Currently in pre-production at Bethesda Game Studios, the acclaimed developers of Skyrim and Fallout 4. The highly-anticipated next chapter in the iconic The...
Don’t worry, in five years it will launch with the same physics tick rate bug and the dearth of anything interesting that is customary of any Bethesda Game Studios game.
Just in terms of timeline, Dragon Age 4 was teased at about the same time with the same level of teaser trailer. It’s releasing this fall.
So a full modern RPG being fully developed in that time by a smaller studio, and for elder scrolls we haven’t heard squat.
Who knows how DA will turn out, but we know modern Bethesda quality thanks to starfield. Not having any news in 6 years proves this trailer was made just to shut fans up
Often times trailers that early are used as a hiring tool, too. Cyberpunk’s original CG trailer was back in like 2012, and that game came out in 2020, but we know from an interview at E3 before The Witcher 3 came out that there was a very small team working on Cyberpunk before Witcher 3 was done, and Cyberpunk at that point was mostly just design documents.
Who knows how DA will turn out, but we know modern Bethesda quality thanks to starfield. Not having any news in 6 years proves this trailer was made just to shut fans up
“Bethesda and Todd Howard announced Elder Scrolls 6 when they did because of fan demand, or in the words of Skyrim’s lead designer Bruce Nesmith, because ‘the pitchforks and torches were out.’”
Source
I hope they’re using this time to learn lessons from their Starfield flop and gather the talent and budget needed to improve upon Skyrim. A modern engine probably wouldn’t hurt.
However, my expectations are very low at this point.
I’m replaying Starfield, and on my second playthrough, I’m noticing the depth they put into this game. Sometimes a single dialogue line you said days ago will have an effect on NPC attitudes through an entire side story. I’m not going to argue that it’s not a regurgitation of their lame formula they’ve milked for the past 15+ years, but they do need to reevaluate where their money/dev time goes to.
Replaying as well, doing side quests I put off and surprised they actually go interesting places. Just did the one where zero G kept turning off and on at the space station that got taken over.
Damn, TIL you can come across these locations on accident just exploring. I thought that place was weird to be randomly floating out there with no real good loot. 😂
I misread your comment and now seem foolish lol but that is hilarious, I think Bethesda needs some work on their world engine and random events. Saw a mod where people are making custom towns now and man would random encounters within that environment…would take it to the next level.
I think it’s safe to assume they know that and would bear it in mind when choosing or building an engine. Their games are famous for modding, after all.
That’s a years if not decade+ long project though, including major investments of time and money that you could pour into actual games. You can’t just stomp a new game engine out of the ground, especially not with how complex video games in of itself have become, and if you want it to be as moddable as their current one.
It would be nice if the game speed and physics interaction were not tied to a inconsistent variable such as frame rate. And it seems that the more they pile on the gambryo engine the less receptive to modding it gets. But i can also accept that the cracks in the games that grow over time may not be the engine, but Bethesda prioritizing MVP centric development over hammering out the problems. Modders are carrying an auful lot of load to even get the games running.
You can’t just stomp a new game engine out of the ground
I don’t know what you mean by that, but creating new game engines and migrating from one to another have both been done before.
Is either of those tasks fast or cheap? Of course not.
Are they worthwhile? Sometimes.
Are they possible? Absolutely.
especially not […] if you want it to be as moddable as their current one.
Well, I can understand why you might assume that if you don’t have a lot of experience in software development, but it’s just not true. Making an engine that allows for very moddable games is mainly about planning for it during the design, and either building good tools for the game data or publishing the specs so other people can. It’s not arcane magic.
(And for what it’s worth, while Creation Engine is quite moddable, it has enormous room for improvement in that area. Actually working with it can be a very frustrating experience.)
They haven’t learned from Oblivion, Skyrim, or Fallout 4. Probably others.
Or really, they learned they can just keep releasing games on a hacked-up Morrowind engine, and make huge piles of money. So that’s what they’ll keep doing.
Yup. ES6 is going to sell like condoms on an STD themed swinger convension no matter how many bugs are going around.
And the saddest part is that too many have learned nothing about AAA titles, and will preorder the game, making the game a massive financial success even before releasing anything of quality.
The nostalgia boner is that it was a very unique game, and nothing has come out quite like it since. It’s not even like Daggerfall or Arena. For someone looking for that experience, Oblivion and Skyrim were massive disappointments.
