Todd Howard

You forget that there's 8 billion people on earth and you forget that they have lives.

That's actually a sobering realization that they all have really interesting life stories and they have their worries.

They suffer in different complicated ways.

And yet,

when you play a role-playing game, there's a, I mean, both computationally and from a storytelling perspective, you wonder if the world goes on without you.

Like if you come back, if you take a break and you come back, is there still a bustling town that now has a history since you have last visited?

So to what degree can you create a world that goes on without you or goes on at the same time as you do your thing, whatever the heck you're doing?

Okay.

But still you're simulating stuff that's close to you.

It is a bit of a simulation going on.

And so that creates some interesting dynamics then.

And so that when you show up to that Mage's Guild, it's a bustling guild full of stuff going on.

Is that one of the essential components of randomly generated worlds?

So when I think back to Daggerfall, it's a gigantic world.

When I first played it, I thought like, I mean, you're just struck by the immensity of it.

The immensity of the possibility.

When you're young and you look into your future, it's wide open.

You can do anything.

And that's what Daggerfall felt like.

The openness was gigantic.