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.
Use 👏 a 👏 better 👏 engine! 👏
If they spend time on a new engine, that would cancel the release of Skyrim on the IBM 5100.
Whaaaat you think the engine that brought the world Boxfield is horrible after eight years of work on it?
box field took me a second but i snorted out loud! lmao
Even py.game would be better at this point...
"Our tech is cutting edge as far as I can tell, the Creation Engine's aging very well! We're not planning on doing anything about it."
I honestly don't even think vanilla Skyrim was that good of a game. It had nice world building, but the combat sucked, the main story was kinda whatever, it was glitchy and a lot of systems were poorly thought out. It's only ever been the promise of a good game which was mostly found in mods.
Skyrim was good because sandbox, music, culture and mood. The parts that made it bad, were endearing.
Combat sucked and you had to spend way too long in the garbage ass inventory/ menus which just ruined the immersion. Im passing on Bethesda games until they fix that dumb shit, but I don't think they will anytime soon. All of their games seem like a soulless copy-paste the theme into the same boring engine.
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.
I expect it to be a buggy mess that has lots of potential and doesn't deliver on half of what it seems like it should do. Then after a year or two it will finally be patched into being mostly stable and mods will have reached a point where it can mostly be turned into the game I actually want. However there will be a few creative decisions that I absolutely hate but which are so unnecessarily locked in that even mods can't fix them, so I'll have to just accept them as an irritant that I will do my best to ignore.
They're gonna block mod tools, just wait.
Considering how the modding community made Skyrim a long-term success, this would be a very foolish decision.
They're going to try make paid mods a thing again.
You say that as if it removes the possibility but I don't think I need to provide specific examples of obviously foolish decisions ruining modern games. There are plenty to choose from.
Oh absolutely, and Bethesda is absolutely capable of that. It would be very myopic for them though. They can't possibly be ignorant of the fact that modding is what kept Skyrim selling for a decade.
Preventing modding would be a substantial exercise in hubris ("we don't need them"), or one of those intentional failure/tax writeoff things.
If they did that nobody would even be able to play the game, you expect Bethesda to do their own patching!?
You'll have to pay a subscription fee.
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.
WoW's talking heads, for example.
Not an improvement.
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.
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
Anything that makes marketers sad is a win for the world, honestly
They're usually just liars acting as a filter between the game and the interested customers.
Instead of just showing the game, they cut what doesn't look good and make it appear as something more than it is. That's their job.
It's not adding value. Peak marketing executed perfectly is just misleading enough to increase sales beyond what just seeing the game would do, without making the customers mad enough to have a negative impact.
I make a rare exception for actual artistry, like some of the WoW expansion cinematics. It's still pretty misleading, but they're pretty.
As for the next Elder Scrolls, I don't think Bethesda has the devs to make it fun or interesting. From what I've seen from them, they are not particularly competent.
It’s too late for me to care. I grew up with TES. I played daggerfall when I was 15 on my pentium. Then every few years a new amazing game came out. Then after sky rim it stopped. I’m in my 40s now and don’t have the time. This game should have come out in 2016 at the latest.
I mean.... Skyrim is ok, I wouldn't say it's amazing...one of the weakest installments of TES. And then they beat every last cent out of it.
This game should have come out in 2016 at the latest.
Absolutely. I'm surprised they didn't try to release a version for calculators.....
I was hoping after the graphical upgrade with Morrowind that they'd bring back interesting mechanics from Daggerfall, but they went the complete opposite direction for the money.
Step 1, this time don't have an unskippable intro that lasts 30 minutes before you can start actually playing.
noted! are you thinking 2 hours is long enough, or should we really try for three?
Or have it as a toggle after your first time watching it
Hey, you're finally awake
Most annoying part of Fallout 3.
3 did this perfectly.
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.
Modern Bethesda and making good games, what a joke.
I mean, even if TES:6 is good it wont meet expectations because expectations are so wildly high.