Going from a volcano that is spewing flesh mutating disease while riding giant bugs around to Tolkienesque Medieval Fantasy Landscape #3045 gave me whiplash. (The Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine save the package though.) And losing the ability to kill whoever I want? Spears???
Skyrim is better. It mangles what could have been a good story by retconning lore and making Alduin into big evil bad, just as Oblivion was about basically Satan invading the world. Morrowind’s villain may not be right, but his motives are 100% understandable and he has a good point. (In Oblivion: why would you join a cult dedicated to killing everyone for no reason?)
As a Morrowboomer, I’m willing to accept the series changed, but there just hasn’t been something to replace what I hoped for ES4. They don’t make games with that vibe anymore. The closest thing I’ve had to scratching that itch would be Planescape Torment, Pathologic, or Zeno Clash.
It’s a tricky balancing act. They need to recover the investment as early as possible to pay less in capital costs but doing that will mean that later on when the product is sub-par it will cause problems and extra work.
Since the engine, game logic, art, story, testing is so heavily coupled together changing the engine a little bit could cause a month of work down the line.
I think personally the best way is to start by making an engine or taking one off the shelf and then write a mini version of the game with shit art that has a lot of bugs.
At the same time making models with hitboxes that all have the same physical properties otherwise, dialog content and recordings and all other content that can be done separately.
Once that is fun to play then you can start working creating a slightly bigger system with a single short storyline to have a cohesive experience and will have the genaral feel of the game.
Once everything above is done setting up a closed beta is the way to go. Take some feedback, add features and redo the small story to be more fun.
Then once everything is a fun experience but people just want more you do the whole everything.
I’m not suggesting that a big budget alone is sufficient to make a good game.
However, enough budget to keep the team employed (note the many gaming industry layoffs lately) and appropriate budgeting (in terms of both money and time) affect things like code, art, and writing quality. It’s kind of important.
I think it’s going to require the people making the most high-level decisions to come to the realization that their old way of doing things is outdated. I don’t have faith that they’ll come to those conclusions.
at the end of the day they are going to make the game they want, whether we like it or not, microsoft is now involved as well so who knows how that is going to affect them with their decisions
I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.
What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.
Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.
Friendly reminder that the original “loremaster” of Elder Scrolls left Bethesda before they released Elder Scrolls Online, and they replaced him with someone who has apparently been making pretty questionable decisions with ESO lore.
I mean, they always have the out of dragon breaks rewriting reality/making multiple conflicting timelines simultaneously canon (see the events of daggerfall as referenced in later games) to handwave away retcons, but overusing that just means that no lore actually matters.
I think of it as a pool from which to draw and connect story elements, rather than rigid canon. If good writers were given the chance, I think they would find plenty of material to work with.
I think I counted 6 quest designers in Starfield, which was a spot in the credits I was specifically looking for given how many quests they had and how many of them would have been better off not even existing. You can’t talk about having 1000 planets and then make quests that aren’t interesting to populate them.
There are more than 50 quests unless you’re getting creative with how you count. There are over a dozen in each major faction, and those ones are mostly okay, but the ones I really take issue with are the nothing quests that aren’t part of any faction; the ones that basically just have you go to a location and then report back. Those are awful. There should be zero quests in there that the quest designers themselves aren’t excited about. Even the bounties that you pick up for a given faction that have you go to a place and kill an enemy mob should be more exciting than what I’ve already described in this sentence.
Perhaps “you’re right”, “you’re wrong and also short, here’s why”, or even “I don’t know”. These would all be things you could tell them and a better response.
It was 5 years and 8 months between the release of Oblivion and Skyrim. Oblivion was released on March 20, 2006, and Skyrim was released on November 11, 2011.
As much of a joke as all the re-releases are, I’m super happy Skyrim VR exists. It’s one of the best VR experiences with the right mods that make it an actual VR game instead of a cheap cash-grab…
Quest 3, no doubt. The Index is old and overpriced at this point. HP Reverb G2 has great picture quality, but the controller tracking isn’t great and the cable is super thick. Plus Microsoft stopped supporting its mixed reality stuff. Vision Pro is not for gaming, just forget about it even if you can afford it. PSVR 2 might be a choice now that it supports PCVR, but I dunno. Its future support is kinda in doubt.
The only real downside of Q3 is being owned by Meta, which is obviously blech, but it’s an amazing piece of technology otherwise, and the price is a steal, since it’s heavily subsidized to grow the market.
