Fallout 76 – Bethesda’s big game this Christmas

GameCentral talks to Bethesda frontman Pete Hines about Fallout 76, Rage 2, Doom Eternal, and… Super Smash Bros.

As much as we enjoy speaking to game developers, they’re usually not the people in charge of the purse strings or the ones making the really big decisions. But most video game publishers don’t like to put themselves in the limelight and interviews with the execs in charge are rare and usually not very edifying. But Pete Hines is different. Bethesda’s vice president of PR and marketing is constantly offering himself up for interview and, for a man in his position at least, is always surprisingly candid.



We’ve spoken to him a number of times before and recently caught up with him again at last month’s Gamescom event in Germany. After one of their busiest E3s ever Bethesda weren’t showing any new demos but Hines was happy to talk about new games such as Fallout 76 and Rage 2, as well as the company’s attitude toward new game announcements, release dates, games as a service, and Nintendo.

Along the way, Hines managed to confirm Wolfenstein III, imply that the death of Dishonored may have been exaggerated, and even hint that a Bethesda character turning up in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate wouldn’t be the most unlikely thing in the world…


GC: I’m not trying to butter you up when I say this – although I guess I am in a way – but I do appreciate the way you make yourself available for interviews like this. You seem to do it all the time, with various people, and that’s very unusual for an exec at a big publisher.

PH: Well, since I started in ’99 one of the roles I always had was as a company spokesman, so whether it’s Quakecon or here or whatever I spend a lot of time with the games, so I can talk about a lot of them – if they need somebody to talk about Legends or talk about Fallout 76 or whatever. I can cover a lot of bases and speak for the company from a publisher level.

GC: Well, good. So, are you… happy at the moment? You must’ve been pleased with how E3 went, I think most people agreed you had the best show.

PH: Yeah, I felt like we had a pretty strong line-up, a pretty strong message. I think we felt good about the show that we had and what we had to talk about, both near term stuff and longer-term stuff. We were pretty pleased.

GC: How important is it now for you to have an impressive E3? Every publisher has quiet years, where they don’t necessarily have much new to show, so do you try and finesse the schedules so there’s always something to talk about at that time of year?



PH: Not in terms of the games, it’s more we sort of pivot around where the games are and what makes sense in terms of what we’re gonna say. So, like Doom Eternal, for example, we’re like, ‘Well, we’re sort of revealing Rage 2 and really showing folks what that game is so maybe we wait and show Doom Eternal, and do that full reveal, at Quakecon – just to give those a bit of space apart from each other.

So it’s that sort of thing more than changing the production schedule for E3 next year. We work pretty closely with our devs so that they understand and are part of the process of, ‘Well when are we going to be talking about what?’ So we’re working together and it’s never a surprise like, ‘What do you mean we’re supposed to be at E3?’ Everybody knows early on; here’s when we’re thinking about announcing it, here’s what we’re planning on talking about, and working on that with them.

GC: One of the most interesting things at E3 was that you did talk about Starfield and the new Elder Scrolls, even though they’re years away. Which is interesting because you started the whole fad of announcing big name games only six months or so before they came out.

PH: Uh-hmm.

GC: And now you’ve gone to completely the other extreme.

PH: Well, in this particular case we felt like… number one, we had been getting asked about Starfield for years because we had filed the trademark and everybody was sniffing around and asking, ‘Well, what is that?’ And a couple of years ago Todd [Howard] said… we confirmed, yes we’re gonna make Elder Scrolls VI but we have two other major titles that they’re gonna work on first.


And we felt that with Fallout 76 that it was important to have the context of, ‘Well here’s what else they’re working on’ so we could say, ‘Look, the next thing they’re doing is Starfield – it’s a single-player role-playing game’. We didn’t want folks assuming, ‘Well, they’re making a game like this with 76 so all future Bethesda Game Studios games are going to look like 76. We wanted to be able to show a roadmap and to say, ‘No, the next thing is going to be single-player and it’s gonna be a new IP.’

GC: As a layman that always seems like the right approach to me. I think the problem is not announcing something a long time before it comes out, the problem is doing a new wave of previews every six months for two or three years until you’re sick of hearing about it.

PH: Yeah, right.

