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.
My expectations of Bethesda, since Oblivion, has been as a mod platform.
Gimme a new engine with updated graphics and great mod support and let the community does what it does best.
Literally dummy easy. Hire the mod developers. Work WITH them not commanding them. Have better graphics than starfield. Hire a decent writer for the main quest.
They need to get over the loading problem with the engine. I’m not smart enough to know if that can be overcome or not, but it isn’t really acceptable to load screen so often, and I say that as someone who really enjoys Starfield
yeah completely agree. It’s honestly embarrassing on Bethesda’s part
Same, but to my knowledge it’s not possible. The engine is too outdated, and Godot wouldn’t feel the same.
This is true, but it’s not like Bethesda’s past few games inspire a lot of confidence.
Fall Out 4, mediocre.
Fall Out 76, bad.
Starfield, bad.
I fully expect tes6 to be ass.
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
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.
They’re 100% right. I don’t expect Bethesda to make anything good.
Step 1, this time don’t have an unskippable intro that lasts 30 minutes before you can start actually playing.
Seems like a good spot to put some unskippable ads. This is a million dollar idea!
noted! are you thinking 2 hours is long enough, or should we really try for three?
Most annoying part of Fallout 3.
Hey, you’re finally awake
3 did this perfectly.
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.
Obviously. ES6 isn’t out yet. The point is that there are many things ES6 could improve over Skyrim if they tried.
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.
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
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.
They can try.
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.
Yeah. It was my bad.
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
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.
Gotcha, entirely Radiant generated quest lines! With AI! And Blockchain! We still doing NFTs? You get NFTs.
the marketing team would cry themselves to death!!!
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.
Really? After the absolute clownshow that was Starfield, my expectations for TES6 are extremely low.
I had low expectations before, but Starfield killed them completely. Starfield actually helped me get over worrying about TES6, because I just lost interest.
Eh, I lost interest about an hour after their initial announcement video 6 years ago. It was obvious that there was no game then, and that it would be a long time before there was anything resembling a game.
So maybe I’ll be interested when they actually launch info about it, but until then, I just assume it doesn’t exist.
My expectations for a TES game are low by default. They just provide the world, the modders provide the game.
I mean maybe if you hadn’t been milking Skyrim for 13 fucking years, expectations wouldn’t be so unreasonably high, would they?
I sincerely doubt that.
Maybe they shouldn’t use marketers. From what I see, marketers are the reason for unreal hype. Look at cyberpunk, marketers told poeple that it was going to be basically a real life simulator and then people were upset that it was only a really fun RPG. (Aside from the launch issues this was also a big thing at launch).
All modern games hype is directly because of marketers.
Here’s a novel thing. Just show us what the game is like. No stupid marketing lingo, no flashy graphics, just what the game is like. Give us the opening mission. There, pay me a marketing fee. No stupid high expectations, no lying about features that don’t actually exist, just telling the consumer honestly what they’re buying.
Remember the time when we had demoes that we could test before commiting to a buy? We should come back to that. Arguably Steam’s return policy could be used as a demo although it only gives access to the beginning of the game and the plethora of cinematics and tutorials, and does not focus on a core part of the gameplay.
Steam’s recent update to carve out a category for demo’s is kinda what you are asking for. At least it is in the right direction, if devs follow it.
Look at cyberpunk, marketers told poeple that it was going to be basically a real life simulator and then people were upset that it was only a really fun RPG
We can’t put all the blame on marketers. It is still to this day a wonky, janky, buggy and substandard RPG. There was no level of softening that would make Cyberpunk palatable enough to be entirely free of negative sentiment.
pay me a marketing fee
Average pay is like 50-60k [per year] for a[n average of a] 40 hour week [job], less if you’re like social media coordinator or something. It’s not like it’s crazy money.
And why hate on people that are usually artists, writers, creatives etc spending half their life using their talents in a bland corporate way to make money to pay the bills so they can spend 10% of their life actually creating art?
Plus, everyone’s job is easy when you reduce it to simplistic terms
I can be a back end developer: just organize the data and show it on my screen. Don’t show me a login page, don’t ask for my preferences, don’t give me help articles, just organize the data
I can be a firefighter: just put out the fire, don’t ride around in a big truck, don’t slide down a pole just put out the fire.
50-60k for a week‽.
That’s almost pretty much double the average monthly salary here.
a year to work a full time job I meant.
edit: I looked it up, average - 50th percentile - is actually $79k per annum. Still not crazy money for a full time job.
Lol, I also messed up the currency conversion. Of course we don’t earn around 30k USD a month. That would be insane. We earn on average around 30-35k SEK a month which is much less.
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.”
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.
