» Fri Jun 21, 2013 3:41 am The boss of Bethesda owner ZeniMax has hinted the developer may be working on a new IP and that Fallout 4 could be made by a different developer.
Once thought of as a shoe-in for an E3 reveal, Bethesda parent company ZeniMax has poured cold water on the idea that a Fallout 4 announcement is imminent, or that it’s what Bethesda Game Studios are working on next.
ZeniMax vice president Pete Hines told website http://www.polygon.com/2013/6/19/4446938/zenimax-discusses-studios-future-and-fallouts-e3-absence that he’s not going to ‘say or hint’ what Bethesda Game Studios are working on at the moment, and that ‘making assumptions’ was a ‘bad idea’.
‘I mean [fans] have been clamouring for a Fallout game for a long time now. What people need to understand – whether it is Bethesda Game Studios, Arkane or anybody — expecting information like that in any short period of time after they moved off one project to the other is really unrealistic,’ said Hines.
‘We are not into annual franchises — just trying to spin out a version of our game year, after year, after year — like, we have never done that, I don’t see that it is something that we are doing anytime soon.’
‘But that doesn’t mean that we are going to take our time and wait six or seven years in between a game that a studio puts out. But these are big games that take a long time and folks need to understand that we have a very certain way of going about things.’
Elsewhere in the same interview Hines discusses Fallout: New Vegas, which was developed by external company Obsidian Entertainment – although whether this is meant to hint that the next Fallout could also be outsourced is unclear.
Whatever Bethesda Game Studios (the game developer, not to be confused with Bethesda Softworks the publisher) is working on now they must be pretty far along as they long ago finished creating downloadable content for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and they are only involved in The Elder Scrolls Online in an advisory capacity (new studio ZeniMax Online Studios is making the game).
French developer Arkane Studios, also mentioned by Hines, is heavily rumoured to be working on the controversially delayed Prey 2. Even though a sequel to Dishonored would’ve been the more obvious next project for them.
