I’ve been saying this even before Bethesda went down the gutter. Everyone is pointing to their recent collosal failures like they wouldn’t still be disappointed even if ES6 was “perfect.”
I don’t think anybody can point out what, exactly, made Skyrim so fucking legendary. It was a buggy, unpolished mess of a game. Its lore was inconsistent. It had a villain and story that should have been deeply intriguing and interesting and yet it does Alduin a disservice and was, quite frankly, boring.
But somehow the game was fun. So fun that people spent an average 80 hours a week playing it, me included! And the only possible exploration is that Bethesda had passion, and then Skyrim inflated their egos. So I can see why people see their recent spree of lackluster-to-terrible games as a very valid reason for agreeing with Tod Howard, for once.
Set that aside, however. Let’s assume they “get it right.” Let’s assume it’s made with passion and recent history has humbled them. People will still be disappointed. Why? Because “it’s not Skyrim.” Just in the same way that hardcore ES fans hated Skyrim because “it’s not Morrowind.” Skyrim set the bar so astronomically high that it would take an absolute fucking miracle for them to, at bare minimum, meet expectation! And it would honestly be better that they didn’t, because then people would expect them to hit that milestone every, single time when the “secret ingredient” to Skyrim’s legendary success is so fucking aetherial nobody can say exactly what it is.
They can try.
This is true, but it’s not like Bethesda’s past few games inspire a lot of confidence.
They’re 100% right. I don’t expect Bethesda to make anything good.
Fall Out 4, mediocre.
Fall Out 76, bad.
Starfield, bad.
I fully expect tes6 to be ass.
been playing Fallout:NV and its so good. They should go back to using elder scrolls as a way to show off new engines and then license them out to new companies to make games.
Skyrim should be seen as an abberation here. If the game turns out good thats just a plus
New Vegas was made by Obsidian in 18 months
yeah that’s the point, Bethesda generally builds an ok game and engine and puts an above average mod/design system on it. Obsidian is far better at making actual video games.
I firmly believe that if Fallout 4 wasn’t made on the ancient CE, it could have been legendary. There’s so many good ideas in Fallout 4, you can see what kind of game the devs really wanted to make, but it feels so clunky.
On the other hand it also has one of the worst main stories in an RPG ever
Ideas are cheap, you can literally list a hundred ideas for good games in a day. The hard part is an implementation that matches your imagination of what it would be like.
and this fact makes things worse because it’s their in-house engine and if they can’t make their ideas and execution work on their own framework that’s an even bigger failure. It’s not like they were trying to learn Unreal while making their game
Their engine is not the issue. Starfield in particular needed a lot more investment into making their engine work for that style of game, but it is functional for FO and TES. Switching to UE would require building a ton of tools, creating a lot of new tech, and having the team learn to use it. UE isn’t just some perfect engine you can swap over to. It has tons of issues and things you need to learn. The bones of it are as old as the Creation Engine’s too.
My biggest issue with Starfield was the writing. The stories were boring and mostly didn’t make sense. They also forced you down one or two paths, even when other options should have been available. This is also true for their other games, but much less noticeable.
They’ve also been removing the player’s ability to make their own fun in the world, and instead you just have to follow what they’ve given you. For example, no spell crafting in Skyrim, and very limited enchanting. Why? They still aren’t balanced. They’re just less fun and interesting.
points taken, but what I meant was that they of all people should be able to make the best possible game on their engine. if they were making the game on a new engine it’d be easier to understand if their eyes were bigger than their stomach due to their inexperience
Step 1, this time don’t have an unskippable intro that lasts 30 minutes before you can start actually playing.
3 did this perfectly.
Most annoying part of Fallout 3.
Hey, you’re finally awake
noted! are you thinking 2 hours is long enough, or should we really try for three?
Or have it as a toggle after your first time watching it
lol, you don’t have an issue with Elder Scrolls 6.
You have an issue with Skyrim.
It’s cool. We’ll make it for you (and far more impeccably gorgeous than you would). Just give us the engine.
- The Modding Community
I’m glad some of them chose not to be enablers after Starfield.
The adoring fan and characters like claptrap are proof that I would never make it as lead designer for game sequels. I would never include a character like those and think to myself “This needs to be more than an annoying minor side character, I need to bring them closer to begin to the identity of the games.”
Really? Just make the exact same game as Skyrim with better graphics and a new plot, while making it less likely to have bugs and glitches and maybe fix the largest complaints about Skyrim.
Just make the exact same game… with better graphics and a new plot
It works for Capcom and Nintendo just fine. Nintendo even skips making a new plot.
commence marketing team weeping for weeks on end
What a cop-out.
Bethesda didn’t have trouble making games when they cared about making games. Now, they care about making money. Yes, devs should get paid for their work. But design decisions based on anything other than making a good game poison the well.
This is why small devs are absolutely killing it with indie games on PC at the moment. AAA titles fail over and over again, because they’re designed for C-suite pockets first and gamers second.
There already are a few indie Morrowind clones like Dread Delusion that I’ve had my eye on. Not sure what elements will have been compromised by the budget but keen to give it a go after payday next week.
At this point I could give up a lot in terms of budget. Give me text without audio all day long if the writing is good. I think we’ve lost our way on RPGs.
