IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Bethesda's Todd Howard on RPG Development, 3D, Not Supporting Nintendo and More

Posted July 29, 2010 by James Brightman

IG: You mentioned Fallout, and you guys are publishing the Obsidian-developed Fallout: New Vegas. Are you overseeing that to make sure it lives up to the Fallout legacy? There was some concern about the last Obsidian developed game. I think it was for Sega, Alpha Protocol; there were some bugs and some complaints about that. I’m wondering about your relationship with Obsidian and [are you] monitoring the Fallout…

TH: No, no, no; we pretty much handed it over. I think Fallout: New Vegas really benefits because the Obsidian guys are some of the original developers of Fallout. It’s a situation where they know it really well and they have the tech and everything from Fallout 3 to build on, and it was important to us. The best game is going to result from them doing the game that they want to do, and we really liked their pitch. I’ve talked to them. If they have questions about stuff, they’ll ask our opinion. We want to make it so that they can make the Fallout game that they feel is best, and at the end of the day, they know it really well. If it was somebody else, we probably might have to [say]: “Hey, no, that’s not the way it works in Fallout,” but they know it inside and out. They helped create a lot of it. It’s been a really good situation.

IG: It’s been about, and I’m estimating here, maybe about a year since Zenimax bought id [Software].

TH: Yeah it was. I remember us talking to one of the guys and I was like, “yeah, last year at E3 we weren’t allowed to talk about that.” Our biggest worry was that someone was going to find out.

IG: Now that you’ve had a year under this new structure with id being in the same sort of corporate family, what kind of meeting of the minds has there been, if any? Is there any thinking of your teams co-developing something with the geniuses over at id? Can you talk about that relationship a little bit?

TH: The relationship is really good. We’re run as separate studios but there’s a tremendous amount of mutual respect. One of the reasons we wanted to be in business with them, we’ve known them a long time. I’m very friendly with the guys down there. They’re very similar to us. You can tell people that, but they’re very low ego guys who just really like to do cool sh*t. They’re very independent minded and they always have been, but so is Bethesda, you know? We have the resources to publish on our own, but I think being an independent publisher with the resources to do what we want, we have a lot of benefits that made the fit with id really, really good. We share ideas; we share code; if someone wants to see, “hey, how do you do this?”

As far as us co-developing something, I don’t think that’s going to happen in the short term. I think it could happen one day. I think we have a case where they have a really strong group down there in Texas and we have a strong group in Maryland and we talk. I think it’s best for any game [that] you create it with a team that’s sitting there around each other living and breathing the game. I don’t know that it would yield the best game that people might have in mind.

IG: It must be pretty cool though to have the programming god, John Carmack, just a phone call away, under the same corporate umbrella. “Hey, John, I was wondering about this?” If you’re busy, stuck on something on one of your own projects, it must be a pretty amazing resource...

TH: Actually, it is (laughter). I really love my iPhone. He’s always messing with that. He’ll send me stuff and that’s just like, “John Carmack just sent me an iPhone thing to look at it; that’s awesome!” He thinks on another level. I think [what] people don’t know about John [is] he’s very much a realist, too. He knows what’s important graphically and what’s not; what people will notice and what they won’t notice, and he has just a lot of experience on top of all of that. Some of our conversations are not pure technical: “How do you solve your shadows this way? Or how do you organize a code base? How do you manage change in a code base? How do you figure out what’s causing bugs?” Things like that really as a development process are really, really helpful between the two groups.

IG: You mentioned iPhone, and John has talked about his own interest in creating games for iPhone. Is there any interest on your side and Bethesda’s side for diving into more iPhone games or smartphones or any of that sort of thing?

TH: Initially, we were like, “ok we’re going to do something; we have a really cool design for a game.” Once the id thing came about, they were doing enough mobile stuff that I kind of felt, “Ok, they’re doing some really good stuff right now; let’s see how that market goes before I start putting my own time or other people’s time into something that, at the end of the day, might be a distraction from the bigger game that we need to be making.” For now, it’s definitely on the back burner. We have a game that I’d like to see made one day, but corporately now, with the id mobile stuff, they have a bunch of stuff that’s out, they have a bunch of stuff they’re working on, so I feel, as a company, we have a good foot in that area and we’ll see where it goes.

IG: How about the social side with Facebook and all those platforms? It seems like every developer and publisher under the sun is trying to get a piece of the Facebook pie. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that…

TH: I’ve got to be honest: I don’t get it. I look at it and try to understand but for now I’ve just decided to ignore it (laughter). I think, one day, maybe I’ll figure it out, but until then, I don’t see the allure of those kinds of games. There might be a way to connect people. I think that’s always a good goal: to connect people through your game. So I’ve kind of looked into that, how we might be able to do some of those things. But as far as a game on there, I don’t know.

IG: It does seem a little bit more of a different audience. There are some hardcore gamers who will play Facebook games, but it’s not as regular as….

TH: Yeah, the light bulb hasn’t gone off for me. I just don’t get it. I get these little messages: “I’ve got a new horse, or fish?” I don’t know.

IG: (laughter) Yeah, I don’t play them much myself, either. Another thing that I wanted to get your take on is just looking at the state of development in the game industry, you guys have a unique structure, because as you said before, you can self-publish. You own your IP. That’s a very contentious issue between publishers and developers these days. You look at the Infinity Ward situation and what happened there. It looks like we’re seeing more and more of these deals where independent developers are getting lucrative publishing contracts and they still hold onto the rights of the IP and I’m wondering what your thoughts are on this transition. Is this the new business model for development? Are we going to see more and more of that developer empowerment?

TH: I think you will, and particularly if they’re of the talent and skill level of those that have done it recently – Bungie, Epic, Respawn, Valve – because in any business equation like that, you have somebody with resources and expertise the other one doesn’t have. With the top tier developers, they have expertise that can’t just be created on your own. It’s good and smart of them to leverage that. They deserve the rewards that come from that. At the same time, though, there are publishers who have resources. It takes a lot of money to publish a game, from the cost of goods, and the royalties to the console manufacturers and marketing; it’s a big risk. You could be laying out $100 million to publish a big game.

IG: I’m sure that was a good estimate for Red Dead Redemption’s cost.

TH: I don’t know what it is. If you think about just the build, and you’re shipping a million copies, the cost of goods on those million copies is a lot. That necessarily isn’t a huge game. A huge game will ship five million copies. The publishing area of the business is oftentimes equally important, and it’s one of the things we’re blessed with, being able to publish our own stuff. That we can put it out there and get that many copies and get it worldwide, I’m always shocked. I just view it with my blinders: we’re making a game, and I make one, and there you go, and have fun. We make one copy. The logistics of doing all that and publishing it... It blows my mind.

IG: I’ll wrap up with one more quick question. I don’t know if there's anything more you can add since you don’t have anything to show from your own internal team…

TH: Sorry. This is my own e3 of embarrassment. I have nothing! (laughter)

IG: So what's the focus right now? What are you looking at in terms of your projects? Is there anything you can say on what's going on internally at your studio?

TH: I would say that we have pretty much the same team. I've worked with a lot of guys for over 10 years – the group that did Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3. We just really enjoy doing what we're doing. We don’t want to be doing a ton of stuff. There will definitely be – and I'm glad everybody’s patient with us – gaps and sometimes bigger gaps between the titles. We hope it's worth the payoff. Thanks for your patience and bear with us. Hopefully it will be worth the wait.

IG: Is there an estimate of when there will be an announcement? You know, an announcement about an announcement!

(laughter)

TH: We do have an estimate, but I'm not allowed to talk about it. Even right now it's an estimate.

IG: Great, thanks so much Todd.

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.