Interviews// Bethesda Softworks: Shivering Isles Interview

SPOnG: I remember first seeing the pack for Morrowind and – not being a big fan of RPGs myself – I was still quite taken with it. However, here in the UK – I’m not sure if it’s the same in the States - there is still quite a stigma attached to fantasy and to role-playing. Of course, there’s a certain market for that, but outside of that is it not difficult to take fantasy RPGs ‘mass market’ because of this type of stigma?
Pete Hines: Yeah, I think that was probably true once upon a time, but it’s a lot less true now. Part of that is due in part to Peter Jackson, who took Lord of the Rings and made it really cool to like and enjoy fantasy stuff. You know, nobody who does what we do can say that they haven’t been affected by Tolkien. He was a huge influence on anybody who’s made role-playing games. Ever. And Peter Jackson took that and made it accessible to a mass market and made it cool to be into elves and dwarves and all that sort of thing. So that’s certainly helped to change that stigma.

And then of course, there is the fact that a game like Oblivion is so remarkable looking that brings a lot of people in. They see the graphics and go “Wow! What is that? That looks amazing!” And then they pick it up and play it and they find out that you don’t need to be a Dungeons and Dragons freak to enjoy a role-playing game. You don’t need to know about extensive stats and all that to enjoy a good RPG. You can control it very naturally. It plays like a first person shooter. So we see much less of a problem with that anti-RPG stigma.
There’s still some of that there, and it’s still a challenge for us, but not nearly what it used to be.

SPOnG: So with that being a challenge, what are you doing – say with the Shivering Isles expansion – to appeal to non-traditional RPG players?
Pete Hines: Honestly? Not much! That’s not who it’s for. If they weren’t convinced by Oblivion and what it was and how well it’s done and all the critical success it’s had at this point, then doing an expansion is probably not going to make them run out and buy the game. So, we’re targeting the millions of players worldwide who bought and like Oblivion – so hopefully the majority of them will want to play it. So, we’re marketing to those folks – letting them know “here’s all new stuff for you to do – new content, new quests, a whole new place for you to go to that’s unlike anything you did in Oblivion….but at the same time stays true to the spirit of this RPG that you’ve enjoyed so much… so you can take your existing character and go into this whole new place…” So that’s where we’re going to make our bones, not with those who’ve ignored Oblivion for the last year. It may happen, but there’s no point us running after those folks.

SPOnG: The one thing I always feel after playing Oblivion, and after just having played Shivering Isles earlier today, is this incredible sense of immersion in the game. It’s almost like… it’s a very weird feeling when you stop playing the game… Last year after first playing the original game for a whole afternoon at Take Two in Windsor, I found myself wandering around a nearby park having these very strange flashbacks to the game… It was very hard to come back to the real world! Is this common?
Pete Hines: Heh! We certainly hear similar stories from a lot of folks. We love to hear about people who lose track of time. We love when we hear stories about people staying up playing till 4am and having no idea! As a game developer, that’s what you live for. You live to create an experience that is so engrossing and engaging that you lose track of where you are and what you are doing… You look at your watch and four hours have passed and you haven’t eaten and you still haven’t taken your jacket off from when you got home from work…

So, yeah, that’s what you live for, to create that kind of compelling experience, that you are so focused on what is going on there that you get this sense of fully-believable immersion in the world… So those stories let us know we’ve been successful.

SPOnG: So what are the current sales figures for Oblivion? Is it the best seller in the series to date?
Pete Hines: Yeah, well not actually quite yet, but it's destined to be Yeah. We announced just over a few weeks ago that we'd sold over three million units worldwide. Morrowind was, and still is, a huge seller for us. It's still selling on PC and on Xbox, so it will take a while still for Oblivion to pass it. But on the track it's on there's no doubt that it will.