It’s going to be a while yet before we hear anything of either Starfield or The Elder Scrolls 6, both of Bethesda Game Studios’ upcoming single player RPGs. While there’s still a chance that Starfield launches on current-gen platforms, The Elder Scrolls 6 is primed for next-gen systems. So how does Bethesda make sure that the work its doing on those games is in line with what Microsoft and Sony have got planned for their systems?
According to Pete Hines, senior VP of marketing at Bethesda, the studios have been in communication with Microsoft and Sony about the direction their hardware will be headed in to make sure they’re on the same page, and even though that hasn’t gone to the extent where they flat out tell them everything about the specs of the systems, there seems to be enough communication between them to make sure that they’re headed in the right direction.
“All of our studios and we as a publisher talk to them a lot about where they are going, where they are headed and what we can expect,” Hines said while speaking with Stevivor. “You can shoot for the moon, but if you are literally just shooting for the moon and ignoring everything else then don’t be surprised if you’ve veered wildly off course. You want to shoot for the moon but make sure that at least it’s along the same kind of path that somebody else is doing, because if you’re not – or sort of uniformed and going off into a different direction, you might find yourself all alone. You might find that the degree in which you have to pivot is a pretty big chasm.”
“It can be a little bit of both, but definitely we’re talking to all of these platform partners and figuring out where they are headed,” he continued. “To be honest with you they don’t just come back and go, ‘Oh here are the specs as of today’, they’re not going to do that. But they’ll say, ‘We like where you’re headed’, or, ‘You’re thinking in the same way we are’, whatever sort of vague yes or no they can give us. It’s a little bit of dancing around it but we feel like our teams have a good idea of where they should be heading down the road.
“It’s not just about next year or the year after, we have studios planning 4 and 5 years out. They need to make sure they are thinking in the right way.”
It’s not surprising to hear that- it stands to reason that if the next generation of consoles is on the horizon (which definitely seems to be the case), then both Sony and Microsoft will be wanting developers and publishers to already be working on games to support their future systems. For instance, the developers of Final Fantasy 15, Luminous Productions, also seem to be working on a new AAA game for the PS5. Read more on that through here.
