Skyrim - Interview @ Games.On.Net

Games.On.Net intervirewed Bethesda’s Pete Hines who shares his thoughts on modding, and why he thinks Skyrim was so successful. As usual here is a small preview.

With Bethesda widely expected to announced a major new RPG at this year’s E3 conference next month, we asked the company’s Global Director of PR and Marketing what he thought made Skyrim such a breakout success for the company. While Skyrim did herald major changes to the game’s appearance and continued tweaks to the formula, Hines said that there was more to it than just simple continual upgrades.

“I also think that comes down to ‘right game, right time’,” Hines said. “At that point in the console life cycle, to have that big of a game come out, with that big of an audience already out there and ready and able to play that game, it was just… almost a perfect storm of potential for a game like that.”

Hines countered my assertion that Skyrim was the most important RPG for the company by saying that, in fact, “the most influential or game-changing Elder Scrolls game was Morrowind.”

“That was the first one that we did that was not just on PC. We did it on Xbox, and it opened up that kind of a game to a console audience, and at the time people said to us ‘That is never going to fly. Console gamers will not get a game like this, it’s too complex, blah blah blah.’ But it did awesome. It sold and sold and sold for years and years and years.”

“I think the success of that was really a big watershed moment for us as a company when we realised like, gamers are gamers, and people like fun stuff regardless of what platform they play. And that was where we felt like we really started to grow our audience out of just PC only to a much wide, broader audience that made games like Oblivion, and Fallout 3, and everything we’ve done since then a real possibility. It helped Bethesda go from being one internal studio and a dozen external ones to all these internal studios that are doing different things but that share a kind of common design philosophy.”

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More information.

(actually) the most influential or game-changing Elder Scrolls game was Morrowind

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That's good

(… because it was) on Xbox

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That's bad

I'm still surprised Morrowind was such a smash on the Xbox. I would never have expected that.

That said, like all TES games - the game was a joke in terms of balance and you could essentially beat the game using a single attack with the same kind of weapon all the way through. I'm guessing that must have been a factor.

Even so, the game was extremely text-heavy - and I can't imagine a casual gamer sitting on the couch having much fun with that.

Sometimes, these things are just hard to predict, I guess.

At the time Morrowind was released text based games were the rule, its hard to imagine now. For all the love that Morrowind gets now, its balance was much poorer in my opinion than in Skyrim or Oblivion. Basically the game was much, much easier playing as a melee fighter than as a mage, archer, or thief. I wish they kept the deep skill system and didn't go with level scaling, but in most other ways I find Oblivion and Skyrim better games. Morrowind did have the most unusual and colourful setting of the elder scroll games. I will never forget the giant mushrooms and the sandstorms.

forgottenlor said:

At the time Morrowind was released text based games were the rule, its hard to imagine now. For all the love that Morrowind gets now, its balance was much poorer in my opinion than in Skyrim or Oblivion. Basically the game was much, much easier playing as a melee fighter than as a mage, archer, or thief. I wish they kept the deep skill system and didn't go with level scaling, but in most other ways I find Oblivion and Skyrim better games. Morrowind did have the most unusual and colourful setting of the elder scroll games. I will never forget the giant mushroom and the sandstorms.

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Xbox games weren't text-heavy as a rule, though. Most games didn't have much to read and were more about shooting and jumping.

I have a much easier time understanding the impact of KotOR and Fable, but that's me.

“That was the first one that we did that was not just on PC. We did it on Xbox, and it opened up that kind of a game to a console audience, and at the time people said to us ‘That is never going to fly. Console gamers will not get a game like this, it’s too complex, blah blah blah.’ But it did awesome. It sold and sold and sold for years and years and years.”

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This is what is so great about crowd funding, indie developers, and even companies like Bethesda who do both developing AND publishing… they can do what they want despite marketers and publisher who don't know what to do with an IP unless it's been around 50 times before.

I am amazed by the success of Star Citizen and with each additional million they get, I throw another pie in the face of some stupid marketer pointing at a pie chart screeching 'space sims are dead.'

"I understand where it [complaints about bugs] comes from. I mean I don’t agree with it, but I understand where it comes from. It’s an oversimplification, but people are entitled to their opinions. They spent hard money on the game, they’re allowed to think whatever they want for the $60. Or whatever it is.”

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This erks me a little bit. When you take a look at the unofficial bug patch for the PC it is ENORMOUS. To say that - well whatever, if you paid the $60 you can have an opinion - I find that rude. Looks to me like the next TES game will be about meeting yet another super-cool marketing date (ie 11-11-11) rather than releasing the game when it's been properly 'cooked.'

I can confidentially say that the next TES game will NOT be a day 1 buy for me - especially with such a smug attitude about bugs by hines. Why buy on day 1? It will inevitably be much more stable and play better after 3 to 6 months of patching by Bethesda and the mod community. I'm patient. I'll wait. I'll probably even wait for the mark down. I'm not gonna pay to beta test the next TES game like I did with Skyrim.

