Pete Hines retired from Bethesda in 2023 after nearly a quarter-century at the company, where he did everything from writing game manuals and stuffing boxes to hosting E3 conferences and guiding the company’s global marketing and PR strategies. Three years down the road, though, he’s still one of the studio’s most staunch defenders.
In a new interview with Firezide Chat, Hines said he used to be frustrated by the way Bethesda seemed to be held to a different standard that other, less ambitious studios: Bethesda’s games often faced criticism for being janky or buggy, but they’re also tremendously complex, at a scale few others are willing to attempt.
“Who else out in the world allows you to just stack up one quest after another on the fly while you’re going wherever you want and doing whatever you want?” Hines said. “Go try that shit in Red Dead Redemption 2.”
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“[Start a quest], then try and stop doing that quest and do something else and see what the game does. What does the game do? It says, no fucking way. Pick one of these. We’re not keeping track of all this shit at the same time.”
“And you’re probably at some point going to be able to break it because there’s so much chaos in here. But the game experience you get for that is something you can’t find anywhere else. Nobody gives you that level of freedom. Nobody says walk into this room full of weapons and cast a spell or launch a grenade and watch all the shit fly around the room. They don’t do that.”
Bethesda itself doesn’t do that quite like it used to—Morrowind is probably where the studio’s wreck the world approach, and its jank, peaked—but I think the point holds: They’re not the strongest narrative experiences ever, but systemically, Bethesda’s worlds can’t be beat. And Hines thinks the team should get more credit for what they do than where they fall short: “Put some respect on the name of not just Todd but this whole team that leans into the shit everybody else runs away from.”