I hope they're using this time to learn lessons from their Starfield flop and gather the talent and budget needed to improve upon Skyrim. A modern engine probably wouldn't hurt.
However, my expectations are very low at this point.
They haven't learned from Oblivion, Skyrim, or Fallout 4. Probably others.
Or really, they learned they can just keep releasing games on a hacked-up Morrowind engine, and make huge piles of money. So that's what they'll keep doing.
Yup. ES6 is going to sell like condoms on an STD themed swinger convension no matter how many bugs are going around.
And the saddest part is that too many have learned nothing about AAA titles, and will preorder the game, making the game a massive financial success even before releasing anything of quality.
Don't forget they learned they can charge for mods, too!
They haven’t learned from 3 of their best and most popular games?
People have such nostalgia boners for Morrowind. Warranted or not, it’s still annoying.
What does that have to do with the comment you replied to?
Also why would it be annoying if people say a good game is a good game and it is warranted?
It's like people on this thread have some pathological need to complain about SOMETHING.
I think Elder Scrolls is one of those properties whose biggest detractors are its fanbase. Runescape is exactly the same, and it's totally bizarre.
The nostalgia boner is that it was a very unique game, and nothing has come out quite like it since. It’s not even like Daggerfall or Arena. For someone looking for that experience, Oblivion and Skyrim were massive disappointments.
Going from a volcano that is spewing flesh mutating disease while riding giant bugs around to Tolkienesque Medieval Fantasy Landscape #3045 gave me whiplash. (The Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine save the package though.) And losing the ability to kill whoever I want? Spears???
Skyrim is better. It mangles what could have been a good story by retconning lore and making Alduin into big evil bad, just as Oblivion was about basically Satan invading the world. Morrowind’s villain may not be right, but his motives are 100% understandable and he has a good point. (In Oblivion: why would you join a cult dedicated to killing everyone for no reason?)
As a Morrowboomer, I’m willing to accept the series changed, but there just hasn’t been something to replace what I hoped for ES4. They don’t make games with that vibe anymore. The closest thing I’ve had to scratching that itch would be Planescape Torment, Pathologic, or Zeno Clash.
The budget for Starfield was twice that of Baldur's Gate 3. Throwing more money at it isn't going to do a lot if they're allocating it poorly.
I'm not suggesting that a big budget alone is sufficient to make a good game.
However, enough budget to keep the team employed (note the many gaming industry layoffs lately) and appropriate budgeting (in terms of both money and time) affect things like code, art, and writing quality. It's kind of important.
I think it's going to require the people making the most high-level decisions to come to the realization that their old way of doing things is outdated. I don't have faith that they'll come to those conclusions.
I don’t have faith that they’ll come to those conclusions.
Sadly, I don't have much faith in them either. (Hence my low expectations.)
I can still hope, though. Elder Scrolls has enough fans and lore that there's certainly potential for a great new game.
lore
Friendly reminder that the original "loremaster" of Elder Scrolls left Bethesda before they released Elder Scrolls Online, and they replaced him with someone who has apparently been making pretty questionable decisions with ESO lore.
I mean, they always have the out of dragon breaks rewriting reality/making multiple conflicting timelines simultaneously canon (see the events of daggerfall as referenced in later games) to handwave away retcons, but overusing that just means that no lore actually matters.
I think of it as a pool from which to draw and connect story elements, rather than rigid canon. If good writers were given the chance, I think they would find plenty of material to work with.
at the end of the day they are going to make the game they want, whether we like it or not, microsoft is now involved as well so who knows how that is going to affect them with their decisions
Hopefully it'll be like Minecraft; that game has gotten way better since Microsoft.
I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.
What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than "we can"), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.
Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft's meddling.
The real number is Morrowind had something like 10-20 writers that worked on it. Modern Bethesda games have 1.
Michael Kirkbride counts as 15 writers-in-one with enough cocaine.
It's a good thing that he definitely didn't leave the company years ago then!
He released his Coda, he's washed his hands of the setting.
Lol he's definitely worth it
I think I counted 6 quest designers in Starfield, which was a spot in the credits I was specifically looking for given how many quests they had and how many of them would have been better off not even existing. You can't talk about having 1000 planets and then make quests that aren't interesting to populate them.
There's a recent video that adds all of that up. Starfield had some crazy low number of quests, I think 50ish, and Morrowind had like 300+.
And of course Starfield has an astronomical number of devs on it.
There are more than 50 quests unless you're getting creative with how you count. There are over a dozen in each major faction, and those ones are mostly okay, but the ones I really take issue with are the nothing quests that aren't part of any faction; the ones that basically just have you go to a location and then report back. Those are awful. There should be zero quests in there that the quest designers themselves aren't excited about. Even the bounties that you pick up for a given faction that have you go to a place and kill an enemy mob should be more exciting than what I've already described in this sentence.
I don't know what to tell ya dude.
Perhaps "you're right", "you're wrong and also short, here's why", or even "I don't know". These would all be things you could tell them and a better response.
K
Starfield has more quests than Skyrim (both somewhere around 200 or so quests). Morrowind definitely felt like it was twice as much as those.
It's a tricky balancing act. They need to recover the investment as early as possible to pay less in capital costs but doing that will mean that later on when the product is sub-par it will cause problems and extra work.
Since the engine, game logic, art, story, testing is so heavily coupled together changing the engine a little bit could cause a month of work down the line.
I think personally the best way is to start by making an engine or taking one off the shelf and then write a mini version of the game with shit art that has a lot of bugs.
At the same time making models with hitboxes that all have the same physical properties otherwise, dialog content and recordings and all other content that can be done separately.
Once that is fun to play then you can start working creating a slightly bigger system with a single short storyline to have a cohesive experience and will have the genaral feel of the game.
Once everything above is done setting up a closed beta is the way to go. Take some feedback, add features and redo the small story to be more fun.
Then once everything is a fun experience but people just want more you do the whole everything.
While you’ve made some valid points, keep in mind this isn’t a startup, it’s a massive studio
A modern engine probably wouldn't hurt.
If it does not have similar levels of moddability then it will absolutely hurt.
I think it's safe to assume they know that and would bear it in mind when choosing or building an engine. Their games are famous for modding, after all.
That's a years if not decade+ long project though, including major investments of time and money that you could pour into actual games. You can't just stomp a new game engine out of the ground, especially not with how complex video games in of itself have become, and if you want it to be as moddable as their current one.
That’s a years if not decade+ long project though
Yep.
You can’t just stomp a new game engine out of the ground
I don't know what you mean by that, but creating new game engines and migrating from one to another have both been done before.
Is either of those tasks fast or cheap? Of course not.
Are they worthwhile? Sometimes.
Are they possible? Absolutely.
especially not [...] if you want it to be as moddable as their current one.
Well, I can understand why you might assume that if you don't have a lot of experience in software development, but it's just not true. Making an engine that allows for very moddable games is mainly about planning for it during the design, and either building good tools for the game data or publishing the specs so other people can. It's not arcane magic.
(And for what it's worth, while Creation Engine is quite moddable, it has enormous room for improvement in that area. Actually working with it can be a very frustrating experience.)
Not if they simply use the latest Unreal Engine.
They already built their new engine. That's what Starfield is using.
lol, no.
Starfield is still using the creation engine, which is based on gamebryo, which they're using since Morrowind.
Correct. And they made a new version for Starfield. That's all they're going to use. Anyone that thinks they'll ever switch engines is daydreaming.
It would be nice if the game speed and physics interaction were not tied to a inconsistent variable such as frame rate. And it seems that the more they pile on the gambryo engine the less receptive to modding it gets. But i can also accept that the cracks in the games that grow over time may not be the engine, but Bethesda prioritizing MVP centric development over hammering out the problems. Modders are carrying an auful lot of load to even get the games running.
Agreed on all points.
And the topic was about them making a modern engine.
You're missing the point.
Dude... You are the one missing the point here. lol
We were talking about them making a new actually modern engine, instead of sticking to their old gamebryo trash heap. And then you come along, claiming that they already did that, even though they literally did not. Please stop playing daft.
They DID make their modern new engine. They spent five years upgrading gamebryo/craption. They aren't going to change engines.
That is their modern engine.
I don't know how else to spell it out lol.
That's all they're going to use.
They had a turd. They polished it up a little. It's still the same turd.
Their 'modern' engine is only modern to them, but it's pathetically behind everyone else. I can only imagine the spaghetti code that thing is at this point.
I think we're only ever see a new engine once Todd is no longer part of the company. Because the quote him out of context 'it just works'
Thanks, I needed that laugh.
I'm replaying Starfield, and on my second playthrough, I'm noticing the depth they put into this game. Sometimes a single dialogue line you said days ago will have an effect on NPC attitudes through an entire side story. I'm not going to argue that it's not a regurgitation of their lame formula they've milked for the past 15+ years, but they do need to reevaluate where their money/dev time goes to.
Replaying as well, doing side quests I put off and surprised they actually go interesting places. Just did the one where zero G kept turning off and on at the space station that got taken over.
Damn, TIL you can come across these locations on accident just exploring. I thought that place was weird to be randomly floating out there with no real good loot. 😂
I misread your comment and now seem foolish lol but that is hilarious, I think Bethesda needs some work on their world engine and random events. Saw a mod where people are making custom towns now and man would random encounters within that environment.....would take it to the next level.
