Mighty Inside

New Inside the Vault with Michael “Svenn” Latanzia:

What’s your job at Bethesda?
I am a Quality Assurance tester here at Bethesda. I have the dream job of sitting around playing games all day.

What other games have you worked on?
I started out working on Oblivion for the Playstation 3, and I also got to work some with Shivering Isles. Since then I’ve mostly been working on Fallout 3, with the exception of a couple weeks that I helped out on AMF Bowling: Pinbusters for the Wii.

What is the best part about working as a tester? The worst part?
The worst part of being a tester is how repetitive it can get. Most people rarely spend more than 100 hours or so on a game, but as a tester we have to spend literally thousands of hours on the same game before it’s released. That quest that was really fun the first time through seems a lot less interesting when you’re playing it again for the 20th time.

The best part is everything else. I love getting to see the changes a game goes through over the course of the development. It’s also very entertaining seeing some of the crazy bugs that pop up along the way.

Oblivion Revisited

Gameplayer’s Dylan Burns talks about the lessons Bethsoft should take from Oblivion:

Of course, you may know Bethesda from a little game called Oblivion, which itself has faced its fair share of controversy. The big question we therefore have to ask is this: does Bethesda have the balls to make Fallout 3 kick arse? Well that depends on whether they can face up to the flaws of Oblivion. Certainly that game will do them no favours with Fallout’s hardcore fans: in fact, one of the original developer’s key staff described the sale of the license as feeling like “our ex wife had sold our children that she had legal custody of.” Talk about pressure!

So lets start with analyzing Oblivion in all its Radiant glory.[...]

There you have it – our take on what Bethesda needs to focus on in its development of Fallout 3 and what lessons it should learn from Oblivion. We think we’ve covered just about everything that most perspicacious gamers would pick up. This feature should certainly not be taken as an attack on either game; we are actually very much looking forward to Fallout 3, and we still think that Oblivion is one of the best RPGs ever made.

But it’s when you study the things that you love that your desire to mould it, even just a little bit, arises. If there’s a point you think we’ve missed, be sure to head on over to our forums and post it for all to see – who knows, maybe Bethesda will actually listen to us!

It’s a pretty controversial six pages article, worth a read. I still don’t get why the gaming press sees so many problems in Oblivion now, and not two years ago…