Zeschuk told me he’s been a fan of Bethesda’s game for the best part of two decades, from all the way back to Elder Scrolls: Arena and Daggerfall right up to Fallout 3. He says he admires how Bethesda specialises, producing games that are distinctively theirs.

“For me, Bethesda is probably the best in the world in terms of creating a sense of place,” he says. “The world seems so real it actually feels like you’re there. I think if you were to describe their superpower, that would be it. Fallout 3 was utterly believable as the area around Washington DC.

“Another thing that was actually very productive we learned from Oblivion is how a game is the sum of its parts, but often something greater than that. If you picked Oblivion apart, you could nitpick about certain things, but when you put it all together it was just a spectacular package. And in fact, it’s that package that’s the impressive thing. And I think that was a great learning for our Dragon Age.”

In parallel, Zeschuk believes what makes a Bioware game utterly distinctive is the high level of integration of story into the overall experience:

“There’s folks that do similar stuff, but I think you could almost say they do it in the Bioware style. We were the first to do it that way. If you look at, for example, how story is presented in a Final Fantasy, it’s very different to what we do. I think if you can identify a Final Fantasy style game then I think you should be able to identify a Bioware style game.

“Another we do – and maybe it’s not in the easily identifiable way – is we never compromise,” he continues. “By that I mean we never release a game with features or elements that are not as good as they could be. You can always disagree with the way it was implemented or what was implemented, but I think when we do put a feature in a game we do a good job of it.

I asked Zeschuk if he would agree that perhaps Bethesda makes the more ambitious games but that they lack the polish of a Bioware game.

“I think that raw ambition comes through in both our products,” he says. “And somehow what [Bethesda] build is magnified in some way. I mean, you can never polish every single aspect in a game the size we make; we just have to make sure we polish the right stuff.”

Zeschuk laughed when I then ask him if that was why Dragon Age has taken six years to make.

“Yeah, somewhat!” he says. “I think it was really daunting to create, in our minds, the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate. I think it’s reflective of why there has never been a Baldur’s Gate 3. You know, you have this beloved product, and its very distinctive and detailed, and it’s very hard to recreat them or create a game in a similar vein. The sheer amount of stuff you have to put in it – that’s just an incredible undertaking.”

Can you identify what makes Bioware and Bethesda games unique or distinctive from each other? What style of RPG do you prefer to play?

A book blurb on the Waterstone’s retail site reads “A novel that takes places forty-five years after the Oblivion Crisis, which is the story of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion game and the expansion pack Shivering Isles. It partly bridges the gap for the next game, which is set 200 years after the Oblivion crisis.”

So, assuming “the next game” in Oblivion continuity isn’t a ZeniMax Online massively multiplayer online game, this might be a hint at an Elder Scrolls V. Although, to hear Bethesda’s Pete Hines tell it, that’s the natural conclusion anybody could draw from how well The Elder Scrolls IV sold.

Well spotted, Silver!

P.S. Yes, I read The Age of Unreason series. When I was a kid. So Keyes’ Star Wars work is how I think of him and I consider it a compliment.

Greg Keyes is perhaps best known for his steampunk series The Age of Unreason, which features historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Isaac Newton, neither of which will be appearing in The Infernal City. The novel takes place four decades after Oblivion, telling the story of a group of unlikely heroes banding together to unravel the secret behind the floating city of Umbriel, which leaves undeath in its wake. It sounds like your standard fantasy romp, but Keyes does some pretty fabulous things when shaping characters, so we can probably expect a great deal of personality at the very least. All I know is it’s about time we got some officially sanctioned Elder Scrolls fiction to tide us over between games.

The Infernal City is due out on November 24 from Del Rey, and can now be preordered at Amazon.com.

Pre-Order The Infernal City [Bethesda Blog]

It’s something that’s been gnawing at me for a while now, but as we approach Christmas 2009 – the fifth holiday season for the Xbox 360, and fourth for the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii – that gnawing has turned into some serious, unchecked mastication.

After all, a new hardware generation is meant to usher in a new generation of games to go with it. And not just games that look prettier, or sound better; titles that give you something entirely new in terms of game design and mechanics, something that could only be done by taking advantage of the latest in console hardware.

Yet I think only a handful of games this console generation have done so. Which ones? Oh, I’m glad you asked. Games like:

Dead Rising – There has never been a game like Dead Rising. It’s open-world in appearance, but the entire game is built around the concept of navigating an endless sea of zombies in numbers previous consoles simply couldn’t get on-screen at once.

