Bethesda Softworks Podcast Interview

In a new podcast interview conducted by OXM UK, Bethesda’s Pete Hines discusses the changes they’re making in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, their marketing tactics for Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, the importance of graphical prowess, how Oblivion’s horse armor DLC still sells to this day, and more. Some of the topics are expanded upon in detail in two separate articles here and here, so I’ll quote from those:

“In one respect everything we’ve done has done well, including the much maligned horse armour,” he said.

“I swear to you I don’t have the report in front of me, but multiple people bought horse armour yesterday! For some inexplicable reason. It happened, I promise.

“So that sold, and Shivering Isles sold, and everything we did for Fallout 3 sold, so it’s clear to us that what matters most is value – and whether it’s value at the 10 dollar or 10 pound price point, or five pounds, or whatever it is, so long as it’s good value, people will like it and buy it.

…

Hines revealed that Fallout 3 marketing used images of action sequences because these showed off the upgraded Gamebryo engine best.

“People were like ‘they’re not focussing on the RPG stuff, all their demos are all about action and not about quests’. Well, we tend to show what shows well,” Hines explained.

“It’s very difficult to convey to somebody in a period of time – here’s a character that you didn’t create, but somehow I’m going to get you to care about this quest and the context of it, right now.”

“But everybody gets pretty pictures, and everybody gets the big story stuff, and so I think graphics in a similar way gets a lot of people interested right away.”

“They see something, and they say ‘holy crap, that looks amazing – now I want to know more about it’. As opposed to ‘yeah that looks OK, and it looks like it could be any other game’.

“We don’t want to be that. When you see our stuff, we want you to go ‘that’s Skyrim for sure – that can’t be anything else, it looks unbelievable’.”