Console version of Skyrim Bethesda's "lead SKU"

Bethesda's Craig Lafferty has laid out some flamebait by suggesting that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been developed primarily for consoles.

"We use the consoles as our lead SKU," the Skyrim lead producer told CVG.

"So we develop towards the consoles and then porting to PC is usually not too bad actually ."

Lafferty commented that the current console generation is still going strong.

"We could get a lot of the current hardware; we learned a lot from Fallout and Oblivion - and also it became clear with Kinect and [PS] Move that the new consoles weren't gonna be soon enough for when we wanted to launch the game," he explained.

Meanwhile, comments about opening the game to a wider audience seem almost designed to further set the core to raging.

"We wanted to take it and make it really accessible," the producer said.

"… We still have the complexity behind the scenes, but we wanted to make it so that you could pick up the controller and play and it was easy; the average person could get into it.

"We knew we wanted to make the user interface a little bit more open and available … get away from the stats and things like that.

"We're all big apple fans, so slick users interfaces is one of the things we really wanted to do, make it real natural and polished. You're gonna be in that menu a lot."

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim releases on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on November 11.