Bethesda is publishing four games this year. Brink, Hunted, Rage, and Skyrim. Now I know BGS is developing Skyrim and the rest are being developed by other people but you think the release has anything to do with Skyrim bringing the "crown jewel" if you will of Bethesdas portfolio this year? I'm sure out of those four games Brink and Hunted are ready to be released earlier obviously, hence the May and June release dates respectively, but Bethesda is choosing to release Rage in September and Skyrim in November. They obviously want Skyrim in that holiday slot and expect it to be a big, AAA blockbuster title at the end of the year.

I realize it may just be because Skyrim will not be ready before then and maybe couldn't meet a September release but I'm thinking if they really pushed for it Skyrim and Rage could have swapped release dates. I like it and it shows where Bethesdas priorities and loyalties lie.

Skyrim IS their baby, the crown jewel, and therefore gets the holiday release and closes out 2011 on top.

I want Skyrim to be pushed back as much as possible to prevent the Oblivion fiasco. (an unfinished game using a game engine that was horribly prioritized in terms of power use)
Of coarse TES games are Bethesdas babies. It's their most played and bought games. When someone says Bethesda, you think "TES".
I think they are releasing on 11-11-11 because they need that much time to make a great game, nothing more.

I bet Skyrim could be ready by July but they waited until Nov because that's usually a good time to release games and it also gives Beth plenty of time to find bad bugs/glitches and fix them.

They have 5-6 years experience with the consoles now and are also using a new engine. I'm not too worried about the game having to be pushed back because of game engine not being prioritized or not being used efficiently enough. Stability will hopefully be fine. Over the course of a consoles life cycle many tricks are learned and you tend to be able to maximize efforts and squueze as much as you can out of it without sacrificing as much as you would have during the consoles infancy state.

I don't think this is the case.

Normally Bethesda won't release a specific release date until quite close to release, with RAGE they did this over thirteen months in advance. Why? Well someone on the RAGE forums point out that it's Tim Willits' 40th birthday. (September 13th is also shortly after QuakeCon allowing id to grab everyone's attention and then release the game a few weeks later, rather than a few months.)

Something else to think about, id started shopping for a publisher because they felt that the big publishers all had major FPS series of prominence and they didn't want their own games to be overshadowed or pushed aside. Bethesda Softworks had no FPSs in their portfolio except for Brink, and Splash Damage has worked closely with id software so I imagine there were no concerns here of a conflict of interest of divided priorities.

Taking this latter point in to account it would be silly of Bethesda to push RAGE's release date around to better suite BGS's next title. And taking the former point in to account September 13th obviously has some significance to id and RAGE (Tim Willits is RAGE's lead designer). Bethesda may have had 11-11-11 penciled in before RAGE had a firm release date, and it may be that both games were slated for a Fall 2011 release which required some thought on release dates, but I seriously doubt Bethesda was punting RAGE back so Skyrim could take prominence.

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Haha, nice disclaimer

I′d prefer if Skyrim was released at june 15th 2012. That′s when summer break starts and I can let go of reading al those tests, papers and what not, and focus whole-heartedly on the game..... and beer. :foodndrink:

Fixed.

Sometimes it's important to note, I don't want people believing that speculation on my part is in fact an official response from Bethesda.

:tongue:
for you :foodndrink:

They chose 11/11/11 because:

1) Holiday season. Epic sales.

2) Cool date.

3) It gives them a healthy amount of time to polish the game, squash any bugs, and smooth everything out overall. After all, this is a biggy for Bethesda.