I like Starfield.
Sshhh that isn't an approved opinion for Internet use
The only thing Bethesda is motivated to do, frothing, absolutely chomping at the bit, is figure out a way to successfully monetize modded content.
Yes, will probably make a monthly subscription that walls off ability to download mods.
(Also, it's "champing" at the bit. Sorry for the correction but it's a small pet peeve seeing chomping so much now)
as long as they don’t have space travel between every objective and hundreds of barren procedurally generated planets it will be fine.
We all know that all they are going to do is re-release new versions of their old games on devices we largely don't care about.
It's gonna take twice as long as Starfield all to contain the same jank in an even larger, more barren, world where nothing is interesting and you're just going through the motions because that's what Todd Howard thinks games are.
It really does feel like Starfield completely killed any excitement for Bethesda games, everything since Oblivion has been a step in the wrong direction IMO.
Including Oblivion. I enjoyed it but it was a huge disappointment to me coming out of Morrowind. Bethesda reputation for me has been on Morrowind credit this whole time.
Even Morrowind was a simplified version of Daggerfall, even though it was groundbreaking when it was released. They decided that the direction to take was to simplify the mechanics progressively, to make the series more appealing to more people, as opposed to adding interesting complications back as their tech develops. They succeeded in their mantra of "keep it simple, stupid". I don't have any hope that the next game will be more interesting. It will look prettier, of course.
Idk, having only played Oblivion and Skyrim, I feel like (generally speaking) the simplifications in Skyrim were for the better. Take custom spells for example. Only a few spells really even made sense to make and it was better to make them in very specific ways. It's not like the games are super difficult. Fucking around with spells and more complex enchantments was cool but too easy to cheese.
Oh, and the leveling. Holy fuck what an over complicated mess. Where you could accidentally over level but also under level. Insane. Good riddance.
Complex systems are not inherently good. They're good if they provide meaningful choices and are fun to use. But ES has always been about the story and exploration more so anyways (in my opinion).
It's smaller but I would not say it was dumbed down like Oblivion was to Morrowind. Morrowind feels more or less the same as Arena or Daggerfall, except in how character progressiom works and that you didn't have to swing your mouse around trying to hit things with your weapon.
It literally still has all the deeper mechanics like performing rituals during certain times of the day/months/year and what not. Just not a procedurally generated world with RNG quests or dungeons. And thank God for that because Daggerfall and Arena both could literally break by generating a dungeon you couldn't actually finish.
Oblivion had quality of life improvements that made it a better game IMO. Yes Morrowind was bigger and deeper, but it was also a frustrating game that didn't age very well.
People have actually made it through Starfield? I tried so hard, but couldn't make it past 20 hours (which isn't a lot for a Bethesda RPG). The story is just sodamnBORING.
The story is just so damn BORING.
Oh boy, you're lucky. I trudged through for 70h out of sheer morbid curiosity. The boring main story goes straight into "icecream on forehead" when the starborn show up. The ending is just a shit cherry on top of that, with Emil Pagliarulo's best "fuck you for asking questions" ever
Good to know. I don't even know about these "starborn" people. Never made it that far.
I don't believe, they're actually 6 years into the development. Back then, they just announced that at some point, there would be a TES6, but they've been busy developing Starfield since then.
As part of Starfield, they did do some engine upgrades. You know what that looks like...
Their announcement for the 30th anniversary implies that it is in early pre-alpha right now. Chances of it running on the same exact engine as Starfield are practically 100%
Wonder if it'll be ready for the 30th anniversary of Skyrim
Anyway
Chances of it running on the same exact engine as Starfield are practically 100%
You can still make improvements in pre-alpha for sure. Not massive overhauls of existing systems, but there's no reason you couldn't fix bugs, incrementally improve existing features and add new ones.
Sure, you could, but given beths track record in that regard, why would they? They have been perfectly happy shipping Skyrim to new platforms with the same bugs for nearly a decade.
I don't think the announcement implies anything. Truly. It's just them trying to get shareholders happy about hype.
Who knows, honestly. I’m not holding my breath for this game anymore. When it comes out, i’ll check it out, but if it’s in the same pitiful state as Starfield, then idk
Don't worry, in five years it will launch with the same physics tick rate bug and the dearth of anything interesting that is customary of any Bethesda Game Studios game.
Welcome to the place washed by Iliac waves
There's two and a half peasants with the same ugly face
You're not into small towns? Check out big-ass plains
Fifty times the size of Skyrim's, twice as many pointless caves!
And there's even one new cave variation!
If they take too much fucking longer I'm gonna look for my RPG fix Elsweyr.
Normally, I would say that I don't care when a game comes out, as long as it's a genuinely good, complete experience. But knowing Bethesda, it'll be another 5 years before we see anything, and then we'll get an embarrassingly buggy title, that hasn't innovated on anything since Fallout 3 came out.
I used to forgive them for anything, knowing that the modding community would just patch things anyway, but we've seen how Starfield was rejected by a ton of people with skills.
I think too many people forget that Skyrim was actually popular enough without mods to bring enough modders to the table to fix the rest of it. Bethesda seems to have forgotten that they actually have to deliver a mostly fun and mostly playable game for a proper modding scene to take root.
That really is a pretty substantial part of it too. Modding at its core requires a good game, and everything else comes from people wanting to change parts of it, that aren't necessarily to their liking. Bethesda somehow assumed that people would be willing to reimplement half of the game at launch. That just won't slide anymore, for 70$
Yep. And the good mods take a while to make too. If your game is dead 3 months after launch, who's going to still be motivated to keep working on a big overhaul type mod?
It didn't help that Starfield didn't release with any of the normal modding toolset for Bethsda games. It literally didn't get it until this month.
1 dev of the skyrim together mod.
Shadow of the Erdtree DLC comes out this month after being developed for 2 years. Even amazing games take forever to develop, I'm certainly not waiting half a decade for another fucking Starfield...
That's the difference. I would wait a decade for a follow-up to Elden Ring. It was a genuinely incredible game in every way.
Starfield didn't have modding, but was it an embarrassingly buggy title that hasn't innovated on anything since Fallout 3?
They could take 30 years to make it, but it would still be made by Bethesda and it would still suck.
I have great memories of Morrowind
It was still a glitch fest, but at least the world was top notch.
*netch
*netch bully
You're madness forking right.
What the hell man. Don't nix hound me about this.
Me replaying New Vegas, lol I had it crash on me like 7 times during my playthrough. Classic Bethesda engine
7 is pretty damn good for that engine. Were you doing a speedrun?
You mean you didn't enjoy sending giants flying?
In morrowind?
I have great memories of Skyrim. And FO3. And New Vegas. And Fallout 4. And Fallout 76 actually got not bad. And Elder Scrolls: Online had one of my favorite quest chains in a game. And...
Lemmy is way too edgy to enjoy good games that are also popular.
Lenny indeed lacks some casual fucks, almost every thread has some extreme opinions. I had someone unironically try to explain to me why it would be beneficial to the human race to go extinct.
Excuse me, I'm a casual fuck thank you.
Ah you’re a fellow Heroes of the Storm enjoyer?
Ok so, I didn't enjoy Skyrim as much as I enjoyed Morrowind, in fact I never finished it; I skipped Oblivion 'cause at the time it came out I... had other things to deal with.
I liked FO3 (weirdly, I liked it better than FONV), but in my opinion the new ones don't hold a candle to the first two.
I agree almost 100% with you on this. I did play Oblivion, but Skyrim has the more interesting world IMO which makes it a slightly better game. The strength of Bethesda games that makes them good, in my opinion, is the same every time: explore a large interesting world with your own created character. This explains (in part) why people like Morrowind so much: the world is just so weird and interesting.
The problem is they don't know how to improve on that concept. Instead they are mostly adding features that either don't add anything to it or actively detract from it. For example, Fallout 4 received settlement building and weapon crafting. But, the time I'm spending on my town, I'm not actually out exploring. If I can craft weapons, I care less about the cool weapons I find in dungeons. Now, Starfield got rid of most of the crafted world altogether in exchange for procedural planets that aren't interesting to explore at all.
Aan an aside, I don't think it even makes sense to compare the first two fallout games with the Bethesda ones. Fallout 3 and beyond are not really sequels, they're a completely different series set in the same universe.
This explains (in part) why people like Morrowind so much: the world is just so weird and interesting.
I think you're right. Maybe they should make a game based on Scavengers Reign.
Fallout 3 and beyond are not really sequels, they're a completely different series set in the same universe.
I would argue they're not even the same universe. While F1 had its share of of people living in post-war rubble, by F2 the world was mostly newly-build cities or primitive societies but there was a sense of progress, like having actual money (and by Tactics paper money was in everyday use). Then F3 comes and everyone is living in a pile of rubbish, with unreadable burnt pre-war books on their shelves like they want to pretend the world is how it used to be, nevermind that generations have passed, and everyone is back to trading in caps.
Yeah, that's weird of the new Fallout games, there's people sleeping on 200-years old mattresses (what are they made of, asbestos?). I get the destruction, and I understand how they may not be able to rebuild civilization to the old standards for a long while, but ffs, at least patch your walls!
There's an industry to make new guns but people just step over the skeleton in the lobby of the half-collapsed hotel the three dozen residents call "Halftower" without a drop of irony.
