Bruce Nesmith on AI, GTA VI, Elder Scrolls & Fallout

Bruce Nesmith, the lead designer of the best-selling video game Skyrim, has explained how advances in AI could reshape future games in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, and Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto VI, due out in November this year.

Speaking to GoHumanize AI humanizer on his role in developing Radiant AI at Bethesda, and the roles he expects Generative AI and other forms of AI to play in creating evermore immersive gaming experiences, Nesmith also gave his thoughts on what to expect from Elder Scrolls VI.

In a wide-ranging interview, the gaming industry veteran also discussed his hopes for the merger between Bethesda and Obsidian, the studio behind Fallout: New Vegas, and his next projects as an author, including a new book due out in May 2027.

Read his full interview below.

Q: How has your book trilogy, Loki Redeemed, been received since its release?

I believe that right now on Amazon it has about 220 or so five star reviews, so I'll take that.

That’s the life of an independent author in modern times. It’s not a calling that’s going to make you rich. That’s just not on the cards so I’ll take my 200, smile and be happy with that.

I'm not doing it to get rich anyway.

Q: Has it been a satisfying experience to swap video game development as your main focus to now writing books as an author?

I'm happy with it, yes. The people who have commented just to say how much they’ve liked it, that’s probably about 200 more reviews than I thought I’d get, to be honest.

I’ve loved it, and it’s fun to write books, and it’s got to be fun to do the work before you have any fun with the reception the work receives, at least in my point in life.

I’ll have a new book out in May 2027 called Gravitas. I decided to go ahead and get more professional support on the release of this one so it’s moved the release date later than I had hoped for so it’ll probably be late spring or maybe even early summer.

It’s not available for pre-order, not with the way these things go right now. Sure, if you’re a big name author, those pre-orders can be meaningful, but I’m not a big name author. Pre-orders? They don’t generate anything. Gravitas will be available to pre-order a week or two before release.

If I was Brandon Sanderson, I could put it on pre-order right now and generate a huge amount of interest, but that’s not going to happen for me.

Q: What were the challenges and opportunities that you and your team found with Radiant AI in the making of Oblivion, and how did it change with Skyrim?

Skyrim is where we actually implemented Radiant AI, not Oblivion. We had Radiant systems in Oblivion and perhaps the term AI was appropriate back then but it would not be appropriate to call it that today. AI has taken on a completely different meaning.

If you call anything AI now, you’re setting an expectation for your players that just isn’t going to be present if they play Oblivion because what we had was a system where we could dictate what NPCs did in the world.

They would run around on a timetable, offering services at certain times, perform activities at certain times, and you could put conditions on that. At the time that Oblivion was released, we considered that to be an AI system but that’s because we used AI as a catchall for anything where you were managing events, and that’s basically what that was. It was nowhere near as sophisticated as what we would call AI today.

So how this came about was that Todd Howard came up to us and he had this wonderful little napkin drawing. You hear about napkin drawings and they’re mostly apocryphal but no, I literally got one on a napkin, and he started talking about the difference between various versions of the Elders Scrolls games and now initially characters had all been static. Then we had them moving around the world so they understood their environment but they didn’t understand each other or the player.

What he wanted for Oblivion was to have NPCs that could understand the player and understand each other, and for its time it was a pretty revolutionary idea. Kurt Kuhlmann, my partner in crime, and I were really excited by all this and went off and worked on it, and we came up with what we thought was a cool idea.

We went back to Todd and showed him how we could make the things that the NPCs did were sensitive to what the player was doing. The example was the player killing an NPC and their friend or relative would come and find the player to attack them, and Todd thought that was a great idea, but then he hit us with the whammy: “OK, anything other than killing people?”

That was met by silence because Kurt and I had nothing so we went back, went through all the things in the game that could be NPC activities, and we came up with a list of about 50 or so, things like picking up an item, dropping an item, learning a spell, entering a new zone.

