It’s all a matter of personal taste. But yeah, Beth’s best games are definitely in the past.
People will point at Skyrim and Morrowind to showcase how much better their older games were, but pretend Oblivion didn’t happen. :P
Personally I feel that way about Morrowind - mechanically it’s like a stripped down, worse version of Daggerfall while also being an inferior implementation of a fully 3d game than Oblivion.
Of all the TES games Oblivion has aged the worst. If you didn’t play it at the time its really hard to be objective about it now. Too much Bloom and ugly potato faces combined with its floaty, clunky combat make it a chore to play today. Game had some great quest writing though and Shivering Isles is a GOAT expansion. It also has an undeniable, if somewhat unintentional, goofy charm to it that I love.
At the time a lot of Morrowind fans hated it for going against established lore and “dumbing down” the series, but it did well critically and was generally well received by the public. It got a lot of people, including myself, into the series. I went back and played Morrowind and loved it so I can see a lot of Oblivion’s weaknesses more clearly, but I still have a soft nostalgic spot for it in my heart.
Oblivion is my personal favorite so definitely up to personal interpretation.
Yeah personally I reckon that Oblivion and Daggerfall are the two best TES games ever made - both are better than Morrowind, and significantly better than Skyrim.
I also reckon that Starfield will be up there with Oblivion and Daggerfall a couple years after the modding tools are released!
Yeah, as someone who hasn’t played Starfield and has no interest in playing it, all their criticisms were just saying they didn’t care for the style starfield was going for. Which is fine, but that doesn’t make it a bad game.
It could be that “NASA punk” is boring to 99/100 people, but that doesn’t mean a game in that style is bad. I think we can all agree that games that are enthralling to a very niche set of people are a good thing, because we all want that game to be for us. We don’t want or expect every game to be equally enthralling to every person.
For me, the “NASA punk” wasn’t the turn off.
Starfield could have been a great game. But the general route Beth has taken with Fallout, and continued in Starfield, doesn’t appeal to me. Pointless building filler, environmental storytelling over actual storytelling, radient quests everywhere and so on.
I have no doubt they’ll do the same with TES. Just half-assing it really. Skyrim was already pretty flat, so…
Yeah, Morrowind was mind blowing when it came out. Then I skipped Oblivion, and Skyrim, mechanically, wasn’t that much of a leap over Morrowind. Sure it looked better and had voice acting, but it still feels like a static world. I wouldn’t consider Witcher 3 to be quite the same genre as TES, but imo W3 raised the bar for my expectations from Bethesda. So far I think they still have not made a game as good as W3.
