Interview Pete Hines interview at Edge

[Vault Dweller]

Tags: Bethesda Softworks

<a href=http://www.edge-online.co.uk>Edge</a> has posted an <a href=http://www.edge-online.co.uk/archives/2007/02/you_interview_b_1.php>interview</a> with Pete Hines. The interview questions were submitted by the site's readers, exploring many different topics like "why ur gaems r so awsome and big?!!" and "can u make it even more accessibal 4 people? kthxby!"
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<blockquote><b>What's your opinion of Japanese RPGs? What do you think are the main differences between them and your own games? And do you think Elder Scrolls games in the future would use anything other than a firstperson view?</b>
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I’ll answer the last one first. No, we would always include a firstperson view in The Elder Scolls. I think the main difference for us – it’s not just Japanese RPGs, although certainly more with those than any others – is how open-ended we are. You know, I admittedly haven’t played many Japanese RPGs, mostly because I haven’t really enjoyed them. They have lots of cutscenes (at least the ones I’ve played), lots of dialogue – and obviously we have lots of dialogue as well (Obviosly - VD) – and they’re very linear and very scripted. With those games it’s very much a greased rail – you always know exactly where anybody is at however many hours they’re into one of those sorts of games, whereas in ours it’s very much a player-driven thing – you decide what your story’s going to be. You don’t want to do any of the main quest? You can play the game for 100 hours and never touch the main quest. That’s a huge departue, and like I say not just in Japanese RPGs but really for many other RPGs. I think there are a lot of other things but at its core that’s the most striking difference.</blockquote>Discuss.
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[Excrément]

I agree

 

[Castanova]

Pete Hines is kinda right, actually... VD, are you just being a balanced reporter? Or, if not, what was so offensive about his answer besides the fact that he had a hand in spawning Oblivion?

 

[HardCode]

You know, I admittedly haven’t played many Japanese RPGs, mostly because I haven’t really enjoyed them. They have lots of cutscenes (at least the ones I’ve played), lots of dialogue – and obviously we have lots of dialogue as well – and they’re very linear and very scripted.

OOOPS! He let the cat out of the bag, admitting that dialog is t3h sUx and he doesn't like dialog in RPGs.

... whereas in ours it’s very much a player-driven thing – you decide what your story’s going to be.

Right ... although the story is in the player's head and not in the game, just like Notepad.

You don’t want to do any of the main quest? You can play the game for 100 hours and never touch the main quest. That’s a huge departue, and like I say not just in Japanese RPGs but really for many other RPGs.

Sure. You can steal static NPCs' clothes and wash them in the river, and then give yourself 5 gold in the console. At least that is how ESF members do it.

 

[vazquez595654]

Boring easy question with an obvious answer, but at least he got it right. Rails vs non rails.

 

[Greatatlantic]

If jRPGs put you on a greased rail (which I agree with), then Oblivion puts you into a greased frying pan.

 

[Micmu]

You mean 1 rail vs. 4 rails?

 

[vazquez595654]

Why do people still bash Pete Hines? It's like making fun a retarded kid for throwing ice cubes at the sun in an attempt to get him to stop.

 

[vazquez595654]

If you're comparing JRPG's to Oblivion they are quite different and his answer is correct. Oblivion is a sandbox (albeit a very shallow, boring, and pointless one) and JRPG's mostly are not.

 

[Texas Red]

Note how he skillfully hypes Oblivion between the lines.

Hey, how about an interview with *real* questions. Its always censored shit.

 

[Amasius]

Pete Hines: I don’t know that we could have done anything else to make the game more accessible to folks. More than anything we try and focus on removing things that are annoyances and irritants, whether it’s things we did in our own games that annoyed us or things we find in other things that annoy us. I mean, the objective at the end of the day is to have fun and to enjoy yourself, so we try and avoid the negative and remove obstacles from you having fun. Things like vampirism, if we had to do it over again, probably we would have made that a little easier to cure – I’m sure that Vile Lair was particularly popular because people found out it had an instant cure for vampirism and people who had vampirism wanted to get rid of it without going through the process of removing it.

 

[Ladonna]

HardCode picked up the hidden gem.

'Dialog'

The end.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Pete Hines is kinda right, actually... VD, are you just being a balanced reporter? Or, if not, what was so offensive about his answer besides the fact that he had a hand in spawning Oblivion?