We worked with the programmers to make sure that these were things we could actually capture because certain things, like taking damage and whatnot, was a little trickier because it happens so frequently. The way most modern games work for things like this is that they work in a threaded environment where the event goes in and gets processed when there's a chance, which may be a couple seconds later.

Things that need immediacy, like taking damage, are processed immediately, but you can't interrupt that process to go and do some procedural AI thing over here or there so we had to make sure that we were living within a space that programmers were comfortable with too.

Once we were ready to go back to Todd he really liked this ultimate list but what it required was adding a huge amount of data to objects and NPCs in the game, data we had never added before. This data would allow us to know something about the characters or objects that we hadn’t known before and that was key. For example, we'd created the idea of a location.

Previously, in a dungeon or a town, there were physical objects sitting in the environment but there was no sense of which town it was in. We could now attach a location ID that helped to give meaning to situations.

Suddenly we could say this is a town, this is a dungeon, this is a place that is dark. Those are just examples of things we could do but we would know that when you entered an area, or when you left it, so these would be events that we could have something happen. Let’s say the player enters this town, somebody approaches them and they can talk, because we now know you have entered town, and what that town means. We could also assign relationships between these NPCs and objects too, and each other, and what was the nature of their relationship? Are they family or an acquaintance?

If the boss or owner of a shop was killed, their employee would step up into the role and take on the inventory of the shop and work their shifts to open and close the premises. If you dropped a high value item in a settlement, like a Daedric artefact, maybe a couple of NPCs would react and fight over it? Not because it was scripted but because there would be checks against a set of conditions until it found something and then generated a collection of activities. Perhaps a guard comes over to settle the quarrel too and now it’s three people fighting over this high value item.

From the player’s point of view, they just dropped an object in the world and some NPCs reacted to that. There may have been another game that had done that at the time, I would be shocked if there wasn’t, but none at the scale of Oblivion. None of the big AAA games out there had done anything like that before. Suddenly you’re experiencing a game with NPCs in the world that understand the player and react to them. The world becomes a living thing in a way it had never happened before.

Q: It’s been said in the past that Bethesda are facing a no win situation with their next run of games given how high expectations have been set by Skyrim especially. Would an even deeper focus on Radiant AI and the immersion it can offer be a better way to impress players rather than continuing to offer scale and quantity with bigger and bigger maps?

A more immersive experience could be the way forward but the question you really have to ask is whether that is what the players want? It all comes down to what they expect, and what the team can deliver.

Let’s say in Elder Scrolls VI, they create a world where everything is reactive. That’s not an adventure. That’s all setting. It’s the backdrop. It still comes down to whether you are able to use these things to actually create the adventure.

You have to decide as a team where your priorities lie because you don’t have unlimited resources. Is that Radiant AI system from Skyrim sufficient or not? Let’s take a look at the Fallout games. They used Radiant AI but took it in a different direction, to increase the sense of scale of the world and the adventure. They weren’t interested in having living, breathing schedules where people went to work, went home and did other activities, not to the same depth as we saw in Oblivion. They didn’t react in the same way with the nuance to events that we established in the Elder Scrolls games. That was a conscious decision. It gives Fallout a different flavour and the decision was made that the payback for putting more effort into these elements just wasn’t sufficient so they had to make the call.

Let’s say you are on the team making Elder Scrolls VI, well you have to make the decision on what you put your efforts into, and the work we did with Skyrim was seminal. It created a living, breathing world. I think there is great value in that but at the same time, we had this density of activity. You did not have to walk very far before you ran across a dungeon, ran into some monsters, found a quest, or somebody asking you to do something. That's what actually made the game exciting because if we had just the first and not the second, with the towns that were interactive and had nothing to do, nobody would want to play that.

Historically, many games, including those made by Bethesda, were sold with towns that weren’t interactive but there was lots to do in the world, so you know where the bias is, and that is the decision that game developers are going to have to make.

For these reasons, I doubt that we will see any serious extension of the Radiant AI system, at least to the extent that would be noticeable to most players, to make them feel like the world is more detailed and alive than what we had already achieved with Skyrim.

