Pete Hines on Starfield, Bethesda and bugs: "We embrace chaos"

In late 2001, the dot-com crash struck ZeniMax, and a team of thirty-some developers in the company’s basement feared for their jobs. They were late delivering their new role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, to Microsoft; their board of directors had begun having doubts about the whole videogame enterprise. People were pulling seven-day workweeks on something none of them were sure would ever see the light of day. Morale was in the toilet.

While Bethesda may have hit a slam dunk with Starfield, the same can hardly be said about Arkane Studios’ Redfall. Having launched just a few months prior to Starfield, Redfall was met with a wall of well-warranted critique. Yet, according to Bethesda’s head of publishing, the book hasn’t yet closed on Redfall.

There’s been a bad trend in video games over the last several years that gamers are truly tired of. We’re speaking of developers launching titles that aren’t ready for release and then expecting gamers to play them, buy them, or stay with them despite their “buggy states.” An excellent example of this is Redfall. The game by Arkane Studios, who had an excellent track record before this title, was an unmitigated disaster due to how buggy and boring the game was at launch. The title was dead on arrival, and it’s stayed that way ever since.

Bethesda's head of publishing, Pete Hines, has said that game bugs are inevitable and they ultimately allow the studio to lean into player freedom. 

Bethesda’s head of publishing, Pete Hines, has affirmed that Arkane’s co-op FPS Redfall won’t be abandoned, and that “we're going to get it to be a good game”. 

Bethesda Game Studios’ titles have always had a reputation for being technically rough, buggy games, and though Starfield is very clearly the most polished a BGS game has been at launch in a long, long time, it still has its fair share of technical hiccups.

Bethesda Softworks publishing head Pete Hines has reassured players that Arkane isn't giving up on Redfall, despite its lukewarm reception on launch earlier this year. In fact, he's confident it will be a good game people want to play on Game Pass ten years from now.

Bethesda games like Skyrim and Fallout are known for being epic open world RPGs and for being a bit buggy, but these smaller issues in Starfield also allowed the game to be so grand according to one developer.

Never has a Bethesda game been released without at least a few bugs. We all know how it goes… we either cease to play Skyrim because our AI companions won’t stop running into traps, or we embrace the wonderful weirdness and turn it into streaming content. And it’s not just us players who feel the need to cut Bethesda games some slack for their shortcomings.

Bethesda's Senior VP of Global Marketing and Communications, Pete Hines, wants people to skip sleep and stay up in order to play Starfield.

Starfield is so close, you can almost feel the cold void clutching at your bones through the thin sheen of your delicate spacesuit: September 1 for everyone who's purchased the Premium or Constellation editions of the game, and September 6 for everyone else. And when it's finally out the door, that clears the deck for the game everyone's really been waiting for: The Elder Scrolls 6. Right? Well, yes, but not anytime soon.

Starfield might be right around the corner, but that doesn’t mean that gamers can expect to hear any updates about The Elder Scrolls 6 any time soon, according to Bethesda’s head of publishing, Pete Hines.