Skyrim Developer Says PC Development is a Headache
Between piracy and the infinite number of hardware configurations, developing games for the PC can be a real "headache."
Wednesday in an interview with Joystiq, Bethesda VP of Marketing Pete Hines admitted that PC development can be a "headache," especially when the team is trying to create a universal experience across multiple platforms. He states some of the obvious factors which have reportedly driven other developers completely (insane and) over to the console side, namely piracy and numerous hardware configurations.
"From a technical standpoint, yes, the PC is a headache," he acknowledged. "It just is. A million different possibilities of hardware, drivers, etc. As you saw with Rage, all it takes is some bad video card drivers and years of hard work comes off as 'buggy' when in fact it's a really solid, stable game."
Naturally piracy is also a major factor to deal with in PC development. Other studios and publishers have claimed that services should be offered to convince gamers not to steal games while others force titles to remain connected at all times or come packed with heavy-duty DRM.
"Unless you decide not to make your games available for PC, it's a problem and you have to deal with it," he said. "So we do the best we can to protect it without resorting to Draconian measures, and we continue to enthusiastically support our PC fans with things like the Creation Kit and the ability to create and add unlimited amounts of mods and content to your existing PC game."
Also during the interview, Hines was asked if he could see Bethesda developing anything else other than massive RPGs. He said that he'd like to see Todd Howard develop a modern NCAA football title because both men love the sport. Still, he would expect fan responses to be less-then lackluster given large-scale RPGs is what Bethesda does best.
"We do what we do best," said Hines. "We make big, crazy RPGs, and fortunately for us the previous ones have done really well so there's no reason for us not to keep making them. If that's what we loved doing and nobody wanted to play them, we'd have a problem on our hands."
Guess that means we'll never see another Terminator title from the studio ever again? To read the full Joystiq interview, head here. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim lands on store shelves tomorrow, November 11, 2011, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PC.
- Gaming,
- Bethesda Game Studios,
- Skyrim ,
- Elder-Scrolls ,
- RPG ,
- Piracy ,
- RAGE
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What they mean then is they have to do some extra work and program DX11 for PC versions as PC gamers are getting tired of outdated DX9 crap being ported from consoles to the PC platform and then seeing poor sales figures. It's not all about piracy on the PC, games which are programmed correctly and have dedicated features that only a PC is capable of running normally see large sales figures.
funny, i thought the reason direct x was created was so devs had a standard to work to independent of the system configs... as far as i know you program your games to dx9/10/11 api's without having to worry what hardware its gonna be used on... basically if your machine supports the api's then the games will work....
sounds like he either doesnt understand how the games are made or he is trying to pull a fast 1 in the hope he can baffle us with tech shpeel to hide the fact they made a hash of there game...
skyrim is basically fallout 3 re-skinned and reworded... we all know that the Bethesda softworks engine isnt that stable so i guess he will try and blame pc hardware for there software failings.
wow i really love the word basically
@HEXiT: I guess it is more performance than "working". A six year old rig with an aging graphics card, single-core processor and 512MB RAM can support the DX9 API, but most people wouldn't call single digit frames per second to be a "working" game.
Yeah, a console is a fixed hardware platform (bar the HDD) with known performance behaviour, where as the PC is variable and needs detail settings, but having seen my wife playing Skyrim at the weekend with everything cranked up to Ultra-High then it is incredibly spectacular and I can't see consoles coming anywhere close to the level of detail (plus they have to put up with Hi-Def TVs, which aren't as good a resolution as many monitors, especially if they're only HD-Ready).
Skyrim looks ALOT better on PC, why in the hell they want inferior platforms for their games is beyond me
"skyrim is basically fallout 3 re-skinned and reworded"
Agreed. But I loved fallout 3 so that's not a bad thing. But yes I agree with the general principal that we (at least I am) are sick of these console games on PC.
People who can afford high spec PCs have enough money to purchase GOOD games made for PC and therefore devs should be targeting these people whom have an appreciation for fine quality games and forget this whole "oh but if we make actual proper PC games boo boo bi boo, pirates boo boo bi boo".
PC games practically don't exist any more, we're playing games designed and built for 5 year old technology. When is the last time you saw a game really push the boundaries? Something that blew away all console games? I haven't seen one for about... 5 years!