They could extend the idea to the adventures more, and generate richer quests and more adventures, but while some players might appreciate all the real life going on around them, if it’s all just the setting, it’s still only part of the tapestry against which they need to do other activities.

Q: Is it a shame that people seem to believe that Skyrim was a step back from Oblivion when it comes to the NPCs in each game and their daily schedules?

I definitely do not think Skyrim was a step back from Oblivion. Skyrim for that particular piece was absolutely a step forward but it's a good marketing point and more than that, it's immersion. Yes, you feel immersed in the game more if the NPCs become more alive for you because they feel more real, seeing this guy wandering around doing stuff in his laboratory. He's not just standing there waiting for you to talk to him. That makes the game feel more real.

So things like that, I think they'll do more of that in Elder Scrolls VI. The flip side is that as you make the world more real and alive, you might not be able to enter a shop because it’s not open. You may have to wait for the shopkeeper to return to town so what do you want to do? You want to sell your stuff. Do you want to wait? Does that level of immersion make for a better experience? You have to choose.

I’m hoping Elders Scrolls VI has a lot of immersive stuff like that which makes the world feel even more alive and organic but I don’t know how much more I would want to layer on top. I’d rather they work on the small stuff which would be animations, how NPCs interact with objects on desks and tables in front of them, rather than larger scale stuff.

I can bet you that there's going to be quests that start because you drop something!

Q: Have Bethesda stayed away from bringing these elements to Fallout due to wanting a more sparse, less alive experience, setting these games in a nuclear wasteland?

I don’t think they’ve stayed away from bringing Oblivion-style NPC schedules to Fallout because it’s set in a nuclear wasteland. If you look at the NPCs in Skyrim they didn’t leave their towns either, and Fallout has towns. You can wander around them. I think it’s just a matter of making a decision that we would rather have a little bit more adventure and give up some of that real life detail like scheduling, and that is a completely legitimate design choice.

Personally, I like the method we had in Skyrim where the characters felt more alive. You could have your cake and eat it too and bring that into Fallout but it does take extra effort and resources that would be taken from something else.

I wouldn’t say that the designs made on the Fallout games have been a negative thing, it’s just different choices for a game with different goals, and it also helped to set the tone. If you do go into a Fallout game, you want to always feel like you’re wandering the wasteland, and that was the cool thing. That’s the heart of the game.

Skyrim was more about finding dungeons and the quests that got you into town, not that you didn't do that sort of thing in both games. You did. It's just a subtle difference where you get a little bit more out of the people living in a world in a more natural way in Skyrim then you would in a world that has been blown up.

Q: There is a lot of talk around the intelligence and complexity we’ll be able to expect from NPCs in Grand Theft Auto VI but is there something that Rockstar can learn from how you made Oblivion and Skyrim feel alive through their NPCs?

NPC schedules like we saw in Oblivion and something like the Radiant AI from Skyrim would fit the Grand Theft Auto IP very well.

They’re trying to create a world based on something that actually exists, and it would only enhance the immersion by making people feel more real, having them go and meet another NPC for dinner at a restaurant and then go back to their apartments or back to their jobs. I think that would enhance Grand Theft Auto VI but it all comes at a cost and they will have had to decide if they want to pay that cost.

Either way, I think there will be a lot of cool stuff in GTA VI and while there is the promise of what modern day AI is able to bring to life, and I don’t know if we’re there yet, to be honest. When you go back to those schedules people love from the Elder Scrolls games, they were all handcrafted. It was like directing actors at the theatre, getting them to hit their mark with a X on the floor. We placed markers throughout the world for all the places where we wanted NPCs to do something, and we had to do that by hand, and then you have to build the package from there. It’s a script running off a form that’s been filled out by a human who has decided what they’ll do, when they’ll do it, what they’ll do in each location and so on. We couldn’t just put an NPC in a location and leave them to do stuff. That didn’t exist but that’s the promise of where we are going next. I’m just not sure if we’re there yet but I can definitely see how we can get there. It’ll need AI in the modern sense to be able to assist with creating and managing those schedules without needing the human designer.

