RPGWatch Forums - PC Power Play - Pete Hines Interview

Found another interview for Fallout 4 with Pete Hines to share with you all.

Link - http://www.pcpowerplay.com.au/featur…4,408572/page0

Quote:

PCPP: I was really curious as how you managed to keep it all under wraps for so long, and why is it that every game is not announced six months before launch?

Pete Hines: It’s not like we’re not guilty of that because Doom was first announced before we even acquired id [Software]. It feels like Doom has been around forever. It’s not like we’re the patron saints of six months announced launch. We like to shorten it as much as we can whenever we can. Not every game is Fallout 4. If every game was Fallout 4, we could do that every time. It was a bit of a special case. It’s a special studio, and every game is different. I’m glad, so far, that it’s worked pretty well. I think we feel pretty good about where we’re sitting today. I don’t know how we could be in any better spot if we announced the game last year, if we could hope to be in the spot we are now. I’m a big fan of immediacy and trying to shorten it and you don’t have to wait long. It’s coming, because there’s so much stuff going on out there now that people are paying attention to between indie stuff and things on Kickstarter and Early Access, and here’s all these games coming. And to your point, it’s not just the game that are coming this year, but the ones I know about that are coming next year. There’s so much noise that to break through that does take a lot of effort.

PCPP: I’m curious about cross-collaboration between studios. I heard talk of how id Software might have had a hand in helping improve the gunplay.

Pete Hines: I mentioned to a couple of folks that… I mean, all of our studios collaborate all the time. Sometimes it’s very general: a graphics thing, a feature they’re trying to implement, a physics problem they’re trying to solve, an animation thing. Other times it’s, ‘How do we make our combat better? How do we help with the way our guns fire? The responsiveness between the controls and the latency between that and when…’ yeah, the teams all talk to each other. MachineGames and id are always talking to each other because they’re both doing stuff that involves a lot of guns and combat.

Those guys have definitely talked, and Todd and his team have gone to them and talked to them and asked questions and look for feedback on, ‘How does this feel? How did you guys do this? What are the things you did to make this feel better? This weapon… how does the recoil feel for this?’ Just stuff like that. It’s not like, ‘Ooh, this is a really unique case.’ This happens all the time across every game. The Tango guys on The Evil Within send out builds to guys in all of the other studios play to get feedback on things like level design or pacing or whatever. It’s not unique. Maybe it’s unique, but it’s unique to Bethesda that we have all of our studios talking to each other, working together, whether they’re using the same engine or not, whether they’re in the same genre or not. But they’re seeing what each other do. ‘I notice you did this, and how did you do this?’ That kind of thing.