OXM recently conducted an interview with Bethesda executive Pete Hines (via Games Radar) and in it Hines shed some light on many aspects of the company, and one particular area of discussion was regarding Bethesda's willingness to take as long as is necessary to get a game right. When asked about this, Hines responded:
"I get your point. I don't think we're unusually happy! *laughs* We are still a company. We do have to pay salaries and keep the lights on and it's not like we take these things lightly or easily. Games are hard to make and sometimes things happen. But we never take that stuff like, "Oh, it's fine, take as long as you want." No, we have a business and we need to try and make money on this and pay everybody on time. So we don't take that stuff lightly. But we do believe that, ultimately, if the game isn't good and isn't right, then this has all been for nothing. If it's not ready, if it's not what it needs to be, then we don't feel like we have any other choice. We don't feel like it is an option or a choice to put out something that is half- baked or not all the way there."
Also discussed in the interview was Skyrim: Special Edition and, when asked if the remaster was a one-off considering Bethesda don't fall into the "remake culture", Hines said:
"Generally speaking, yeah. We did one for Dishonored but that was a unique case where it was a new IP at the very end of the last generation of consoles. So remastering it and bringing it to this gen wasn't a ton of work and it made a lot of sense given the proximity of those two. Skyrim was more about the work that Bethesda Game Studios had done in the early days of getting ready for Fallout 4 on this generation of consoles - moving the Skyrim engine and doing some work to run it on this generation of consoles just to see how it worked, and so forth, before they started doing all their Fallout stuff. It's the most recent thing they did."
Are you glad they did remaster Skyrim?