I also liked Skyrim and oblivion. Not sure how people can think they suck.
Those games don't suck. But Bethesda is so washed now
I liked Daggerfall, too, despite serious glitch issues. I just saved a lot and it was fine.
and then they'd re-sell it a bunch of times after that too.
Because it was such a bad game that people gladly bought it again?
I like the bugs. The Giant Space Program was nice
God what a fucking boring and wrong opinion to be have
Just in terms of timeline, Dragon Age 4 was teased at about the same time with the same level of teaser trailer. It's releasing this fall.
So a full modern RPG being fully developed in that time by a smaller studio, and for elder scrolls we haven't heard squat.
Who knows how DA will turn out, but we know modern Bethesda quality thanks to starfield. Not having any news in 6 years proves this trailer was made just to shut fans up
Who knows how DA will turn out, but we know modern Bethesda quality thanks to starfield. Not having any news in 6 years proves this trailer was made just to shut fans up
Pretty sure they flat out said this was true
Yup:
"Bethesda and Todd Howard announced Elder Scrolls 6 when they did because of fan demand, or in the words of Skyrim's lead designer Bruce Nesmith, because 'the pitchforks and torches were out.'"
Source
Often times trailers that early are used as a hiring tool, too. Cyberpunk's original CG trailer was back in like 2012, and that game came out in 2020, but we know from an interview at E3 before The Witcher 3 came out that there was a very small team working on Cyberpunk before Witcher 3 was done, and Cyberpunk at that point was mostly just design documents.
And DA4 got almost remade to remove the live service features
What's Bethesdas excuse?
they were working on starfield?
I wouldn't dare to call Bioware a smaller studio, pretty sure people said that Bethesda is the one that is strangely small for a AAA developer.
The teaser itself is some generic terrain with procedural grass anyone could do in blender in 3h
That's what I thought at the time "yes that does spell elder scrolls VI, Bethesda, and?"
Tbh it was 100% a move to avoid pissing off the fans by only announcing Starfield
They just released this teaser to shut everyone up at the time
It's like people have completely forgotten that fact. That snippet was at the very end of a 30 minute Bethesda presentation that had Fallout 76 with its multiplayer being a significant move away from their traditional formula, Elder Scrolls Blades (which is a mobile game nobody remembers) and the reveal of Starfield, a completely new franchise. Of course fans are going to question where is TES 6.
And a few months later Blizzard showed what happens when you don't tease Diablo 4 after revealing Diablo immortal.
I played Blades for a little while until it got too 'gimme gimme' about me paying. Then I stopped. Not paying to win.
DON'T YOU GUYS HAVE PHONES???
But what really hurts is that diablo immoral is a HUGE money printer.
I want to be positive and I'm trying to remain optimistic, but somehow I just know it in my bones that they're going to further Fallout 4 the franchise and strip away even more skills and attributes. Hell, maybe they'll get rid of dialogue entirely.
Indeed. I would love to have a "modernized Morrowind" experience -- an RPG game that really nails the role-playing part of RPG, but without the cheesy parts of Morrowind like the unintuitive combat system -- but all of us know that it's just not gonna happen.
The combat in Morrowind is intuitive if your previous RPG experience used dice and paper.
You can 100% tell someone's paper RPG experience level by their favorite elder scrolls game lmao
Not quite. It's just harder to disconnect the 3D visual of a sword or mace swing very clearly hitting a creature and said hit missing entirely, especially as you're in direct control of when and where the attack happens. For comparison, it's much easier to accept misses in Neverwinter Nights because you're not directly controlling the attacks. The fact that you can also look at the log of dice rolls helps a lot, too.
Hell, even in Arena and Daggerfall, where you're also in direct control of your swings, it's easier to accept when it doesn't hit thanks to the slow animations and 2D graphics of your equipped weapon and the enemy sprite.
What is the most "paper RPG" version? Morrowind? Daggerfall? Morrowind is as far back as I've played, maybe I need to revisit older titles?
but all of us know that it’s just not gonna happen.
Certainly not by Bethesda, but in truly typical fashion, Bethesda games are are held together and made fun by modders (and sometimes, even fully built, as is the case with Enderal). Only trouble is that can take a wild and/or completely unknown amount of time.
100% they're going to try to do AI NPCs and you're going to get cartoonishly awful dialogue that will be great for memes and terrible for any kind of actual gameplay.
ES6 will have a voiced main character.
An AI voice with zero emotion
Stop, do not proceed with the unlifening of my entire family. Please, if you do it may awaken some mystical power within me that I have to read carvings on walls and talk to some old monks to use properly.
Excited for the special edition of the trailer
ported to the Nintendo Switch
I used to be a Dragonborn like you, but then I got a fire arrow to my dedicated graphics card.
Now nothing newer than Oblivion will ever run on that machine.
Try Daggerfall Unity. Only the engine is newer, also loads of bugfixes and mod support.
Thanks, I'll try it.
luckily the last time Bethesda had good writing was Morrowind so you're not missing much
In Morrowind I like the story and the music. But as I explored the battle mechanics, I couldn't stand the randomness.
Also in a later retries after Oblivion and Skyrim I missed the real talking more than the graphics enhancements.
A bit unfair, I know. Maybe I'm not that game connoisseur myself.
yeah but the talking was annoying af. it felt like they had like four people voicing the entire game. meanwhile a small independent studio like supergiant makes a much smaller game fully voice acted but doesn't feel exhausted as quickly as Skyrim, with thousands of lines both written and performed fantastically. i can't excuse anything Bethesda is doing anymore. they're getting worse with every game, both in terms of writing and gameplay.
Yes, mostly Wes Johnson with a bit of a very annoyed Sean Bean.
But I have a soft spot for the over the top Sheogorath, the unnecessarily aggressive guard shouts and the calm voice of the Khajiit women.
Some of the other few voices I can't stand, especially the blacksmith of Chorrol ("A pleeeeasure to serve you").
Do you want another release of skyrim? Because that's how you get another release of skyrim!
The Skyrim releases will continue until morale improves.
-Todd Howard
As much of a joke as all the re-releases are, I'm super happy Skyrim VR exists. It's one of the best VR experiences with the right mods that make it an actual VR game instead of a cheap cash-grab...
I've wanted to try VR. Any recommendations?
Quest 3, no doubt. The Index is old and overpriced at this point. HP Reverb G2 has great picture quality, but the controller tracking isn't great and the cable is super thick. Plus Microsoft stopped supporting its mixed reality stuff. Vision Pro is not for gaming, just forget about it even if you can afford it. PSVR 2 might be a choice now that it supports PCVR, but I dunno. Its future support is kinda in doubt.
The only real downside of Q3 is being owned by Meta, which is obviously blech, but it's an amazing piece of technology otherwise, and the price is a steal, since it's heavily subsidized to grow the market.
A cheaper version is expected to be announced soon, so that might be an alternative. But otherwise there isn't much competition unless you're looking into a very particular niche.
I have a feeling they'll be pushing different releases of Starfield so they can act like it was good.
why are so many people absent mindedly pushing this buggy mess narrative? starfield was their least buggy release ever (i personally only encountered one terrible bug that was easily fixed with reloading a save)
its not like bethesda ever released a game as buggy as fallout new vegas or cyberpunk, besides 76 but, like new vegas and cyberpunk, it got fixed
New Vegas gets a pass because it was made in 18 months.
not too much of a pass though, because it was obsidian who gave the timeframe
Well, at least they won't need to make "thousands of planets" worth of "content", so the game might at least look consistent
Still, after Starfaild, my expectation is for TES6 to have something that kinda almost resembles Dark Messiah of Might and Magic's melee combat; only Archery, Melee, Magic and Armor skills to level up; Emil Pagliarulo's "greatest" story yet with double the time travel and multiverse bullshit; twice the amount of stories that get nowhere and that nobody in the world cares about; removal of stealth
Well, if you think about it, they might want to do a Daggerfall with thousands of nondescript villages and dungeons, powered by AI.
I hope they're not biting off more than they can chew. I mean, the scope of the whole project sounds bigger than Daggerfall, which means it's unlikely they'll finish on time and, when they do release something, there's a high chance it'll be lacking tons of features at launch.
massive, procedurally-generated world with plenty of variety in the environments and locales. Dungeons and cities are crafted to feel unique from one another, offering limitless options for layouts and aesthetics. The world itself is ever changing; cities can grow, deteriorate, or be entirely destroyed by war, and the sky, landscape, and flora change with the seasons.
Unless they're Dwarf Fortress level masters of procgen, I won't expect much more than typical single pass "random perlin terrain"
It will be lacking features, this kickstarter is just to fund a year of early access development to shop it around to publishers to get started on the real work
Which would be an improvement over the 10 different "dungeon" buildings + 3 caves + 6 POIs you can find in starfield
Heck, if they went back to Oblivion's concept of having the npcs with predefined lives and goals and slapped a free version of chatgtp onto the npc interactions, it would be cool.
I hope stealth gets a major rework, at least. Or maybe not stealth itself but how the AI handles interacting with it. No NPC should ever guess that it was just the wind when there's an arrow sticking out of them or their colleague is lying dead in plain view (or even just doesn't respond when they call to them).
