The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered / Bethesda & Virtuos
Pete Hines, the former head of marketing at Bethesda, said that the creators of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion redesigned the combat system three times before the game’s release. And the reason was the philosophy of Todd Howard.
Hines explained that Howard’s approach forced the team not to focus on internal ideas about the “right” battle. He told them to look at the results of testing and how it felt.
“The great Todd Howard says that great games are played, not made. Meaning, every idea you have about what’s good or not only matters if somebody starts playing it and then that’s what’s going to define whether it’s good or not,” explains Hines of the company’s philosophy.
That’s why the combat system was changed three times during the development of Oblivion, and the team deliberately avoided giving away the details of the combat system. They weren’t sure if the current version would be the final version, so they focused on the elements of the game that they thought players would definitely like.
In fact, later Bethesda avoided details even about the Oblivion remaster, which had neither an advertising campaign nor pre-orders. Despite significant problems with optimization on any hardware, game confidently broke into the top at the start. Now the situation is a bit worse: after patch 1.2 in Steam the game’s rating dropped to 61% with “mixed” reviews. The reason is simple: poor performance on PC, freezes, FPS “drops” and bugs that cause crashes even during save.
But in general, this practice of improvisation has happened in other Bethesda projects. During the testing of Dishonored, one of the QA specialists accidentally inhabited a fish when he was checking the damage from falling. The developers didn’t even know that this feature existed — it was only intended for rats and humans. Instead of fixing the bug, the team decided to capitalize on the discovery: level designers created hidden routes for fish so that players could enter buildings through pipes, swimming like a slippery perch.
“It’s a great example of how a random find turns into a game changer,” Heins adds.
Although some players may argue with the words of Bethesda’s exec. Recently, most of all criticized Starfield, especially after the release of the Shattered Space DLC. Players were dissatisfied with the weak plot, technical problems, and limited freedom of action. The same dissatisfaction was expressed with Fallout 76, which has a controversial reputation. Although the recent the update with the ability to play as gulas aroused interest and more content based on the Amazon seriesMany fans believe that the game does not meet the standards of the series. So, Todd Howard’s philosophy has its flaws.
Source: DBLTAP
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