Meet Erik Deitrick - Senior UI Programmer at Bethesda Game Studios

Having worked on a ton of Bethesda Game Studios titles throughout his tenure here, Erik Deitrick has now left his mark on Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and now Starfield.

Erik shares more on his time at Bethesda Game Studios and what it is he does as a Senior UI (User Interface) Programmer.

What was your role when you started at Bethesda Game Studios?

I started here in 2005 so... I’ve been here for 17 years! I started straight into UI. I didn't have a ton of UI experience, but they needed UI people. It was about a year out from when we shipped Oblivion. I implemented a couple of menus, along with the lockpick and persuasion minigames. The lockpicking game was an interesting one and when I started it, it was actually a memorization game. On starting the game the order of the tumblers was randomized and the player broke picks until they figured out the order and raised all the tumblers. But we wanted something different, and one of the ideas was that the tumblers would be pushed up and the player had to click when it was in the right position to lock it in. The problem was that it ended up being too easy. If you've ever played a rhythm game, you’d know it would be pretty easy once you get the timing down. What I ended up doing is making 3 different speed buckets for the tumblers, slow, medium and fast, and then randomizing each of those speeds. It meant that if you were patient and waited for the slow movements, you had a big window to react and a good chance of locking in the tumbler. By the end of development, I still thought it was too easy and could do it with my eyes closed based on sound alone. But the feedback on the difficulty of that game has been...mixed. I think 8-10 years after Oblivion was released I was sitting at a bar and someone noticed I was wearing a Bethesda Game Studios jacket, and when he found out what I worked on said, "F*** you, you broke all my picks!" It's been about 3 years since I've heard something along those lines...

What was your favorite project you’ve worked on?

While I was working on Skyrim, I remembered back to a time when I was in high school and had bought Wolfenstein and was explaining to a friend who gamed how great it was and that he needed to play it. It was the first FPS I had played, and I was blown away. At any rate, I told my friend I loved it, but that what I really wanted was something similar, but in a medieval world with an ax and shield as I made my way through a dungeon. Getting to work on the game you've wanted to play since high school is amazing.

What was your first project in the video games industry?

The first game I worked on was Tarzan Untamed, for Ubisoft. Enough time passed before the game came out, and I ended up not playing it on release. It wasn't until years later when I was at a Cartoon Cuts, (which is a barber shop for kids where they watch cartoons and play video games while they wait) that I saw the final product. I remember wondering if any of my code was still in the game as I stood there, watching this kid play it. I tried to convince him to have Tarzan jump and swing from a vine. I'm sure he was confused as to why this adult was telling him how to play his video game, and eventually he just gave me the controller so I'd leave him alone. But I was thrilled to discover the vines behaved exactly as I had left them.

Tell us your favorite work-related story.

This is a long one, buckle up!

After Skyrim shipped, I had the pleasure of spending a whole weekend helping my son's character get married in the game. I had told him that if you get married, your spouse could open up a shop and earn you money while you were off adventuring. That alone completely sold him on it, he was getting married. He was 6 at the time, maybe 7 and didn't play the game in a way that made NPCs like him. After talking him through getting the Amulet of Mara, we went from NPC to NPC to see if we could find him a partner. Funny enough, I learn a lot from this part, like what he was looking for in a wife. His criteria was "Someone with a pretty face and a nice voice, who doesn't want to kill me."

