Bethesda Softworks Interview
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The editors over at CVG managed to catch up with Bethesda Softworks' Pete Hines for a somewhat in-depth interview about their planned business model for The Elder Scrolls Online, upcoming projects that they haven't announced yet, their gradual move toward multiplayer, and more. I have to assume that Fallout 4 and potentially even a The Elder Scrolls VI are in development, but it's hard to say for sure with their stance on announcements:
Elder Scrolls is probably your flagship series at Bethesda. Star Wars: The Old Republic didn't work with a subscription model and that's one of the biggest entertainment brands in the world. Is there any anxiety about this model not working?
Anxiety? I would say yes, because I'm anxious about everything all the time [laughs]. I don't get paid to sit around and assume that everything is fine, so I tend to worry about everything and I want to make sure that we're doing things in the right way for the right reasons. But I guess, to answer your question, I don't know whether or not previous games that have done subscriptions haven't succeeded because they were subscription-based, or because of the game that they were and the value that the customer got, and that's ultimately what we're talking about.
If you feel like you're getting your money's worth for whatever you're paying - whether it be $15 for a month or $2 for a DLC - then you're going to be happy. If you're not, then you won't. You could do a free-to-play game where somebody wasn't happy, because maybe they don't feel like they're getting value for the money that they played upfront, even if it's not a pay-by-month subscription. We felt like the subscription model fit best what we wanted to do, not because we want you to pay per month to play the game, but because we want to provide real and meaningful content support on a regular basis.
That's not just a few items or a thing here and there, that's real significant stuff that adds to the game in a whole host of ways, and doing so needs a good sized group of people who are working on and creating new stuff. That's stuff we can start working on now, as well as stuff we can work on when we start to get player feedback.
There's a couple of Guild quest lines in the game at the moment, but there are certainly noticeable Guilds that aren't in the game - there's no Dark Brotherhood, for example. You can't set aside a bunch of people to work on a cool Dark Brotherhood quest line unless you've figured out a way that you're going to pay those bodies to spend that time. Otherwise you'd just put them onto something else. We feel like this approach is going to give people who want to play the best value, and reason to look forward to the next new thing that's coming out. The Elder Scrolls is our crown jewel and it's the series that made everything we do possible, so it's a big triple-A title that demands huge, ongoing triple-A support.
Does Bethesda have any more announcements this year?
It remains to be seen. Is that coy enough? I think it's rare that we let a year go by that we're not talking about something, but you know, we've got a number of studios at work on a number of things: Battlecry, which we started up a year-and-a-half ago is working on a free-to-play thing we haven't talked about. Arkane and id [are working on projects], and even among folks that we do have announced titles for, there's lots going on. We'll just have to wait and see.
