Bethesda Softworks Interviews

[GameBanshee News]

I'm starting to think that Bethesda might have a new game announcement in the pipeline, as two separate interviews concerning the company's past, present, and future have popped up.

The first is at Voodoo Extreme with production director Ashley Cheng:

What was it like going from The Elder Scrolls, which is Bethesda's property, to Fallout, which is a series created by someone else? How do you go about working within the constraints of someone else’s design?

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. Much like Bryan Singer has been quoted saying he treated Superman Returns as a sequel to Superman 2.

Plus one of the great things about the Fallout world is the lore itself. The lore is American history: a wonderfully interesting alternate universe of American history. Being able to explore themes of slavery and patriotism, government, Abraham Lincoln and important historical documents, plus re-creating monuments like the Capitol or the Washington Monument – it was a tremendously fun project to work on. American history is a fantastic lore playground to work on.

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.

While the other is at GamesIndustry.biz with PR rep Pete Hines:

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.

[fable]

Quote:

Q: Bethesda releases cater to a hardcore gam----ing audience, but Todd Howard recently said that the industry needs to do more to attract new players.

You mean, more than dumb down their titles for the kiddie squad? And weren't those hardcore gamers left behind, somewhere after Morrowind?