Finger: One of the highlights at Bethesda's E3 presentation was with the woman and her dog, and how she would feed it, and put the sleep spell on it (and from some reports, also actually kill it). That was one example, but many people are questioning whether that was a hand-scripted sequence and whether that can actually happen with the game's dynamic AI system. Are there many occurrences like this throughout the game?

Todd Howard: With our AI system, we give the NPCs goals and we can conditionalize those for anything, the big one being "time of day". Such as "sleep here at night", "eat here from 12 to 2", those kinds of things. So for the E3 demo, we packed a bunch of goals together so you could see various things the NPCs could do back to back. She eats, she reads, she sleeps. So the only really hand-done parts were to squeeze it together. Can they light their pets on fire? Sure. Do they do it often? No. That was just to show it can happen and to get some laughs.​