A cheaper version is expected to be announced soon, so that might be an alternative. But otherwise there isn’t much competition unless you’re looking into a very particular niche.
why are so many people absent mindedly pushing this buggy mess narrative? starfield was their least buggy release ever (i personally only encountered one terrible bug that was easily fixed with reloading a save)
its not like bethesda ever released a game as buggy as fallout new vegas or cyberpunk, besides 76 but, like new vegas and cyberpunk, it got fixed
Since they announced that it will be PC and XBOX only- I stopped giving a shit. I refuse to buy a new hardware that once was accessible without having to.
You’re probably not missing much. Morrowind is the last good Elder Scrolls game they ever made. But that has also been PC/Xbox exclusive since 2002 so may as well write the series off completely.
Don’t even need to get into ranking them, it’s just completely asinine to say Oblivion and Skyrim are not even good at all. Circlejerk nonsense from someone who probably hasn’t played any of them.
I bet I’ve played a lot more of them than you have.
It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t having fun with Skyrim, and I thought it wasn’t as good as Oblivion. The games weren’t getting any better, just prettier. The writing and worldbuilding was getting objectively worse, too.
Morrowind is the only one I keep going back to, it’s the only one that has some semblance of soul.
i agree that skyrim is not as good as oblivion, but that isn’t what we were talking about.
Do you stand by the statement that Morrowind was the last “good” elder scrolls game? In other words, you think Oblivion and Skyrim are not good at all?
They should just release a new game with the graphical fidelity of Fallout 4, but with better performance and animations. They could probably cut their dev budget in half if they made a game with Skyrim’s scope and FO4’s graphics.
No one plays Bethesda games for their graphical fidelity so they really need to stop wasting time there.
Frankly, they could rebuild skyrim with the fallout 4 mechanics for base building, shared item storage for crafting, weapon modding, and for shits and giggles throw in steam centurions being unobtainable dwemer power armor frames.
Fuck, sell me basic ass skyrim but integrate the top 30 mods on nexus into the base game. It’s honestly not hard to do better then they’re doing.
I have great memories of Skyrim. And FO3. And New Vegas. And Fallout 4. And Fallout 76 actually got not bad. And Elder Scrolls: Online had one of my favorite quest chains in a game. And…
Ok so, I didn’t enjoy Skyrim as much as I enjoyed Morrowind, in fact I never finished it; I skipped Oblivion 'cause at the time it came out I… had other things to deal with.
I liked FO3 (weirdly, I liked it better than FONV), but in my opinion the new ones don’t hold a candle to the first two.
I agree almost 100% with you on this. I did play Oblivion, but Skyrim has the more interesting world IMO which makes it a slightly better game. The strength of Bethesda games that makes them good, in my opinion, is the same every time: explore a large interesting world with your own created character. This explains (in part) why people like Morrowind so much: the world is just so weird and interesting.
The problem is they don’t know how to improve on that concept. Instead they are mostly adding features that either don’t add anything to it or actively detract from it. For example, Fallout 4 received settlement building and weapon crafting. But, the time I’m spending on my town, I’m not actually out exploring. If I can craft weapons, I care less about the cool weapons I find in dungeons. Now, Starfield got rid of most of the crafted world altogether in exchange for procedural planets that aren’t interesting to explore at all.
Aan an aside, I don’t think it even makes sense to compare the first two fallout games with the Bethesda ones. Fallout 3 and beyond are not really sequels, they’re a completely different series set in the same universe.
Fallout 3 and beyond are not really sequels, they’re a completely different series set in the same universe.
I would argue they’re not even the same universe. While F1 had its share of of people living in post-war rubble, by F2 the world was mostly newly-build cities or primitive societies but there was a sense of progress, like having actual money (and by Tactics paper money was in everyday use). Then F3 comes and everyone is living in a pile of rubbish, with unreadable burnt pre-war books on their shelves like they want to pretend the world is how it used to be, nevermind that generations have passed, and everyone is back to trading in caps.
Yeah, that’s weird of the new Fallout games, there’s people sleeping on 200-years old mattresses (what are they made of, asbestos?). I get the destruction, and I understand how they may not be able to rebuild civilization to the old standards for a long while, but ffs, at least patch your walls!
There’s an industry to make new guns but people just step over the skeleton in the lobby of the half-collapsed hotel the three dozen residents call “Halftower” without a drop of irony.