Oblivion/Fallout 3 – Two games, I know, but they do the same thing, so they go in the same listing. Nobody ever forgets that first time you leave the Imperial sewers/Vault 101 and take in the world around you, realising that Bethesda haven’t crafted a level, they’ve built a seamless, living world well beyond the scale of previous titles like Morrowind.

Yes, they also appear on PC, but remember, these games were also built from the ground up with consoles in mind, rather than being crude ports.

Wii Sports/Wii Sports Resort – To this day, the only games that have truly delivered on the promise of the Wii Remote, integrating it so naturally within the gameplay experience that you can’t imagine playing the games without it.

So as good as Modern Warfare is, as good as Mario Galaxy is, I don’t call them truly “next gen” games. Why? Because they fail my “next gen” test, that’s why.

Here’s the test: If a game can be ported to a console in a previous generation and keep its core gameplay and overall design in place, it’s not what I’m calling for the purposes of this piece a “next gen” game. Mario Galaxy was great, but really, it’s a GameCube title with some star-shaking stuff thrown in. Modern Warfare? Amazing, but as the upcoming Wii port attests, it used the 360 and PS3 primarily for better graphics and sound. LittleBigPlanet? Another great game, but the PSP version shows the core experience could have been done on a PS2.

Other games I think fail this test are Halo 3, BioShock, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid 4…OK, pretty much everything. You get the idea. Sure, they’re nice and shiny, and have lovely pre-rendered cutscenes, and there are advanced uses of physics and AI under the hood, and most important of all, advanced online connectivity, but all of those are just tweaks, improvements, icing on the cake, candy for the eyes. None of them fundamentally change the way you approach a game, or a genre.

Not like Mario Kart and F-Zero did with Parallax scrolling. Or Mario 64 with its use of 3D. Or Grand Theft Auto III with its living, breathing city. Those games re-wrote the book. You just couldn’t do GTAIII on the PlayStation. Or Mario 64 on the SNES. They were true “next gen” games.

So why do we have so few this time around? What’s the problem? There’s refinement under the hood. There’s games that some, and especially the developers, may disagree with me on (GTAIV, for example, or Halo 3 and its extensive multiplayer modes). And there are some who could argue, with a fair point, that the same problem plagued most games from the previous generation.

Certainly the cost of development can’t help. Worlds are built with engines, and engines are built on rules. If you wanted to come up with something entirely new, you’d have to do it yourself, which for many developers and publishers in this current economic climate just isn’t feasible.

It can also be argued that a single jump in the mid-90’s – from the 16-bit era to the N64 and PS1 – will long be the most significant in gaming, taking us as it did from 2D to 3D, and that subsequent generations can’t be relied upon to deliver the same level of innovation. Fair, to a point, but then there are still plenty of games like GTAIII that were able to innovate well past the 32-bit era.

One final possibility, however, is that there is innovation going on in today’s games beyond the superficial. It’s just, we can’t see it. Chatting with Bethesda’s Todd Howard on the subject, he put this idea forward:

“I think the visual component of it is the one that everyone notices first, and it’s also the prime part that benefits from what the new hardware gives you,” he says. “So it’s just harder to see the innovations beyond that, but they’re there. I’d guess there’s just as much pure ‘design innovation’ with this generation as there has been in the last few.”

“Look at the basis now for how games handle physics, difficulty, controls, save games, or simple load screens. I know it sounds silly, but I get excited by innovations in loading screens, because they’re the worst part of a game. I’m interested in how games simply start.”

Promising, yeah, but does that really hold water when compared to more fundamental changes? Not really. “There’s been innovations in AI, but it certainly hasn’t kept pace with the graphic fidelity, which yields this overall feeling of it going backwards,” Howard adds. “The environments are so complex now in games, that building good AI just to manoeuvre them takes serious time. But that’s not an innovation, that’s simply the AI doing what it could do before in a game.

“My hope is, as we developers turn the corner on how to make the games simply ‘work,’ that we can innovate more on how the games respond to the player, whether that is the AI, or socially, or something else.”

Maybe that explains it, and in 30 years, we’ll look back on the current generation as one where developers were finding their feet, laying the groundwork for sprawling, innovating and revolutionary titles of the future.

The developer’s Pete Hines posted a statement on the Bethesda Blog today, clarifying Howard’s comments regarding the future of the Elder Scrolls series.