They should use strategies and tactics that work against stealth. Patrols (including their own stealth patrols sometimes), roll calls, better lighting, positioning of guards to cut off entrance points, traps (and not just the dungeon traps, but NPCs setting new traps when they suspect stealth, where the trap could be as simple as a trip wire attached to metal rings that will jingle if someone disturbs them), spells that locate nearby people, using senses other than sight and hearing, dark vision. Sometimes stealth missions should be forced to end and come back later because the residents realize someone is trying to sneak around and kill or rob them and go on high alert with effective tools to negate stealth. Just sometimes, sometimes it should work like it does in Skyrim where a guard just doesn't want to deal with whatever is shooting arrows at him and maybe just yells threats instead of using a stealth counter (just get rid of that memory of a goldfish thing).
I mean, stealth is fun, but it's not as fun when every single character I make ends up becoming some kind of a stealth archer because the NPCs are effective at generating opposition to everything but that.
Shut up. 6 years!? 👴
The beforetimes
It was 5 years and 8 months between the release of Oblivion and Skyrim. Oblivion was released on March 20, 2006, and Skyrim was released on November 11, 2011.
Yes, but we didn’t have AAAAA gaming standards back then. Do you think they could have made a masterpiece like Skull & Bones in those days?
Skyrim is almost three times as old now. I'm going to be honest, I'd rather just have another Skyrim expansion than a modern Bethesda game.
Check out Beyond Skyrim
...which is 9 years old.
Still gonna be done before ES6
This looks awesome
Probably working out how to add stealth archer mechanics to a MTX.
Wow, thought it was like 2 years if you asked me
It's just the time necessary to figure out how to create a ladder climbing animation
Got to do better than Star field and come close to BG3 , dark souls, elden ring. Chances are they hit the reset button after it became apparent they couldn't coast on the mod community
Doing better than starfield shouldn't be hard for them. Getting on par with the quality of Divinity Original Sin, much less Baldur's Gate 3, is likely beyond bethesda's ability, tho.
that'll never happen. they don't have good writers.
Just hire Kirkbride back goddamnit. I installed Immortals of Aveum and saw that Kirkbride is the main writer and got pumped on the game but that damn thing keeps crashing on me. So I'm back to just playing Diablo or Minecraft for the time being.
come close to BG3 , dark souls, elden ring
All of these were lovingly crafted bespoke characters and story arcs, with god only knows how many hours of real human thought put into the story, the setting, and the dialogue.
Bethesda execs don't want any of that shit. They want a big button that says "MAKE NEW GAME" that they can slap and then a new game that pops out of a slot on the other side of their computers.
The mod community is so vital to these modern games because its real humans having real human ideas that go into them. Business only gets to latch on after the fact, once a DOTA or CS:GO has already fully taken off and left orbit.
After the reviews on Starfield, maybe this is for the best.
You really want to see what shameful AI slop they try to shoehorn into this game? Or how much of it is shamelessly cribbed and rehashed from Skyrim, the last good thing Bethesda ever did? Do you really want to play "Morrowwind But If It Was Designed By Houston's Urban Planning Team?" Enjoy an hour and 30 minute commute to your next quest, plus traffic, you stupid idiots.
Now with a bug patch that's labeled as DLC!
Meanwhile me with shitty laptop & Skyrim LE be like.... Nah...i don't need that thing bc my Skyrim already perfect
Make it IBM T43 and Oblivion.
It would not surprise me at all if we are another six years away.
Anyone else not like the capital E in Elder? Looks like a G.
Can't wait to play this in 2030.
I personally think if something is in pre-production you shouldn't announce it at all.
They announced it back then because at the time people were afraid they were only going to make Fallout games.
Wow, I'm feeling old.
Gonna have Skyrim on NerveGear before this comes out lol
They should just release a new game with the graphical fidelity of Fallout 4, but with better performance and animations. They could probably cut their dev budget in half if they made a game with Skyrim's scope and FO4's graphics.
No one plays Bethesda games for their graphical fidelity so they really need to stop wasting time there.
Frankly, they could rebuild skyrim with the fallout 4 mechanics for base building, shared item storage for crafting, weapon modding, and for shits and giggles throw in steam centurions being unobtainable dwemer power armor frames.
Fuck, sell me basic ass skyrim but integrate the top 30 mods on nexus into the base game. It's honestly not hard to do better then they're doing.
I'd be willing the buy another expansion for Skyrim. I want to return to Skyrim so badly but I've done literally everything that game has to offer
Get VR.
Motion sickness. I can use vr for simulators though
Bunch of capital G Gamers in here.
Goddamn.
I remember remarking at the time that they likely didn't have much more than a terrain object and a title card.
Probably still don't.
They can keep it. Bethesda sucks
Since they announced that it will be PC and XBOX only- I stopped giving a shit. I refuse to buy a new hardware that once was accessible without having to.
You're probably not missing much. Morrowind is the last good Elder Scrolls game they ever made. But that has also been PC/Xbox exclusive since 2002 so may as well write the series off completely.
last good
Aite I loved Morrowind, it’s one of my top games of all time but both Oblivion and Skrim are stellar. SkrimVR with mods is insanely fantastic.
this bethesda anti circlejerk has gotten way out of hand. i hated starfield too but that doesn’t change how awesome oblivion and skyrim were.
I fully agree, like what the fuck
I never played Starfield and Morrowind is so amazing but
Morrowind will NEVER be better than modded Skyrim, that the fuck, it’s so magical.
Don't even need to get into ranking them, it's just completely asinine to say Oblivion and Skyrim are not even good at all. Circlejerk nonsense from someone who probably hasn't played any of them.
Completely agree. I didn’t want to be hostile like I would be if I was back on Reddit but that’s fucking insane bullshit that’s insanely wrong lawl
Its almost like treating opinions as facts leads to bullshit replies like this one.
The poster has an opinion and explained it well. They actually think Skyrim and Oblivion are bad games, what's so hard to believe?
I bet I've played a lot more of them than you have.
It took me a while to realize that I wasn't having fun with Skyrim, and I thought it wasn't as good as Oblivion. The games weren't getting any better, just prettier. The writing and worldbuilding was getting objectively worse, too.
Morrowind is the only one I keep going back to, it's the only one that has some semblance of soul.
i agree that skyrim is not as good as oblivion, but that isn’t what we were talking about.
Do you stand by the statement that Morrowind was the last “good” elder scrolls game? In other words, you think Oblivion and Skyrim are not good at all?
ESO is fun. But that's not even by the same team lol
Yeah it is.
So they could release a trailer-perfect version of it today and it'd still be six years outdated.
Didn't they make an MMO in the mean time? It is like asking when Warcraft 4 is going to be released.
My theory is that they've been reallocating teams into Zenimax Online studios for projects like ESO. TBH I've been playing it and it's pretty cool compared to the dated feel of Vanilla Skyrim. If any of you own it, ESO Plus is free until June 19th, you just have to head to the Crown Store and click the free trial button.
I've tried to get into ESO multiple times, always hyping myself up to just ignore the combat/difficulty and pacing and do it for the story alone, but it wears me down quite quickly every time. The vibe is just entirely off in every way. It's like playing with a cheap McDonald's toy with stiff legs and a weird button that makes it move it's arms vs. a licensed action figure.
Save for my issues with the lack of real risk or challenge anywhere outside of running end-game group content solo, I always get irritable with the weird class themes the developers went with. I think if they had three guardian base classes (Thief, Warrior, Mage) and allowed players to spend their limited pool of points into other Elder Scrolls trees (Destruction, Alteration, Restoration, Conjuration, Blunt, Blade, etc.) it could have been balanced well enough and felt true to what we've come to expect from that universe. But instead it feels like they made the game as an entirely different MMO, then at the last minute agreed to put an Elder Scrolls skin on it.
I'd like to be a Warrior with minor specialization in Restoration and Alteration, but if I want to play that sort or archetype I basically have to be a Templar who uses sun spells and does all of his fighting with aetherial javelins, maybe joining the Mage's Guild or something to simulate some sort of Alteration type buffs. Or I roll a Dragonknight who is themed entirely around fire and lava spells. Or I run around labeled a Sorcerer and use daedric spells/buffs to simulate Alteration, and ignore the rest of that classes abilities to branch out into melee and armor abilities. It's all just so convoluted and unusual.
Beautiful soundtrack, though.. Moth, Butterfly and Torchbug really does things to my heart, and leaves me hopeful that even without Jeremy Soule, TES6 may still have the type of score it deserves.
Combat Difficulty? I haven't experienced that yet and I'm at CP 385. When does the difficulty start? Are you talking about the super late game trials?
Oh you mean lack of difficulty, yeah I feel that it's sort of a let down.
I did try ESO for a few weeks but it just felt a little bit... Not TESy? Like the actual movement feels different, the combat feels different, it just feels like a bit of a different beast! It's fun for what it is though, for sure. What do you play as? :)
For sure the mechanics are wack, but it's got fully voiced dialogue for tons of quests, it's got material gathering and a bunch of other exploration based activities to do. It's also got equipment and consumable crafting, but TBH not much of it is actually useful except for Provisioning.
Argonian Templar, stuck with the training gear until summerset isles and swapped to Psyjic Gear to prep for trials.
I wonder how much different it is now, compared to when the game was in closed beta.
