I’m honestly baffled as to why people have had any faith in Bethesda Game Studios for years. Even if you liked Fallout 3 or 4, what they did with 76 should’ve obliterated any remaining trust.
- Fallout 3 releases and it’s good
- Fallout New Vegas releases and it’s great
- Fallout 4 releases and it’s disappointing but it’s okay because it’s just a blip. They had some good new ideas in there, they were just balanced out in the other direction by a lot of bad ones. Bethesda’s track record is still solid, if somewhat tarnished.
- Fallout 76 releases and it’s disappointing but that’s because they’ve never made (and shouldn’t have made) an MMO before. A lot of the coverage is centred around the shoddy launch, which doesn’t really matter for a non-MMO title.
Fallout 3 isn’t even comparable to the originals, it’s a completely different game.
I went and played Fallout 1 because I loved 3 so much… It took a few false starts (1 intelligence was a terrible call for a first playthrough lol, it ended bad)
Now I see it, 1 and 2 were so brilliant with the role playing and story that I can’t go back to 3! 😊 So many choices, strong characters, just brilliant.
Only as far as storyline and setting go. Other than that, it was an okay shooter.
FO4 settlement mechanism is amazing. It’s literally a 1st person city builder. I can’t think of any game similar to that yet.
It’s crazy to me how close that system was to being great and then seeing what they did with outposts in Starfield. While I didn’t really care for how it worked in vanilla, the ability to customize your base was awesome. Babysitting settlements was a chore, but SimSettlements fixes that. Starfield you can’t do much to customize it and it essentially useless from a mechanics standpoint, except for grinding a bunch of levels by cheesing time compression planets, but I’ll just use the console if I want to do that.
The problems is that’s not what Fallout is. It’s not a settlement sim. But when I played F4 for the first time, it felt just like Fallout Shelter with a quest tacked onto it, which is not at all what I wanted. Especially the way the game strongly pushes you into the Minutemen. It makes it extremely tedious for a new player. After the first time, I walked away from the game and didn’t come back to it for over a year. I decided to give it a go and completely ignored the Minutemen, and it was such a better game. But you have to know you can do that.
Also it wasn’t until modding was opened up that the settlement system got good, IMO.
Elder scrolls online??? They didn’t “make” it, but they were damn familar with the mmo scene.
As someone who went to the midnight launch of Skyrim and finished the main quest that night, ever since that moment I’ve been disappointed in Bethesda’s direction. Skyrim was fairly uninteresting, though the mods now can bring it some life (but still can’t make it as good as Morrowind, especially the huge UI downgrade we got with the switch to consoles). Fallout 4 does have some redeeming qualities I think, though generally it was also disappointing. Starfield is the last piece I think most people needed to wake up and see that they don’t want to make good games anymore. They only care about making a game they can market to as many people as possible, so they can’t do anything interesting with it.
The issue is most Bethesda has made at least one of many people’s favorite games. Many of the people behind them still work at the company, so they could do it again. I think there’s always some hope they can look at what makes games good (both their own and things like Baulder’s Gate 3) and realize making generic crap isn’t going to cut it anymore. It worked for Skyrim and somewhat for FO4 (though that still has some fairly unique aspects), but people have so many options for better games.
Morrowind is the reason I’m in the game industry and has impacted my life more than any other single piece of media. It’s been heartbreaking for me to see the treatment Elder Scrolls has gotten. I was so excited for Skyrim it was the only game I’ve ever preordered, it’s the reason I originally got a Steam account, and the whole game is a let down start to finish.
I was hesitantly optimistic for FO4 when I bought it, it was off-putting but I worked through the disappointment of running into invisible walls so often, and when I finally got the gear and the freedom to power armor my way to the roofs I was pumped until I discovered they put fuck all up there. Morrowind was designed with jumping and flying and they made a 3D world that was fascinating to explore, Skyrim is completely flat, FO4 pretends to have 3D space but it’s a contentless liar. I’m so jaded now I didn’t even get to the hesitantly optimistic step with Starfield I just assumed it was going to be empty filler
I wasn’t hesitantly optimistic about Starfield, rather hesitantly pessimistic. I knew they were going to fuck it up, but I thought there could be something interesting somewhere at the core. There wasn’t though. Even if there are good mods, which I’m not sure of at this point, I don’t think Starfield can be worth playing. I love sci-fi, so I would put up with a shit game if they actually cared about the sci-fi concepts, but they didn’t even bother with that. They acknowledged the concept of things like generation ships, but then didn’t care about what made them interesting, for example.
The fact that Morrowind built it’s world as a world and then gave you tools to play in it is what makes it work so well. People in the world can levitate and breathe under water, so some people used that in the world, so you’ll find that the world utilizes it. Also, the spaces are built as real spaces mostly, but all later games built “roller-coasters” where there’s a start point and a fixed path you have to take and an exit. You don’t get to use your brain to find other options. You’re supposed to turn off your brain and follow the quest marker and that’s all. It really sucks.
