With recent blockbuster games like Batman: Arkham Knight providing a rich graphical experience for gamers, some developers may feel pressure to spend more time on visuals than the content of their games. This is not the case for Bethesda Softworks, which boasts an atmosphere for their upcoming Fallout 4 in which gamers can interact with everything they see.
Pete Hines, vice-president of PR and marketing for Bethesda, stated that “everything in the world [is] something tangible – you don’t walk into a room and see lots of stuff and it’s all fake. All the items are actual items. You set off a grenade in a room? It’s going to blow shit around and knock it all over the place. You have to spend cycles and stuff tracking where all of that went, and how it’s going to bounce around.”
Addressing the tendency to evaluate the relative quality of games exclusively in terms of graphics, Hines said, “If you’re going to hold us up to any other game and compare us side by side then it had better be a game that does all the same things. If you can deconstruct and reconstruct the world in real time, in the game, and you can pick up every single item and it’s not just a texture then we can talk. Otherwise, well then it’s a bit apples and oranges.”
Follow Rob Shimshock on Twitter.