One of Skyrim’s coolest systems actually started as a huge “brute force” script in Fallout 3.
Todd Howard explained that Fallout 3 had around 40–50 random encounters, like NPCs being attacked by Deathclaws or groups fighting over random objects.
Bethesda liked how these events made the world feel more alive, so they started thinking about turning the idea into a proper system instead of manually scripting everything.
That eventually became Skyrim’s radiant quest system, which could dynamically choose NPCs, locations and situations for quests.
“It wasn’t elegant, but it turned out to be a really cool system in the game that made the game dynamic.”