shark's high-fiving so this is a you know snapshot of the team who made a fallout three a lot of people who worked really really hard you know if we weren't getting paid for this we would we would do it for fun next one games so there are three big rules that we really design our games bottom this one is the most important one great games or play not made I'll go through these in the top and keep it simple and define the experience so when you're designing your own things these are things that we keep in mind that maybe you could keep in mind actual people excellent games nice so your plan when you go to make a schedule on a big game is not as important as the overall culture because when if you have crazy ideas something always goes wrong I'm sure you've already any of you put together stuff design wise you know the cooler your idea probably the more stumbling blocks you run into so you could make you have a really big project or games take three years the stuff always always goes wrong and if you have a good culture it can overcome a lot of that a lot of that and then your ideas or how does a important as your execution so you can have you know you see I'll see people who come and pick up some things and say well here's my here's my game design and it's you know this thick and here's my plan and it's equally thick schedules and budgets and there's the and that to me is always like this is not going to work because you really need to get in and play your game I prefer designs that are are short and have a prototype or something you can play to show you what's really fun and I prefer as opposed to a schedule to meet the people involved to see how they get along to see what their drive is for that particular topic so I'm going to back up for those three rules the third one was to find the experience kind of the first thing we do when we're going to make a game what is the experience in this game and when I ask people a lot of their games are like you know it's cool and awesome so most people subscribe things this way those are not experiences you know one of the first things that we have some first thing we made for Fallout 3 was this image this image was made in 2004 five years ago like what does the game feel like what does the player feel like like it feels like this he's like post-apocalyptic bands this image actually eventually became the cover of the box it was made by this guy east bomb and he's the lead artist in the game when I gave this talk he was in the audience I was trying to embarrass him the first time he never keep always has this expression when he loves things this is his face so in Photoshop I wish he was here so embarrassing I did this to embarrass myself after that I walked by moving in a segregation research I had to take this picture we do a lot of research so we look at the old games you know okay so what does the player experience go back and play the whole games they have a lot of age to them obviously we kind of look for things that stuck out to us whether it's you know the violins or how the dialogue worked or things like that one of the good exercises that that we do also is we read old game reviews so if you were to look at a road like an overview of an over schools game and you just blacked out a few words between like arena doctor fellow Morrowind oblivion they all read about the same because there's this you know time value like this is graphically state-of-the-art you can walk around to pick up a world this is first personally you do the following thing so it was fallout it's really nice to read all reviews because they remove a lot of the aging to get down on a player experience so then kind of the next thing we did was do these big paintings kind of the key experience in our games is also the world itself it kind of is the main character that speaks to the player so we did a bunch of these images of DC you know what the wasteland would look like on the East Coast as opposed are the West Coast things like that and you you know be surprised is how good of a game design an image like this is like recreate the loneliness of this but also you get this whole cave some dangerous things like that so we're the big cities in the game you know how people live Rivet City Jefferson Memorial which is the where they're trying to purify all the water in the game how many of you play fallout free okay I don't explain stuff it's rolling when you when you get out of school and you have a career in video games you know you'll have the following event happen to you that happens to me often Yuliya Temba van cocktail party whatever with your significant other at school say what do you do so I make video games and they'll give you look like you're an idiot that's for kids so they usually follow me like our days of violent video game as a matter of fact they are that's terrible what are you working on now again we've blown up Washington DC then they go talk to somebody else if you like the person you're talking to you to say I work with computers and they usually change subjects hey here's some more stuff like that so one of them you know we kind of picked up that ball suit as one of the things that we thought was really really important I chronically so we kind of want to reinvent it we do lots and lots of concept ron's like this is just a brief smattering of the vault suit drawings we did to kind of hone in on what it would look like that's kind of a fun one you've seen it in the game but just those elements that we felt more iconic the pip-boy device we figure in a game like fallout or any mobile in game we have you spent a lot of time looking at your stats so we want to make that entertaining and that's my oho mention how I'll come back to it which is the role of games is shifting like in you know how people view them over the last even a few years it's accelerating from a something that is a dexterity challenge you know like an old arcade game is it is a skill challenge how good am I at patent and it's moving now more toward entertainment how much does this entertain you so with something like the deploy and looking at your statistics that is how much how entertaining can we live that we spend a lot of time on load screens a load screen is the hardest design problem there is because those greets up there like a downline of fun you are doing nothing so designing a good load screen that the player doesn't mind looking at for however long it is is really really difficult it's a fine way to entertain them if to find a way to entertain the player what it dies and so with the pip-boy that's kind of close to the the final design we needed to find a way to entertain it a lot of times in a game like ours it could kind of look like a spreadsheet of information so okay we have little hull boy images where you know