Q: How soon until we see Generative AI and Large Language Models generating dialogue between NPCs and in conversations with the player, rather than repeating set phrases as we have become used to in most video games?

I don’t think using Generative AI to create conversations between NPCs and the player would take away too much control from developers because it would be left to the sort of NPC speech that would not be relevant to the story.

What it can offer is something that feels more alive when you bump into them in the street or interact over trying to shop in their store. It’s about having them do more than repeat “excuse me” or asking: “Can I help you?” It’s that sort of dialogue where this technology could add something but it will be a long way off because of how costly it would be to hook games up to a Large Language Model and run it dynamically like that. You can’t fit it into your PC or Xbox so that means you’re running AI as a live service for millions of players and that costs a lot of money.

What you might get instead are clever ideas on how to mix it up. Do we need a Large Language Model or can we put a Small Language Model into a game, where the Generative AI is going to generate dialogue within more limited parameters, so maybe there’s only 10 different interruption prompts. Maybe in 10 years from now, I wouldn’t even want to guess, but right now it’s the more likely path for how Generative AI can enhance immersion.

I could also see some point in the future where we actually have a computer that people can run their games on that’s also powerful enough to run LLMs locally to string stuff together but even then it would be limited. That would still allow you to try and make language feel more natural and varied. There’s definitely something that could be done there but we’re not there yet.

This moment feels like a similar moment to the advent of realistic graphics, and realistic language is also going to take some serious hardware improvements in order to be able to run, and you need all the processing speeds, more memory and more storage.

The cost of computer components is a short-term issue. We’ll see if that remains a problem in the longer term, and there will be more competition for these components. It’s not just gamers who want these sophisticated chips. They’re used in all sorts of applications, more than ever, so prices may remain high because of that, but we’ll see.

Q: Will merging Bethesda and Obsidian make it more likely we see a follow up to Fallout: New Vegas, either as a sequel or a new game in another location from that team?

I don’t have any special knowledge on what will happen now between Bethesda and Obsidian but if I were directing them I would say that they should be left to work on a side story to the mainline Fallout games, whether that’s a sequel to New Vegas or something new.

I could see them working on New Vegas 2 or a new interpretation of the Fallout IP in another new location that’s off to the side. That’s what I would push them to do because it would allow them to flex their own style and give them the maximum ability to be creative and take ownership over what they’re creating.

That’s what I would do with Obsidian if it were down to me.

Q: Would you like to see Obsidian unleashed on the Elder Scrolls IP too to go and create their own interpretation of the setting, as they did with Fallout: New Vegas?

I would always be excited to have more Elder Scrolls games. More is more, and that’s better.

The problem facing Obsidian is that they aren’t a team that have worked on the Elder Scrolls IP, and you can’t just hand Elder Scrolls over to any organization. You can take the best team in the world and tell them to go and make a new Elder Scrolls game and you’ve just sunk them into a two year learning curve. That’s just the reality of it. These games are hideously complicated, highly specialized, so I would think that Obsidian’s take on an Elder Scrolls game, like we saw with New Vegas, would be unlikely.

I think it's a unique environment where you now have Obsidian able to make New Vegas 2 and more spin-off Fallout games, but never say never.

I don’t think it’s as likely that we get a New Vegas-style game within the Elder Scrolls series, which in certain ways is a detriment to Elder Scrolls as a franchise. The closest thing you will get, to be honest, is what we have with the Elder Scrolls Online, and that is a highly successful MMO, but if anyone can pull it off, it would be Obsidian.

Q: Would Obsidian be the perfect team to look into creating Morrowind 2 or setting a game in the more unusual regions of Tamriel such as Elsweyr or Black Marsh?

Could Obsidian take us to some of the stranger places in the world of Elder Scrolls given their style? Well, the stranger and more unusual something is, the more effort you have to put into it on multiple fronts.