Tragically, all the NPCs hated him. I remembered that Mjoll in Riften would send you on a quest to find her sword, so I figured that if he did that quest and found her sword maybe she'd marry him. So we find her sword, completes her quest, and sure enough she's willing to marry him! Mjoll had a follower Aerin in Riften, and he had a couple of dialogue lines like "I've never seen Mjoll this unhappy", and "Someday I should leave this place". At any rate my son gets married, and he steps out of the chapel and bumps into the Aerin who says, "I've never seen Mjoll this unhappy." We mark it off as unfortunate timing and move on. However, once my son has her move into his house in Whiterun (which also has Lydia living there) Aerin moves in too. Tragically, he keeps his dialog from Riften, so my son would frequently walk around his tiny Whiterun house, packed with 4 other people, and hear “I’ve never seen Mjoll this unhappy” or “someday I’ll leave this place.” My son got angrier and angrier each time it happened. He suggests we invite Aerin out hunting and "make it look like an accident". I tell him he can't kill him because he'll get a bounty, and that the answer is a bigger house. I suggest the nice one in Windhelm that would be big enough he wouldn't bump into Aerin quite as often. So we go through the quest to get the house but something won't allow it, so I suggest that we need to advance the civil war quest to be able to buy it. We go through the quest, and he gets to the part where he has to storm Whiterun. I step away to make dinner while he does, and suddenly I hear him yelling from downstairs. I pause dinner, head downstairs, and find him sitting there with the game paused, with tears running down his cheeks. I ask what's wrong, and he exclaims "There's fighting and fire everywhere, and I don't know if my horse is ok, and I don't know if Mjoll is ok, and I just want to make sure everything is ok." I assure him he has a save to go back to and I take the controller and show him that his horse is ok (even though there were fireballs exploding all around it). He has me fight the battle for him though, and every with new person I kill he says "I think that was him, I think that was Aerin, he's fighting for the bad guy. You killed him!"

Once I finished the battle, he suddenly can't open the door to the house. So we go through the rest of the quest with the jarl, and we attempt to enter the house once more. He finally gets in and as soon as he walks through the door, he bumps into Aerin who says "I should really leave this place." The guttural, primal scream he let out made me think the controller was going to shatter in his hands. At any rate, if there's a modder out there who can make a mod where you can invite someone out to hunt and kill them without getting a bounty, you've got at least one person who will download it.

What your favorite thing about working at Bethesda Games Studios?

It's the people I work with. I could work on a game I didn't like, if I like the people... but I couldn't work on a game I loved with horrible people. Luckily, I get to work on games I like with people I like.

There are a lot of jobs where you can describe what you do, and most people simply don't understand. The fact that I make video games and have an end product that I can point to, that millions of people have played, is a really great feeling.

What was your favorite contribution to the Fallout series?

I’ve worked on Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76. I spent a lot of time on the Pip-Boy UI a lot on 3 and 4. Forget survival mode, if you want a real challenge, hand off the Pip-Boy app to a child while you play. There's nothing like having your weapons and clothing swapped out for whatever they think will be funniest during a firefight.

But my favorite contribution would be that I had a hand in the Fallout 3 hacking minigame design. The original design was more of a reflex game, where a timer was counting down and the player was filling in different letters in the password in a short amount of time. When we were considering alternatives, I remembered a game I’d asked to borrow in high school from my sister’s boyfriend (after he’d finished it). He ended up giving me a copy of the game and a printout of the exe file opened in a hex editor around the memory where the passwords were. I would have to look through the garbage text for passwords and try them out. I took that experience and added a bit from other pitches that had been made, and together, that was the model for the password minigame that was pretty much what shipped. I ended up buying the game back in high school because looking through those pages wasn't fun, but the minigame turned out to really feel good.

Do you have a favorite story or interaction from the community?

I occasionally play 76 with my daughter. I say “occasionally” because she just wanders around picking flowers and giving them to me, and then takes all of my resources to build her own camps. Most of which just end up with musical instruments on the roof, and as many stash boxes as she could cram on the main level. Once when I was watching her build her camp, right along the path down the hill from the vault, a higher level player came up and gave her a bunch of recipes. I watched this guy patiently try to get her to understand that he was giving her a bunch of recipes and all she had to do was pick them up. But she wasn't listening, completely preoccupied with adding stash boxes to her little one-room house with no crafting stations. That sort of patience and helpfulness is something that surprised me, and something I've seen a lot of in 76.

What are you working on next that you're excited for everyone to see?

I'm head down, nose to the grindstone on Starfield, and I’m definitely excited for people to see it.

Thank you so much Erik for taking the time to answer our questions. If you want to work with Erik or anyone at Bethesda Game Studios, visit our careers page and apply today!