he's holding a rabbit like this and a lot there's a lot of goofy stuff there but to kind of make it entertaining just look at your stats there's a simple e that's it was a big thing we wanted to do we knew we want to do it initially for a lot of reasons this was one of our so we you know a good thing if somebody's already done something or you can kind of mash it up in some way it's a great way to prototype things and we'll probably rule out the lead designer and writer of all three and I would sit down and play a lot of first-person shooters and one of us pretend to be vats so we just play the game like do you want to use it now how many points do you have and kind of like act out that's what feel like and then we used the initial inspiration was what if it was like burnout but there were body parts of eyeballs and teeth and when you crash flying everywhere then we had our concept guide do some really quick pictures and again you know the documentation on this was there were some but it wasn't a lot it was what feels like this I'm going to make the sound affection fall out kazumi you know tease why I'm in here and how it feels keep it simple that was a rule number two this one's fairly self-explanatory images you visa fraud like a lot every new designer we get does the following they want to impress the people at work so they come up with the most complicated hairbrained crap that is never going to work and we tried the first thing we teacher but you've got to keep this simple the other thing they do if they build levels they're always five times the size they should be with lots of wine new stuff so again you want to entertain entertain entertain so we try to keep things really really simple particularly in our games where you have lots and lots of systems that interact if we make them overly complicated they don't interact as well we have lots of little systems interacting you get more complex behavior because the player understands them so I think you see in our games you're like oh this is how the physics work okay I'll try to do this marketing part of your process this is up doesn't apply to being in school but something that we do and you know you guys assume play a lot of games you can show any games you're looking forward to that are coming out this fall order language world on Dragon Age check again I assume here you've all experienced these games already in some manner seumas not a sequel like an assassin's creed SAS esprit does it really well modern warfare 2 does it really well which is the marketing stuff is part of the process they think about like that's actually your first experience with the game when you're designing game you think of it as okay I put the you know the first level is the first experience well it's not this doesn't make sense because he's going to come here as an affair soon as well but he has the flu this is behind these are head of marketing PR he's been with the company for a really time and he's a good sounding board so I'll stay home like well how do you feel about this idea and you make what the hell you're talking about and I keep doing it till he makes this face and so like the first experience of Fallout 3 for a lot of big games is a magazine cover like that's your first experience with the game so we actually really planned what's the first thing anybody ever sees it's that image of the guy and then what's on the website so you already probably experienced this with games are looking forward to you know brutal legend always things that got national legend is a demo well so they they went all the way but all these things we're having a trailer to giving demos to the box so the box is an experience when you go to the store to pick up Assassin's Creed 2 you know what's on the cover what does the Box look like it what's on the manual these are all experiences what's the disc look like so I mean this might be a little obsessive that this is stuff I think about so I wanted the manual to look like the cover of fallout ones man you know the vault dweller Survival Guide I wanted the disc to have the please standby image so you look at the disc you put it in you start it and it came up on the screen of the same image that's a little obsessive but the point being that we try to make that part of the process in terms of what is the audience see the whole time they arte the biggest thing great games are played um made really simply means you have to play your game you can have the biggest design in the world and when you play it you're going to throw a lot of it out so start as soon as possible gets the screen and play with it because that my view you love best might not work and you'll also find a lot of opportunities for fun that you had never thought of because you playing the game yet so that's very easy to say when you go to do it it's harder to recognize the signs of this they're going to get I get that they get pretty bad like because it's your baby or like the best idea ever a lot of times you don't want to see that this is not working and eventually the signs get so I'll go through we look for one of the stories from fallout free is actually downtown so like the Washington DC part of the map the game we shift had about we shift about half the stuff we built so during development the downtown DC hearings twice as big and it took us a long time to realize this just is not fun in any way and we have a lot of people working on the stuff and just you know finally made the decisions this stuff has got to go we need to get rid of a lot of space we'll have a process going through throughout which space is going to go but you know imagine you're a level designer on that project someone like me comes to you and says I wish to delete the last six months of your work and uh- sad don't say this to this these things will happen you these things happen during development and they're the hardest things to do because you know these people and just like look this isn't serving the game well we need to get rid of it we need to change it it really is the hardest thing to do to like come to terms with the reality of what's fun in your game so you have to admit when you made a mistake this is my favorite song and really this is absolutely the hardest thing to do and when making a game to say this road is we messed up so this is something to we look at so what are you looking for when you're trying to make your game better you know how do you kind of suss out what's good or bad a particular idea and there isn't really a formula for this you just kind of know what's fun but these are kind of the stages those a player experience and I think this stuff will help you even in what you're what you're doing right now so the first thing somebody does when they're playing your game is they learn how to play the