Todd Howard

Just a curious tangent, what's involved with programming in open world game?

So we talked about, we will talk about design and so on, but specifically the programming, because I think this question came from what are some interesting sticky bugs that you've encountered throughout your life in creating these games?

And this is one of them that you mentioned.

So what are some of the challenges of programming these open world games?

So there's like a...

What are the major systems?

Is there, like, the physics of the game, the engine of how, like, stuff, yeah, like, yeah, the physics, the motion, and maybe how light is rendered and all that kind of stuff?

And that's integrated into a larger system, the ability to pick up the NPC.

So it's not like a little quirk that's hard-coded in.

It's part of a bigger system.

That's such a fascinating world of designing the experience for the NPC, because in part that experience defines the experience of the player.

So how they interact with their environment defines how the player experiences their environment.

Is there room for further and further development of the AI that controls the NPC?

But they're reacting to the player.

But what about some of the richest experiences we have with people is like the chaos of it, the push and pull, the unpredictability.

Is there something, I don't know if you've been following, but the quick, amazing development of language models

The neural network, natural language processing systems, dialogue systems.

Do you think there's some possibility of using sort of these incredible neural nets that can have open-ended dialogue, basically chatbots?

I love the idea that you'd be using that to design different NPCs and then testing if they're good enough.

If they're like a little too crazy, you don't want like the super.