Bethesda Softworks Interview

Edge Online has published an interview with Bethesda’s Pete Hines, in which the PR representative answers questions about Oblivion, Shivering Isles, episodic content, and more. Sounds like they’re sticking to role-playing for awhile:

Q: I really loved one of Bethesda’s old games, The Terminator is there any chance you’ll make any more non-RPGs, or do you think it’s better for developers to focus on one type of game?

A: I can tell you that right now there are no plans internally for us to do anything other than roleplaying. We have one very large team that we move between projects, so we don’t have an Elder Scrolls team and a Fallout team, we have designers and artists and we assign people to projects because they’re always in different states, right? Something that’s early on doesn’t really need a lot of help from programmers, for example, until you need to start getting game systems up and running. [Our] guys are really good at making roleplaying that’s what they’re going to stick to; they’re finishing up the rest of this Elser Scrolls stuff Shivering Isles and Oblivion PS3 and they’re going to move on to Fallout 3. We would love to do another Terminator game at some point The Terminator was one of the things that helped Bethesda make a name for itself in the ’90s but whether or not we would ever do another Terminator game or whether or not we would do another internal project that’s not a roleplaying game, it’s really TBD. And if we did we’d probably have to create it as a separate entity because once you get too big of a size it’s impossible to manage that many people. So you’d almost have to create another autonomous unit that just did firstperson shooters. And that’s why we go out-of-house to do other stuff we worked with Zombie on Rogue Warrior, for example, and with other companies for Star Trek to try and expand beyond roleplaying and try and hopefully bring some of our knowledge of gaming and what makes a good gaming experience to folks who have the ability to bring lots of programmers and designers and experts in that particular area to that project.