Oblivion designer says Bethesda are “about not making polish”

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On a current livestream, Gamasutra requested Rolston if there was something about Bethesda Game Studios that significantly outfitted them for making the epic, open-world video games which have made their title.

In reply, Rolston says that the studio “has a long institutional memory, and the personalities in it have fought with one another and worked together for a long time.” He additionally says that the studio’s common growth instruments allow everybody within the staff to know each other’s work:

“It might well be the only studio that has the ability to see all the ways sausage [is] made in a sympathetic way. Something like Ubisoft, with its very, very large teams who all do very specific tasks – that is a very high-polish production model.”

By distinction, and this will likely shock you:

“Bethsoft is about not making polish. And I don’t mean that in any way negative; there’s a level of jazz to what’s going on, rather than classical music coming from a script. If it isn’t clean but it’s fun, we can understand it… anybody can just go in and see how it’s done, and say ‘oh, I understand that, maybe we can do this instead.’”

This suggests a stage of experimentation and many-cooks collaboration throughout the studio, which maybe explains why Bethesda has developed a status for placing out enjoyable video games which can be additionally stuffed with glitches.

You can try Gamasutra’s full stream with Rolston here. The query on Bethesda’s tradition begins at round 21 minutes.