Q: The recent Fallout DLC was released as a corrupted file on Xbox Live – how much did that cost Bethesda to correct, and how does something like that damage good will with the fans?
Pete Hines: It's one thing if you put out something that's really buggy and there are a lot of problems that we should have caught. It is another thing entirely when the thing that was put up for them to play is missing big chunks. That's not a bug, that's just somewhere along the way something got corrupted and pieces of data were missing.
Good thin every Beth game has no bugs and certainly none that should have been weeded out in QA.
Q: Bethesda releases cater to a hardcore gaming audience, but Todd Howard recently said that the industry needs to do more to attract new players. How does Bethesda hope to do that, to stop users becoming frustrated early in a game and giving up, and is it an industry wide problem?
Pete Hines: Guys who are making the games tend to be the ones who play a lot of games, and they forgive elements of the game quickly because "that is just how games work" instead of removing barriers and making it so that both a veteran of a game can get in quickly, but someone who has never picked up a controller gets eased into it. These are just things that we as an industry can get better at: The process of the stages that players go through as they master and move on to new challenges.
You can look at the way we start Oblivion and Fallout. Both games are designed so that during the first 30 to 45 minutes of the game you are playing the game the right away. We're not forcing you to watch a lot of cutscenes. We're not putting big tech screens up explaining how to do something. We give you your character and have you start doing stuff. While you're doing, you're learning how to play the game. You're learning a bit about yourself and the world. Whether it is Oblivion and going through a dungeon and figuring out what kind of weapons you want to use and what's going on in the story and how different game systems work, or in Fallout where you're growing up as a kid and flashing through different periods of your life – the objective is to have fun with the first period of the game where people are learning how to play and not have them reading a manual.
1) Beth games do not cater to any hardcore gamers, their games are extremely accessible. 2) The beginning of Fallout 3 & Oblivion are far worse than a cutscene, it's forced handholding that's plain obnoxious. Assuming that you're player has never read the manual is a bad way to make a game, it's one thing to have a tutorial that teaches players how to play the game but it's another thing entirely to design your game around the idea that the player need not read a manual and force the tutorial down the player's throat.
For example, with the experience site we put together for Fallout, the whole idea for it was to present Fallout in a way that people will think is cool regardless of whether they obsess over it daily or they had never heard of it. We present the game to them in a way that is cool, interesting, and engaging. It doesn't matter what their level of knowledge was coming in; they were simply able to get it.
Designing by the rule of cool works if the IP uses the rule of cool. Fallout used some rule of cool but wasn't entirely based on it while Fallout 2 was much more so.
You've worked on some of the most influential games in recent memory, including Fallout 3, and The Elder Scrolls III and IV. What goes into producing such huge titles?
Fallout 3 and TES III & IV were not influential games, they were simply popular games.
Since Morrowind, our core team has stayed together and we improve exponentially with each game we finish together.
Considering that Morrowind is considered by many to be better than Oblivion, I beg to differ.
For us, it was easy because we’re big fans of the first two Fallout games. We treated Fallout 3 as the sequel to Fallout 2, and just took it from there.
Which is why a large portion of your staff has never played any Fallout game and why you raped canon throughout the game?
Was the shift from fantasy to post-apocalyptic a difficult one? Do you have a preference between working with The Elder Scrolls and working with Fallout?
The shift wasn’t too difficult, at least, not for me. Fallout 3 is as much a follow up to Oblivion as it is to Fallout 1 and 2. Both games are fundamentally about exploration, living a different life and building your character the way you want.
Fallout 3 is very much so a sequel to Oblivion, but Fallout 1&2 were nothing like TES.
While there is no excuse for letting a bug like this through, this is a prime example of the challenge we face with DLC. Due to the size of Fallout 3, it is a huge challenge to test DLC against existing characters and saves and everything you can possibly do in the game. However, our terrific fans generously send us saves to roll into our testing cycles and we should do better with this on future DLC.
There is no excuse but here's ours anyway. Also note that customer /= fan, many of these "fans" were quite pissed and some even wanted their money back.
That wasn't the first time you've had difficulties with bugs. When Fallout 3 was first released, it had problems as well. In fact, there was one point where my PC copy was virtually unplayable, crashing every five minutes or so. Why are some games released in that state?
I think game developers and publishers can certainly do better with supporting PC SKUs. The challenge lies in testing and resolving conflicts with the huge variety of hardware configurations and drivers that are out there on PCs. Compatibility is exponentially harder to support on PC than on consoles, where everyone has the same specs. The problem is that the end user, like you, can have a problem that we can’t fix because something else is causing it to crash. Our tech support folks spend a lot of time related to software running in the background, out-of-date drivers, and other issues that affect our game, but are outside of our control.
Is there a chance that releasing games with bugs ends up hurting sales? Some gamers won't play anything from a certain studio if they've had a bad experience with a buggy product.
I agree. I think it is important to support your product and create as polished an experience as possible for consumers. It is certainly one of our top priorities here at the studio.