I’m always stupidly, but reservedly, hopeful that any studio will realize people play their games most frequently to engage them in interesting ideas, not to disengage from them or they’d watch a movie. BG3, making as much money as it has and being as classic an RPG as it is, has given me hope that larger studios will realize their mistakes. If Bethesda put their budget behind a classic RPG then they’d do huge numbers and make another new classic, but I know they won’t.
Morrowind is the reason I’m in the game industry and has impacted my life more than any other single piece of media. It’s been heartbreaking for me to see the treatment Elder Scrolls has gotten. I was so excited for Skyrim it was the only game I’ve ever preordered, it’s the reason I originally got a Steam account, and the whole game is a let down start to finish.
I feel pretty much the same as you about those games, which makes me very curious what your opinion of Oblivion is. I’ve recently had a bit of a (belated) revelation about it, so I’m interested in other opinions and discussion.
Similar story for me, too. I’m not in the game industry, but Morrowind is the game that made me realize how great a game could be. It got me really into gaming, which made me want to be a game developer. I ended up not becoming a game developer, but that’s what got me on the path of learning to code, so it certainly affected my life.
I remember waking up early on Saturday mornings so that I could play Morrowind for a bit before my parents woke up. A friend and I would take turns playing as our different characters after school. Before that I had played Sonic the Hedgehog, Wolfenstein, and Duke Nukem – and those were fun – but Morrowind put you inside of a story, a really good story, that took place in a world that felt completely real.
While it’s too bad to see that The Elder Scrolls 6 likely won’t deliver that same kind of experience, I’m sure games like Baldur’s Gate 3 are filling that role for kids today. There are still people making inspirational virtual worlds, and players are still being changed by them.
This 💯🔥
I’m at the stage where you stop complaining about videogames and you just stop buying them.
I’ve realised that all the people who worked in the videogames industry that made it special have either sold out, dropped out, or aged out at this point. Keep your expectations low my friends.
I was weirdly forgiving of Fallout 76 (never played it, I’m not too hot for multiplayer games) because it was made so soon after fallout 4. It always felt like one of those DLC that got so large that it got released as a standalone game, which practically any large game studio has done and Bethesda did with Arcane’s Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider.
A huge soft spot I have for the elder scrolls comes from the heroic fantasy exploration with enormous orchestral music and adventure in every direction, something people say about Starfield is that it’s large and sparse, which is accurate for a grounded space game but goes against what makes half of Bethesda games fun. Fallout falls in the middle of the pack being far more pulpy than Starfield and in 4, I feel this was a large issue with it feeling bland; it’s pulpy wackiness was toned down when it should have gone up.
I don’t expect Bethesda to give me the video game equivalent of game of thrones but I do expect the Saturday morning cartoon that I’m equally fond of, and they still hold all the ingredients to make that recipe. Unfortunately Starfield was always tonally wrong for that, but ES6 is perfect for it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still only buy ES6 a year or so after release, maybe 2-3 if it’s really crap, but I think a fair few of the ways that they’ve deviated from the working formula post Skyrim may not be an issue here.
Good. Then, you can only be positively surprised.
No, you can be many more things than that. Skyrim killed my hype for anything else Bethesda made, but I was still hopeful for a cool sci-fi game with Bethesda issues. I didn’t expect much from Starfield, but I was still left with a sense of disappointment. It’s not that I expected anything good, but I was still somewhat hopeful that it could be interesting, but it refused to be. There wasn’t any surprise element to what I felt, just a tinge of loss at what we could have had if the company tried to make good games still instead of making marketable games.
Personally, I found it particularly damning, how generic all of it was. They had a really interesting, diverse world with Morrowind. Then Oblivion was already a severe step backwards with relatively generic high fantasy. And Skyrim felt even more samey to me.
Well, and now with Starfield, I already start sleeping when I hear the name. What is it supposed to be? Astrology Astronomy Simulator 2024? Did really no one in that management meeting have a better idea for the premise other than that it’s Fallout in space?
To some degree, obviously it’s not supposed to be fantasy, so maybe they’ll actually be more creative with that, again, but with them now belonging to Microsoft, too, I just fully expect design by committee.
Did you play Starfield? It’s definitely got plenty of ideas. It just chickened out of some of them and wrote checks it couldn’t cash for others. (Also, I think you meant astronomy, not astrology.)
All the new ideas in Starfield fall into one of two categories:
- The technology doesn’t exist to implement it.
- The talent at Bethesda is incredibly ill-suited to implement it.
The Bethesda response to fans saying their main storyline was trash was to make a game where the main storyline is the primary focus and draw of the game? That’s a bold move.
The NG+ stuff is a cool idea, but again, Bethesda just fundamentally lacks the talent to implement it. You can’t hit what they were aiming for with a handful of gimmicks. I wouldn’t even trust the team behind New Vegas, or whoever writes at Larian, to do it justice.
I would absolutely trust Obsidian to handle the NG+ angle that Bethesda was aiming for, because they would have known that the right way to do it is to not let you do every faction’s quest line in the same playthrough.
