Todd Howard Interview
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Q: What were the essential strengths of Arena and Daggerfall that you felt it was critical to retain? What difficulties did you encounter in this regard, and did anything related to them turn out to be especially challenging?
A: Freedom to play the character you want is the essential strength of the Elder Scrolls, along with walking this line between role-playing and action. You don't want to make it so twitchy that hardcore role-players can't enjoy it, but you want to engage everyone as much as possible, and the majority of our audience can handle action games like Quake. Most of the problems we encountered came from making the game as open-ended and freeform as possible. We made the rule early on that every NPC is just like the PC, so everyone can be killed, etc. This caused loads of quest problems that we had to solve. "Uh oh, someone just killed the Duke? What kind of effect does that have?" We'd playtest quests over and over, only to have someone find a new way of doing it and then we'd have to account for that.