game and I imagine you if everybody here plays a lot of games I sue anybody you're not plating otherwise you're in the wrong wall all right out and so what's that you have time anymore um the when you go to play a game you have the experience of sleaze items like this anxious feeling when you first start like I don't know how it works yet even if you're an experienced gamer you're waiting to like the second hour of the game you really get it to really be in the groove so the trickiest thing one of the tricky things of game design is how to make this part fun and entertain the player while he learns the game the last thing you want to do here is put pressure on him like you and I you just want to teach them how to play the game the next phase of getting into play have a placement exercise like he's learned your game and now he's just he's just playing you still don't want him to feel like he's gonna die this is the sweet spot on your planet you've all experienced this one play game and like I've gotta now this is just fun okay again step one is kind of the trickiest the trickiest one not necessarily dude but to make really entertaining to make it feel like it's not work and then we're going to get the challenge stage where even you can start making them feel this way excuse me you know now we picked it up the play for a bit you can start up in a difficulty a bit and make sure you're getting challenged but you've keeping that in mind everybody it likes to win I have two minutes these are not mine unfortunately like this picture as well one of the things we do with our games is give the player these really really powerful things so they feel challenged so you've obsolete fall three and The Fatman the big bomb launcher so we give that to you pretty early in the game and it's basically a weapon that kills anything so on the surface you would say as a designer why am i giving the player a weapon that kills anything this early in the game what we find is so we give you ammo for it so you're doing a fancy game to give them like the potion of super life and strength or you can kill anything and you give them three or four of these potions so they can use it to get out of hard situations to keep playing but most people don't use them you're like here's the potion of infinite strength and chilling and everyone finishes the game with the potion of infinite stream killing cause I know I'm not a will see I can get through this probably something works later on but a good game zone will be like you know I'll give you another one later if you use it so they mean those are things that subconsciously work on the player if he's really frustrated and he wants to you know get through this particular battle I'm throwing and then finally you can once you've done all that you can surprise the player with something new they've learn to do it they're playing now they've been challenged they got through that and as wow something new and then of course the whole thing cycles over again so everybody here played half-life 2 yeah genius game I think one of the best modern games of this Metroid as well so Nintendo does this really well object so think about mentoring your head and follow this curve like about half-life 2 in your head and follow this curve think about getting the gravity gun in half-life 2 I think it's one of the best examples of this rights to give you a gravity gun you're like you don't think I cause we were not going to figure out how to use this thing you're like any alright and then the big the dog comes out you're throwing the balls I mean look at our robot your plane is goofing off like you know we're like this thing's gonna kill me and then they kind of up it but surprise you and then you get the fermentation everybody with me on that before the game good slides explain but they they do a really really good job of it so does a Nintendo with a lot of their stuff so this this one's just funny it doesn't have a lot of bearing on what you're doing but something to keep in mind to make a game which is it's not just coming out in America okay it comes out gaming now is a worldwide thing you have to think about how it's going to be received in other countries you know fallout was banned in India for instance because you can blow up to edit caps and that is a no-no so we shipped in a lot of countries we have a lot of dialogue we found out that Japanese time exists we're working the people in Japan to translate Jessica's office as well so we work with people in Japan and we have a lot of the game has about 50 hours of reported dialogue so all that stuff has to be translated in every you know whatever 5 to 5 to 7 languages that we're shipping on sort of the biggest tasks that we do most games don't face that but we have so much dialogue so this is a little sampling of some stuff that got emailed to us from the translators would email us what they did to understand things so that nurdrage Bergman translator asks this isn't this is a line of the game that mayor McCready says he's a little cursing like KITT you know it's like a ten-year-old kid who curses so the translator wanted to know you know this language barrier we get like very specific deserver bye and any kind of salty you know lunchroom conversations you have that's great Brittany's like fall out you know it's an avenue for any wacky crazy terrible idea that you might never have so another thing we look at when we're making the game as we get toward the end I think you play games we hope you'll see this I'll just go to this my favorite weed my name this one I'm like negative truth or I don't know it doesn't make any sense um so I have no name for this but it's like you can almost feel these layers of badness on top of your game so you play a lot of games you're when you're like if they had just you know or this part you know you can almost feel the really cool game underneath potentially some crap so you know that takes the forms of bugs and polish game balance things how difficult how much weapons do and then woody what do you drive to her so last year we were really crunching away at fallout and this was sort of a chart that we made internally as we as we went toward kind of finishing like how many bugs do we have but ultimately it's like an emotional thing how does it how does it feel when you play the game we were doing simultaneous platforms so for a while a PlayStation 3 version like this the urge so we eventually saw that's another kindig we shift twenty two versions of fallout on day one you know so that's all the different platforms all different languages and all of those have to have to go through a process we do a lot of optimization so over time you know what's the actual quality of the game code that's running and you'll notice it you know it starts out with really it