I love Bethesda games- I loved Oblivion, I loved Skyrim, I’ve even come around to liking Fallout 4 by now. But I’d have to be blind – literally so, in this case – to assume that their games actually look any goo. While Oblivion was a bit of a looker for its time, and Skyrim at least has a great art style going for it, Fallout 4 was, simply put, an ugly game. It was an ugly game, with no redeeming quality to it, visually speaking, at least.
In an interview with Metro UK, Bethesda’s Pete Hines discussed the visuals of Bethesda’s games, noting that while the development team would love for nothing more than its games to be state of the art when it comes to graphics and visuals, Bethesda will always favor interactivity and gameplay over sheer graphical grunt.
“I would say that we always want our games to look as good as possible, within the context of what we’re doing,” he said. “And that is creating really massive and interactive worlds. So you can make any number of sacrifices or cuts to get there, if you’re willing to do that. I simply don’t think that we are, that it’s not enough for you to be able to go all over the place. That we want you to be able to walk into a room and have a table like this one [points to ordinary table] with objects like this, but they’re not just textures that you can’t actually do anything with. There’s a cost to everything when it comes to development.”
Which is fair enough- in the end, I can hardly blame a developer unwilling to compromise on their vision for how their game should play (the all important part of a video game) just to make it look shinier. We get enough of that from most developers this generation already- it’s nice and refreshing to see Bethesda standing up for something different. That said, let’s hope that Fallout 5 and The Elder Scrolls 6 at least end up looking better for their time than Fallout 4 did for its time.