Now this is an interesting issue, not only with TES games but regaring bugs in general. Some players like you experienced a lot of bugs in Skyrim. Others, like me had very few. I honestly wonder why.

Part of it may be due to how critical we are. I'm not very critical, which means that I don't pay much attention to/tend to overlook minor bugs, like temporary glitches in sound and graphics, etc. But this goes beyond that - I do notice crashes and quest breaking bugs, but unlike many of the watchers, I encountered very few of that kind. And I put a lot of hours into Skyrim.

Perhaps this is a topic for a thread of it's own.

BTW: I found Oblivion more buggy than Skyrim, however I still enjoyed it (unmodded).

pibbur who again admits that he finished (and actually had fun with) the bugfest of a MM game which shall not be mentioned by name

You know I got almost to the end of Might and Magic IX, but I stopped because I was too powerful and it got a little repetitive. Might and Magic IX had several bugs, but it was a lot of fun. Might and Magic IX, I mean

pibbur who said:

Now this is an interesting issue, not only with TES games but regaring bugs in general. Some players like you experienced a lot of bugs in Skyrim. Others, like me had very few. I honestly wonder why.

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TES games are big and open so whether or not one encounters a lot of bugs could be as simple as the direction and order-of-things one happens to take. It just so happened that the course I went down on my initial play through of Skyrim happened to cause me to trip across quite a few existing bugs. Where your course happened to avoid them. And of course, perhaps there are bugs we don't perceive at first or even at all depending on the kind of bug that occurs.

Oblivion had quite a good number of bugs too, but I really don't think I hit anything substantial in that game. But for me, Skyrim was pretty bad. And looking at the unofficial patch and things never addressed by Bethesda formally, is in my view, shameful. They could have taken just a small percentage of their overall profit and come back to the game, even now, and fix at least some of that stuff. Their case worsens when they re-package Skyrim in a variety of ways, and still do not bother to fix at least some well documented bugs.

I say this as a fan of Bethesda and a fan of the TES series. I also say this without an expectation of 'perfect' or even near perfect code out of the gate (that ideal died when the internet was born). But Bethesda does have a reputation to move slow on bug fixing and not really patch a game up properly. And with hines semi-snotty attitude on this subject (since you paid $60 you're allowed an opinion - bleh), I can see why.

I'm very cautiously optimistic about their next game and how they'll ruin it by making it accessible for non-gamers.

Bethesda's post-release patch support is nothing short of disgraceful. Their work can be genuinely amateur. They show contempt and indifference for their fans and customers with their track record.

Daroou said:

I'm very cautiously optimistic about their next game and how they'll ruin it by making it accessible for non-gamers.

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I'm not quite sure what you mean by "non-gamers", but I'll assume you're referring to the mainstream. Anyways, making their games more accessible is something Bethesda started doing years ago.. mainly beginning with Oblivion.

Daroou said:

Bethesda's post-release patch support is nothing short of disgraceful. Their work can be genuinely amateur. They show contempt and indifference for their fans and customers with their track record.

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Contempt? I think you're going a little heavy on the drama with that one.

I agree that they seem indifferent about certain things though, and I've lost some respect for them because of it.

TheMadGamer said:

TES games are big and open so whether or not one encounters a lot of bugs could be as simple as the direction and order-of-things one happens to take.

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That is the big problem, that Skyrim may be the most complex game ever made. I mean from a design to implementation to quality assurance perspective, pure development. So many quests, freedom to have npcs killed, so many "radiant" actions in npcs and locations, and a dicey step by step quest progress trigger mechanism. Devising test cases for all the quests is one thing, but accounting for the order of events in the world at large blows the feasability of bug-free out the window. Still, I only encountered one bad bug, shortly after release I did the main quest before the thieves guild and got locked out of the TG questline by some event that happened there.

Now this is not a pardon of Bethesda. They can make quests unbreakable, and now they surely are better prepared to use designs that prevent the host of problems that needed fixing. They can make quest progress more flexible so if a step blows up it doesn't kill it. They can fence radiant action better by setting boundaries early in design so that problems don't happen in implementation. They can learn from their big, early design choices in Skyrim and make a game as complex to the user that isn't as complex to the development team. They can do better next time.

I also feel that expecting them to go back and patch Skyrim better than they have is asking too much. They did 9 title updates, patching the game nearly 2 years post release. How many others do that? How many others do it with significant staff investment to make major changes? Learn from the big picture design problems (bad design made Skyrim so prone to bugs and hard to fix) and make your next game better when it can designed to not break easily. Fixing Skyrim's bugs at this stage costs 100 times more than preventing those types of bugs from being a problem in the next game (design fixes are likely at least a couple orders of magnitude cheaper than maintenance fixes).

It plays very well for nearly everyone, so go on to the next game where resources are far better spent.

Wait, Skyrim's Unofficial Patch is still being developed? Knowing the sheer size of people that must have been involved, this is both impressive and scary.