Lenny indeed lacks some casual fucks, almost every thread has some extreme opinions. I had someone unironically try to explain to me why it would be beneficial to the human race to go extinct.
I don’t think they ever said that. It’s their “first new IP” in 25 years, and was “in production” since 2013, likely just planning stages. In reality, production only really started after FO76, when more people were available to do actual work.
Sports games suck (almost always) so no thanks. I’m sorry that you’re this sensitive to people who don’t take every opportunity to talk shit about Bethesda. It is a fact that they’ve released some incredible games and also that they actually don’t owe anyone anything at all
I love Bethesda, what are you on about? See, that’s why making assumptions is bad lol.
No they don’t owe anyone anything. Unless you consider the fact that a company owes fans a good product or else they lose those fans. Like I said, I love Bethesda, but I’m not a blind fan boy. I can see them slipping with each new release. Do you think Fallout 76, with its issues and lies they told about it never having P2W is good? So you think a huge number of barren planets adds and entertainment value? They need to start doing better because they can’t rely on their past success forever.
It’s like people have completely forgotten that fact. That snippet was at the very end of a 30 minute Bethesda presentation that had Fallout 76 with its multiplayer being a significant move away from their traditional formula, Elder Scrolls Blades (which is a mobile game nobody remembers) and the reveal of Starfield, a completely new franchise. Of course fans are going to question where is TES 6.
And a few months later Blizzard showed what happens when you don’t tease Diablo 4 after revealing Diablo immortal.
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Don’t worry, in five years it will launch with the same physics tick rate bug and the dearth of anything interesting that is customary of any Bethesda Game Studios game.
Welcome to the place washed by Iliac waves
There’s two and a half peasants with the same ugly face
You’re not into small towns? Check out big-ass plains
Fifty times the size of Skyrim’s, twice as many pointless caves!
And there’s even one new cave variation!
Just in terms of timeline, Dragon Age 4 was teased at about the same time with the same level of teaser trailer. It’s releasing this fall.
So a full modern RPG being fully developed in that time by a smaller studio, and for elder scrolls we haven’t heard squat.
Who knows how DA will turn out, but we know modern Bethesda quality thanks to starfield. Not having any news in 6 years proves this trailer was made just to shut fans up
And DA4 got almost remade to remove the live service features
What’s Bethesdas excuse?
they were working on starfield?
Often times trailers that early are used as a hiring tool, too. Cyberpunk’s original CG trailer was back in like 2012, and that game came out in 2020, but we know from an interview at E3 before The Witcher 3 came out that there was a very small team working on Cyberpunk before Witcher 3 was done, and Cyberpunk at that point was mostly just design documents.
I wouldn’t dare to call Bioware a smaller studio, pretty sure people said that Bethesda is the one that is strangely small for a AAA developer.
Pretty sure they flat out said this was true
Yup:
“Bethesda and Todd Howard announced Elder Scrolls 6 when they did because of fan demand, or in the words of Skyrim’s lead designer Bruce Nesmith, because ‘the pitchforks and torches were out.’” Source
Elder Scrolls VI exits pre-production, development begins (August 2023)
I hope they’re using this time to learn lessons from their Starfield flop and gather the talent and budget needed to improve upon Skyrim. A modern engine probably wouldn’t hurt.
However, my expectations are very low at this point.
We all know that all they are going to do is re-release new versions of their old games on devices we largely don’t care about.
I’m replaying Starfield, and on my second playthrough, I’m noticing the depth they put into this game. Sometimes a single dialogue line you said days ago will have an effect on NPC attitudes through an entire side story. I’m not going to argue that it’s not a regurgitation of their lame formula they’ve milked for the past 15+ years, but they do need to reevaluate where their money/dev time goes to.
Replaying as well, doing side quests I put off and surprised they actually go interesting places. Just did the one where zero G kept turning off and on at the space station that got taken over.
Damn, TIL you can come across these locations on accident just exploring. I thought that place was weird to be randomly floating out there with no real good loot. 😂
I misread your comment and now seem foolish lol but that is hilarious, I think Bethesda needs some work on their world engine and random events. Saw a mod where people are making custom towns now and man would random encounters within that environment…would take it to the next level.
Thanks, I needed that laugh.
The only thing Bethesda is motivated to do, frothing, absolutely chomping at the bit, is figure out a way to successfully monetize modded content.
Yes, will probably make a monthly subscription that walls off ability to download mods.
