Skyrim lead designer says it will be 'almost impossible' for Elder Scrolls 6 to meet fan expectations: 'Marketing departments just put their heads in their hands and weep'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!'
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.