really bad because you're having a lot of features and then when you have a lot of the features in the game you start optimizing and crash testing it and making it better in it the game starts running a lot faster and then as you get toward release you have to stop doing that because the way you optimize a game is you you know you take out something that's already doing that you you know it's again what's going to notice you know you're you're rendering shadows in this way or hey I in some other way that no-one's noticing so you start optimizing those things by the end of the cycle and the games are close to release you need to stop doing that because you could really break the game what we sort of found is wrong way is if we you know that that middle part there that kerb or you can optimize optimize this is like on the 360 and the ps3 is pretty steep you know we're in the midst of another big project now and the power that we're able to eke out of these systems as we get better at it is really impressive so one of the minds that the current hardware generation of the 360 and the ps3 even like what you're doing a high-end PC right now is going to keep going for a long time despite what x-bar that was my equal opportunity insult like here's the PlayStation so I'm going to kind of wrap some of this up again playing not as important as your culture your ideas are as important as your execution and if you're fortunate enough to pull all this off you know you get a very very happy group of people you get having P you get the conference companies happy you get the ESRB is happy Japan London's Happy's guys happy kids onliner happy hours east bones happy yeah you're just giving the tea in your own work good luck to all of you it goes well thanks I'll wait for time good I turn my phone off fine I'm good okay so I guess we'll do your questions yeah yeah right here they're definitely times a burnout when you when you should project where you're really crunching away but um I think the greatest thing about gaming is that it's also technology so you know is I think it's this combination of you know the technical magic something that I find really interesting just like software development and then all the creative stuff so it's I think as a medium it's always moving forward so I think there's no loss of ideas that we have at work and you know it'll change four years from now with hardware or you know messing with the Microsoft and at all you guys know what that is okay so we have to play around with that and it's like the most amazing thing I've ever seen it's amazing you know so the technology you know keeps doing this and you know me personally for me I let's like new toys someone sends me do video card it's like Christmas what some really awesome that you couldn't put involved great hat without I shouldn't question there's a pretty big list actually George Mason University they're probably like a number of weapons that we wanted to do vehicles is a big thing the obviously you know comes to mind such a piping list of little things but as far as big things if I beat vehicles I was wondering how many of those ideas that you have saved up from old games actually make it into new projects that you do a good number actually like you know we did have horses in Oblivion and that became a sore spot and more when we made that like they wanted divorces so you know coming out of fallout like one of our big technical things was you know we've like an art animations aren't the way we'd like technically or any of that so we've spent a lot of time doing a new animation system and a lot of technology behind that so usually it's our own desires mixed with you know public reaction to what we did my god I was like who does interviews so that would be in an interview like if you're a candidate yeah um it depends in the position usually the the director of that departments with you know art director technical director design director and then usually one or two other people and then if they all like you you don't so it's usually like four or five people we are hiring if you want to get a job with us really the best way to do is to apply online and write a good cover letter so if it's a fork a thing like I hear you're hiring I wish to have a job I can get you nowhere so if you're here tonight I'm looking for you will come across my desk in some fashion so if you mentioned you were here it'll definitely pick up for the people looking at very large entities of beef same idea again very very quickly like the idea goes both ways then read and um it's hard to say I would take each one case-by-case certainly if you know that we we bought in software in the summer so I work I know the rage guys pretty well I get to go for a ride in John Carmack scar that's pretty awesome is a Tesla by the way it's silent it's how that is it how that was your toaster now that's a segue it wasn't answering your question but I think a lot of those things like looking at rage I've had a lot of time to look at it you know a lot of things I think are just post apocalyptic conventions so it's hard to say whether people are going to lead that out with with lots and lots of games in rages case you know that's what I'm really familiar with I don't I don't think so in the back culture it's like what do people find how do they treat each other in your studio what do they find important what's the same bar for how you go about something you know I think that using the same way you'd say any any office culture what's the culture like you know if you came to our office you the general vibe is these people really like games and they really like making games and they like making games with each other you know and that's I think that shows through in the games that's a questions your enemies what was your favorite game favorite game with the last one fallout 3 it's always the last one I mean that honestly them look better on on application computer theme design or applied computers well it depends if you're applying for like a level design position the design work you're applying for a programming position truthy they're like the major it doesn't we want to know like what you've done so if you just come to us and you say well I have this degree it doesn't matter that much in terms of MIT you need to have the degree to produce something else we would ask you will show us a level what have you done say you're a level designer and you don't have a really strong level that we can look at in some way in some other day we will ask you to create something in the gap the Fallout editor so most level design submissions we get we will go if we like the person on paper if they don't have a level we'll say would you create something in the kick and we have a number of guys who've gotten jobs purely based