Not only do you have the programming and art hurdles that will be a struggle, you’ve also got design and writing that is also going to be a challenge. As opposed to the mainline game, you can’t just lean on what is always front and center, you have to provide more colour and shade.

I think the Elder Scrolls Online showed Obsidian how they could go about it. They split the difference. They gave you some of the strangeness but they also filed a lot more of it away so that it was still approachable. They took us to Elsweyr and we see the Khajit and their different lifecycles as cats, but you don’t see any one character progressing through them.

You see a little kitty, a big kitty, a man kitty, and that’s just how they dealt with it, to give enough of an appearance for the player, and if you look at the actual architecture it’s interesting without being totally bizarre, and that’s one way to approach it.

If Obsidian, or Bethesda for that matter, were to set an Elder Scrolls game in Elsweyr or Black Marsh, or return to Morrowind, I think they would have to do something comparable to the Elder Scrolls Online. They’d have to make choices to capture the strangeness without making it so weird it makes player heads explode!

What are the things they can afford to make really cool and unusual? Look at Morrowind. It had Ald'ruhn, the city built inside a grab, but the other cities were pretty normal. You didn't have people living in trees or underwater or things like that which would make it really challenging for the team to create. That’s the sort of choices you have to make.

Even once you’re inside the crab, everything looks kind of like a normal city in a lot of ways.

Q: What could be the big new feature of Elder Scrolls VI given we roughly know that it will be set in Iliac Bay, and possibly centred around Sentinel City?

What will be the big new feature for Elder Scrolls VI? I think boats and potentially even naval combat are the natural ones.

Moving vehicles is not something that the Elder Scrolls has never really had. You had carriages that would take you from place to place but most players only did that once. It didn’t really add anything.

Setting Elder Scrolls VI in Iliac Bay, you’re setting yourself up for a big expansion into seafaring stuff, and even if you never go under the water, think about all the things you could do on top of the water. It could be really cool. We might get entire skill trees allowing you to walk on water or have boats that allow you to do more than just sail your boat. There could be all kinds of unique creatures and spells that could work with water too.

To me that would be an opening you take real advantage of because there is a lot of stuff there and I think it would be very exciting for the team working on it too. Boats and gameplay over water, that would be a dragon level feature, in my opinion, but of course you could have kraken to contend with at sea.

You'd have to have a kraken. I mean sharks and and krakens are the two obvious ones and Sea Elves. Sea Elves are a thing in the lore but I don't think they've ever made an appearance in the games in any significant way and their lore is so broad.

Q: Skyrim was the first game to bring the Falmer to life in the games so perhaps Elder Scrolls VI could introduce the Sea Elves?

The underground environment that the Falmer live in, Blackreach under Skyrim, is to me very cool. One of my original plans for Skyrim, which they rightly talked me out of, was to have Blackreach actually stretch under the entire map. There would have been tunnels into rooms and places everywhere but obviously that was in excess of the map we got, and it would have just been too much work.

Blackreach is still pretty damn big, at least next to a lot of places, so I think when you’ve got Iliac Bay filling the whole middle of your map, you could make something like Blackreach that reaches around and under, connecting places underground. You could do something really interesting with that.

Q: Could Bethesda build upon the ideas of an underwater vault and area that was cut from Fallout 4 to do something interesting with the Sea Elves?

One of the designers was pushing very hard for an underwater environment in Fallout 4, and they made a bunch of proof of concept stuff to show how cool it could be, but at the end of the day, it proved to be just too much, and they didn't pull the trigger on it in a broader way.

I don’t believe it is true to say that there was a plan to do that underwater section, with the vault, and that it didn’t make it into the game. I think it was more a matter of somebody on the team who was really pushing for it, and he had a lot of really good ideas, but it’s that old adage. You can't do everything.

When it comes to Elder Scrolls VI, if it were me, I would probably kibosh anything underwater and keep everybody focused on the surface in that same spirit, not because it wouldn't be cool, but because I’d rather do this part really well rather than do both of these parts not so well.

