Todd Howard Interview

An interview with Todd Howard of Bethesda has surfaced over at GameSpy today, where he discusses the origins of Morrowind and what they are currently doing to keep the RPG successful. A snippet:

Q: When you first conceived Morrowind, how did you start? It’s a huge game, where do you begin? Do you start with the world? What you’re going to allow, not allow? A feature list? I mean, where do you begin something this large?

A: That’s a really good question. With something this large it’s all of those things at once. You try to come up with a high level goal. What kind of experience do you want the user to have? It’s one of the three rules I have in game design. One of them is: “Define the experience. Never ever define your game as a set of features.” You get married to features and it could end up that that feature doesn’t matter . and needs to be removed. Programmers say, “But you designed it, and it took me weeks to program it!” To which I reply with, “Sorry, it sucks, it’s not serving our big goal.” So we define the experience. With the Elder Scrolls games we want you to be able to freely play the role you want to play and feel the choices you make are as important and the choices you didn’t make are interesting. Anything that doesn’t serve that gets cut out of the game.