(Also, it’s “champing” at the bit. Sorry for the correction but it’s a small pet peeve seeing chomping so much now)
If it does not have similar levels of moddability then it will absolutely hurt.
I think it’s safe to assume they know that and would bear it in mind when choosing or building an engine. Their games are famous for modding, after all.
That’s a years if not decade+ long project though, including major investments of time and money that you could pour into actual games. You can’t just stomp a new game engine out of the ground, especially not with how complex video games in of itself have become, and if you want it to be as moddable as their current one.
They already built their new engine. That’s what Starfield is using.
lol, no. Starfield is still using the creation engine, which is based on gamebryo, which they’re using since Morrowind.
Correct. And they made a new version for Starfield. That’s all they’re going to use. Anyone that thinks they’ll ever switch engines is daydreaming.
It would be nice if the game speed and physics interaction were not tied to a inconsistent variable such as frame rate. And it seems that the more they pile on the gambryo engine the less receptive to modding it gets. But i can also accept that the cracks in the games that grow over time may not be the engine, but Bethesda prioritizing MVP centric development over hammering out the problems. Modders are carrying an auful lot of load to even get the games running.
And the topic was about them making a modern engine.
Not if they simply use the latest Unreal Engine.
Yep.
I don’t know what you mean by that, but creating new game engines and migrating from one to another have both been done before.
Is either of those tasks fast or cheap? Of course not.
Are they worthwhile? Sometimes.
Are they possible? Absolutely.
Well, I can understand why you might assume that if you don’t have a lot of experience in software development, but it’s just not true. Making an engine that allows for very moddable games is mainly about planning for it during the design, and either building good tools for the game data or publishing the specs so other people can. It’s not arcane magic.
(And for what it’s worth, while Creation Engine is quite moddable, it has enormous room for improvement in that area. Actually working with it can be a very frustrating experience.)
I think we’re only ever see a new engine once Todd is no longer part of the company. Because the quote him out of context ‘it just works’
deleted by creator
They haven’t learned from Oblivion, Skyrim, or Fallout 4. Probably others.
Or really, they learned they can just keep releasing games on a hacked-up Morrowind engine, and make huge piles of money. So that’s what they’ll keep doing.
Yup. ES6 is going to sell like condoms on an STD themed swinger convension no matter how many bugs are going around.
And the saddest part is that too many have learned nothing about AAA titles, and will preorder the game, making the game a massive financial success even before releasing anything of quality.
They haven’t learned from 3 of their best and most popular games?
People have such nostalgia boners for Morrowind. Warranted or not, it’s still annoying.
The nostalgia boner is that it was a very unique game, and nothing has come out quite like it since. It’s not even like Daggerfall or Arena. For someone looking for that experience, Oblivion and Skyrim were massive disappointments.
Going from a volcano that is spewing flesh mutating disease while riding giant bugs around to Tolkienesque Medieval Fantasy Landscape #3045 gave me whiplash. (The Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine save the package though.) And losing the ability to kill whoever I want? Spears???
Skyrim is better. It mangles what could have been a good story by retconning lore and making Alduin into big evil bad, just as Oblivion was about basically Satan invading the world. Morrowind’s villain may not be right, but his motives are 100% understandable and he has a good point. (In Oblivion: why would you join a cult dedicated to killing everyone for no reason?)
As a Morrowboomer, I’m willing to accept the series changed, but there just hasn’t been something to replace what I hoped for ES4. They don’t make games with that vibe anymore. The closest thing I’ve had to scratching that itch would be Planescape Torment, Pathologic, or Zeno Clash.
What does that have to do with the comment you replied to?
Also why would it be annoying if people say a good game is a good game and it is warranted?
It’s like people on this thread have some pathological need to complain about SOMETHING.
I think Elder Scrolls is one of those properties whose biggest detractors are its fanbase. Runescape is exactly the same, and it’s totally bizarre.
Don’t forget they learned they can charge for mods, too!
I like Starfield.
Sshhh that isn’t an approved opinion for Internet use
The budget for Starfield was twice that of Baldur’s Gate 3. Throwing more money at it isn’t going to do a lot if they’re allocating it poorly.
It’s a tricky balancing act. They need to recover the investment as early as possible to pay less in capital costs but doing that will mean that later on when the product is sub-par it will cause problems and extra work.
Since the engine, game logic, art, story, testing is so heavily coupled together changing the engine a little bit could cause a month of work down the line.
