Todd Howard Interview

The guys over at HomeLAN have scored an interview with Todd Howard of BethSoft, discussing their upcoming RPG Morrowind. Here’s a little bit about the construction kit:

HomeLAN – The construction kit has gotten a lot of attention for Morrowind. How hard has it been to create tools that are powerful for the team to use yet simple for mod makers to use?

Todd Howard – It takes time, but it’s not “hard”. We need to make it easy for us as well, so we build it in layers. The more powerful features are not in-your-face when you start it up. We needed to create it, really for ourselves. We had to have a robust toolset to build the size of game we’re talking about. So taking it to the next level and making it user-friendly and something that comes with game was a very natural step. Do we have to do it? I don’t think so, but it opens the game up to new possibilities and I think it’s really new in terms of how mods can be made and shared over the net since you can plug-in other people’s characters and such into your own game easily. Especially with the kind of game we’re doing where we’re trying to encourage this open-ended experience, it’s great to have hundreds of adventures you can download into your existing games. The Construction Set itself operates on many levels. Doing the basics like building areas and creating objects and characters is incredibly easy and fast. Complex quests, actions, and scripting are obviously more complicated logically, but the interface makes it user-friendly.