Bethesda’s Pete Hines on the future of The Elder Scrolls: Legends

These days I am a CCG bigamist, desperately trying to maintain functional relationships with both Hearthstone and The Elder Scrolls: Legends without them finding out about each other. It’s an expensive, time-consuming problem, but also a lot of fun. After all, who doesn’t like smashing sweet monsters with numbers attached into each other?

Despite the recent Chaos Arena event in Legends, and the addition of the 10-card Madhouse Collection, the game technically remains in closed beta. At Pax West last September Tom Marks spoke to Pete Hines, Bethesda VP of PR and Marketing, who told him that the game could be called launched if they wanted. But here we are in February 2017 and it’s still not officially out.

With the meta feeling a little stale, and queue times getting longer, I sat down with Hines again this week to chat about Bethesda’s plans for Legends. We talked about the need for new content, and an accompanying publicity push once the game does launch. I also asked him about whether he worries that developer Dire Wolf may be distracted by working on multiple card games at once (they’re also behind Eternal). Check out the full conversation in the video embedded above. 

Hines is clearly a huge CCG fan and Legends is something of a passion project for him by the sound of it. It was good to hear that Bethesda is well aware that Legends needs a push, which it sounds like they’re hoping the launch of the mobile and tablets plus some substantial new content will provide. As I wrote when I first started playing it, I like Legends a lot, even if the suggestion that it will challenge Hearthstone now feels a little excitable. 

Still, CCG players have arguably never had it so good on PC, so I’m still optimistic Legends can find a decent audience when it goes into full release. And from the sound of it, you can put your money on March for that happening.

Tim Clark

With over two decades covering videogames, Tim has been there from the beginning. In his case, that meant playing Elite in 'co-op' on a BBC Micro (one player uses the movement keys, the other shoots) until his parents finally caved and bought an Amstrad CPC 6128. These days, when not steering the good ship PC Gamer, Tim spends his time complaining that all Priest mains in Hearthstone are degenerates and raiding in Destiny 2. He's almost certainly doing one of these right now.