My expectations are just be as good as skyrim. I still go and explore skyrim and find new fun things i had never seen before. It's the best i can ask for.
Maybe it'll be as good. I would strongly recommend waiting for reviews in 2032 when it finally launches.
Skyrim launched 11.11.11
Expect ES6 on 2.2.22 oh wait, missed that one, 3.3.33
They're definitely not going to go back to any of the better earlier games before Skyrim.
Idk i never played the other games. I've heard many times that they are better. I play skyrim in VR only. I might look for mods to play the earlier games in VR as well.
I'd love to play VR. Someday
You can probably get a used Quest 2 for a good price. It's definitely capable enough to get a feel for VR, and whether or not you should invest more in a better setup.
Yeah I know. Unfortunately new toys like new hardware isn't in my current future. Someday though.
Really after the mess that was their space game?
Don't forget fall out 76
I already did. And will again. Mostly because it's not worth remembering. Not because I'll ever trust Bethesda
There is no modern Bethesda. They are still making games based on 15 year old standards, with an engine a lot older and technically more debted than that.
It's kinda like trying to make Edward Scissorhands a brain surgeon by adding a few more rubberbands between the blades.
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.
commence marketing team weeping for weeks on end
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.
I think at this point I am more excited for, and have higher expectations of, Skywind.
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.
How many people who worked on Morrowind, Oblivion, and/or Skyrim are still working there? This is a question I feel does not get asked enough when it comes to beloved franchises. People talk about their favourite game developers and how they “sold out” or whatever. I don’t think I see enough recognition that sometimes the best people at a company just leave.
The reality is that it's been 20 years since many of those "best games ever". 20 years is a huge chunk of your working life. It's just not realistic to keep the same people that whole time, or even a percentage of them.
People don't want to think about the reality of it, they just want content to devour.
bethesda has one of the least amount of turnover for any gaming company. so you can check the credits for morrowind then check for skyrim then check for starfield and you will see a lot of familiar names
Honestly if they had just put a little more thought into the loot progression and made a couple systems more interesting it would have been a much better game.
The randomized empty open world planets wasn't great but they also did that in Daggerfall so I don't think it was totally unprecedented and still had some value if there was a better incentive to explore (in my opinion better and more interesting loot would have kept me exploring).
What pissed me off the most was the fact that when you built the armillary it literally showed up on the OUTSIDE of your spaceship and you couldn't build it indoors in your settlements. What the fuck? You literally killed people for some of those artifacts. Why would you keep them outside for fucks sake?
The randomized empty open world planets wasn’t great but they also did that in Daggerfall so I don’t think it was totally unprecedented
Well, in case of daggerfall you could actually move through the land to the next city/town without a single loading screen.
And in theory you could move from one end of the land to the other end (but the game would likely crash due to procedural generation or memory issues before)
i think a rogue would stab you in the back killing you instantly before the game would crash
True but Daggerfall was definitely made with fast travel in mind as the main way to get around.
yep it was.. which makes it more impressive to implement it this way
Yeah I know, I played Morrowind, Oblivion, and unfortunately Skyrim. I expect it to be pretty and large, but not have much unique, good stuff, the side quests will be "go steal this same vase 6x from different people oh look you run the Thieves Guild now," and the main quests might be neat.
I'm not sure I'll be picking it up tbh.
It's been a long time since 11-11-11.
They haven't been working on it since then, if they did, they've already scrapped it and fired the old devs.
They're developing games for modern audiences now, they'll be adding a bard class, there'll be a traveling circus prominently featuring throughout the story and with a tent near most major cities. And you'll finally be able to play as a bearded midget lady. That's what dwemer are now, they decided. A matriarchal bearded civilization whose ancient traditions led to modern circuses. And you have to help the Queen save the world from the Nazi Elves and alt-right Nords.
Why does none of this sound like it'd make a game bad, unless you're hoping your fantasy RPG will own the libs?