Q: Some leaders in AI tech have touted this idea that one day games and movies will create custom experiences tailored to the desires of individuals. Could that be the future for IP like Elder Scrolls, Fallout or even Grand Theft Auto to become platforms that generate games based on your preferences rather than new releases we wait 10 or 15 years to enjoy?

I am on record, once upon a time, saying that I did not think computers would be able to write stories that would match human stories. I have to eat those words.

I am living in an era when they are proving that they can do that and they will do that better and better, and that’s reality. But we won’t step right into it.

To go from where we are now to some idealistic pinnacle where you might load up Elder Scrolls or Fallout or Grand Theft Auto and have it create a new, personalised game just for you, that might be something our great, great, great grandchildren experience.

What could come sooner is something like a DLC that could exist for Skyrim or a feature for future Elder Scrolls games, like a dungeon and adventure maker that will create infinite new dungeons and quests for you. You go through some portal and you’re there. Maybe they could exist all around the map like Oblivion gates that you can use, always creating new stuff to do.

There's not a whole lot of difference between that and the geomorphic dungeons which have been done for decades, you’re just applying Generative AI to make them more interesting. Not only does that mean the gross geometry of each space will change, all the teeny tiny pieces and details that make a quest what it is can be created and changed too.

It will all come down to the rules and parameters. There have to be rules for what a generated quest can do, but these don’t have to be big, epic quests to rival the main story anyway. They can still follow certain structures and formats, just elaborate upon them. One might be a fetch quest, a rescue quest, all those kinds of quests.

I could very much see something like that released as a DLC with some kind of subscription model. Pay X dollars a month to get unlimited new dungeons that AI will create for you, theoretically unlimited and unique every time.

Q: Will we see an online component to Elder Scrolls VI, and was there ever any talk of adding a multiplayer element to Skyrim as many modders have since done?

Multiplayer is always the second thing the team asked for when making a new game, at Bethesda. I’m talking about the people inside the studio. With Skyrim it was: “can we make it multiplayer yet? How about now?” Not yet, not yet.

Then Fallout 76 hit and the lift around that project was significant. Until you’ve tried to create a game of that scope, you can’t even begin to understand that it’s an order of magnitude more complex and difficult than you ever thought it could be.

The short answer is yes but ultimately that’s how Elder Scrolls Online came about, and really these games are all building on the titles that came begore them, like Second Life. That’s the sort of experience a Skyrim would expect if they could take it online into multiplayer. I’m not surprised mods exist now.

Having an open space in a game world like the Elder Scrolls where you can, in effect, create your own content by LARPing your own characters, I can see the appeal. I’m just not aware of any serious discussions that took place at Bethesda about offering that in Skyrim.

We wanted to create an adventure game. We didn’t create things to just become an empty space for players to go and create the experience themselves. That wasn’t what we were interested in doing at the time.

Q: Some analysts have claimed that GTA VI will make creators millionaires through user-generated content. Could that be the future Elder Scrolls VI and Fallout 5 are able to offer to players too?

Could user-generated content make players rich in the next Elder Scrolls or Fallout games? I don’t know if anybody could make a career out of it yet. The numbers just don’t work. That doesn't mean they won't work in the future. They just don't work right now.

You’re one person or a very small team competing to do what hundreds accomplished, and it’s just about the numbers but the variety of skills and experience too. Bethesda have got artists and programmers and writers and all the resources.

To be able to match that quality and produce something to be sold or licensed and then make enough money to pay all your people back, that’s a big ask.

I won’t say it can’t be done, and AI could actually make it easier for creators in the future to do that, but right now you might make some money but it will be difficult to generate significant revenues, so you’re not going to make a living off it in the short-term.

It’s about scratching that creative itch, and for that I’m all about the Creation Club. It’s a very cool idea, allowing fans into your game to participate and create things. It’s a marvellous, wonderful thing and I wish more companies took that approach. I hope others take the dive like Rockstar with GTA VI, allowing players to create content other people can experience.

