The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Interview

Joystiq has an article-style interview with Bethesda’s VP of PR and Marketing Pete Hines, on subjects such as the Elder Scrolls franchise’s success, developing on PC, football and more. Here’s a snip:

“Good games are good games,” said Hines, “so the core experience is the same on all platforms, and we try to do some things with the UI for PC folks to have the best experience possible. From a technical standpoint, yes, the PC is a headache. It just is. A million different possibilities of hardware, drivers, etc. As you saw with Rage, all it takes is some bad video card drivers and years of hard work comes off as ‘buggy’ when in fact it’s a really solid, stable game.”

Apart from driver issues and wildly unpredictable configuration possibilities, one of the biggest obstacles with developing for PCs right now is piracy. Having a great game people want to play may be a winning strategy on the consoles, but on the PC that just makes you more susceptible to having your game jacked and not making a dime from it. Hines acknowledges this is a problem Bethesda has also faced.

“Unless you decide not to make your games available for PC, it’s a problem and you have to deal with it,” he said. “So we do the best we can to protect it without resorting to Draconian measures, and we continue to enthusiastically support our PC fans with things like the Creation Kit and the ability to create and add unlimited amounts of mods and content to your existing PC game.”

He also said that PC gamers will be “very pleased” with the performance of Skyrim. Pleased enough, one has to hope, that they’ll be willing to pay for it at retail instead of downloading it from torrent sites.