Bethesda Exec: I Am Privy To Some Stuff Regarding Next-Gen Consoles

We’re in the final years of this current console generation’s life cycle, and though there’s still plenty of knockout games to look forward to in the next couple years or so, we’re now in the time where developers have started building projects that will like appear on the PS5 and/or the next Xbox, whatever that will be called. Two such projects are Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6 (though Starfield might still end up coming to current gen consoles).

In light of that, what expectations does Bethesda have from the next generation of consoles, systems that they are, it would seem, working on already for some of their upcoming projects? Bethesda’s Pete Hines says that he’s privy to some information on that front, but he’s unsure about how huge a jump it will end up being.

“I am curious to see what it looks like and how it’s different,” Hines said while speaking with Yahoo. “I’m privy to some stuff which obviously I can’t really talk about, but there is also a lot that I’m not sure on what it’s going to look like. And more importantly how big a shift we can expect.”

Hines went on to talk about shifts we’ve seen from one generation to the next in previous years, mentioning that while the shift from the PS2/Xbox era to the PS3/Xbox 360 one was hugely noticeable, the change with the following generation wasn’t quite as dramatic. Will the PS5 and the next Xbox bring about a similarly incremental change, or perhaps a larger one like the sixth generation of console gaming did? Hines’ answer? Well, he doesn’t really know for sure.

“I feel like there was a shift from Xbox and PS2 to Xbox 360 and PS3 that was pretty demonstrable,” Hines said. “Because we went from the old way to HD and the HD thing was so dramatic. It was night and day. Then you went to Xbox One and PS4 and it wasn’t like ‘woah’. The graphics folks that are super into it can certainly tell, but to the average consumer they were like ok it still looks good. How much of that will change, I don’t know. The rest of it doesn’t matter to me because I’m not drawing art or coding or designing. What really matters is what the developers think. What do they need and what are the kind of power and features they are looking for.”

I can see where Hines is coming from. The leap from the PS3/Xbox 360 to PS4/Xbox One was relatively an incremental one, especially when you compare it to what we’ve seen in the past. That said, I do think that next-gen consoles will definitely continue in this iterative fashion rather than a re-inventive one- that’s something that Nintendo seems to be focusing on almost exclusively now. Then again, all the talk of cloud technology being integrated with next-gen consoles definitely sounds interesting, so you never know.