Because it sounds like they'd be ditching everything previous fans love about the universe and lore to hit a bunch of buzzwords. There is insane shit from older games that I'm sure will never see the light of day (unless a modder gets inspired) because Bethesda wants to sanitize and mass-marketize the world.
Will Elsweyr explore at all the fact there are effectively different species of Khajiit tied to under what combination of the phases of the dual moons the baby is born? Or will Bethesda just throw some big, gruff, talking tigers and some small, funny, talking house cats around and call it a day after putting in exactly one (1) version of each of those that inverts that mold?
Will the Mane be like this: https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Mane ? Or will he just be a Khajiit in LaCroix-level flavorings of Middle-Eastern adjacent clothing?
You are why they do these things to games.
Tear out the guts, replace them with industry standard parts and the most recent fad.
None of those things individually have any impact on the game. And none of them are likely to ever make it into a game by a company like Bethesda. The fact that you're nitpicking these kinds of things, with no real basis, really makes you wonder the actual reasoning behind your post.
Rewriting things like dwemer would have no impact.
Right.
Fuck you.
Holy shit dude go the fuck outside.
That's where modern sequels are best experienced. At a distance, not dealing with them.
Do what was done with Skyrim but make the dungeon puzzles less terrible, remove the horrific bugs, and make the setting a desert or lush forest. Boom, billion dollar game. Send me money, Todd.
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.
Oh it can be done. The only question is: is Bethesda the one to do it?
...Larian Studios has entered the chat
Eh. I'd argue the Beyond Skyrim Team is the real successors
Fair point.
After Starfield my expectations are so low that the only way I'd be disappointed is if it's worse than Skyrim. And Skyrim wasn't even that amazing in hindsight.
The best they made, for me, was Morrowind.
While I enjoyed the rest of entries and I'm very fond of the Shivering Isles, IMO it was the originality of it, its story and art, but also the freedom it granted.
My advice would be to go back to that time and instead of massive places, just build a fun place to explore.
And the combat was laughably terrible. Still my favorite entry as well. I just felt so unhindered after getting through the first bit.
The one thing that really made it stand out to me was the caves. Some were short, most had hidden places in them that would normally be a pain to get to, and the larger ones were works of art.
I remember well going for a quest, seeing a cave and then falling through a rabbit hole into a death cult while being a laughably underpowered magician.
It felt closer to what I commonly experience with D&D than other games, mostly due to the combination of freedom and curated world.
That said, yes combat was dull, uninspired and probably the weakest part of the series.
The hand-craftedness of morrowind. That was why is was so good. There was always something hidden. You saw the dev's hand in every area knowing someone would explore it even though it's off the beaten path. The vendors actually carried or stored their inventory and it could be stolen without some theft marker telling the guards across the world "this is Balti Ser's wooden fork, remove from player!'
Oblivion and later: paintbrush go brrrr
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.
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."
I expect nothing and I know that they will still dissapoont me. Marketing isn't weeping because they don't know how to sell the expectation, they weep because they don't know how they can convince anyone to even look at that game.
Same. Pretty sure I own every Bethesda rpg right up through Fallout 4 and Skyrim. I just couldn’t be bothered with Fallout 76 bullshit, and the handful of my friends that played Starfield said it was just sad.
I don’t much care what they release next. It won’t hold a candle to BG3.
I was a pretty hardcore Bethesda fan for years, long before Skyrim. But they have burned me too many times now for me to have any faith in ESVI.
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
I don't blame the MD tbh, if I had to try and make Starfield worth buying I'd fucking quit
Fire Emil and you'll be on a good start to un-fucking yourselves, Bethesda
Awesome, I hate marketers.
TES6 isn't out yet? neat. wouldn't know, cuz fuck Bethesda
I fell off the Bethesda train around Oblivion. They peaked with Morrowind and it has been downhill since.
I seriously doubt they do actual surveys. The only one’s raising the bar are AAA developers.
I think it will meet my Creation Store fan expectation, and that's not something I am looking forward to.
They can try.