One great bonus of no voice acting is modding is a lot easier. It’s cool seeing how well Sim Settlements was able to use existing voice lines for the player and make them work, but I’m sure it was a lot of effort. Most small mods end up having to just use books and things like that because they can’t afford acting talent. If you just have text for characters speaking there’s no limit for them.
WoW’s talking heads, for example.
Not an improvement.
It’s not like they don’t know how to make a good game. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Take Skyrim, make a new land with new characters and new quests, make it 4 times as pretty, fix the biggest bugs. Maybe make the quests a smidge more complex. Boom.
I love how you can probably accurately guess someone’s age by if they think Skyrim was the best Bethesda game. It was bland and boring, but pretty, in my opinion.
the marketing team would cry themselves to death!!!
Gotcha, entirely Radiant generated quest lines! With AI! And Blockchain! We still doing NFTs? You get NFTs.
Thank God they lowered the expectations after Starfield.
I know I’m in the minority, but I fucking love Starfield.
It’s a galactic scale zen garden when I need peace.
It’s a shooter/space combat sim when I choose violence.
There’s things that aren’t good about it, it needs so many more factions, followers, and NPC interaction points to fill the fish bowl that’s there, but there’s so much to love too, IMHO.
In a time where MOST major studio games have turned to no effort live service dogshit, I think hating on flawed but grand games like Starfield as just more unsalvagable garbage is just an invitation to studios to keep churning out actual garbage like Suicide Squad since there’s no pleasing modern gamers so don’t bother trying, just lean entirely on an IPs nostalgia.
So happy for you! I think it’s a fine game with great highs, but it is a different game when compared to Skyrim obviously, which makes one wonder how ES6 would be.
Edit: fixed the ?. I was genuinely happy for you
You make it sound as if I’m the one that brought Starfield up out of nowhere in relation to Skyrim/TE6.
No wait. That “?” was a typo. I genuinely meant I’m happy for you.
Ah thank you for the clarification! Sorry socials can be hostile places didn’t mean to take that the most hostile way.
That’s awesome but on paper I still think it’s objectively bad. I got the game for free with my CPU and still feel like I got burned some how. There’s no world where I see myself ever finishing that game.
Yeah, I was gonna say. I’m sure it’ll meet my expectations, and I’ll be disappointed.
And Fallout 76, and in some sense, Fallout 4
Oh it can be done. The only question is: is Bethesda the one to do it?
…Larian Studios has entered the chat
Eh. I’d argue the Beyond Skyrim Team is the real successors
Fair point.
Yeah I know, I played Morrowind, Oblivion, and unfortunately Skyrim. I expect it to be pretty and large, but not have much unique, good stuff, the side quests will be “go steal this same vase 6x from different people oh look you run the Thieves Guild now,” and the main quests might be neat.
I’m not sure I’ll be picking it up tbh.
It’s been a long time since 11-11-11.
They haven’t been working on it since then, if they did, they’ve already scrapped it and fired the old devs.
They’re developing games for modern audiences now, they’ll be adding a bard class, there’ll be a traveling circus prominently featuring throughout the story and with a tent near most major cities. And you’ll finally be able to play as a bearded midget lady. That’s what dwemer are now, they decided. A matriarchal bearded civilization whose ancient traditions led to modern circuses. And you have to help the Queen save the world from the Nazi Elves and alt-right Nords.
Holy shit dude go the fuck outside.
That’s where modern sequels are best experienced. At a distance, not dealing with them.
Why does none of this sound like it’d make a game bad, unless you’re hoping your fantasy RPG will own the libs?
You are why they do these things to games.
Tear out the guts, replace them with industry standard parts and the most recent fad.
None of those things individually have any impact on the game. And none of them are likely to ever make it into a game by a company like Bethesda. The fact that you’re nitpicking these kinds of things, with no real basis, really makes you wonder the actual reasoning behind your post.
Rewriting things like dwemer would have no impact.
Right.
Fuck you.
Because it sounds like they’d be ditching everything previous fans love about the universe and lore to hit a bunch of buzzwords. There is insane shit from older games that I’m sure will never see the light of day (unless a modder gets inspired) because Bethesda wants to sanitize and mass-marketize the world.
Will Elsweyr explore at all the fact there are effectively different species of Khajiit tied to under what combination of the phases of the dual moons the baby is born? Or will Bethesda just throw some big, gruff, talking tigers and some small, funny, talking house cats around and call it a day after putting in exactly one (1) version of each of those that inverts that mold?
Will the Mane be like this: https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Mane ? Or will he just be a Khajiit in LaCroix-level flavorings of Middle-Eastern adjacent clothing?
How many people who worked on Morrowind, Oblivion, and/or Skyrim are still working there? This is a question I feel does not get asked enough when it comes to beloved franchises. People talk about their favourite game developers and how they “sold out” or whatever. I don’t think I see enough recognition that sometimes the best people at a company just leave.
The reality is that it’s been 20 years since many of those “best games ever”. 20 years is a huge chunk of your working life. It’s just not realistic to keep the same people that whole time, or even a percentage of them.
People don’t want to think about the reality of it, they just want content to devour.
bethesda has one of the least amount of turnover for any gaming company. so you can check the credits for morrowind then check for skyrim then check for starfield and you will see a lot of familiar names
I was a pretty hardcore Bethesda fan for years, long before Skyrim. But they have burned me too many times now for me to have any faith in ESVI.
