Bethesda frontman Pete Hines recently sat down with GameCentral to talk about a plethora of things — including developing for the Nintendo NX, Fallout: New Orleans, and the truth behind Prey 2.

The interview is quite lengthy, therefore I will try my best to only bring to table the salient bits, and break it all down in a convenient, and organized way.

Fallout 4 Sales: I

n regards to sales of the latest installment in the popular series, Hines said, “It’s done absolutely fantastic for us, we’re very pleased.”

Cancelled Prey 2 game:

When asked about Prey 2 (its cancellation), and Bethesda’s relationship with developer Human Head: Hines had the following to say:

“ I’m not gonna talk publicly about the back and forth, and the he said/she said. It does absolutely no good to anybody. And I’m certainly not about to say anything to try and cast anybody in a bad light, one way or another. Here’s the fact: the game didn’t turn out like we wanted. It didn’t work, and it didn’t happen.

I find it really interesting that I get abundantly more questions about Prey 2 being cancelled than Doom 4 being cancelled. Everybody seems to forget that we did actually cancel a Doom game at iD for pretty much the exact same reasons, and started over.” (bq)

In response to this, GameCentral pressed Hines that the rumor wasn’t that Prey 2 was turning out poorly (and alas cancelled for this), but that Bethesda was purposefully failing their milestones. To this Hines replied:

“Utter nonsense. I will simply say this: I don’t know what possible good reason we would have for spending millions and millions of dollars to create something to then suddenly arbitrarily decide, ‘No, we don’t want to actually make our money back off what we’ve put into it’. Because we were footing the bill, right? We’re the publisher, we’re paying the developer. We’re putting all the money into it.

I’m spending my own time taking trips up to Madison, creating brand, creating trailers, putting effort into it, taking it to E3, doing all that stuff. And to take all of that time and investment, and for the notion to be, ‘Oh yeah, for arbitrary reasons we decided to fail the milestones and are just going to wave goodbye to all that and never see any of it returned is the dumbest argument I’ve ever heard.” 

From here GamerCentral pressed them that the reason Bethesda was actually failing the milestones was because it was trying to force them into a situation where it could acquire them against their will and for less than they were worth, something that publishers have done in the past to developers.  Hines denied this, citing Bethesda’s many great third party relationships with developers, and saying, “I think Tango [Gameworks, the studio behind The Evil Within] was the last acquisition. It’s not like we’re on some acquisition tear.” He then went on to reiterate that it simply came down to the game not reaching the demanded quality level, citing BattleCry as another recent example of this.   

“It’s no different to BattleCry, which isn’t anywhere. Isn’t being talked about, and it’s on hiatus because it also wasn’t rising to the level. Just like the Doom game that we cancelled.”

Developing for the NX:

When asked about Hine’s recent quote that said he talks to Nintendo all the time, Hines replied, “We talk about to them about games! We talk to the, about what they’re up to!”

He went on to add:

“It’s not like we’ve never done anything on Nintendo. We haven’t done anything on Nintendo in a very long time…Look, our philosophy is we want to make our games, as they’re designed and built, available on as many platforms as possible. And so Nintendo, as a maker of a platform, you want to constantly be in touch with them, to see what they’re doing, where they’re headed, and whether or not there might be some opportunities down the line, with where they’re going.”

GameCentral then poised Hines with why they haven’t supported Nintendo with games in the recent past, to which Hines said technical issues  were always the issue.

From here, GC asked if the NX was as powerful as an Xbox One (or more), could Bethesda be interested? Hines replied with the following:

“Then it will absolutely be something that we consider. Okay… let’s say they come out and say tomorrow it does X, Y, and Z. Well, Dishonored 2 is way down the road, it’s not in the conversation. But anything that is in development, I think we’d take a look at and see if technically does it line up with what they’re doing?”

E3 2017/Fallout New Orleans:

When asked by GC if Bethesda is having another presser at E3 next year, Hines said the following:

“Probably, given what I know about what we’re gonna have going on next year, and what we’re gonna have to talk about, I would say that we’d probably have enough stuff to fill the time. And again, mostly because I really continue to like the idea of being able to talk to everybody about what we’re doing at the same time. So yeah, knowing what I know, I think we would probably do another one next year.”

GC followed up with a question about the rumor/rating leak for Fallout: New Orleans and whether or not Bethesda would ever consider doing something with the series like it did with Obsidian and Fallout: New Vegas. To this Hines said Bethesda doesn’t comment on trademarks, neither denying it or confirming it. Further, to the the later question Hines said, with a grin, “I don’t know; we’ll have to see.”

And that’s all she wrote folks.

My Opinion:

My takeaways: Bethesda isn’t developing for the NX, Fallout: New Orleans is real and is being made by Obsidian, and that Hines wasn’t hiding something about the cancelled Prey 2 game.

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Tyler Fischer is a Senior Writer for MONG who plays video games when he’s not busy researching alien conspiracy theories at 2AM. You can find him on Twitter.