If it's such a high priority then it wouldn't happen with every game. There are still a crapload of bugs that are unfixed and you've only released one bugfix patch.
Will there be a Fallout MMO?
I have no idea if there ever will be one but I’ll be first in line to play it! We don’t make MMOs. We have a sister company, ZeniMax Online Studios, that focuses on those. We’ll have to wait to see what they’re up to.
Sounds like you do since you failed to mention Interplay.
We don’t specifically take ideas from mods for future titles, but we do read everything on the forums and we take all that feedback into account for future projects.
Considering that people have found where you have stolen mods, tweaked them, and put them into Fallout 3, I disagree.
Everybody knows that publisher and developer Bethesda has built its reputation as a game studio by consistently delivering incredibly deep, lengthy, and immersive RPGs -- and built a huge audience for its titles by maintaining that commitment.
But what may not be as clear is that the company has managed to keep interest for its titles alive for years after their introduction, in stark contrast to many publishers, whose titles disappear from retail after mere weeks, in many cases.
Would you mind removing Bethesda's cock from your mouth before writing an article? Thanks.
In the third [Fallout 3 DLC pack, Broken Steel, out this month, which continues the game beyond its original ending], it really allows us to react to what the response was once the game came out. We were genuinely surprised how many people were disappointed or upset that the game had an ending. Because most games have an ending, but most Bethesda games don't.
No, some TES fans whined about it while there were significantly more complaints about how shitty the ending was. Hell, Emil admitted that the ending was broken and that they knew about it in advance and didn't give a shit.
So we started looking at the biggest stuff we'd done that people really liked, but that we could do in smaller, digestible chunks.
That's where we came to the Knights of the Nine model -- it's substantive and it adds multiple hours of game play and new items, but we can do it in a time frame that allows us to get it out without waiting forever. That's what we've gone for with Fallout 3.
Fallout 3's DLCs average about 2 hours of gameplay. I feel safe in saying that most people would be far more happy with full expansions than with paying $60 for three two hour long expansions.
It's an interesting evolution, because as Bethesda Game Studios specifically, you've traditionally operated with what some see as a more antiquated development model -- spend three or four years developing a game, ship that big thing, get started on something else. How much have you had to adapt your methods to adjust the way you think about development?
PH: It doesn't change how we think about it. We have always been really good at what you're talking about, which is managing the game's life cycle -- what are you doing with the game three months out, six months out, one year out, two years out?
Way to replace his question with something you made up.
I think it's actually something we do better than most publishers, if not all publishers. I say that because -- well, what does your average big publisher put out a year? Thirty games? Forty games? Whatever the hell the number is.
You guys don't do much publishing at all as opposed to most publishers who provide financing for other development companies and publish their work. In other words, you guys have a terrible business model for publishing while they have an excellent one for it.
They're doing that every year. They have these large number of titles and they just don't think about them like we do, whereas we do something like Oblivion or Morrowind. We're still selling Morrowind on a monthly basis. We still have it out there. Oblivion is still doing terrific for us.
No you don't. Most companies do far better than you as they actually provide patches which fix their games rather than letting customers do all of the repair work. As far as adding content goes, you fail when compared to most MMOs and when compared to companies like Blizzard (still adding content to Diablo II). You're not even in the top 10 bub.
We don't give up on our stuff, ever. There is always a market and a niche and people out there who are willing to buy it. DLC is just another component of that. We make games that have legs and that stick around and that people will continue to be vested in and play for a long time.
This is just another way to reach out to those folks to say, "If you really like this, here are some more things that you might like." It's the lifecycle of the product as a thing you sell, as well as the game as a thing you play. It allows people to keep coming back to it.
You enjoy milking your customers for all their worth but you don't believe in patching your games.
I have people who ping me about this -- I was just talking to a press guy who said, "I just had a friend start playing Oblivion. He had never played it and now he's really into it." That guy's going to go out and start buying downloadable content. He's probably going to go buy the much-maligned horse armor.
Nothing like bragging about ripping people off with the horse armor.
PH: Well, honestly, those guys are masters of it. I wouldn't ever try and compare us and them.
"We're the best! Oh wait, there's all of those other guys who are exponentially better than us..."
What they've done with Steam is just wholly remarkable. And when Steam first came out, they took what was the equivalent of their horse armor lumps and then some. [laughter]
Steam never had the horse armor problem, people hated it then for the same reason they hate it now, just most people have forgotten how wonderful it was to not have to have another application running and a connection to the internet in order to play games one has bought. Steam is DRM cleverly hidden behind digital distribution and shopping capabilities and is still a giant pile of unnecessary shit, it's just that it's gold plated shit.
PH: It's both. It's really just finding folks we think are doing the kinds of stuff that we want to work with them on. We don't necessarily focus on genres -- "We need two third-person shooters for 2010." It's just, "What are you doing and does that fit with the kind of games we like to make? How are you pushing the boundaries and what kind of new things are you trying?"
Actually every game you publish is one that you've either made or contracted out to be made (unless Cthulu is an exception) so I call bullshit.
EDIT: Fixed quote tag
