Bethesda On RPGs, Episodic Content, and 'Massively Singleplayer'
Bethesda's Pete Hines answered some reader questions over at the UK's Edge, all of which gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the future of single-player RPGs, the state of the RPG union, as well as further hope that in the not too-distant future I'll be able to kill days at a time playing Fallout 3.
Here's what Pete had to say about the differences between designing MMORPGs and traditional RPGs, and why Bethesda is likely to stay in the business of "massively singleplayer" RPGs for the foreseeable future:
"One of the big differences between a game like Oblivion, which we love to term ‘massively singleplayer’, and a game like WOW or any other MMO is that in a singleplayer game you can get away with a lot more, because you’re focusing everything on the individual who’s playing – nothing in the world matters except that character and everything that character does, and whether that character is having fun... So it’s just a very different approach when you can focus all your energies for everything in the world on what this one character is doing, versus, y’know, one character out of several thousands…"
Make the jump to read more of Bethesda's answers to the pro-RPG agenda!
Pete didn't mince words when answering the question of whether or not Bethesda is likely to hop on the episodic content train (no, but respectfully so):
"It doesn’t fit what we do well. We tend to like ‘big crazy’ and it’s really hard to do ‘big crazy’ in an episodic way – it’s either you go all the way or don’t even bother. So as far as roleplaying is concerned I think we’ll stick with ‘big crazy’ and doing big games that people can look forward to and get excited about... There are very few truths in this industry, but one of them is that Valve is very, very smart and whatever it does is probably a brilliant idea, so if Valve is doing episodic content, it’s probably a great idea and is going to be here forever."
Hey, "Big Crazy" was my nickname at band camp. Good times. You know what else is good times, beside segues? Developers that dedicate themselves to RPGs, that's what. And Bethesda isn't leaving the field any time soon...in fact, it seems like the lion's share of the studio's talent will soon be deployed to making our Fallout 3 dreams come true:
"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?...[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 Elder Scrolls stuff – Shivering Isles and Oblivion PS3 – and they’re going to move on to Fallout 3."
Yay, yay, yay. Bethesda gets big crazy hugs from one Mr. Tinnamous Dancer, Esq. Now gimme my massively mutated single-player Fallout experience, you bastards!
You interview… Bethesda: the Q&A [Edge-Online.co.uk]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 20 February 2007
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: bethesda, fallout 3, massively singleplayer, oblivion, the elder scrolls
Oblivion stole many of my Xbox Live friends from the clutches of my Gears of War matches... I now must sadly play with strangers and foul-mouthed idio-crats.