on the level they built on the programming side it's a little bit trickier you know look at some sample code and the programming there's lots of disciplines so it's definitely trickier to look at a programmer and a level designer and artists you know for here an artist it's good to have a degree but mostly if you want to look at what's your portfolio but there are a lot of artists out of school they tend to have unless they have experience the artist coming out of the schools have the best portfolios the designers coming out of good programs have the best design portfolios there's two ways to do that I think it's it's a great question one is to create that portfolio on your own send it anyway just say hey you're looking for experience I don't have any the company but here's what I've done I should take a look at it in a cover letter mentioned their games if you're a fan you play their games mention it the other way is through QA so we have an internal QA department it's growing pretty rapidly we also so you're in school week we hire up so say we're shipping a number of games so we're also a publisher so I don't deal with the side really but so we're publishing games that we didn't make so this game wetness came out it's made by a Canadian group that gets q8 internally a number of other games coming up again I'll break we have the in stuff rage things like that so those are get q8 internally and sometimes the needs balloon up for like three or four months all of a sudden we need three times the QA people and we'll hire a lot of people temporarily and if you do a really good job of that you can get noticed and you know I would say 20% of my team is from QA so it's probably you know the best route so in the work environment there itself and within Bethesda how much actual on-the-job learning is there as well as like internships you guys hire spender so officially on the job learning for regular employees well like if you first come into a company and you're learning the programs that they use you know their particular engines it varies by person you know if you're an artist we use maps so somebody comes in who we thinks an awesome artist they just know Maya but we like their talent we know there's going to be a period of time to learn that if they're a level designer who doesn't who work somewhere else they've done a lot of unreal stuff but we looked at him you think it's awesome you know it's gonna be a period of time learning our editor it varies by person but me it's not structured we usually just give them you know something simple to do it first and and walk them through it artists what would you suggest as you know um depends on whatever usually most people are hiring on the art side for one of three areas animation character art which is like making you know like the character meshes I'm doing the animation very to degrade if of things and then environment art which sometimes crosses over to a level designer for us it's separate you know how and sometimes like architecture background helps that as well but mostly what we look at is a 3d art portfolio it's best to put on a website because if you email files that are really big they get choked so they might get denied best to set up a website the other thing I'd say is don't sleep on the website design like when we go to load up a website to look at a portfolio if the website is really cheesy looking that's uh sort of says like you know I've gone to our websites and been more impressed with a person just by the you know the graphic design of the website itself oh this is really slick you know I'm interested then look at the art as far as the 2d stuff we probably more than a lot of studios look at 2d stuff as well so if you're coming out of school obviously you're to go to 2d stuff and studio painting those kind of things that can show us raw talent because sometimes the the program is a barrier I don't know what George Mason teaches as far as 3d art I found in general the colleges lag behind in 3d art really teaching you how to render things and materials and things like that they excel at the fine art part so let's say it's a portfolio we have a really nice you know these really dramatic paintings but the and then the 3d stuff isn't quite the same level which please still be like well this looks pretty good it's in our case we might go back to the person say hey can you build us something you know Phyllis environment or build us a character we see some talent here but we're not you don't have something 3d that we want to look at that's a tricky one actually our designers are our writers so obviously we look at white examples you know it's another thing where most people wouldn't do video games tend to overwrite we overwrite like weird we right-wing in too much stuff most people who play fallout I watch and play it and grow it all this brilliant stuff like it's our guide and I just Jane with my chops I killed so I think the trickiest thing to do is to write really short things just to get the information across but are right we don't have any ways a sole writer there are also quest designers level designers so if you're looking for that kind of thing we would look for like a quest as I really understand some programming language we look for a quest like here's the player does here's what the characters say we have one sound he's unbelievable most ideas have more so truthfully I only hired one sound guy so the wrong person on the sound front there there are multiple disciplines as well as far as doing or folding things being able to put things together with sound effect libraries and voice recording is a big skill that noticed from different sound engineers some of them are good at it and some of them are not as good at it makes a big difference being able to actually direct somebody when they're recording dialogue which I think most people think about video game sound with that and then music as well so I you know I have looked at some portfolios and the best thing to do actually is on the book into your portfolio and take like a really dramatic scene like seasonal transformers like that it's like over the top and that's a bit easier we find like if you take a clip from a game or something really serene like what does it sound like when you just walk through town that's much much harder for us to do then when the killer is going yeah as far as the music side of things would I be right in saying that as if you're looking to be a game composer you also have to have like kind of music technology skills as well as just the music skills absolutely okay yeah big time and I'll tell you the best people are the best at that part my last two games I used announcer was pretty well for Bob and Jeremy Soule for the eligible stuff and both of them are masters of you know mini music