Games.Net: Oblivion's outdoor scenes look astonishingly realistic. We've heard that Bethesda has been in touch with researchers concerning realistic depiction of tree growth and soil erosion. Could you elaborate on that? What kinds of tricks did the researchers help you with?

Todd Howard: A great many things in nature seem random, but are really based on statistics, math, and other things happening over really long periods of time, like millions of years. Once we understood how those things worked, we found we could not only create environments that looked a lot more realistic, but environments that the game could generate for us, so we could spend our time on other elements of the game.