I'm being a balanced reporter. That and I had to leave my office to attend some dumb meeting, shake hands, and nod my head knowledgedly, reflecting my wisdom and vast powahz, invested in me. So, I had to replace a half-written comment with "discuss".

 

[Excrément]

Pete Hines is kinda right, actually... VD, are you just being a balanced reporter? Or, if not, what was so offensive about his answer besides the fact that he had a hand in spawning Oblivion?

I'm being a balanced reporter. That and I had to leave my office to attend some dumb meeting, shake hands, and nod my head knowledgedly, reflecting my wisdom and vast powahz, invested in me. So, I had to replace a half-written comment with "discuss".

how many dumb meeting have you per day?

...that's trolling...

 

[vortexv1]

Pete is right, Japano RGS are one Rail. In Elder Scrolls you decide when you do what.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

You are on a rail too, but you get to write your own timetable.
I actually thought that comment was OK, but the vampirism one is ouch.

 

[Micmu]

Huh... how did that vampirism quest look like anyway? Did they forget to mark checkpoints and build in walkthrough messageboxes or are they aiming at something even more Diablo for their next project?

 

[Chinese Jetpilot]

You don’t want to do any of the main quest? You can play the game for 100 hours and never touch the main quest. That’s a huge departue, and like I say not just in Japanese RPGs but really for many other RPGs.

I know this is a rhetorical question, but have RPG's become so bad that now the fact that you can take a quest now or do it later is considered something to hype? It's not just Petey, but even Bioware was waxing about it in a previous interview:

You might be flying through space on your primary quest when you get this distress call or you hear some message. The planet’s on sensors, so do you want to explore this now or do you go back later? It’s all non-linear.

 

[Vault Dweller]

They'll probably change it to something like:

You've been bitten by a ... No, too complicated. Something like:

message text: vampire, argh!!!, ouch!!!, lol ur vampire now!
A radiant NPC quickly approaches you: lol ur vampire now! cure? yes/no/rumars?

 

[Elhoim]

I wondered how much time it would take him to say stuff...

Pete Hines: No, no. I mean, Oblivion is such a big game, which sucks people in and has them play so much, that what makes most sense to us is to give those people something to do with those characters that they’ve attached so much to. So doing an expansion allows you to do that – it allows you to take those guys and go to a different place where you can do new quests and find new stuff, and at the same time go back to the original game. Because one of the things we find is when people play expansions, they play the expansion content but then they also want to go back and do more stuff in the game that they realised they never finished – like: “Hey, I didn’t realise I was that close to becoming head of the thieves guild – I’m going to go back and finish that,” and so on. So we like this idea of continuing this character that you’ve spent so much time addressing, and giving them more stuff to do without breaking it apart completely and just doing a standalone thing. That’s not something we do – we believe in doing a big game and then doing a big expansion.

They really love doing stuff in bethesda!

 

[Elhoim]

When you kill an NPC, that NPC stays dead forever – it doesn’t come back to life so that someone else can kill him two minutes later.

Really? Then those guys with a crown icon must have a bug in them! I´ll report it in the ESF right now!

 

[Lord Chambers]

Vault Dweller, thanks for dumbing down your news post by using shit like "exploring many different topics like 'why ur gaems r so awsome and big?!!' and 'can u make it even more accessibal 4 people? kthxby!'" If you hadn't translated their properly typed questions into exaggerated txt spk I wouldn't have been able to tell they were stupid.

 

[Limorkil]

That interview is decidedly uncontroversial. I agree with what he says.

My only area of concern is that Bethesda are still listening to [the small number of] people who complain about having consequences for their choices. The bit about vampirism is saying this: "Some people did not like how once you chose to get vampirism you had to do a quest to cure it." So even that limited consequence is on their list of "things to avoid". They already gave the player the ability to do everything, whether it made sense or not, and now they are seriously looking at ways for players to easily undo previous choices. Urgh.

Bethesda have gone down an ugly RPG road, one ideally suited for the spoiled ADHD kids of today, where nothing the player does has any effect and everyone gets a gold star and a pat on the head regardless.

 

[Elhoim]

Pete Hines: Particularly for a game like ours, where you have 500 hours of gameplay...

Wow! Just like the prices, the quantity of hours get bigger everyday!

 

[JarlFrank]

No, no. I mean, Oblivion is such a big game, which sucks people in and has them play so much

It should be: "Oblivion is such a big game, which sucks."