It was a literal floating camera back then, lol.
Never played the game afterward due to subscription-based access.
I risk sounding like a fucking shill, but it's a purchase to own the game, the subscription is only for ESO Plus which gives access to all DLCs without having to purchase them individually.
It used to be subscription only back in the days.
Is there literally a single opinion in this thread that doesn't reek of entitlement and rage?
I hope they're using this time to learn lessons from their Starfield flop and gather the talent and budget needed to improve upon Skyrim. A modern engine probably wouldn't hurt.
However, my expectations are very low at this point.
They haven't learned from Oblivion, Skyrim, or Fallout 4. Probably others.
Or really, they learned they can just keep releasing games on a hacked-up Morrowind engine, and make huge piles of money. So that's what they'll keep doing.
Yup. ES6 is going to sell like condoms on an STD themed swinger convension no matter how many bugs are going around.
And the saddest part is that too many have learned nothing about AAA titles, and will preorder the game, making the game a massive financial success even before releasing anything of quality.
Don't forget they learned they can charge for mods, too!
They haven’t learned from 3 of their best and most popular games?
People have such nostalgia boners for Morrowind. Warranted or not, it’s still annoying.
What does that have to do with the comment you replied to?
Also why would it be annoying if people say a good game is a good game and it is warranted?
It's like people on this thread have some pathological need to complain about SOMETHING.
I think Elder Scrolls is one of those properties whose biggest detractors are its fanbase. Runescape is exactly the same, and it's totally bizarre.
The nostalgia boner is that it was a very unique game, and nothing has come out quite like it since. It’s not even like Daggerfall or Arena. For someone looking for that experience, Oblivion and Skyrim were massive disappointments.
Going from a volcano that is spewing flesh mutating disease while riding giant bugs around to Tolkienesque Medieval Fantasy Landscape #3045 gave me whiplash. (The Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine save the package though.) And losing the ability to kill whoever I want? Spears???
Skyrim is better. It mangles what could have been a good story by retconning lore and making Alduin into big evil bad, just as Oblivion was about basically Satan invading the world. Morrowind’s villain may not be right, but his motives are 100% understandable and he has a good point. (In Oblivion: why would you join a cult dedicated to killing everyone for no reason?)
As a Morrowboomer, I’m willing to accept the series changed, but there just hasn’t been something to replace what I hoped for ES4. They don’t make games with that vibe anymore. The closest thing I’ve had to scratching that itch would be Planescape Torment, Pathologic, or Zeno Clash.
The budget for Starfield was twice that of Baldur's Gate 3. Throwing more money at it isn't going to do a lot if they're allocating it poorly.
I'm not suggesting that a big budget alone is sufficient to make a good game.
However, enough budget to keep the team employed (note the many gaming industry layoffs lately) and appropriate budgeting (in terms of both money and time) affect things like code, art, and writing quality. It's kind of important.
I think it's going to require the people making the most high-level decisions to come to the realization that their old way of doing things is outdated. I don't have faith that they'll come to those conclusions.
Sadly, I don't have much faith in them either. (Hence my low expectations.)
I can still hope, though. Elder Scrolls has enough fans and lore that there's certainly potential for a great new game.
Friendly reminder that the original "loremaster" of Elder Scrolls left Bethesda before they released Elder Scrolls Online, and they replaced him with someone who has apparently been making pretty questionable decisions with ESO lore.
I mean, they always have the out of dragon breaks rewriting reality/making multiple conflicting timelines simultaneously canon (see the events of daggerfall as referenced in later games) to handwave away retcons, but overusing that just means that no lore actually matters.
I think of it as a pool from which to draw and connect story elements, rather than rigid canon. If good writers were given the chance, I think they would find plenty of material to work with.
at the end of the day they are going to make the game they want, whether we like it or not, microsoft is now involved as well so who knows how that is going to affect them with their decisions
Hopefully it'll be like Minecraft; that game has gotten way better since Microsoft.
I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.
What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than "we can"), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.
Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft's meddling.
The real number is Morrowind had something like 10-20 writers that worked on it. Modern Bethesda games have 1.
Michael Kirkbride counts as 15 writers-in-one with enough cocaine.
It's a good thing that he definitely didn't leave the company years ago then!
He released his Coda, he's washed his hands of the setting.
Lol he's definitely worth it
I think I counted 6 quest designers in Starfield, which was a spot in the credits I was specifically looking for given how many quests they had and how many of them would have been better off not even existing. You can't talk about having 1000 planets and then make quests that aren't interesting to populate them.
There's a recent video that adds all of that up. Starfield had some crazy low number of quests, I think 50ish, and Morrowind had like 300+.
And of course Starfield has an astronomical number of devs on it.
There are more than 50 quests unless you're getting creative with how you count. There are over a dozen in each major faction, and those ones are mostly okay, but the ones I really take issue with are the nothing quests that aren't part of any faction; the ones that basically just have you go to a location and then report back. Those are awful. There should be zero quests in there that the quest designers themselves aren't excited about. Even the bounties that you pick up for a given faction that have you go to a place and kill an enemy mob should be more exciting than what I've already described in this sentence.
I don't know what to tell ya dude.
Perhaps "you're right", "you're wrong and also short, here's why", or even "I don't know". These would all be things you could tell them and a better response.
K
Starfield has more quests than Skyrim (both somewhere around 200 or so quests). Morrowind definitely felt like it was twice as much as those.
It's a tricky balancing act. They need to recover the investment as early as possible to pay less in capital costs but doing that will mean that later on when the product is sub-par it will cause problems and extra work.
Since the engine, game logic, art, story, testing is so heavily coupled together changing the engine a little bit could cause a month of work down the line.
I think personally the best way is to start by making an engine or taking one off the shelf and then write a mini version of the game with shit art that has a lot of bugs.
At the same time making models with hitboxes that all have the same physical properties otherwise, dialog content and recordings and all other content that can be done separately.
Once that is fun to play then you can start working creating a slightly bigger system with a single short storyline to have a cohesive experience and will have the genaral feel of the game.
Once everything above is done setting up a closed beta is the way to go. Take some feedback, add features and redo the small story to be more fun.
Then once everything is a fun experience but people just want more you do the whole everything.
While you’ve made some valid points, keep in mind this isn’t a startup, it’s a massive studio
If it does not have similar levels of moddability then it will absolutely hurt.
I think it's safe to assume they know that and would bear it in mind when choosing or building an engine. Their games are famous for modding, after all.
That's a years if not decade+ long project though, including major investments of time and money that you could pour into actual games. You can't just stomp a new game engine out of the ground, especially not with how complex video games in of itself have become, and if you want it to be as moddable as their current one.
Yep.
I don't know what you mean by that, but creating new game engines and migrating from one to another have both been done before.
Is either of those tasks fast or cheap? Of course not.
Are they worthwhile? Sometimes.
Are they possible? Absolutely.
Well, I can understand why you might assume that if you don't have a lot of experience in software development, but it's just not true. Making an engine that allows for very moddable games is mainly about planning for it during the design, and either building good tools for the game data or publishing the specs so other people can. It's not arcane magic.
(And for what it's worth, while Creation Engine is quite moddable, it has enormous room for improvement in that area. Actually working with it can be a very frustrating experience.)
Not if they simply use the latest Unreal Engine.
They already built their new engine. That's what Starfield is using.
lol, no. Starfield is still using the creation engine, which is based on gamebryo, which they're using since Morrowind.
Correct. And they made a new version for Starfield. That's all they're going to use. Anyone that thinks they'll ever switch engines is daydreaming.
It would be nice if the game speed and physics interaction were not tied to a inconsistent variable such as frame rate. And it seems that the more they pile on the gambryo engine the less receptive to modding it gets. But i can also accept that the cracks in the games that grow over time may not be the engine, but Bethesda prioritizing MVP centric development over hammering out the problems. Modders are carrying an auful lot of load to even get the games running.
Agreed on all points.
And the topic was about them making a modern engine.
You're missing the point.
Dude... You are the one missing the point here. lol We were talking about them making a new actually modern engine, instead of sticking to their old gamebryo trash heap. And then you come along, claiming that they already did that, even though they literally did not. Please stop playing daft.
They DID make their modern new engine. They spent five years upgrading gamebryo/craption. They aren't going to change engines.
That is their modern engine.
I don't know how else to spell it out lol.
That's all they're going to use.
They had a turd. They polished it up a little. It's still the same turd.
Their 'modern' engine is only modern to them, but it's pathetically behind everyone else. I can only imagine the spaghetti code that thing is at this point.
I think we're only ever see a new engine once Todd is no longer part of the company. Because the quote him out of context 'it just works'
Thanks, I needed that laugh.
I'm replaying Starfield, and on my second playthrough, I'm noticing the depth they put into this game. Sometimes a single dialogue line you said days ago will have an effect on NPC attitudes through an entire side story. I'm not going to argue that it's not a regurgitation of their lame formula they've milked for the past 15+ years, but they do need to reevaluate where their money/dev time goes to.
Replaying as well, doing side quests I put off and surprised they actually go interesting places. Just did the one where zero G kept turning off and on at the space station that got taken over.
Damn, TIL you can come across these locations on accident just exploring. I thought that place was weird to be randomly floating out there with no real good loot. 😂
I misread your comment and now seem foolish lol but that is hilarious, I think Bethesda needs some work on their world engine and random events. Saw a mod where people are making custom towns now and man would random encounters within that environment.....would take it to the next level.
