All Your History: Bethesda Part 5 – Maxed Stats

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By the mid-2000s, Bethesda Game Studios had grown into one of the biggest RPG developers in the world.  Their Elder Scrolls franchise had become famous for featuring the biggest open worlds in gaming, offering hundreds of hours of exploration, combat, narrative, and anything else players could think up.  After the spectacular and studio-saving success of the third game in the series, Morrowind, Bethesda then created Oblivion, a towering commercial and critical triumph.  However, after so many years of concentrating on The Elder Scrolls, for their next game they decided to take a break and explore a different world.  In 2004, Bethesda had acquired a license to make a game in the Fallout franchise from the owners of the IP, Interplay Entertainment.  They began work on this franchise as soon as the finished up with Oblivion, and it quickly became clear that they were making something truly special.  So much so that Bethesda’s owners, ZeniMax, bought the Fallout IP outright in 2007.  As part of the deal, Interplay would get a license to make a Fallout MMO.  In many ways, the resulting game has defined modern Bethesda, both bringing them into the most prolonged and public conflict in their history, but also driving them to the very peak of their industry.

Maxed Stats

The massively-hyped Fallout 3 released in October 2008, published by Bethesda Softworks all on its own for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.  This was only two and a half years after their last game, Oblivion; by contrast, Oblivion had taken four years after Morrowind.  The team this time had experience with the Xbox and PlayStation architecture, and so could push out a new game much quicker, even at the grand scale they were used to.

The game itself had absolutely nothing to do with the original Fallout 3, which had been in development back at Interplay years earlier under the nickname Van Buren.  Bethesda had started their project from scratch, and in doing so, put their own stamp on the series.  Where older Fallouts had been top-down, third-person affairs, Fallout 3 was a first-person adventure, very much like The Elder Scrolls.

Within that, however, the classic Fallout elements all returned in their full glory.  The “SPECIAL” level-up mechanic, the cartoony Pip-Boy, and the signature dry comedy all survived the journey from Interplay to Bethesda.  It perfectly captured the retro 1950’s sci-fi vibe that Fallout was famous for.  Everything in the world reminded players of how bleak the apocalypse was, from the dreary art design to the seedy characters to the pervasive radiation.  Any game that gives players the option to blow up a town with a nuke is pretty grim.  It was a darker, edgier game than anything Bethesda had done before.  But at the same time, it was also funnier.  In a darker, edgier way.

As a first-person game taking place in the future, combat revolved less around melee weapons and more around guns.  This had the effect of making Fallout play more like a shooter, allowing it to appeal to a wider audience than the traditional RPG crowd.  However, the massive world, great storytelling, and involving characters kept old Bethesda fans more than happy.  As a matter of fact, more so than in any Elder Scrolls game, the player’s actions had huge ramifications.  Even trying to do the right thing could have negative consequences.  In the end, depending on what players did on their journey, the ending could have any one of over 200 different permutations.

Combined with veteran composer Inon Zur’s haunting score, and the participation of Hollywood talent like Liam Neeson and Ron Perlman, and Fallout 3 was primed to be a smash hit on the level of Oblivion.  It wasn’t.  It was bigger.  Despite the fact that the Fallout brand had never been on consoles before, and hadn’t been on anything for years, Fallout 3 sold 4.7 million units in just over a week.  That’s $300 million in seven days.  This was by far Bethesda’s biggest response to a game, ever, and that specatcular beginning led to a stellar long-run as well.  In the end, Fallout 3 emerged as one of the best-selling RPG games of all time, and turned the studio into a juggernaut.  Bethesda’s attention to detail, tone, and quality had paid off, and now they reaped the rewards of their hard work.

But once players finally got through the huge world and its main storyline, they discovered something shocking, something that no one expected: an ending.  Once the main quest was complete, the credits rolled, and gamers were returned to the main menu.  No more exploring, no more side-quests to do; unlike The Elder Scrolls, when Fallout 3 finished, the experience was over.  To put it mildly, the surprise was not well received, and broke one of the central tenants of a Bethesda experience.  Besides that, the GameBryo engine that they had been using since Morrowind was starting to show its age.  Badly.  Still, as with Elder Scrolls games before it, Fallout 3’s overall quality outweighed these criticisms in the eyes of gamers.

Meanwhile, Bethesda was hard at work on new content for the game.  They would eventually release five pieces of DLC, none of which involved horse armor.  Instead, Fallout 3’s DLC packs were huge content pieces that added new areas to explore, new quests to do, new characters to meet, and hours and hours and hours of time to kill.  One of them even changed the ending so that players could continue their game even after completing the main quest, fixing one of the biggest complaints players had.  Taken as a whole, the DLC for Fallout 3 is often cited as some of the finest DLC ever made for a game.  In other words, Bethesda’s first DLC ever, horse armor, is still considered among the worst of all time; their latest is considered among the best.  Quite an improvement.

With the windfall of cash from Fallout and its downloadable content, Bethesda’s publishing arm, Bethesda Softworks, aggressively expanded.  In 2009 they published both Wet and Rogue Warrior, though sadly, neither game was well-received; Rogue Warrior in particular took a bruising from the press.  But in June of that year, Bethesda announced a surprise, and it was a whopper.  Their owners, ZeniMax Media, acquired no less than id Software itself.  Id was the legendary studio behind the birth of the first-person shooter genre, whose Doom and Quake games had redefined the industry in the 90s.  Like ZeniMax itself, they had remained fiercely independent for years, refusing offers of acquisition from major powers like Activision.  However, by the late 2000s id realized that they simply didn’t have the manpower or resources to remain competitive on their own.  Their last game had released in 2004, and even though Doom 3 was a smash hit, they needed more capital to make more games.  ZeniMax promised to give them total creative freedom, something they’d proved with their Bethesda team.  And so, id agreed to join the Bethesda family.

