Shack: These days, because it's so different than it was ten or even five years ago, what are Bethesda's thoughts on the PC market?

Pete Hines: I would say that for the most part it's a market that we intend to stay in, but it's no doubt that it is by far the most painful platform for us to develop for. [laughs] I mean we were talking about this before, it's a platform but it's not. It's an operating system, and what that operating system is going to contain is almost always different. What I'm playing it on is different from what you're playing it on and what he's playing it on, and making a game that runs perfectly on each of those configuration is impossible. That's not just us, that's everybody. I'm a Company of Heroes junkie; Kurt Kuhlmann--one of our designers--and I play every single day at lunch. We have problems getting it to run sometimes, just weird stuff--and if you go on their forums there are other problems, some of which I've never seen and some of which I have. It's so difficult to tie down what it's going to be with all the hardware.

There was a game reviewer who emailed us and said Oblivion was crashing every five minutes, and we got him in touch with QA and it turned out his printer had software attached to it that was running in the background and making Oblivion crash all the time. I mean, how can you--I promise, that has never happened to an Xbox 360 user in the history of 360s, that some printer driver would be doing this. [laughs] We certainly, for something like the Elder Scrolls or other franchises where it's appropriate, want to make games available on all the platforms where it's appropriate, but at the same time it's a pain in the ass. People just don't understand what a pain in the ass it is. All of these problems you don't have with a video game console.

Shack: Do you guys have any optimism or other thoughts on Microsoft's Games for Windows initiatives, or things like Vista and DX10? It's the first time in years anybody has really led the charge for PC development.

Pete Hines: I certainly think it's a good idea to be doing what they're doing, because it was abandoned, for lack of a better word. Nobody had taken ownership of it, and nobody can really drive gaming on a PC or Windows, or whatever we're going to call it, like Microsoft can. Video card manufacturers can't. That's why it's great for them to be doing it. Games for Windows is good, because the closer we can get to standardizing, maybe that will reduce some of the headaches on our end and more importantly on the user's end. If we can get to to a point where we're using a consistent format that gives everybody a better level of performance with fewer problems, I'm all for anything that does that. Whether or not DX10 and Vista is the answer, I don't know, but I do know that them putting effort there doesn't hurt. It's a step in the right direction.

Shack: So for the forseeable future, you guys are going to stick to PC?

Pete Hines: Absolutely. We'll continue to develop on PC for anything that's appropriate for PC.

Shack: As far as all the versions of Oblivion--PC, Xbox 360, PS3--is there going to be content parity across all three platforms once the PS3 version ships and the new expansion ships?

Pete Hines: No.

Shack: What specifically will be the differences?

Pete Hines: By the time Shivering Isles ships in March, PC and 360 will have Shivering Isles, but PS3 will not. We do plan to put out Shivering Isles for PS3, and we believe we can do it this year. We don't know when, and we don't know how, but other than that it's great. [laughs] That will be a difference, and honestly it wasn't even an option to try and make it available by the time the regular game was out. Otherwise, they should be pretty similar. The base games are the same. By the end of the year, you should pretty much have complete parity. The caveat is that on PS3, the downloadable content plans are still undefined. We're not sure yet how many we're going to offer, which ones we're going to offer.

Shack: So there will be no downloadable PS3 content at launch?

Pete Hines: I don't think so, no. Any one of those we could probably release [for PS3] and be okay, but we have to make sure everything's going to work together with memory requirements and other factors and so forth. It's just going to take us a little while to figure out.

Shack: Have you found Sony to be any more or less accomodating in comparison to Microsoft when it comes to downloadable content? It seems to be a really huge priority for Microsoft.

Pete Hines: Sony is no less accomodating, the only issue is that from Microsoft it seemed like a much bigger deal. You didn't hear about the 360 early on without hearing about Live and downloadable stuff. Part of that is that they already had it, with Live. Not that PS2 didn't have online functionality, but certainly not the same as Xbox. It was a much bigger selling point for the 360, a much bigger driving point in everything they did, even talking with us about Oblivion. We said, "Well here's what we're planning to do," then they'd come back and say, "This is how this is going to work, this is how that is going to work, and you should think about doing this." With Sony it's not exactly like that, it's different. Not... not better or worse, just different.

Turn the page for discussion of the upcoming expansion for Oblivion.