The Elder Scrolls 6: Skyrim 2
The real Bethesda fans will know the game is going to be wonky as hell when it comes out. Mods and fan fixes/tweaks are the real bread and butter. Bethesda just creates the world. The fans make it awesome.
A game should not have to rely on mods to be decent. Base Skyrim is still not a bad game.
Base Starfield is molten shit.
Base skyrim isn't a bad game, but it's a game that no one would have talked about 2 years after it was released. Instead it's been 13 years and it's still ranking around 50th most played game this month.
if base starfield is molten shit, does that make red dead redemption 2 just "okay"
Every single one of Bethesda’s fan favorite games are great games without mods.
Mods are little more than the whipped cream on top of what needs to be an already enticing sundae. Starfield was a perfect example of the fact that mods won’t save a game on their own, and that the days of the level of modability old Bethesda games had are now gone.
Are you kidding me? There's been continents with professional voice acting and 40+ hours of gameplay added to Skyrim. More than once. Not to mention all the patches and tweaks and balancing and UI adjustments.
Skyrim would have fallen off the top 100 games on steam a literal decade ago without mods and fan made stuff. Instead it's still ranked like 50th.
You realize they still sell many, many copies on all the platforms that aren't PC and don't have meaningful mod availability?
Skyrim isn't selling a bunch of copies on Switch for $30 on sale because of PC mods it can't use.
how can people so easily forget how big of a phenomenon skyrim was, pretty sure 90% of the playerbase never even tried mods
hell i still play it vanilla to this day
You can't judge much of anything based on switch owners and third party availability of games.
Except it has the same outcome on every other platform it's on, for the exact same reasons.
Yeah and you get to that point when fans rally around a beloved game renewed by mods over literally decades. If your game is dogshit from the start, that just doesn’t happen. It literally happened with Starfield as some of the most well known Bethesda game modders abandoned the game entirely.
I know at least Gopher (and probably several others on YouTube or elsewhere) literally spelled out the equation for success for TESVI, or at least the beginnings of it.
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.
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.
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.
Use 👏 a 👏 better 👏 engine! 👏
If they spend time on a new engine, that would cancel the release of Skyrim on the IBM 5100.
Whaaaat you think the engine that brought the world Boxfield is horrible after eight years of work on it?
box field took me a second but i snorted out loud! lmao
Even py.game would be better at this point...
"Our tech is cutting edge as far as I can tell, the Creation Engine's aging very well! We're not planning on doing anything about it."
I honestly don't even think vanilla Skyrim was that good of a game. It had nice world building, but the combat sucked, the main story was kinda whatever, it was glitchy and a lot of systems were poorly thought out. It's only ever been the promise of a good game which was mostly found in mods.
Skyrim was good because sandbox, music, culture and mood. The parts that made it bad, were endearing.
Combat sucked and you had to spend way too long in the garbage ass inventory/ menus which just ruined the immersion. Im passing on Bethesda games until they fix that dumb shit, but I don't think they will anytime soon. All of their games seem like a soulless copy-paste the theme into the same boring engine.
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.
I expect it to be a buggy mess that has lots of potential and doesn't deliver on half of what it seems like it should do. Then after a year or two it will finally be patched into being mostly stable and mods will have reached a point where it can mostly be turned into the game I actually want. However there will be a few creative decisions that I absolutely hate but which are so unnecessarily locked in that even mods can't fix them, so I'll have to just accept them as an irritant that I will do my best to ignore.
They're gonna block mod tools, just wait.
Considering how the modding community made Skyrim a long-term success, this would be a very foolish decision.
They're going to try make paid mods a thing again.
You say that as if it removes the possibility but I don't think I need to provide specific examples of obviously foolish decisions ruining modern games. There are plenty to choose from.
Oh absolutely, and Bethesda is absolutely capable of that. It would be very myopic for them though. They can't possibly be ignorant of the fact that modding is what kept Skyrim selling for a decade.
Preventing modding would be a substantial exercise in hubris ("we don't need them"), or one of those intentional failure/tax writeoff things.