GC: Sometimes I’ve even got confused as to whether a game is out yet or not, I’ve played it so much beforehand.

PH: [laughs]

GC: Or even more common I get the final review version and I’ve got to play it for three hours to get to a bit I haven’t seen yet.

PH: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. It’s funny, we talk about that internally as well. But yes, you’re correct. We didn’t do it from the standpoint of, ‘OK, and now we’re actively gonna be talking about and promoting Starfield’. Much in the same way, to use an example from a little bit outside our industry, like what Marvel does in terms of saying, ‘Look, here’s the films that we have and sort of the cadence of things coming up’. And it’s not necessarily, ‘And here’s exactly what that that movie’s gonna be about or who’s starring in it’.


But you have a sense, as a fan, ‘OK, I understand where the next Avengers falls and when there’s gonna be a Captain America, even if I don’t know what the setting or what the names of those things are. We wanted to do something similar, to say, ‘I’m not telling you what the game is, and I’m not gonna have information to share for quite a while, but you know the next thing. Yes, it’s Starfield, it is a new IP, it’s being made by this studio. It’s a single-player RPG, it’ll be a while before it’s ready’.

GC: So you touched there on single-player games, which obviously Bethesda is very closely associated with. And it increasingly feels like it’s only you, Sony, and Nintendo that still make big budget ones on a consistent basis. If it wasn’t for you three it’d be indie games and then just scraps from the table.

PH: It is certainly something that we feel is important and is always gonna be a part of what we’re doing. I mean we’re here, we’ve got Rage 2, we’ve just announced Doom Eternal, we’ve just put out DLC for Prey, there’s Elder Scrolls: Blades – it’s single-player but it also includes an online component… Single-player is an important part of who we are but we’re also willing to have BGS [Bethesda Game Studios] say, ‘We get asked about online and multiplayer and we want to try and do a multiplayer version of our kind of games’.

Even in the case of Wolfenstein, they wanted for this next game they’re making, Youngblood, to say, ‘Well, it’s single-player but because it’s the twin sisters you could play it co-op as well, you could have a friend play the role of the other twin and two of you can play together. We want to try co-op and see what that’s like.’

So long as it’s not forced or arbitrarily tacked on, where we say, ‘Well, Rage 2 – you also have to have multiplayer’. ‘Well the game wasn’t designed…’ Well it doesn’t matter, it needs to be on the box!’ We’ve never really approached games that way. If it makes sense for the kind of experience, great, if not then it can be single-player or it could be online-only or whatever the dev envisions.

GC: I’ve noticed the tone of this discussion has changed recently, in the industry at large, after God Of War was so successful. But six months before that a lot of publishers – not you – were talking as if it was the death of single-player, as if they were no longer economically viable with a big budget. That’s demonstrably not true, so how do you think they came to that conclusion originally?

PH: In fairness, I wouldn’t know. Truthfully, I don’t know, I don’t work there. At the end of the day the challenge that any game developer and publisher has in some way hasn’t changed since I started on this side of the fence in 1999, which is you have to prove a value proposition to your customer. They have to be convinced that what you’re offering is of value to them.

That comes in the form of money, if you’re asking them to buy your game, but if it’s a free-to-play thing you still have a value proposition which is, ‘This is worth your time to play and to try’. Whether it’s taking time away from other games you’re playing or taking time away from other activities they have to be convinced that you’re providing good value.

In some cases, with single-player, that can sometimes be difficult to prove. You should stop playing Fortnite, you should stop playing Overwatch or Doom or Skyrim or whatever you’re playing to come play this other thing. If it’s a shorter experience, like some single-player games can be, then that can be problematic in prying them away from whatever they’re doing to get them to play what you’re making. But we think we have good answers to that stuff and we’re gonna continue to approach that every time in terms of how we answer that question.

GC: One thing that does worry me, and this does seem to be a particular problem with your games, is release dates. You’ve had a lot of great games recently – I think of Dishonored 2 and Wolfenstein II in particular – but as soon as I saw their release dates I, and I know a lot of people, immediately felt that they were doomed coming out at that time of year.

PH: The holidays are always gonna be busy but they’re also a time when lots of people buy lots of games.

