During a recent preview event, I was able to sit down and take some time to chat with Bethesda Softworks' Pete Hines about a variety of topics related to the company and the industry. In addition to touching on the company's near future releases, the PlayStation 3 version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and the PC and Xbox 360 releases of the expansion The Elder Scrolls IV: The Shivering Isles, we were able to have some discussion on Bethesda's attitude towards the Fallout license, some of the company's overall history and design goals, and how Hines views the current state of the industry.

Shack: What was the thinking behind taking Oblivion to PS3 after all this time?

Pete Hines: Our biggest thing is that we wanted to take this big huge open ended roleplaying game that has done so well on other platforms and bring that experience to a whole new audience. We've done some PlayStation products before on various platforms, but nothing of this sort. Nothing on this level.

Shack: Was any of that in-house development or was it publishing-related?

Pete Hines: Yeah, we've done some of our IHRA [drag racing] games through our office up in Hunt Valley. Some of those guys in Hunt Valley--actually, all of those guys--brought that PlayStation experience to working with PlayStation 3, so they were a big help. Anyway, most of the enhancements or tweaks [to the PS3 version] are things that we've done to the PC or 360 version in updates or patches, but there have been a number of things that we've done on PS3 to improve performance.

Shack: Can you speak on those at all?

Pete Hines: The main thing that we've done in terms of something that you'd actually notice is that we did a special shader. On the Xbox 360 version of the game--and the PC, but it's more noticeable on 360 because PC is more scalable--there's a thing where the lower-res textures designed to be seen at a great distance appear closer to the player and they're a little blurry and muddy and you notice that. You go from this point where it's really high-res and then it goes to really low-res. It has to do with the LOD and how high-res the textures are. So what we did is write a shader package that blends the high-res one with the low-res one, so there's no point while playing on the PS3 that you'll notice that effect anymore. It will look natural. It's not really something that's noticeable unless you've played the other versions; it's designed not to be noticeable, but to look realistic.

Shack: Can you offer any insight into how much of that was made possible by the PS3 hardware versus simply the additional development time?

Pete Hines: It was entirely due to extra development time. It's not like the PS3 can do this and the others can't, it's actually something we were considering doing for the other platforms as well. We specifically did it here because we had some time and one of our graphics programmers said he could do it. Things like that are in the PS3 version, but everything else is just things that make the game load faster and run faster, so it runs as well if not better than the PC or 360 version. That was our goal all along. We felt like we were going to take however long it took until the PS3 version looked and played as well as it could.

Shack: Originally Elder Scrolls was PC exclusive, then last generation it came to Xbox, and now it's on PS3. Is there any kind of larger direction behind that?

Pete Hines: Definitely. Our philosophy has always been that we don't believe in trying to design the game for a platform. Our philosophy is to [decide] what game we want to make, then determine which platforms can run that game. Last time around, we were just making [The Elder Scrolls III:] Morrowind for PC because that's all there was that could run the game we wanted to make. Then, halfway through development, we found out about the Xbox, and looked at the specs and said, "Hey, that could actually run Morrowind. We should do it for that platform."

This time around we did Oblivion and again we designed a game that's really going to push some limits and would do the things we thought next-gen consoles might be able to do. When 360 dev kits were available, we did it on them because it was available. It's not really going to run on a Wii for example, but if it could we would put it there. Our philosophy is to make a game and make it available to as many people as possible. We're not looking to limit who can play a game. We want to make something that's fun and we want as many people as possible to play it.

Shack: How do you respond to certain voices from the PC community who make claims such as that you're dumbing down games for the console platforms?

Pete Hines: Yeah, I can't really... It becomes an issue of "Yes you did, no you didn't." They say that we dumbed down our game, that it isn't as complex as Morrowind or that it isn't as good as [The Elder Scrolls II:] Daggerfall. I say, the same people that made Morrowind made Oblivion. There were maybe three or four people total that worked on Morrowind that didn't work on Oblivion. We had designers that had key roles in Daggerfall that designed those same systems for Oblivion. The same ones that people said we dumbed down from Daggerfall were the ones that those same guys made.

So, you know, folks are going to say what they're going to say and there's not much we can do about it. At the end of the day, this group of guys and women said, "This is the game that we want to make. This is what we want out of a roleplaying game and what it should look like and how it should play." That's what they went out and did. You can't please everybody. And we're not going to stop. I'm sure--sure--that we're going to do another Elder Scrolls game. It's doing far too well to stop now. I can also guarantee you that that game will not just be Oblivion retreaded. We believe in starting over and taking the best out of what we did, going back and looking at our old games. We had guys who went back to play Daggerfall and [The Elder Scrolls:] Arena to see what we did right there. We want to stay true to what we do but not just make the same game and add a feature. That doesn't move things forward.

Shack: I was reading that [executive producer] Todd Howard actually went back and read reviews of Arena from when it was released.

Pete Hines: Absolutely, and we do that with everything. We did it with Fallout. We try not to focus necessarily on the feature set but on the experience. If you ask somebody what they love about this game or that game, they're not going to say, "Oh I loved the interface, the buttons." They're going to talk about the experience, what it's like to play it, and that's what we want to focus on, focusing on giving people what they want to be doing in the moment and designing the rest of the game around that so it's fun to play. It's not that it has to include this, this, and this or it's not an Elder Scrolls game. It's never that easy, and you can't make a game that way. You ask twenty people what they love about a game, and it's different every time, so when you try to include everybody's favorite feature you just end up with a mess.

Turn the page to read about Bethesda's thoughts on the Fallout franchise.