If they did that nobody would even be able to play the game, you expect Bethesda to do their own patching!?
You'll have to pay a subscription fee.
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.
WoW's talking heads, for example.
Not an improvement.
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.
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
Anything that makes marketers sad is a win for the world, honestly
They're usually just liars acting as a filter between the game and the interested customers.
Instead of just showing the game, they cut what doesn't look good and make it appear as something more than it is. That's their job.
It's not adding value. Peak marketing executed perfectly is just misleading enough to increase sales beyond what just seeing the game would do, without making the customers mad enough to have a negative impact.
I make a rare exception for actual artistry, like some of the WoW expansion cinematics. It's still pretty misleading, but they're pretty.
As for the next Elder Scrolls, I don't think Bethesda has the devs to make it fun or interesting. From what I've seen from them, they are not particularly competent.
It’s too late for me to care. I grew up with TES. I played daggerfall when I was 15 on my pentium. Then every few years a new amazing game came out. Then after sky rim it stopped. I’m in my 40s now and don’t have the time. This game should have come out in 2016 at the latest.
I mean.... Skyrim is ok, I wouldn't say it's amazing...one of the weakest installments of TES. And then they beat every last cent out of it.
Absolutely. I'm surprised they didn't try to release a version for calculators.....
I was hoping after the graphical upgrade with Morrowind that they'd bring back interesting mechanics from Daggerfall, but they went the complete opposite direction for the money.
Step 1, this time don't have an unskippable intro that lasts 30 minutes before you can start actually playing.
noted! are you thinking 2 hours is long enough, or should we really try for three?
Or have it as a toggle after your first time watching it
Hey, you're finally awake
Most annoying part of Fallout 3.
3 did this perfectly.
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.
Modern Bethesda and making good games, what a joke.
I mean, even if TES:6 is good it wont meet expectations because expectations are so wildly high.
My expectations are just be as good as skyrim. I still go and explore skyrim and find new fun things i had never seen before. It's the best i can ask for.
Maybe it'll be as good. I would strongly recommend waiting for reviews in 2032 when it finally launches.
Skyrim launched 11.11.11
Expect ES6 on
2.2.22oh wait, missed that one, 3.3.33They're definitely not going to go back to any of the better earlier games before Skyrim.
Idk i never played the other games. I've heard many times that they are better. I play skyrim in VR only. I might look for mods to play the earlier games in VR as well.
I'd love to play VR. Someday
You can probably get a used Quest 2 for a good price. It's definitely capable enough to get a feel for VR, and whether or not you should invest more in a better setup.
Yeah I know. Unfortunately new toys like new hardware isn't in my current future. Someday though.
Really after the mess that was their space game?
Don't forget fall out 76
I already did. And will again. Mostly because it's not worth remembering. Not because I'll ever trust Bethesda
There is no modern Bethesda. They are still making games based on 15 year old standards, with an engine a lot older and technically more debted than that.
It's kinda like trying to make Edward Scissorhands a brain surgeon by adding a few more rubberbands between the blades.
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.
commence marketing team weeping for weeks on end
It works for Capcom and Nintendo just fine. Nintendo even skips making a new plot.
I think at this point I am more excited for, and have higher expectations of, Skywind.
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.
How many people who worked on Morrowind, Oblivion, and/or Skyrim are still working there? This is a question I feel does not get asked enough when it comes to beloved franchises. People talk about their favourite game developers and how they “sold out” or whatever. I don’t think I see enough recognition that sometimes the best people at a company just leave.
The reality is that it's been 20 years since many of those "best games ever". 20 years is a huge chunk of your working life. It's just not realistic to keep the same people that whole time, or even a percentage of them.
People don't want to think about the reality of it, they just want content to devour.
bethesda has one of the least amount of turnover for any gaming company. so you can check the credits for morrowind then check for skyrim then check for starfield and you will see a lot of familiar names
Honestly if they had just put a little more thought into the loot progression and made a couple systems more interesting it would have been a much better game.