GC: I realise that, but a large part of it is gift-buying and picking up the big-name sequels. We see time and again, and not just with Bethesda games, that smaller titles get edged out in that situation.

PH: Well, yes and no because there’s gonna be games that people are gonna buy… like my kids – I have two teenage boys – they don’t rely on anyone to go into a store and arbitrarily decide, ‘Oh, Dishonored 2, that seems like something… ‘ They put together a list and say, ‘This is what I want! Don’t screw up and buy something I don’t want. I want this, this, this, and this.’ And so they know what’s coming out and what they’re excited to play. But at the end of the day Wolfenstein did well for us, because we’re about to do two more Wolfenstein games.

GC: But did Wolfenstein II do well? Because I love those games and the second one had a much later release date than the first one and didn’t seem to make much impact on the charts.

PH: Yeah, it did well!

GC: I mean, we never see sales data but looking at the charts and looking at how quickly a game is discounted is usually a pretty good sign. And it seemed to… I don’t want to say flop, but it seemed flop-esque.

PH: No, no. Could it have done better? Sure. But…

GC: Ultimately I just want you to guarantee there’ll be a Wolfenstein III, because I want to see how it ends.

PH: Yeah, sure. Absolutely we’re making a Wolfenstein III. They said on stage that they’re taking a break from the larger story to do this thing. But we all have to see how that ends. [laughs]

GC: But Dishonored 2, that seemed to go the same way. Everyone worried at the release date beforehand and it seemed to suffer from it in exactly the way they feared. And now apparently the franchise is ‘resting’.

PH: Ah, I wouldn’t read too much into that. Look, Arkane has two studios, they’re working on a number of things. That’s no different than Todd Howard saying, ‘I’m gonna make a Fallout game and then I’m gonna make Starfield before I go back to TES6’. He didn’t say I’m never making another… there’s like, ‘We have an idea for another thing here, we have an idea for another there’.

Skyrim did… well.

GC: I noticed that.

PH: [laughs] People have heard of it, it sold some copies, we released it on a few platforms.

GC: [laughs]

PH: The fact that they’re waiting to do that has nothing to do with the relative success or failure it has to do with, ‘We wanna do this and then we wanna try this other thing because we’ve never done this. And we want to try a new IP because we haven’t done one in… decades’. So what Ricardo [Bare – Dishonored designer] was talking about was more of that. Which is we don’t just want to have a studio that only makes Dishonored games and isn’t allowed to try other things.

GC: I ask only out of concern because even with something like Prey, which I didn’t like quite as much as some people, I still want it to do well. Because we don’t get many of those kind of games anymore and I don’t want to see any publisher become discouraged from making them.

PH: Right, right. I understand.

GC: So there’s nothing that’s happened in terms of sales of recent games that’s caused you to change policy on anything?

PH: No, no. We just released DLC for Prey and we have more coming. We’re putting our money where our mouth is and saying, ‘Look, we do believe in these things. We do believe in single-player! [laughs] We are a business, we are trying to make money so we’re doing things that we think are smart. We’re doing things we think people will want and will be successful. And it’s gonna continue to be a mix.’

GC: Of course it’s not just you that this is an issue for, this Christmas line-up is crazy and spring is just as bad too. The thing I don’t understand is even if you had the money to buy everything you want when would you have the time to play them? Who the hell is going to be able to play all these great-looking games?

PH: Gamers!

GC: [laughs]

PH: Look, it’s the best form of entertainment in the world. There’s a lot of people who say, ‘I don’t wanna watch this series or that… I’m gonna go play’.

GC: I’m always being asked if I’ve seen this or that on Netflix. No I bloody haven’t, how many hours do you think there are in my day?

PH: [laughs]

GC: But when you see Fallout 76 in amongst all these triple, quadruple-A titles, one week after the next almost all the way up to March. Is that a sensible way for the industry to go about things?

PH: Sure! C’mon, that’s been happening for years and years and years.

GC: Yes, and it’s always seemed crazy! Especially as it’s always the same kind of game that suffers: the more experimental, less high profile ones.