Q: What will we get first, the Elder Scrolls VI or the PlayStation 6?

I would be shocked if Elder Scrolls VI wasn’t being made and optimised for the next Xbox, especially if it allows them to get ahead of the PlayStation 6. The PS6 might not release until after the new Xbox.

Of course, the first thing that would happen once it does come out is a direct port to the PS6, but it would all come down to the financials and the resources they’re willing to devote to it, and that may push the timeline back and give even more of an advantage to Xbox. It all depends on what the PS6 is shaping up to be and if it’s going to move the needle significantly above whatever the Xbox does. If so, it’ll be worth getting Elder Scrolls VI over to the PS6 much sooner.

I think we’ll also see an Oblivion remaster for the next Xbox and PS6 specifically too. The trick there is to follow the natural state of gaming and how it’s improving, so they could release a version with incredibly improved rendering and graphics, and updated art.

But on Elder Scrolls VI, I don’t think the delay in the PS6 will affect Bethesda or the team working on the game. The PS6 would have to be providing something far greater than the Xbox will to make it worth the effort to create a truly custom version of Elder Scrolls VI as opposed to just porting it over.

Q: Would it be smart for Microsoft to insist on Elder Scrolls VI coming out as an Xbox exclusive?

Hold back Elder Scrolls VI as an Xbox exclusive? I don’t see that happening, at least not long-term to say if you want to play this game, you have to buy our hardware. I think they’ll be looking at how many units of Skyrim they sold on the last generation of PlayStation consoles. Are you going to turn that money down?

Maybe we’ll see Elder Scrolls VI released on Xbox then, after it’s been out for six months or a year, whatever the right time frame is for you to get all that juice out of it as an exclusive, you start looking at other platforms, and the other revenue streams.

Are you making enough from the Creation Club? Are you starting to look at DLC? OK, now you have to say to yourself, what are the pros and cons of releasing it on PS6? I think they’d been turning down too much money not to release it on PlayStation but there are always other considerations, especially for a company that ultimately answers to Microsoft. They may want to hold on to it.

Q: Having overseen the streamlining of certain aspects of the Elder Scrolls series, what have you made of the reception to the release of Marvel's Wolverine and complaints over the game hand-holding players too much?

First of all, let me say that this controversy around Marvel's Wolverine could have happened 15 years ago. In fact, it did. There are games where people thought their hands were being held too much, where they believed that it ruined the experience and made it too easy, so this is not a new discussion. This is a very old discussion wrapped up in new wrapping paper. There is nothing new under the sun.

I think the players always have a higher tolerance for these kinds of things than the critics do, and the super fans. More casual players don't get so incensed about it. So while it is not a tempest in a teapot, it's maybe a tempest in a swimming pool, but ultimately the real thing to look at is what your baseline customers are saying, and whether you’re being true to the character.

Did they push a little too far? I haven’t played the game yet so I can’t tell you but I am a huge Marvel fan who has read a ton of comics over the years and being true to the character when you’re bringing a Marvel property into a video game is the most important thing you can do.

If they did not have some sort of smell or scent ability at all, people would have just as quickly called it out, because it would not have been true to Wolverine as a character, and that’s important. It’s probably more important with Marvel than any other IP because their IP is the characters, far more than anything else.

Maybe the designers could have tried to dial it back a little bit but it’s easy to say and ridiculously hard to do so my bet is that they tried and just didn’t get the split quite where it turns out people wanted it split.

If you think about Oblivion and Skyrim, we had the detect life spell. There was also a spell that would point you to your quest target. It would even draw a line on the ground. I think it was a shout you could use in Skyrim, and there is something comparable in Fallout that would do a similar thing. Was all that too much hand holding? I don’t know. I’ll let the players tell me and our players didn’t seem to object to it, and it really is hard to find the target sometimes of where you’re trying to get to. That may or may not be the case for the team behind Marvel's Wolverine but there will be a lot more context behind the choices they have made.