The flexible and reactive sandbox that Bethesda RPGs are known for delivers a "level of freedom" that "everybody else runs away from," reckons retired studio veteran Pete Hines, and a lot of that comes down to the studio's Creation Engine.
In a long interview with journalist Kirk McKeand's Firezide Chat, Hines digs deeper into an argument he's made before: nobody does it like Bethesda. Here, he focuses on how Bethesda "leans into the shit" that game developers would normally avoid due to technical or design limitations or concerns.
"Look around the industry," he says. "Who else? This is one of the things that used to frustrate me the most doing marketing and PR for Bethesda. If you're going to hold us accountable for stuff, please do it in the context of what they're doing.
"Who else out in the world allows you to just stack up one quest after another on the fly while you're going wherever you want and doing whatever you want? Go try that shit in Red Dead Redemption 2."
The comparison to Rockstar's (arguable) magnum opus is an interesting one. Bethesda games are known for some jank, something folks like Skyrim lead Bruce Nesmith have owned up to, but also for deep and dynamic systems. Red Dead Redemption 2, one of the most celebrated open-world games ever made, is higher-fidelity and more polished but also more prescriptive and selective in its experiences – fully capable of emergent gameplay, but not to the chaotic, daisy-chained degree of a Bethesda game. You spend more time doing things Rockstar's way in Red Dead compared to the freewheeling Bethesda approach in, say, Fallout 4.
Hines highlights the technical challenge involved in this type of game. "Try and stop doing that quest and do something else and see what the game does," he says. "What does the game do? It says, no fucking way. Pick one of these. We're not keeping track of all this shit at the same time.
"And it's like, hey, put some respect on the name of not just Todd [Howard] but this whole team that leans into the shit everybody else runs away from."
Hines also backs Howard's claim that "the most important thing he's ever created is not actually Oblivion or Skyrim or Fallout 4. It's the Creation Engine. It's the Creation Kit." While the engine is often criticized for producing visually dated, buggy, or increasingly familiar games, Hine suggests it is peerless in what it can do for the sandbox. And "if we don't have a tool that allows us to build and manage and organize the world like this, we're never going to do it," he says.
"We don't have one quest at a time," he says of Bethesda's games. "We got checkpoints and save points and blah blah blah. They say we don’t fucking care. Go wherever you want. Try and break the game. We created it for you to do that. And you're probably at some point going to be able to break it because there's so much chaos in here. But the game experience you get for that is something you can't find anywhere else. Nobody gives you that level of freedom."
Bethesda's latest major RPG, Starfield, has become an interesting examination of the studio's own design philosophy. At launch, some longtime fans criticized its limited encounter variety and the less-handcrafted feel of its massive solar system. After its most recent update, the Free Lanes update, some fans like that have found that Starfield now feels a bit more like your usual Bethesda RPG precisely because of changes to exploration (and some quality-of-life fixes improving pacing and general playability).
Some of that wanderlust, the feel of a world worth exploring, has been regained, and it acts almost as a multiplier for the reactive systems Hines describes. I'd argue that Bethesda games are fundamentally about doing what you want in an interesting world, so if the world becomes less interesting, so, too, does doing things in it. And more broadly, the enduring modding communities for Bethesda games like Skyrim provide convincing evidence for Hines' claims about the power of player freedom and a convincing world simulation.
Weighing up the Creation Engine, Hines puts it this way: "Whether it's Elder Scrolls or Fallout, recognizing the need for a tool that would allow you to create and organize all of that chaos and still allow all that freedom – and then giving that tool to fans and saying do whatever you want, change whatever you can, undo our stuff or add your own stuff, we don't care. That's really powerful. It created a different community around Bethesda Game Studios than I think you ever get if they do it another way."