PH: But look at how much the industry has grown. Like, I mean, I feel like I had these same conversations when we released Skyrim in November. ‘Oh, look at all the stuff! And 2011, it might be the most competitive holiday ever…’ Skyrim was just fine. The truth is if you look at the installed bases there are a ton of people who own a console of some sort and every year they’re looking for stuff. And everybody is selling to some percentage of that.

It’s not like there’s only a million people out there who are going to buy it so there’s a cap. They’re selling new consoles left and right. There’s more people getting rid of their PS3s and getting a PS4… so the industry continues to grow. If it was that everybody had to sell to the exact same customer you’d have a problem. But people who buy Call Of Duty may not buy this, they may not buy Fallout 76. But the guy who buys Fallout 76 might not be interested in… Assassin’s Creed or whatever. There’s people with different tastes and I think there’s enough room for everybody.

GC: Again, I only say this out of concern that a good game may not earn the success it deserves.

PH: I totally understand your point.

GC: One question I’ve been asking a lot of people at Gamescom, with a certain amount of glee, is how the fallout from Battlefront II has affected them. And it has affected almost everyone – even mobile developers, to my surprise. But I imagine it’s made little difference to you, because Bethesda is entirely blameless when it comes to encouraging loot boxes.

PH: Well, we really try… we’re pretty aware of where the line is and try and sit on the right side of that line. So I’ll give you an example, it’s not like microtransactions haven’t been a four-letter word in this industry, amongst certain folks, for a while. We have microtransactions in Fallout 76. But, they’re only cosmetic. Anything we’re selling for real money you can also buy with in-game currency that you get as a reward while you play.

And part of the main reason we’re doing it is because we want to provide all of the post-launch content that we do for free. So any DLC or new content we add is free to everybody. And we feel like we’re being upfront, we’re doing this in a way that makes sense. It’s only cosmetic, there is no pay-to-win. You can earn it in-game if you don’t want to buy it. If there’s an outfit you want. Like yeah, you’re getting rewards along the way, just use that to go buy the weapons skin or whatever the hell it is you want.

We just feel that that kind of approach is on the right side of the line where folks go, ‘Yeah, I’m okay with that’. And where that line is will sometimes move but generally speaking we feel like we have a pretty good sense… I mean, we had lunchboxes in Fallout Shelter but nobody had an issue with it because that game wasn’t really in your face about the fact that there was a way to spend money.

GC: But that does become slightly more difficult for you now, because I imagine you regard Fallout 76, and probably Rage 2, as a games as a service?

PH: Yeah, for sure…

GC: And I’m not saying that as a bad thing.

PH: No, no I understand. But that phrase is now a huge buzzword. But Fallout 76 is for sure. But, like, Morrowind for us, in a lot of ways, was a game as a service. We put out a mod tool so that people could create their own content and stay engaged with the product for… there’s people who still, 16 years later, are playing and modding Morrowind.

The way in which we put out content for those games was different, like back then we did much larger expansions that took longer and were further apart. But ever since then we have done those games where we’re trying – to go back to my earlier point – provide a value proposition and say, ‘Look, this is a game that you can spend hundreds or thousands of hours in and we’re giving the community the tools to create that content, on an ongoing basis, as much as they want. Like, do whatever the hell you want.

So, yeah, those kind of games fit naturally into those. Now other ones we’ve done, Wolfenstein or Evil Within, well arguably those don’t look much like a game as a service but Rage 2 is a big open world shooter where we should be adding content and things for people to do on an ongoing basis.

GC: So both those games are going to have substantial microtransactions? I assume neither are going to have loot boxes?

PH: Fallout 76 does not, it’s just a store where you can buy cosmetics if you want. And Rage 2 right now doesn’t have any… doesn’t have loot crates for sure. I don’t know whether we’ll have microtransactions for that or not…

GC: But that would be cosmetic only if you did?

PH: Yeah, if we did it it would be that kind of stuff.

GC: So not having loot boxes sounds like company policy.

PH: Well, it’s game by game and what makes sense. But yeah, we try and make sure, on the whole we don’t want to do anything like we’ve seen other folks do where it becomes a major negative or where we’re locking content behind some kind of gate that you basically have to give us money for. That seems bad.

GC: Yes it does. Well that’s great to hear. I assume Fallout 76 is the most games as a servicey of the two, so how long do you envisage that lasting?

