Bethesda Say Next-Gen Cross-Platform Work Is A Nightmare

In a recent interview with OXM, Bethesda vice president Pete Hines was discussing his views on next-gen consoles and how development of their latest MMO title Elder Scrolls Online, which is being developed by ZiniMax Online Studios is effected by each format.

“It’s really not easy, but it’s certainly much easier,” Said Hines while talking about developing for next-gen. “I’m not trying to insult Sony or Microsoft, but they’re high-end PCs, the way they’re architectured. Though they’re still in development, they’re not done, they’re much easier to develop for.” he continued.

“They don’t all play with each other. PC and Mac play together, but Xbox One is its own thing and PS4 is its own thing. The whole cross-platform thing is just a nightmare.”

This is true of current gen cross platform work, but developers have had 7 or more years to get to grips with how each system works and that isn’t the case with the new consoles where they maybe have had 18 months at best and even then working from target specs of development kits. The PlayStation 4 has a big horsepower gain over the Xbox One, it also has faster memory and while the Xbox One and that must present some issues in development, not to mention they have to build each edition of the game around a different network system such as Live, PSN and PC.

“Are we looking forward to developing on Xbox One?” Said Hines. “Yes. It’s a nice robust machine that allows to do lots of cool stuff and put more cool things in the game.” So nothing particularly encouraging from them in that respect, but for all the Xbox One “fiasco” that has gone around it’s easy to forget that in terms of gaming performance it’s still significantly more powerful than current gen offerings and that’s going to reflect well in next-gen gaming software.

“Much like Xbox 360, all the work that you do just helps more when you go to do it again. When you look at Skyrim and you go back and look at Oblivion, and look at all the content and what we’re putting on the screen, it’s a bit night and day. It probably doesn’t seem that different, but if you actually go back and look, we accomplished so much more.”

This is very true, go compare the first gen console games from Xbox 360 and PS4 to the latest offerings and you’ll be amazed how far the systems have come. If the current offerings from publishers like Bethesda on next-gen consoles are an indication of the hardware future then we’ve got some really great things to look forward to in the coming years.

Thank you OXM for providing us with this information.