Gamers found a way to break Elder Scrolls | Todd Howard and Lex Fridman

Full podcast episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9AAnV59ddE Lex Fridman podcast channel: youtube.com/lexfridman Guest bio: Todd Howard is a legendary video game designer at Bethesda Game Studios. He led the development of the Elder Scrolls series and the Fallout series, and an upcoming game Starfield.

The way you could break Morrowind is what made it fun, and gave it more replayability.

The best part of morrowind was the spell making. Could jump from one side of the map to another or go invisible for a super long time

I find it funny that this is a revelation, as if the Elder Scrolls games haven't been broken in every way imaginable lol

You could do something cool with enchanting in oblivion. If you added invisibility to all your armor pieces and rings/amulet you’d be above 100% camouflage so you could just play the game as a ghost and no one could interact with you. Definitely broke a lot of stuff but was super fun.

Mark and recall was my favorite spell though 😢

I saw this episode pop up on Spotify today and out of nowhere was brought to tears thinking about playing Morrowind as a young kid.

I use to enchant rings in Oblivion that have me like 10,000 speed which was cool for running across the map until I hit a rock and flew straight up for 5 minutes

I remember making a full suit of constant effect restore health clothing and attracting like 15 slaughterfish to attack me. I could not die so I could passively level block, light armor, medium armor, and heavy armor at the same time by just walking away for the keyboard for a few hours. Good times!!!

I was going to make some good games after Skyrim but instead I recalled away.

Fantasy/scifi has the same issue. You give the characters an ability that's too powerful and then you have to find ways to mitigate it. In SG1 they eventually got teleporting tech so they had to always come up with a reason why it couldn't be used every episode after that.

In Oblivion, you could enchant clothing with 20% chameleon. 5 pieces of clothing and you were permanently invisible even while attacking.

Mark and Recall was great, the only thing you add to do and YOU COULD do was prevent the player from using it when it would break quest, exemple given the three final quest ( Dagoth ur's battle, the freaking Bloodmoon Gauntlet and the Clockwork city/Almalexia ). I do play skyrim with a mark and Recall spell ( with 10 different marks tough ) and a survival mod that prevents fast travel, and i like it a lot, it never "breaks" quest but it can allow skipping some content that you are supposed to see on your way out, exemple given that altmer mage that ambushes you after you retrieve the staff of magnus which i skipped.

Before mods… the way to break it on 360 was to basically enchant/ use alchemy / with special armor.

In oblivion you would use the duplication glitch to exploit the permanent effect glitch (or any other glitch really). Using glitches to do other glitches, now THAT's real alchemy going on there!

How TF does recalling break quest. I loved Mark & Recall, but that was also before the fast travel. And fast travel ruined the experience IMO. So IDK I feel ilke Bethesda could have just done better.

The breaks of Skyrim make it for me. Like the dawnstar hidden inventory chest. And also absolutely breaking the smithing enchanting system is part of what ales the game replayable

Oblivion speed and acrobatics exploits were the best! You could run mach 5 and takeoff in the air (a set of stairs worked well or even a random object like a warhammer) just by running at high speeds in them. Oblivion had the best movement, not clunky like skyrim.

Todd howard is a true gamer

Skyrim broke my PC today. It freezed and I even was not able to end the game process. I restarted my PC, it was crazy.