PH: Forever.

GC: Forever?

PH: I’m not being ironic. Like, forever. Because other people have said, ‘Is your timeline two years or five years?’ And I said, ‘Well, they’re still playing Morrowind and you go online and look at how many people are playing Fallout 4 and Skyrim. Those games have been out for four and seven years, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of people playing those games every single day, every single month.

So Fallout 76, our timeline is in perpetuity. Now what that content is gonna be, and what that’s gonna look like, I’m not sure. Part of our thing is we need to get people in the game and see how they respond. We’ve even taken this approach for past DLC. I don’t know if you remember Fallout 3? The big consumer reaction when we launched that game was that they were all upset that it had an ending. And we were like, ‘All the previous games had an ending! We thought we were sticking to what that franchise is…’ But they didn’t want an ending and we had a couple of DLCs in the works but the third one we did we were like, ‘Well, we need a DLC that removes the ending of the game and allows you to continue on’.

So 76 is going to be like that. We have some ideas for this and that, but let’s see what people want more of. Let’s see what they respond to and support that.

GC: And just finally, I’m fascinated by how well you’re getting on with Nintendo. Which just seems like the oddest couple in gaming.

PH: Well, here’s the thing. We’ve always gotten on well with Nintendo, it’s just a question of do the games that we make… technically are they a fit for the platforms that they’re making? In the past the simple answer has been no. Like, Skyrim did not run on anything that Nintendo was making. Could we have changed a bunch of stuff to make it work? Maybe. But that’s not our approach.

But in the case of the Switch the game as we made it, does it run on this? Yeah, it does! It runs well. And so Skryim, Wolf, Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, Shelter, Legends – all of those things are things we’ve said, ‘Look, this either can or will run well on a Switch’. And we continue to look at every game that we make, because we want as many people to play it as possible. I have my Switch with me here in Germany, I think it’s great to be able to take games you love with you.

GC: I feel like this has been true of a lot of questions I’ve asked today, but… that seems like the sensible approach, so why isn’t everyone doing it?

PH: [laughs] I don’t know.

GC: Who’s the dev that did Doom? Push Button?

PH: Panic Button. Yeah, yeah.

GC: They’re great.

PH: They’re awesome.

GC: But they’re also independent, so why isn’t everyone lining up at their door asking them to make Switch ports for them?

PH: It’s just… it’s not that we don’t pay attention to what’s going on in the industry but we tend not to be the chasers. We would rather deal with things our own way, whether it’s VR or Switch or whatever and say, ‘Look, this makes sense for us and who we are and the kind of games we make and the audience we’re trying to reach’. And somebody else might look at that exact same situation and say, ‘I see why it makes sense for them but it doesn’t for us… for whatever reason’.

(A wild PR guy appears and attempts to wrap things up)

GC: Would you consider making an exclusive Nintendo title?

PH: It’s possible, but that’s up to the devs in terms of what game is it that they’d be talking about?

GC: Ubisoft are the other Western publisher that gets on well with Nintendo, and they made Mario + Rabbids where they were able to actually borrow Nintendo characters to use in it. Have you had that kind of development conversation with Nintendo?

PH: I’m not gonna… [laughs]

GC: I’m not expecting you to announce a game but have you talked to them about that sort of thing?

PH: We’re always having conversations with them, but again those conversations wouldn’t necessarily take place with me, they’d take place with a dev to say, ‘We have an idea for a this or a that and we wanna do a game that is a crossover with the Switch’.

GC: I never feel we have enough collaborations in this industry, between developers with very different skillsets.

PH: Sure, although I will say they’re probably not easy to do. I’ve done some licence work before and there is a lot of baggage that comes with it, with all these different rules for how you can do things.

GC: [laughs] I bet Nintendo are terrible for that!

PH: Yeah!

(The PR guy reappears, trying to shoo us out.)

GC: This will just take a second, I can guarantee he’s going to give a very short answer to this.

PH: [laughs]

GC: Have you spoken to them about Smash Bros.?

PH: Oh yeah.

GC: I see. Well, let’s leave it at that. Thanks very much for your time.

PH: No problem, nice to see you again.

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