I like Starfield.
Sshhh that isn't an approved opinion for Internet use
The only thing Bethesda is motivated to do, frothing, absolutely chomping at the bit, is figure out a way to successfully monetize modded content.
Yes, will probably make a monthly subscription that walls off ability to download mods.
(Also, it's "champing" at the bit. Sorry for the correction but it's a small pet peeve seeing chomping so much now)
as long as they don’t have space travel between every objective and hundreds of barren procedurally generated planets it will be fine.
We all know that all they are going to do is re-release new versions of their old games on devices we largely don't care about.
It's gonna take twice as long as Starfield all to contain the same jank in an even larger, more barren, world where nothing is interesting and you're just going through the motions because that's what Todd Howard thinks games are.
It really does feel like Starfield completely killed any excitement for Bethesda games, everything since Oblivion has been a step in the wrong direction IMO.
Including Oblivion. I enjoyed it but it was a huge disappointment to me coming out of Morrowind. Bethesda reputation for me has been on Morrowind credit this whole time.
Even Morrowind was a simplified version of Daggerfall, even though it was groundbreaking when it was released. They decided that the direction to take was to simplify the mechanics progressively, to make the series more appealing to more people, as opposed to adding interesting complications back as their tech develops. They succeeded in their mantra of "keep it simple, stupid". I don't have any hope that the next game will be more interesting. It will look prettier, of course.
Idk, having only played Oblivion and Skyrim, I feel like (generally speaking) the simplifications in Skyrim were for the better. Take custom spells for example. Only a few spells really even made sense to make and it was better to make them in very specific ways. It's not like the games are super difficult. Fucking around with spells and more complex enchantments was cool but too easy to cheese.
Oh, and the leveling. Holy fuck what an over complicated mess. Where you could accidentally over level but also under level. Insane. Good riddance.
Complex systems are not inherently good. They're good if they provide meaningful choices and are fun to use. But ES has always been about the story and exploration more so anyways (in my opinion).
It's smaller but I would not say it was dumbed down like Oblivion was to Morrowind. Morrowind feels more or less the same as Arena or Daggerfall, except in how character progressiom works and that you didn't have to swing your mouse around trying to hit things with your weapon.
It literally still has all the deeper mechanics like performing rituals during certain times of the day/months/year and what not. Just not a procedurally generated world with RNG quests or dungeons. And thank God for that because Daggerfall and Arena both could literally break by generating a dungeon you couldn't actually finish.
Oblivion had quality of life improvements that made it a better game IMO. Yes Morrowind was bigger and deeper, but it was also a frustrating game that didn't age very well.
People have actually made it through Starfield? I tried so hard, but couldn't make it past 20 hours (which isn't a lot for a Bethesda RPG). The story is just so damn BORING.
Oh boy, you're lucky. I trudged through for 70h out of sheer morbid curiosity. The boring main story goes straight into "icecream on forehead" when the starborn show up. The ending is just a shit cherry on top of that, with Emil Pagliarulo's best "fuck you for asking questions" ever
Good to know. I don't even know about these "starborn" people. Never made it that far.
I don't believe, they're actually 6 years into the development. Back then, they just announced that at some point, there would be a TES6, but they've been busy developing Starfield since then.
As part of Starfield, they did do some engine upgrades. You know what that looks like...
Their announcement for the 30th anniversary implies that it is in early pre-alpha right now. Chances of it running on the same exact engine as Starfield are practically 100%
Wonder if it'll be ready for the 30th anniversary of Skyrim
Anyway
You can still make improvements in pre-alpha for sure. Not massive overhauls of existing systems, but there's no reason you couldn't fix bugs, incrementally improve existing features and add new ones.
Sure, you could, but given beths track record in that regard, why would they? They have been perfectly happy shipping Skyrim to new platforms with the same bugs for nearly a decade.
I don't think the announcement implies anything. Truly. It's just them trying to get shareholders happy about hype.
Who knows, honestly. I’m not holding my breath for this game anymore. When it comes out, i’ll check it out, but if it’s in the same pitiful state as Starfield, then idk
Don't worry, in five years it will launch with the same physics tick rate bug and the dearth of anything interesting that is customary of any Bethesda Game Studios game.
Welcome to the place washed by Iliac waves
There's two and a half peasants with the same ugly face
You're not into small towns? Check out big-ass plains
Fifty times the size of Skyrim's, twice as many pointless caves!
And there's even one new cave variation!
If they take too much fucking longer I'm gonna look for my RPG fix Elsweyr.
Normally, I would say that I don't care when a game comes out, as long as it's a genuinely good, complete experience. But knowing Bethesda, it'll be another 5 years before we see anything, and then we'll get an embarrassingly buggy title, that hasn't innovated on anything since Fallout 3 came out.
I used to forgive them for anything, knowing that the modding community would just patch things anyway, but we've seen how Starfield was rejected by a ton of people with skills.
I think too many people forget that Skyrim was actually popular enough without mods to bring enough modders to the table to fix the rest of it. Bethesda seems to have forgotten that they actually have to deliver a mostly fun and mostly playable game for a proper modding scene to take root.
That really is a pretty substantial part of it too. Modding at its core requires a good game, and everything else comes from people wanting to change parts of it, that aren't necessarily to their liking. Bethesda somehow assumed that people would be willing to reimplement half of the game at launch. That just won't slide anymore, for 70$
Yep. And the good mods take a while to make too. If your game is dead 3 months after launch, who's going to still be motivated to keep working on a big overhaul type mod?
It didn't help that Starfield didn't release with any of the normal modding toolset for Bethsda games. It literally didn't get it until this month.
1 dev of the skyrim together mod.
Shadow of the Erdtree DLC comes out this month after being developed for 2 years. Even amazing games take forever to develop, I'm certainly not waiting half a decade for another fucking Starfield...
That's the difference. I would wait a decade for a follow-up to Elden Ring. It was a genuinely incredible game in every way.
Starfield didn't have modding, but was it an embarrassingly buggy title that hasn't innovated on anything since Fallout 3?
They could take 30 years to make it, but it would still be made by Bethesda and it would still suck.
I have great memories of Morrowind
It was still a glitch fest, but at least the world was top notch.
*netch
*netch bully
You're madness forking right.
What the hell man. Don't nix hound me about this.
Me replaying New Vegas, lol I had it crash on me like 7 times during my playthrough. Classic Bethesda engine
7 is pretty damn good for that engine. Were you doing a speedrun?
You mean you didn't enjoy sending giants flying?
In morrowind?
I have great memories of Skyrim. And FO3. And New Vegas. And Fallout 4. And Fallout 76 actually got not bad. And Elder Scrolls: Online had one of my favorite quest chains in a game. And...
Lemmy is way too edgy to enjoy good games that are also popular.
Lenny indeed lacks some casual fucks, almost every thread has some extreme opinions. I had someone unironically try to explain to me why it would be beneficial to the human race to go extinct.
Excuse me, I'm a casual fuck thank you.
Ah you’re a fellow Heroes of the Storm enjoyer?
Ok so, I didn't enjoy Skyrim as much as I enjoyed Morrowind, in fact I never finished it; I skipped Oblivion 'cause at the time it came out I... had other things to deal with.
I liked FO3 (weirdly, I liked it better than FONV), but in my opinion the new ones don't hold a candle to the first two.
I agree almost 100% with you on this. I did play Oblivion, but Skyrim has the more interesting world IMO which makes it a slightly better game. The strength of Bethesda games that makes them good, in my opinion, is the same every time: explore a large interesting world with your own created character. This explains (in part) why people like Morrowind so much: the world is just so weird and interesting.
The problem is they don't know how to improve on that concept. Instead they are mostly adding features that either don't add anything to it or actively detract from it. For example, Fallout 4 received settlement building and weapon crafting. But, the time I'm spending on my town, I'm not actually out exploring. If I can craft weapons, I care less about the cool weapons I find in dungeons. Now, Starfield got rid of most of the crafted world altogether in exchange for procedural planets that aren't interesting to explore at all.
Aan an aside, I don't think it even makes sense to compare the first two fallout games with the Bethesda ones. Fallout 3 and beyond are not really sequels, they're a completely different series set in the same universe.
I think you're right. Maybe they should make a game based on Scavengers Reign.
I would argue they're not even the same universe. While F1 had its share of of people living in post-war rubble, by F2 the world was mostly newly-build cities or primitive societies but there was a sense of progress, like having actual money (and by Tactics paper money was in everyday use). Then F3 comes and everyone is living in a pile of rubbish, with unreadable burnt pre-war books on their shelves like they want to pretend the world is how it used to be, nevermind that generations have passed, and everyone is back to trading in caps.
Yeah, that's weird of the new Fallout games, there's people sleeping on 200-years old mattresses (what are they made of, asbestos?). I get the destruction, and I understand how they may not be able to rebuild civilization to the old standards for a long while, but ffs, at least patch your walls!
There's an industry to make new guns but people just step over the skeleton in the lobby of the half-collapsed hotel the three dozen residents call "Halftower" without a drop of irony.
I also liked Skyrim and oblivion. Not sure how people can think they suck.