All of the stories were like that in starfield. If I could sum it up it would be “jack of all trades, master of none”. Too much stuff crammed in and none of it fleshed out well enough.
Base building was fun, until it was tedious because they only half automated the process.
Ship building was fun, except you could only customize to a point.
Exploration was fun, except they only made really 10ish buildings to just spawned them everywhere instead of generating custom ones (I fought at the same building at least 2 dozen times)
With exploration, we want you to wander through giant spaces and planets, but give you no explorer or vehicle to use.
We also want you to explore the galaxy fully immersed, but couldn’t solve the loading screen problem that yanks you out of the immersion.
So so many cool ideas that you can tell the committee was just like “no, it’s not with finishing that, players will be fine with it”. The entire game feels like it was built by committee.
Yeah, I did mean astronomy. Stupid charlatans co-opting postfixes.
I did not play Starfield; only watched some videos about it. Which is why I didn’t want to argue that it had no ideas, just that it’s overarching premise is incredibly mundane.
But thinking about it now, I guess, even that is the case for their other games. Like, the actual Elder Scroll items are basically irrelevant. And ‘Fallout’ is just a generic postapocalyptic setting. Maybe it’s just that it’s a new series, so it hasn’t yet established an own identity, which gives the weak premise much more weight.
Ultimately, they don’t want a strong premise, because it’s supposed to be sandbox-like. That’s what their fans want. But for answering why you should play specifically Starfield, when tons of space games exist which have done a better job at the space bits, it’s just not doing them any favors.
The sad thing about Oblivion is that there are in-game books in Morrowind and previous games that describe the empire as being in the middle of a bamboo jungle. The vibe comes off as the Roman Empire in South East Asia.
Instead we got generic high fantasy with the occasional guy wearing Roman armor.
Eh, Bethesda flip-flop on that kind of stuff all the time. IIRC in Arena, the Imperial City was just in generic temperate woodland, then it was retconned in some in-game books to a jungle, then retconned again in Oblivion back to generic woodland. Same thing with the armor of imperial soldiers. Generic fantasy plate in early games, Roman in Morrowind, generic fantasy plate in Oblivion again, Roman again in Skyrim… They just can’t make up their minds.
I will say this, though: It’s okay to retcon old lore, but only in order to make it more unique and interesting. Retconning stuff to make it more generic and bland is a high crime.
This isn’t completely fair, Bethesda addressed the issue in universe and there are multiple authors arguing about this and why that is. It plays very well with the rest of the lore which is all about conflicting accounts and variety of interpretation.
If I recall correctly the three in-universe theories are (1) it’s an error and there never was a jungle (2) there was a jungle but Talos CHIMed it away (3) there was a jungle when the high elves (Ayleids) lived there, but when the humans took over the white-gold tower changed the landscape to suit them.
Unfortunately, /r/teslore has no fediverse equivalent that I know of so I wouldn’t know where to have this kind of discussion.
Without upgrading to a new enginge, something that the entire industry has been begging Bethesda to do now for at least a decade, ES6 will feel exactly the same as pretty much all of their games since Oblivion, with the same “go here, kill everything indiscriminately, pick up trinket, deliver trinket” gameplay loop. ES lore is top tier and I’m always down for more of that, but they need to update their shit.
How would a engine change affect the game design philosophy of Bethesda?
Performance? Visuals? Alright. But game design?
Creation Engine powers Starfield and Fallout New Vegas. Quests can be complex, dynamic, with multiple endings, with lots of ways to approach them. Or they can be flat fetch quests. The tools allow both and everything in between.
Bethesda just chooses to use the current game design framework and would choose the same on any other engine.
They are actually updating their game design principles. They stopped using game design documents, they simplified the quests, they try to make sure every play through gets to see as much content as possible. Maybe they should stop updating.
A newer engine would get rid of chests hidden into the ground for storing NPC’s items.
I mean, this is an obviously laughable example but you can be sure that other quirks of the engine are holding back creativity and performance.
As I said Creation Engine did mot stop another studio from being creative.
They are not being hold back by Creation Engine in game design, they are stuck in a design philosophy and production strategy that until now has and got them lots of praise and sales.
They use the chest trick because saves reworking the inventory and container system. That would take time and left the game almost the same, so they don’t.
If they used Unreal engine they’d have to build a new inventory and container system from scratch, who knows if they would end up taking the hidden chest idea (it mostly works) and porting it?
The “Update your engine Bethesda” discussion is valid from many points of view, but most of the problems with current Bethesda releases are cultural. They don’t test nearly enough, they don’t have a “fun” game until a couple months before release, they don’t coordinate the content and mechanics production in any way, the quest writing is a free for all.
And until now things worked out. So they refuse to address those issues.
I loved Morrowind when I was 12, replayed it recently and it was just as good as I remembered. I was hyped on Starfield and bought it blind for 40e. I don’t usually make mistakes like these but I got cocky this time. I still can’t fathom how uninteresting Starfield was. I literally dropped it out of boredom. How can you manage to do this with a space game ? seriously ? how do you create something so bland from a premise so exciting ? with the funds and time you have ?
