Todd Howard Quotes

I think 'Overlord' has definitely benefited because I work with every single level designer, and working where we have space to tell the story. That's what it's all about - getting writers and storytellers involved in the team and being a back and forth process.

You can't just come up with an idea for a game and stick the drama on top. It all has to be one driving thrust.

I can move my characters through it easily, because I understand the background; I've really studied it.

Creating the fictional background for a game world isn't significantly different from creating a background for fiction.

Who I love reading is Jordan Mechner, who wrote 'Prince of Persia.' He put all his journals while he was writing 'Prince of Persia' online.

The technology for radiant stories in 'Skyrim' is phenomenal. We tried and pared it back.

I want games to have their own identity.

With every episodic, there's a learning curve where writers try to find the voice of the characters by way of the actors. Many details are found along the way. On 'Caprica,' although the franchise already existed, we were creating an entirely new world full of new characters.

I would say I'm a storyteller first, but game making is very wrapped up in how I think of story. If I were to have a story idea, and I decided to write a novel with it instead, I'd have to very consciously de-couple it from gamedom - for example, deliberately add in things that could not be represented in a game scene.

If I had done a sequel to 'Day of the Tentacle,' there probably wouldn't have been a 'Full Throttle.' If I did a 'Full Throttle' sequel, there wouldn't have been a 'Grim Fandango.' It's important to make new stuff up.

I don't know how video game narrative works.

I guess if I was made responsible for every single line of dialogue in a game and every single piece of textual visual detail, every sign or piece of graffiti, then yes, I think that would be comparable to the time and effort required to write a very long novel, indeed.

The thing about games is, players often say they don't care about story, but then if you took the story out, what would their reaction be? If no one cared about story, we'd all still be playing Pac-Man. There's nothing wrong with Pac-Man, but the point is, there's a genre of games in which you want to become part of that world.

I'm not the expert on the great gameplay. I come in for the character design, monsters, atmosphere. I'm not the technician.

I don't even make multiplayer games much, so dealing with multiple characters is something new for me - or, rather, something I've had to recall from my days as a roleplaying adventure designer where the party was everything!

It's weird that, in a way, by writing about video games, I get to develop them, too.

I'm used to something where you have to create an entire world, and I do like that process. I like getting the audience to believe that outside of the frame of your television set, there's a whole real world that exists that is different from your day-to-day reality.

The goal for us to do with Squanchtendo is to approach all of our projects with a goal of adding interesting characters, personality, and a story to interact with in-game. Every game we make will be built from the ground up for whatever hardware it will launch on.

You don't really want to talk about 'Duke' in terms of, how many levels are there, how many guns does it have, how many monsters… It's got everything it needs in terms of that, but it's always been about the experience.

At the end of the day, I write characters that I want to play, because I just think, 'Hey, maybe one day it'll get made.'

We believe that creating a 'Mario' game is a special endeavor.

Some media used to talk about video games only to say how violent or addictive they could be. With 'Heavy Rain,' they talked about the story of the game and the emotions they felt while playing.

When I started, I wanted probably to make games that were inspired by films that I liked.

Particularly with our games, people get involved with the characters and the world. They're going to take their time with it pretty seriously, so we need to take it even more seriously to make it good.

'Dark Souls' is my life's work; everything I came up with for 'Dark Souls III' is based on my personal preferences.