making some exotic and orchestra but we've had orchestras play things as well but that's very hard to like you know get in or crossover without that initial step yeah and this person got a question stolen yet how can you solve the situation that came together I want to add a new feature that the defeat to go came and you know I told him no the question was how do we tell the game's arms can't do things won't fit the engine if it's really clear well you know usually they're manthang something approved and they're told no but usually why if it's on an edge we have time we usually say go for it you know try to put it in and see what happens because I mean some of the coolest features come from that there's a gun in Fallout 3 that is a special version of The Fatman called The Verve that she's like it's like a shotgun of nuclear bombs likes guys it seems like I'm gonna make this thing that is never going to work much later he's like check it out when you're creating a game you feel Boston but if you see yellow light open-world games if you want to probably alcohol RTS I don't know we liked the kind of games we make so but like each time we go to do it we really change things up and like you're really hardcore audience will give you a lot of flack for that we have a lot of flack for Fallout 3 it changes we were making but so we you know we just do what we like and if I don't know for some reason we got an RTS book it would probably make one but we do like the kind of game where you it's you just get to go do whatever you want it's usually 10 how we think I'm going to go in the back and they miss a lot of Pullman Quebec how the NPC's the other characters in the worlds react to you you know I think we as a group still find that to be very stiff not just in our stuff but but other stuff we're like environments and video games are really really good you know they almost look you could pretty much do anything you want when it comes to an environment now but when it comes to how characters just act around you how they actually look at you when you just walk up to the character how do they like stare at you how do they react to the things you're doing I see more people doing that something that we're doing a lot more of right now you know I don't think they'll be on the the realm of the physics stuff so no that's a great answer but something's been in our mind it happens all the time it's just like if you know I think if you sit around talk with your friends like would it be cool to kill zombies in the following manner just usually 99% of the ideas I don't know weird weird inspiration you see some you see some movie you read some book and you think there might be a game in this I think just like ideas that come to you that's how they come to us yes you how many artists involved over one major writing work well that depends on the complexity of the feature we do try to pair a grooves up so if it's a complicated feature you might have like a team of six to eight people on that feature and that could be the mix of programmers artists designers you take a few like bats in Fallout there was a graphics programmer for the effects there was a programmer for all the camera movement there was an artist for the camera movement there were three designers of which I was one for how it would one of the rules how to play were the numbers and I said six people something I usually try to mix it mix it up around around the future like the way the voice actors is such like dy on the outside yes more hard the voice acting is a mix it's not people in the building it is actually a union thing it goes through sag after a Screen Actors Guild like in the video game thing so then we use some local DC talent that we sort of known over the years we use kind of the right word is scale scale actors they work for scale in LA people who you see in sci-fi channel a lot as we call them sacré channel actor Jenna did say our internal word and so they usually works for scale and but they're really good the quality you get out in LA is excellent and then we use what you call big name actor like Liam Neeson you know for that I usually travel did Liam in New York did Patrick Stewart in London that kind of stuff we do a lot of those remotely we found that actually works well you know if somebody's on a movie set and they've agreed to be in your movie you tend to work around their schedule but the great thing is some poison so we did Sean Bean was in Oblivion and you know he was in England and we were in rockville maryland never saw a guy but you know heard his voice over the you know we have a back system and it's it's really common in the studios so that's the first thing we did it i was like we didn't have time to fly out there with her and such this is going to be terrible and it was it was awesome so next you down a lot to it over the phone more or less I want to get someone who hasn't asked a question right how exactly do you all keep inspiration going in a team what happens if someone doesn't really believe in the project at all and you all are only like a hundred people so it was a few then that's precious people there um you know it's a good question because it does happen you're gonna have people who think you know hey I don't like this idea I try as long as you give them a you know Avenue to say that so here's why I don't like it and they felt I didn't heard usually they're professional enough to to do their job really well but for the most part the other thing it benefits us as our games are so big that there are so many avenues for everybody's idea you know so even if that person doesn't like this idea there's probably a area in the game where they can be putting one of their own ideas oblivion and fallout is you can run off in the beginning like I said that's one of the things you wanted to do is let people go then even end up being like level max level story I mean the way you resolve that is by locking things off so there are times we'll lock things off by and large we feel that doing that still makes the game more fun sometimes it does break down so we've messed with various you know leveling systems in the game to how the enemies level and we we liked the way it turned out that I think it's unavoidable unless you just draw I just he can't go any further until you've done X but we sort of have scar cells is that fun for the player who's standing there and it says you can't go any further till you've done X do they are they happy or sad and usually there's that so usually we try to find a way to have it makes sense you know in Fallout 3 like the kids won't let you through the thing so there's some reason that it makes sense as opposed to like the old kings quests the King's Quest I find me clicking like you could not jump the hedge wait so we have two kinds