Pete Hines on Starfield: 'We could make a safer, less buggy, less risky game if we wanted to'

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

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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.

Bethesda has been very canny with their Starfield promotion, boasting endlessly about the size and scope of the game, which includes thousands of explorable planets. It’s left fans trying to separate hype from reality and searching for possible cracks in the game’s façade. Well, with a number of leaked copies of Starfield now in the wild, it seems one has been found.

Bethesda Game Studios’ titles have a long and stories tradition of being heaven for the modding community, and titles put out by the studio has enjoyed incredibly long lives as a result of what the community has created using their modding tools. Unsurprisingly, Starfield looks set to continue that tradition.