That was not a direct quote from him. That was someone’s interpretation of what he said. I know, I was there. At his QuakeCon talk he was asked when TESV is coming out and Todd replied, “Don’t look for a new Elder Scrolls game in the near future.” He also went on to say how much the franchise means to us and that it definitely will continue. He just wasn’t going to provide any timeframe on “when.” This should not be news to anyone that has been paying attention. Both Todd and I have said repeatedly that, of course, we’re going to do another Elder Scrolls game. The last one was enormously popular. So was the one before that. You get the idea. So do we.

In other words, the fate of the series isn’t in question, and it shouldn’t be.

Hines goes on in his post to clarify statements Howard made about an Elder Scrolls MMO, pointing out that neither Todd nor anyone on Todd’s team worked on MMOs, and when the studio that does work on them – ZeniMax Online – is ready to show what they are creating, they’ll show it.

I am trying to imagine an angry Pete Hines here, and it terrifies me. Just believe the man and move on before anyone gets hurt.

Clarifying About Next Elder Scrolls game, MMO, etc. [Bethesda Blog]

I thought I’d do something different for today’s Monday Musings. Inspired by a thread over on NeoGAF, I’ve been thinking about what I would do if I was designing the next Elder Scrolls. I’m a big fan of Bethesda, from Daggerfall right through to Fallout 3. But as much as I love their games, I’m equally aware of their flaws. Here’s my attempt to fix ‘em.

1. Reduce World Scaling
In Oblivion, the whole world levelled up with you. It was supposed to provide you with a constant challenge, but in effect it meant you never felt more powerful. Also, those puny bandits you fought at Level-1 would start wearing super-rare glass armour by the time you hit Level-20. Fallout 3 scaled certain quest encounters, but it also had areas that would kick your arse until you were at a high enough level. It makes the world feel dangerous and more varied. And more fun.

2. Stealthier Stealth
Two of the Elder Scrolls main guilds are stealth-based. Yet the way stealth works is primitive, with detection based mainly on your Sneak stat and whether the AI is facing your direction. Thief and Assassin players would love to take advantage of a wider range of stealth abilities: snuffing out light sources, breaking into windows, climbing across rooftops, disguises, using thrown objects as bait or as a decoy, etc. Melee combat made huge strides from Morrowind to Oblivion, so this time it should be the stealth system receiving the innovation.

3. No Morality System
No karma, no alignment, no blatant pet-the-puppy/kick-the-puppy choices, thanks. Morality in the Elder Scrolls should be based on the guilds you join and the quests you take.

4. Overhaul Levelling
Levelling in Oblivion was utterly broken. To attain the maximum +5 attribute bonuses, you spent more time worrying about which skills you were grinding and not enough simply enjoying the game. The next Elder Scrolls should either switch to an experience based system (where XP is awarded for completing quests and performing skill based actions, as in Fallout 3) or a system where your skills increases are reflected in attribute bonuses in a more seamless and incremental way.

5. Revamped Speechcraft
The persuasion minigame in Oblivion was, frankly, stupid. Sure, it was an interesting little puzzle, but it had no place in determining how successful your conversation options would be. There’s a mod out there called Persuasion Overhaul that actually makes those Coerce, Joke, Boast and Admire options meaningful, based on who you are and what type of NPC you’re speaking to. For example, a burly Nord drinking in a tavern is more likely to be persuaded if you begin boasting and joking with him. It lends so much more personality to the people with whom you interact. Bethesda should copy it.

6. Open Cities
Let’s get back to the Morrowind way of having all the cities right there in the world, where you move seamlessly from the wilderness to civilisation with no loading screens masquerading as town gates.

7. Greater Geographical Variety
Sure, there are different regions within Cyrodiil, each with their own climate and type of vegetation. But there aren’t all that many unusual and eye-catching locations. A huge modding effort has seen the creation of dozens of “unique landscapes” available to add to the countryside. It’s paid off, too, creating a far more diverse and interesting world to explore. I’d love to see some startlingly different areas in the next Elder Scrolls, something to give me a reason to venture out in the wild for some sightseeing, rather than just bush-bashing to the next quest marker.

8. More Voice Actors
More, as in, more than the three guys who voiced the entire cast last time around.

9. Better Character Models
People in Cyrodiil were hideously ugly. People in the Capital Wasteland weren’t much better, and I’m not just talking about the ghouls. Bethesda must know this has been a weakness of their games for some time. I can’t imagine they’re not working on vastly improving their character models, especially the faces.