The randomized empty open world planets wasn't great but they also did that in Daggerfall so I don't think it was totally unprecedented and still had some value if there was a better incentive to explore (in my opinion better and more interesting loot would have kept me exploring).
What pissed me off the most was the fact that when you built the armillary it literally showed up on the OUTSIDE of your spaceship and you couldn't build it indoors in your settlements. What the fuck? You literally killed people for some of those artifacts. Why would you keep them outside for fucks sake?
Well, in case of daggerfall you could actually move through the land to the next city/town without a single loading screen. And in theory you could move from one end of the land to the other end (but the game would likely crash due to procedural generation or memory issues before)
i think a rogue would stab you in the back killing you instantly before the game would crash
True but Daggerfall was definitely made with fast travel in mind as the main way to get around.
yep it was.. which makes it more impressive to implement it this way
Yeah I know, I played Morrowind, Oblivion, and unfortunately Skyrim. I expect it to be pretty and large, but not have much unique, good stuff, the side quests will be "go steal this same vase 6x from different people oh look you run the Thieves Guild now," and the main quests might be neat.
I'm not sure I'll be picking it up tbh.
It's been a long time since 11-11-11.
They haven't been working on it since then, if they did, they've already scrapped it and fired the old devs.
They're developing games for modern audiences now, they'll be adding a bard class, there'll be a traveling circus prominently featuring throughout the story and with a tent near most major cities. And you'll finally be able to play as a bearded midget lady. That's what dwemer are now, they decided. A matriarchal bearded civilization whose ancient traditions led to modern circuses. And you have to help the Queen save the world from the Nazi Elves and alt-right Nords.
Why does none of this sound like it'd make a game bad, unless you're hoping your fantasy RPG will own the libs?
Because it sounds like they'd be ditching everything previous fans love about the universe and lore to hit a bunch of buzzwords. There is insane shit from older games that I'm sure will never see the light of day (unless a modder gets inspired) because Bethesda wants to sanitize and mass-marketize the world.
Will Elsweyr explore at all the fact there are effectively different species of Khajiit tied to under what combination of the phases of the dual moons the baby is born? Or will Bethesda just throw some big, gruff, talking tigers and some small, funny, talking house cats around and call it a day after putting in exactly one (1) version of each of those that inverts that mold?
Will the Mane be like this: https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Mane ? Or will he just be a Khajiit in LaCroix-level flavorings of Middle-Eastern adjacent clothing?
You are why they do these things to games.
Tear out the guts, replace them with industry standard parts and the most recent fad.
None of those things individually have any impact on the game. And none of them are likely to ever make it into a game by a company like Bethesda. The fact that you're nitpicking these kinds of things, with no real basis, really makes you wonder the actual reasoning behind your post.
Rewriting things like dwemer would have no impact.
Right.
Fuck you.
Holy shit dude go the fuck outside.
That's where modern sequels are best experienced. At a distance, not dealing with them.
Do what was done with Skyrim but make the dungeon puzzles less terrible, remove the horrific bugs, and make the setting a desert or lush forest. Boom, billion dollar game. Send me money, Todd.
It's cool. We'll make it for you (and far more impeccably gorgeous than you would). Just give us the engine.
I'm glad some of them chose not to be enablers after Starfield.
Oh it can be done. The only question is: is Bethesda the one to do it?
...Larian Studios has entered the chat
Eh. I'd argue the Beyond Skyrim Team is the real successors
Fair point.
After Starfield my expectations are so low that the only way I'd be disappointed is if it's worse than Skyrim. And Skyrim wasn't even that amazing in hindsight.
The best they made, for me, was Morrowind.
While I enjoyed the rest of entries and I'm very fond of the Shivering Isles, IMO it was the originality of it, its story and art, but also the freedom it granted.
My advice would be to go back to that time and instead of massive places, just build a fun place to explore.
And the combat was laughably terrible. Still my favorite entry as well. I just felt so unhindered after getting through the first bit.