Those games don't suck. But Bethesda is so washed now
I liked Daggerfall, too, despite serious glitch issues. I just saved a lot and it was fine.
and then they'd re-sell it a bunch of times after that too.
Because it was such a bad game that people gladly bought it again?
I like the bugs. The Giant Space Program was nice
God what a fucking boring and wrong opinion to be have
Just in terms of timeline, Dragon Age 4 was teased at about the same time with the same level of teaser trailer. It's releasing this fall.
So a full modern RPG being fully developed in that time by a smaller studio, and for elder scrolls we haven't heard squat.
Who knows how DA will turn out, but we know modern Bethesda quality thanks to starfield. Not having any news in 6 years proves this trailer was made just to shut fans up
Pretty sure they flat out said this was true
Yup:
"Bethesda and Todd Howard announced Elder Scrolls 6 when they did because of fan demand, or in the words of Skyrim's lead designer Bruce Nesmith, because 'the pitchforks and torches were out.'" Source
Elder Scrolls VI exits pre-production, development begins (August 2023)
Often times trailers that early are used as a hiring tool, too. Cyberpunk's original CG trailer was back in like 2012, and that game came out in 2020, but we know from an interview at E3 before The Witcher 3 came out that there was a very small team working on Cyberpunk before Witcher 3 was done, and Cyberpunk at that point was mostly just design documents.
And DA4 got almost remade to remove the live service features
What's Bethesdas excuse?
they were working on starfield?
I wouldn't dare to call Bioware a smaller studio, pretty sure people said that Bethesda is the one that is strangely small for a AAA developer.
The teaser itself is some generic terrain with procedural grass anyone could do in blender in 3h
That's what I thought at the time "yes that does spell elder scrolls VI, Bethesda, and?"
Tbh it was 100% a move to avoid pissing off the fans by only announcing Starfield
They just released this teaser to shut everyone up at the time
It's like people have completely forgotten that fact. That snippet was at the very end of a 30 minute Bethesda presentation that had Fallout 76 with its multiplayer being a significant move away from their traditional formula, Elder Scrolls Blades (which is a mobile game nobody remembers) and the reveal of Starfield, a completely new franchise. Of course fans are going to question where is TES 6.
And a few months later Blizzard showed what happens when you don't tease Diablo 4 after revealing Diablo immortal.
I played Blades for a little while until it got too 'gimme gimme' about me paying. Then I stopped. Not paying to win.
DON'T YOU GUYS HAVE PHONES???
But what really hurts is that diablo immoral is a HUGE money printer.
I want to be positive and I'm trying to remain optimistic, but somehow I just know it in my bones that they're going to further Fallout 4 the franchise and strip away even more skills and attributes. Hell, maybe they'll get rid of dialogue entirely.
Indeed. I would love to have a "modernized Morrowind" experience -- an RPG game that really nails the role-playing part of RPG, but without the cheesy parts of Morrowind like the unintuitive combat system -- but all of us know that it's just not gonna happen.
The combat in Morrowind is intuitive if your previous RPG experience used dice and paper.
You can 100% tell someone's paper RPG experience level by their favorite elder scrolls game lmao
Not quite. It's just harder to disconnect the 3D visual of a sword or mace swing very clearly hitting a creature and said hit missing entirely, especially as you're in direct control of when and where the attack happens. For comparison, it's much easier to accept misses in Neverwinter Nights because you're not directly controlling the attacks. The fact that you can also look at the log of dice rolls helps a lot, too.
Hell, even in Arena and Daggerfall, where you're also in direct control of your swings, it's easier to accept when it doesn't hit thanks to the slow animations and 2D graphics of your equipped weapon and the enemy sprite.
What is the most "paper RPG" version? Morrowind? Daggerfall? Morrowind is as far back as I've played, maybe I need to revisit older titles?
Certainly not by Bethesda, but in truly typical fashion, Bethesda games are are held together and made fun by modders (and sometimes, even fully built, as is the case with Enderal). Only trouble is that can take a wild and/or completely unknown amount of time.
https://tesrskywind.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJkeWN3_fbA
100% they're going to try to do AI NPCs and you're going to get cartoonishly awful dialogue that will be great for memes and terrible for any kind of actual gameplay.
ES6 will have a voiced main character.
An AI voice with zero emotion
Stop, do not proceed with the unlifening of my entire family. Please, if you do it may awaken some mystical power within me that I have to read carvings on walls and talk to some old monks to use properly.
Excited for the special edition of the trailer
ported to the Nintendo Switch
I used to be a Dragonborn like you, but then I got a fire arrow to my dedicated graphics card.
Now nothing newer than Oblivion will ever run on that machine.
Try Daggerfall Unity. Only the engine is newer, also loads of bugfixes and mod support.
Thanks, I'll try it.
luckily the last time Bethesda had good writing was Morrowind so you're not missing much
In Morrowind I like the story and the music. But as I explored the battle mechanics, I couldn't stand the randomness.
Also in a later retries after Oblivion and Skyrim I missed the real talking more than the graphics enhancements.
A bit unfair, I know. Maybe I'm not that game connoisseur myself.
yeah but the talking was annoying af. it felt like they had like four people voicing the entire game. meanwhile a small independent studio like supergiant makes a much smaller game fully voice acted but doesn't feel exhausted as quickly as Skyrim, with thousands of lines both written and performed fantastically. i can't excuse anything Bethesda is doing anymore. they're getting worse with every game, both in terms of writing and gameplay.
Yes, mostly Wes Johnson with a bit of a very annoyed Sean Bean.
But I have a soft spot for the over the top Sheogorath, the unnecessarily aggressive guard shouts and the calm voice of the Khajiit women.
Some of the other few voices I can't stand, especially the blacksmith of Chorrol ("A pleeeeasure to serve you").
Found the interview about voicing Oblivion again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brLRSsR_acw
Yay, six more years til they release a buggy mess
Do you want another release of skyrim? Because that's how you get another release of skyrim!
The Skyrim releases will continue until morale improves.
-Todd Howard
As much of a joke as all the re-releases are, I'm super happy Skyrim VR exists. It's one of the best VR experiences with the right mods that make it an actual VR game instead of a cheap cash-grab...
I've wanted to try VR. Any recommendations?
Quest 3, no doubt. The Index is old and overpriced at this point. HP Reverb G2 has great picture quality, but the controller tracking isn't great and the cable is super thick. Plus Microsoft stopped supporting its mixed reality stuff. Vision Pro is not for gaming, just forget about it even if you can afford it. PSVR 2 might be a choice now that it supports PCVR, but I dunno. Its future support is kinda in doubt.
The only real downside of Q3 is being owned by Meta, which is obviously blech, but it's an amazing piece of technology otherwise, and the price is a steal, since it's heavily subsidized to grow the market.
A cheaper version is expected to be announced soon, so that might be an alternative. But otherwise there isn't much competition unless you're looking into a very particular niche.
I have a feeling they'll be pushing different releases of Starfield so they can act like it was good.
why are so many people absent mindedly pushing this buggy mess narrative? starfield was their least buggy release ever (i personally only encountered one terrible bug that was easily fixed with reloading a save)
its not like bethesda ever released a game as buggy as fallout new vegas or cyberpunk, besides 76 but, like new vegas and cyberpunk, it got fixed
New Vegas gets a pass because it was made in 18 months.
not too much of a pass though, because it was obsidian who gave the timeframe
Well, at least they won't need to make "thousands of planets" worth of "content", so the game might at least look consistent
Still, after Starfaild, my expectation is for TES6 to have something that kinda almost resembles Dark Messiah of Might and Magic's melee combat; only Archery, Melee, Magic and Armor skills to level up; Emil Pagliarulo's "greatest" story yet with double the time travel and multiverse bullshit; twice the amount of stories that get nowhere and that nobody in the world cares about; removal of stealth
Well, if you think about it, they might want to do a Daggerfall with thousands of nondescript villages and dungeons, powered by AI.
looks like they're being beaten by old daggerfall devs at their own gimmick then https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oncelostgames/the-wayward-realms/?ref=kicktraq
I hope they're not biting off more than they can chew. I mean, the scope of the whole project sounds bigger than Daggerfall, which means it's unlikely they'll finish on time and, when they do release something, there's a high chance it'll be lacking tons of features at launch.
Unless they're Dwarf Fortress level masters of procgen, I won't expect much more than typical single pass "random perlin terrain"
It will be lacking features, this kickstarter is just to fund a year of early access development to shop it around to publishers to get started on the real work
Which would be an improvement over the 10 different "dungeon" buildings + 3 caves + 6 POIs you can find in starfield
Heck, if they went back to Oblivion's concept of having the npcs with predefined lives and goals and slapped a free version of chatgtp onto the npc interactions, it would be cool.
I hope stealth gets a major rework, at least. Or maybe not stealth itself but how the AI handles interacting with it. No NPC should ever guess that it was just the wind when there's an arrow sticking out of them or their colleague is lying dead in plain view (or even just doesn't respond when they call to them).