of design jobs we have a quest designer they tend to write those stories and then implement the logic for the characters and then we have level designers who build they really build they admit Semitic gameplay so you're going through a dungeon well you know they actually fill the level and script the encounters and put down the enemies all that stuff we are trying to like bring those two things together for us we find there's too much because it's two different people we find too often the question you play fallout or oblivion you'll get a guy who tells you to the button but he's telling me like why you should go do this and then you go play a level that you know maybe it hasn't McGuffin at the bottom that gets the thing that you think I talked about but the levels we have a lot to do with that so we're trying to bring that together more where a lot of that story or whatever happens happens through how the level on a minute-to-minute basis as opposed to set up and then level but we still have two different it's two different disciplines for us I I mean 11 you can do something on paper to you but mostly wants me to comply so if you're going to submit a level as something you design say it's not if it's not our thing it's a very to us loading it up and looking at it so say it's a real level you can break it down on a website and say here is my design here's my to design your screenshots and point them where they are in the level and the kind of interaction who are going for it lets us know how you think from a quest design standpoint we look for designed a quest who the characters are tell the story but then we also look for the logic like actually waiting like the script if a and B happened this and this and this and this is resent people that walk not really actually we really try to avoid putting most time you want to put people you know into it we find sometimes it gets a little cliche no I can't say we have but it's a big game I didn't put all the people in so I'm sure somebody did the red shirt Gary time that's about some level designers there was a number of walls they're all supposed to be different everybody no he's asking about there's a vault in Fallout 3 there's a bunch of guys all named Gary and there's a guy the team that Gary is nothing to do with it there was a vault and some of the two level designers were working on it set wood they were tasked with coming up with the shtick for the vault and I don't remember if this one was a pre-existing fallout one that said it was cloning and he was cloning and they're all Gary's so they had made it and it was kind of a quick thing it's a fault and you know maybe they're trying to get out of work because like all the guys are the same it's a pretty good it's asset actually it's all these incidences of so very late in the game people will places like this level isn't make any sense is it a bug all the guys are the same at this time they didn't say Gary they just used a regular there he is yeah they used a regular dialogue they would fall back and the levels aren't was like I can really use we're really tight on voice but we have to translate it into a hundred languages we're late the days like we just love I just need I need them to say Gary like we can't be changed record it he's like look doesn't matter at all in Gary here they say in Japanese or whatever I'm going and all this agreed it didn't matter this level is I was so persistent like fine just record it and put it in and it made that level it is hilarious so when you play the level oh yeah Gary Gaetti he's when the sound was reported like four or five lines it was like you know taking less time to put it in then we talked about it for days and it's really love it so we have in Rockville Maryland we have Bethesda Softworks were part of a larger company called ZeniMax media which is really it's very similar to Bethesda Softworks in terms of Bethesda Softworks is 99% of em actually or it was for a long time so the second X maybe is headquarters in Bethesda Softworks and are in Rockville Maryland that's where my groom is Bethesda Game Studios we have another office in Hunt Valley round outside of Baltimore which is ZeniMax online studios so we also have an online studio if you apply on our website the resumes also go there okay so they're also hiring for the end the motor building that hasn't been announced but ZeniMax online you're absolutely animal so when you apply it tends to go to both places now we also have in software so actually if you would ever discipline your end in your cover thing if you're willing to move to Texas or Baltimore wherever then to have and it gets sent to all three developments to use ZeniMax online with us a game studios and its software and if we really like somebody we all like Sony or building your game there's obviously circulation going on from all the fan board do you ever pay attention to that be it for me sure I'm it's purging the work particularly like you're imagining these websites all they do is talk about you if it's hard like I'm not going to look at that I've gotten used to sort of dealing with it because you get a lot of the bloom usually told people in the offices look at their problems but not their solutions because they don't have the game in front of them but like the problems they have the problems will have a follow-up free or real problems you know they like this is the problem then they have something like crazy-ass solution usually I tend to ignore that but we'll go on there and like it really does make our games better reading like what what how the fans react to something cuz um you know the reviews are big as well but like a hardcore fans kind of drill down in and that's what the construction set and do all this stuff yeah it really is a lot of ideas and which I've hired people from the community one of my best programmers did a more when mom you could lock guys heads off and I couldn't figure out how even did it how to do that I wrote the gun how to do this I've no idea it's like I hacked in your scripting language and run my own code and make my own extension of your scripting engine well we want job here's a guy pointing is terrible um so say you're a graphics programmer you say like here's my here's my application when doing all this cool shader stuff we'll look at the code we'll go to the section that interests us most I don't really have a good example usually look for an application if you if you wrote part of some larger thing like this is really cool class that I grew that does this you know you would even send that along I don't know if that that helps this one that's probably the hardest part is to look at look at code yeah I wish it was more specific look like sends the header file is never the urban it is making we look at it as fake so it is