10. No Main Quest
Yes. The main quest in Oblivion was bad. (It was bad in Fallout 3, too.) For me, it’s not so much the quality of the writing or the scenarios the quest takes you through. It’s more the incongruity of it. The main quest is supposed to give you direction and impetus; it’s urgent you find the emperor’s heir and close those Oblivion gates. Yet here’s a game where the whole point is: do whatever you want. You can ignore the main quest in Oblivion for years of in-game time, and still that threat from Mehrunes Dagon never appears to get any closer.
What if the next Elder Scrolls didn’t have one? What if your entire adventure was about the guilds you joined, the people you met, the quests you stumbled upon, and the life you create for yourself? Expand the guilds and the factions, make more of them and make your rise through their ranks more meaningful. But don’t ask me to save the world again. Seriously, I’ve got better things to do.

So, Elder Scrolls fans, how do you rate my suggestions? And what do you think Bethesda should do? What would you like to see in the next Elder Scrolls game?

Typical of new Steam additions, the updated Bethesda catalog is currently cheap. That means things like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition Deluxe, which packs in the original Oblivion plus nine downloadable content offerings, including the horse armour pack, can be yours for just $US19.99 USD. That’s something like a zillion hours for every dollar you spend.

The addition of Bethesda’s older stuff, Call of Cthulhu and Morrowind, also comes with a batch of new, as the publisher’s Rogue Warrior is also listed for pre-purchase.

Thanks to KefkaticFanatic for the heads up.

Bethesda Softworks [Steam]

Reader Tom sends us the above image, and while I haven’t seen the same advertisement myself (nor can I see any mention of the games in the retail store), I can confirm that a listing for “Oblivion: Game of the Year Edition” has magically appeared overnight in my press account.

I, incidentally, have never played any of Oblivion’s expansions. Looks like that’s about to change.

Despite spending much of their time in London last week talking about Fallout, Rogue Warrior and WET, Bethesda’s Pete Hines couldn’t help but bring up the role-playing game as well.

“We’re not talking about the next Elder Scrolls, but that doesn’t mean we’re not doing anything with the franchise,” Hines said.

What they’re doing is working with Del Rey Books on a new series of novels based on the video game series.

Penned by New York Times bestselling author Greg Keyes, the novels will be original stories based in The Elder Scrolls universe, Hines said. The first novel, The Infernal City, will be published this fall.

The Infernal City is set after the events of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and finds the citizens of Tamriel facing an uncertain future.

“Floating high above the land is a strange and mysterious city that is casting a horrifying shadow – wherever it falls, people die and rise again as undead. It is up to an unlikely duo – a seventeen-year-old girl named Annaig and the Emperor’s young son, Prince Attrebus – to rescue the kingdom from doom.”

Keyes wrote the Age of Unreason Tetrology, three New York Times bestselling Star Wars novels and the Kingdom of Thorn and Bone.

Hines said that Bethesda has already been given the first half of the first novel’s manuscript. And that Keyes is working with Bruce Nesmith and Curt Coleman, both of whom worked on The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall back in the day and on Oblivion.

“We felt this was a good opportunity for us to do something with a great new author,” Hines said.

“We’ve been big fans of Greg’s work for a long time, and we’re thrilled he agreed to bring his talents to The Elder Scrolls. We see these books as a natural extension of the franchise and think fans will love the stories and characters Greg has created.”

Fallout 3’s “The Pitt” and “Operation: Anchorage” – in terms of size and complexity – are where Bethesda wants to be with its DLC strategy, according to Bethesda’s marketing and PR vice president.

Pete Hines, talking to Gamasutra on Friday, said Oblivion’s “Knights of the Nine” DLC is the model going forward. “It’s substantive and it adds multiple hours of game play and new items, but we can do it in a time frame that allows us to get it out without waiting forever.”

Hines was obliquely referring to the other two extreme examples of Oblivion DLC – the painfully skimpy, much derided horse armour, and the behemoth Shivering Isles – “what I think was the first ever full expansion on a console for download.”

Hines also touts Bethesda’s attention to managing its product’s life cycles as “something we do better than most publishers, if not all publishers.” He adds:

They have these large number of titles and they just don’t think about them like we do. … We don’t give up on our stuff, ever. There is always a market and a niche and people out there who are willing to buy it. DLC is just another component of that.

With all due respect, PS3 gamers might feel a bit differently about Bethesda’s attention to their products. Sure, there’s probably a Microsoft contract holding back that DLC. Maybe Bethesda is still thinking about them, too, but PS3 gamers might still feel a bit neglected, if not given up on.

Growing Your Long Tail: Hines On Bethesda’s Keen Focus [Gamasutra via EvilAvatar]