They should use strategies and tactics that work against stealth. Patrols (including their own stealth patrols sometimes), roll calls, better lighting, positioning of guards to cut off entrance points, traps (and not just the dungeon traps, but NPCs setting new traps when they suspect stealth, where the trap could be as simple as a trip wire attached to metal rings that will jingle if someone disturbs them), spells that locate nearby people, using senses other than sight and hearing, dark vision. Sometimes stealth missions should be forced to end and come back later because the residents realize someone is trying to sneak around and kill or rob them and go on high alert with effective tools to negate stealth. Just sometimes, sometimes it should work like it does in Skyrim where a guard just doesn't want to deal with whatever is shooting arrows at him and maybe just yells threats instead of using a stealth counter (just get rid of that memory of a goldfish thing).
I mean, stealth is fun, but it's not as fun when every single character I make ends up becoming some kind of a stealth archer because the NPCs are effective at generating opposition to everything but that.
Shut up. 6 years!? 👴
The beforetimes
It was 5 years and 8 months between the release of Oblivion and Skyrim. Oblivion was released on March 20, 2006, and Skyrim was released on November 11, 2011.
Yes, but we didn’t have AAAAA gaming standards back then. Do you think they could have made a masterpiece like Skull & Bones in those days?
Skyrim is almost three times as old now. I'm going to be honest, I'd rather just have another Skyrim expansion than a modern Bethesda game.
Check out Beyond Skyrim
...which is 9 years old.
Still gonna be done before ES6
This looks awesome
Probably working out how to add stealth archer mechanics to a MTX.
Wow, thought it was like 2 years if you asked me
It's just the time necessary to figure out how to create a ladder climbing animation
Got to do better than Star field and come close to BG3 , dark souls, elden ring. Chances are they hit the reset button after it became apparent they couldn't coast on the mod community
Doing better than starfield shouldn't be hard for them. Getting on par with the quality of Divinity Original Sin, much less Baldur's Gate 3, is likely beyond bethesda's ability, tho.
that'll never happen. they don't have good writers.
Just hire Kirkbride back goddamnit. I installed Immortals of Aveum and saw that Kirkbride is the main writer and got pumped on the game but that damn thing keeps crashing on me. So I'm back to just playing Diablo or Minecraft for the time being.
All of these were lovingly crafted bespoke characters and story arcs, with god only knows how many hours of real human thought put into the story, the setting, and the dialogue.
Bethesda execs don't want any of that shit. They want a big button that says "MAKE NEW GAME" that they can slap and then a new game that pops out of a slot on the other side of their computers.
The mod community is so vital to these modern games because its real humans having real human ideas that go into them. Business only gets to latch on after the fact, once a DOTA or CS:GO has already fully taken off and left orbit.
After the reviews on Starfield, maybe this is for the best.
You really want to see what shameful AI slop they try to shoehorn into this game? Or how much of it is shamelessly cribbed and rehashed from Skyrim, the last good thing Bethesda ever did? Do you really want to play "Morrowwind But If It Was Designed By Houston's Urban Planning Team?" Enjoy an hour and 30 minute commute to your next quest, plus traffic, you stupid idiots.
Now with a bug patch that's labeled as DLC!
Meanwhile me with shitty laptop & Skyrim LE be like.... Nah...i don't need that thing bc my Skyrim already perfect
Make it IBM T43 and Oblivion.
It would not surprise me at all if we are another six years away.
Anyone else not like the capital E in Elder? Looks like a G.
Can't wait to play this in 2030.
I personally think if something is in pre-production you shouldn't announce it at all.
They announced it back then because at the time people were afraid they were only going to make Fallout games.
Wow, I'm feeling old.
Gonna have Skyrim on NerveGear before this comes out lol
They should just release a new game with the graphical fidelity of Fallout 4, but with better performance and animations. They could probably cut their dev budget in half if they made a game with Skyrim's scope and FO4's graphics.
No one plays Bethesda games for their graphical fidelity so they really need to stop wasting time there.
Frankly, they could rebuild skyrim with the fallout 4 mechanics for base building, shared item storage for crafting, weapon modding, and for shits and giggles throw in steam centurions being unobtainable dwemer power armor frames.
Fuck, sell me basic ass skyrim but integrate the top 30 mods on nexus into the base game. It's honestly not hard to do better then they're doing.
I'd be willing the buy another expansion for Skyrim. I want to return to Skyrim so badly but I've done literally everything that game has to offer
Get VR.
Motion sickness. I can use vr for simulators though
Bunch of capital G Gamers in here.
Goddamn.
I remember remarking at the time that they likely didn't have much more than a terrain object and a title card.
Probably still don't.
They can keep it. Bethesda sucks
Since they announced that it will be PC and XBOX only- I stopped giving a shit. I refuse to buy a new hardware that once was accessible without having to.
You're probably not missing much. Morrowind is the last good Elder Scrolls game they ever made. But that has also been PC/Xbox exclusive since 2002 so may as well write the series off completely.
last good
Aite I loved Morrowind, it’s one of my top games of all time but both Oblivion and Skrim are stellar. SkrimVR with mods is insanely fantastic.
this bethesda anti circlejerk has gotten way out of hand. i hated starfield too but that doesn’t change how awesome oblivion and skyrim were.
I fully agree, like what the fuck
I never played Starfield and Morrowind is so amazing but
Morrowind will NEVER be better than modded Skyrim, that the fuck, it’s so magical.
Don't even need to get into ranking them, it's just completely asinine to say Oblivion and Skyrim are not even good at all. Circlejerk nonsense from someone who probably hasn't played any of them.
Completely agree. I didn’t want to be hostile like I would be if I was back on Reddit but that’s fucking insane bullshit that’s insanely wrong lawl
Its almost like treating opinions as facts leads to bullshit replies like this one.
The poster has an opinion and explained it well. They actually think Skyrim and Oblivion are bad games, what's so hard to believe?
I bet I've played a lot more of them than you have.
It took me a while to realize that I wasn't having fun with Skyrim, and I thought it wasn't as good as Oblivion. The games weren't getting any better, just prettier. The writing and worldbuilding was getting objectively worse, too.
Morrowind is the only one I keep going back to, it's the only one that has some semblance of soul.
i agree that skyrim is not as good as oblivion, but that isn’t what we were talking about.
Do you stand by the statement that Morrowind was the last “good” elder scrolls game? In other words, you think Oblivion and Skyrim are not good at all?
ESO is fun. But that's not even by the same team lol
Yeah it is.
So they could release a trailer-perfect version of it today and it'd still be six years outdated.
Didn't they make an MMO in the mean time? It is like asking when Warcraft 4 is going to be released.
My theory is that they've been reallocating teams into Zenimax Online studios for projects like ESO. TBH I've been playing it and it's pretty cool compared to the dated feel of Vanilla Skyrim. If any of you own it, ESO Plus is free until June 19th, you just have to head to the Crown Store and click the free trial button.
I've tried to get into ESO multiple times, always hyping myself up to just ignore the combat/difficulty and pacing and do it for the story alone, but it wears me down quite quickly every time. The vibe is just entirely off in every way. It's like playing with a cheap McDonald's toy with stiff legs and a weird button that makes it move it's arms vs. a licensed action figure.
Save for my issues with the lack of real risk or challenge anywhere outside of running end-game group content solo, I always get irritable with the weird class themes the developers went with. I think if they had three guardian base classes (Thief, Warrior, Mage) and allowed players to spend their limited pool of points into other Elder Scrolls trees (Destruction, Alteration, Restoration, Conjuration, Blunt, Blade, etc.) it could have been balanced well enough and felt true to what we've come to expect from that universe. But instead it feels like they made the game as an entirely different MMO, then at the last minute agreed to put an Elder Scrolls skin on it.
I'd like to be a Warrior with minor specialization in Restoration and Alteration, but if I want to play that sort or archetype I basically have to be a Templar who uses sun spells and does all of his fighting with aetherial javelins, maybe joining the Mage's Guild or something to simulate some sort of Alteration type buffs. Or I roll a Dragonknight who is themed entirely around fire and lava spells. Or I run around labeled a Sorcerer and use daedric spells/buffs to simulate Alteration, and ignore the rest of that classes abilities to branch out into melee and armor abilities. It's all just so convoluted and unusual.
Beautiful soundtrack, though.. Moth, Butterfly and Torchbug really does things to my heart, and leaves me hopeful that even without Jeremy Soule, TES6 may still have the type of score it deserves.
Combat Difficulty? I haven't experienced that yet and I'm at CP 385. When does the difficulty start? Are you talking about the super late game trials?
Oh you mean lack of difficulty, yeah I feel that it's sort of a let down.
I did try ESO for a few weeks but it just felt a little bit... Not TESy? Like the actual movement feels different, the combat feels different, it just feels like a bit of a different beast! It's fun for what it is though, for sure. What do you play as? :)
For sure the mechanics are wack, but it's got fully voiced dialogue for tons of quests, it's got material gathering and a bunch of other exploration based activities to do. It's also got equipment and consumable crafting, but TBH not much of it is actually useful except for Provisioning.
Argonian Templar, stuck with the training gear until summerset isles and swapped to Psyjic Gear to prep for trials.
I wonder how much different it is now, compared to when the game was in closed beta.
It was a literal floating camera back then, lol.
Never played the game afterward due to subscription-based access.
I risk sounding like a fucking shill, but it's a purchase to own the game, the subscription is only for ESO Plus which gives access to all DLCs without having to purchase them individually.
It used to be subscription only back in the days.
Is there literally a single opinion in this thread that doesn't reek of entitlement and rage?