The one thing that really made it stand out to me was the caves. Some were short, most had hidden places in them that would normally be a pain to get to, and the larger ones were works of art.
I remember well going for a quest, seeing a cave and then falling through a rabbit hole into a death cult while being a laughably underpowered magician.
It felt closer to what I commonly experience with D&D than other games, mostly due to the combination of freedom and curated world.
That said, yes combat was dull, uninspired and probably the weakest part of the series.
The hand-craftedness of morrowind. That was why is was so good. There was always something hidden. You saw the dev's hand in every area knowing someone would explore it even though it's off the beaten path. The vendors actually carried or stored their inventory and it could be stolen without some theft marker telling the guards across the world "this is Balti Ser's wooden fork, remove from player!'
Oblivion and later: paintbrush go brrrr
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.
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."
I expect nothing and I know that they will still dissapoont me. Marketing isn't weeping because they don't know how to sell the expectation, they weep because they don't know how they can convince anyone to even look at that game.
Same. Pretty sure I own every Bethesda rpg right up through Fallout 4 and Skyrim. I just couldn’t be bothered with Fallout 76 bullshit, and the handful of my friends that played Starfield said it was just sad.
I don’t much care what they release next. It won’t hold a candle to BG3.
I was a pretty hardcore Bethesda fan for years, long before Skyrim. But they have burned me too many times now for me to have any faith in ESVI.
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
I don't blame the MD tbh, if I had to try and make Starfield worth buying I'd fucking quit
Fire Emil and you'll be on a good start to un-fucking yourselves, Bethesda
Awesome, I hate marketers.
TES6 isn't out yet? neat. wouldn't know, cuz fuck Bethesda
I fell off the Bethesda train around Oblivion. They peaked with Morrowind and it has been downhill since.
I seriously doubt they do actual surveys. The only one’s raising the bar are AAA developers.
I think it will meet my Creation Store fan expectation, and that's not something I am looking forward to.
They can try.
The Elder Scrolls 6: Skyrim 2
The real Bethesda fans will know the game is going to be wonky as hell when it comes out. Mods and fan fixes/tweaks are the real bread and butter. Bethesda just creates the world. The fans make it awesome.
A game should not have to rely on mods to be decent. Base Skyrim is still not a bad game.
Base Starfield is molten shit.
Base skyrim isn't a bad game, but it's a game that no one would have talked about 2 years after it was released. Instead it's been 13 years and it's still ranking around 50th most played game this month.
if base starfield is molten shit, does that make red dead redemption 2 just "okay"
Every single one of Bethesda’s fan favorite games are great games without mods.
Mods are little more than the whipped cream on top of what needs to be an already enticing sundae. Starfield was a perfect example of the fact that mods won’t save a game on their own, and that the days of the level of modability old Bethesda games had are now gone.
Are you kidding me? There's been continents with professional voice acting and 40+ hours of gameplay added to Skyrim. More than once. Not to mention all the patches and tweaks and balancing and UI adjustments.
Skyrim would have fallen off the top 100 games on steam a literal decade ago without mods and fan made stuff. Instead it's still ranked like 50th.
You realize they still sell many, many copies on all the platforms that aren't PC and don't have meaningful mod availability?
Skyrim isn't selling a bunch of copies on Switch for $30 on sale because of PC mods it can't use.
how can people so easily forget how big of a phenomenon skyrim was, pretty sure 90% of the playerbase never even tried mods
hell i still play it vanilla to this day
You can't judge much of anything based on switch owners and third party availability of games.
Except it has the same outcome on every other platform it's on, for the exact same reasons.
Yeah and you get to that point when fans rally around a beloved game renewed by mods over literally decades. If your game is dogshit from the start, that just doesn’t happen. It literally happened with Starfield as some of the most well known Bethesda game modders abandoned the game entirely.
I know at least Gopher (and probably several others on YouTube or elsewhere) literally spelled out the equation for success for TESVI, or at least the beginnings of it.