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.
More information.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.”