Not long after, Bethesda also bought the distribution rights to id’s current project, Rage.  From now on, anything id will be released by Bethesda, including id’s older classics, which Bethesda recently brought to Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network.  In addition, Bethesda now uses id’s annual QuakeCon event to showcase all the upcoming games that it will publish, whether from Bethesda, id, or an external party.

But after this good news, came the bad.  In September 2009, Bethesda filed a lawsuit against former Fallout owners Interplay.  When Bethesda had bought franchise from them, they had given Interplay a license to make a Fallout MMO, provided they raised the money themselves and began work within two years.  The two years were up, and Bethesda wanted Interplay to stop trying to raise money.  Interplay resisted, claiming that they were indeed working on the game and that Bethesda was out of line.  This feud is ongoing to this day, and has only gotten more heated as time has gone on.  Bethesda now claims that when they gave Interplay a license to make a Fallout MMO, they only meant an MMO named Fallout; in other words, Interplay cannot use any assets, weapons, characters, or locations from Fallout.  They can’t even use the logo.  Interplay of course contests this, and in fact claims that since Bethesda is breaching the terms of the contract, the rights to Fallout should revert back to them.  It’s an all-around ugly affair with no end in sight.  Appropriately for Fallout, it is a dark quest line where the consequences of previous decisions have come to haunt both parties.

None of this stopped Bethesda from publishing a new Fallout game in 2010.  New Vegas was not made by the Game Studios division, but rather, by outside developer Obsidian Entertainment.  This was no coincidence: Obisidian had been founded by the former Interplay team that had created Fallout in the first place.  Bethesda now allowed them to tell the tale that Interplay had not.  New Vegas used the same engine and style as Fallout 3 had.  The setting had changed from a destroyed Washington, DC, to the destroyed American West, allowing for a welcome change to the color tones and art.  In fact, Fallout New Vegas showcased the exact same setting they had been working on in the cancelled Van Buren project years earlier.  While the world and story were as huge and involving as fans had come to expect, the graphics were really getting decrepit at this point, and at its launch the game was as buggy as, well, a Bethesda title.  Still, New Vegas went on to be a success on the level of the massive Fallout 3.

2011 saw Bethesda publishing more external titles: the shooter Brink from developer Splash Damage, and the RPG Hunted: The Demon’s Forge from developer inXile.  Unfortunately, neither game scored well with the critics.  To date, Bethesda has yet to successfully launch a franchise they didn’t have a hand in internally.  But they will get their chance in October, when they at last release id Software’s long-awaited Rage.  With a mix of RPG, driver, and classic shooter elements, the game will show off the latest idTech engine and hopes to remind gamers everywhere why id once ruled the gaming world.  Still, being a first-person game set in a post-apocalyptic desert, Rage may find itself competing with Bethesda’s own Fallout franchise.  Of course, it’s possible that the success of Fallout may actually lift gamer interest in that genre.

Aside from Rage, Bethesda currently has a whole suite of games to publish, including no less than The Elder Scrolls V from Todd Howard and the Bethesda Game Studios team.  Bethesda is taking this opportunity to address many of the issues gamers had with the series, starting with the graphics.  Finally tossing the old GameBryo engine, Bethesda has built their own home-brew engine for the first time since 1995.  This new Creation engine seeks to improve facial animations and draw distances, while still giving a quality polish to every detail.  Using this new tool, Bethesda is once again hand-crafting the entire world; no randomly-generated environments.  Everything will be made with an artist’s touch.  Also, the game promises to have dragon battles.  The game, titled Skyrim, is set to release worldwide on November 11, 2011.  This is notable because this is the same week that the juggernaut franchise Call of Duty will release its newest title.  Such is The Elder Scrolls’ reputation, that even the biggest name in gaming doesn’t scare Bethesda away.

Down the road, Bethesda also plans to publish Dishonored from developer Arkane studios, which they acquired in 2010; and Prey 2, an IP they bought in 2009, from developer Human Head Studios.  In addition, id founder John Carmack has stated that they are already at work on Doom 4.  However, in the meantime, Bethesda have embroiled themselves in another legal battle, this time with indie developer Mojang.  Famous for creating the underground sensation Minecraft, Mojang has scheduled its next game, Scrolls, to release on November 11, 2011 — the same day as The Elder Scrolls.  Bethesda filed a lawsuit, claiming the similar titles and dates would create market confusion.  Mojang protests, stating that Bethesda cannot possibly have a trademark on the word “Scrolls.”  Mojang has offered to settle the matter over a game of Quake, although since Bethesda owns Quake-makers id Software, it probably wouldn’t be a fair fight.  The case is ongoing.

Bethesda Game Studios stands as one of the most powerful developers in the world, with an ardent fan base and a sterling track record.  With the growing might of their publishing division, Bethesda Softworks, they stand poised to become one of the industry’s biggest players.  And most amazingly, their owners, ZeniMax Media, have remained private through all this time.  They don’t have to worry about placating investors or about how a decision might affect stock; ZeniMax, and the studios they own, can do whatever they want.

In June 2011, Bethesda celebrated their 25^th anniversary, better able to make the games they love than ever before.  They are starting to experience the growing pains of reaching the big leagues, including the trials of publishing and the backlash of legal suits.  But it seems clear that twenty-five years on, Bethesda’s world still has endless hours of content left to explore.

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