Channel: Chris Weissenberger

Views: 157,256

Rating: 4.961359 out of 5

Keywords: Todd, Howard, GMU, George Mason University, gaming, video games, Bethesda, Fallout 3, Oblivion, Elder Scrolls, talk

Id: CrfdNJDVpR4

Length: 73min 14sec (4394 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 12 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/Callous1970]

This comes as a surprise to you? Of course they check out the major forums about their games.

It's still a good video to watch.

[u/[deleted]]

Well since you might be watching I'd love to see a companion that you can create with the player character building system on a future DLC. Maybe a build your own Synth or android deal.

[u/pepsiROCK]

They could be any one of us right now! 0.0

[u/[deleted]]

I remember watching this back in 2013. It was because of this video that I decided I wanted to take computer programming in college (UK).

Also, in that video he addresses the changes they make to their games. Basically Bethesda got a lot of flack from harcore Fallout fans when they made Fallout 3.

Full Quote: "Each time we do it [Make a new game] we really change things up, emm, and like your really hard-core audience will give you a lot of flak for that. We got a lot of flak for Fallout 3; the changes we were making. Emm, so, but, we, ya-know, just do what we like"

I feel like this quote is very relevant to the Fallout 4 changes people are worried. Personally, I say don't worry about it, Bethesda know their changes will be unpopular, but they trust themselves to show that these changes are in fact for the better and so far they've delivered every time since Bethesda Game Studios was create.

[u/suzaku1221]

/u/facethespaceguy9000 a spy comfirmed.

[u/Kittehlazor]

SPY CREEPIN' AROUND HERE

[u/sounders127]

Not spies but potential employees XD

[u/facethespaceguy9000]

A lot of other interesting insights in this video too, for those who haven't seen it!

[u/nervousasian]

Its a good thing. means they listen to the community