I think personally the best way is to start by making an engine or taking one off the shelf and then write a mini version of the game with shit art that has a lot of bugs.
At the same time making models with hitboxes that all have the same physical properties otherwise, dialog content and recordings and all other content that can be done separately.
Once that is fun to play then you can start working creating a slightly bigger system with a single short storyline to have a cohesive experience and will have the genaral feel of the game.
Once everything above is done setting up a closed beta is the way to go. Take some feedback, add features and redo the small story to be more fun.
Then once everything is a fun experience but people just want more you do the whole everything.
While you’ve made some valid points, keep in mind this isn’t a startup, it’s a massive studio
I’m not suggesting that a big budget alone is sufficient to make a good game.
However, enough budget to keep the team employed (note the many gaming industry layoffs lately) and appropriate budgeting (in terms of both money and time) affect things like code, art, and writing quality. It’s kind of important.
I think it’s going to require the people making the most high-level decisions to come to the realization that their old way of doing things is outdated. I don’t have faith that they’ll come to those conclusions.
at the end of the day they are going to make the game they want, whether we like it or not, microsoft is now involved as well so who knows how that is going to affect them with their decisions
Hopefully it’ll be like Minecraft; that game has gotten way better since Microsoft.
I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.
What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.
Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.
Sadly, I don’t have much faith in them either. (Hence my low expectations.)
I can still hope, though. Elder Scrolls has enough fans and lore that there’s certainly potential for a great new game.
Friendly reminder that the original “loremaster” of Elder Scrolls left Bethesda before they released Elder Scrolls Online, and they replaced him with someone who has apparently been making pretty questionable decisions with ESO lore.
I mean, they always have the out of dragon breaks rewriting reality/making multiple conflicting timelines simultaneously canon (see the events of daggerfall as referenced in later games) to handwave away retcons, but overusing that just means that no lore actually matters.
I think of it as a pool from which to draw and connect story elements, rather than rigid canon. If good writers were given the chance, I think they would find plenty of material to work with.
The real number is Morrowind had something like 10-20 writers that worked on it. Modern Bethesda games have 1.
Michael Kirkbride counts as 15 writers-in-one with enough cocaine.
It’s a good thing that he definitely didn’t leave the company years ago then!
He released his Coda, he’s washed his hands of the setting.
Lol he’s definitely worth it
I think I counted 6 quest designers in Starfield, which was a spot in the credits I was specifically looking for given how many quests they had and how many of them would have been better off not even existing. You can’t talk about having 1000 planets and then make quests that aren’t interesting to populate them.
There’s a recent video that adds all of that up. Starfield had some crazy low number of quests, I think 50ish, and Morrowind had like 300+.
And of course Starfield has an astronomical number of devs on it.
Starfield has more quests than Skyrim (both somewhere around 200 or so quests). Morrowind definitely felt like it was twice as much as those.
There are more than 50 quests unless you’re getting creative with how you count. There are over a dozen in each major faction, and those ones are mostly okay, but the ones I really take issue with are the nothing quests that aren’t part of any faction; the ones that basically just have you go to a location and then report back. Those are awful. There should be zero quests in there that the quest designers themselves aren’t excited about. Even the bounties that you pick up for a given faction that have you go to a place and kill an enemy mob should be more exciting than what I’ve already described in this sentence.
I don’t know what to tell ya dude.
Perhaps “you’re right”, “you’re wrong and also short, here’s why”, or even “I don’t know”. These would all be things you could tell them and a better response.
as long as they don’t have space travel between every objective and hundreds of barren procedurally generated planets it will be fine.
It was 5 years and 8 months between the release of Oblivion and Skyrim. Oblivion was released on March 20, 2006, and Skyrim was released on November 11, 2011.
Skyrim is almost three times as old now. I’m going to be honest, I’d rather just have another Skyrim expansion than a modern Bethesda game.
Check out Beyond Skyrim
This looks awesome
…which is 9 years old.
Still gonna be done before ES6
Yes, but we didn’t have AAAAA gaming standards back then. Do you think they could have made a masterpiece like Skull & Bones in those days?
Yay, six more years til they release a buggy mess
Do you want another release of skyrim? Because that’s how you get another release of skyrim!
As much of a joke as all the re-releases are, I’m super happy Skyrim VR exists. It’s one of the best VR experiences with the right mods that make it an actual VR game instead of a cheap cash-grab…
I’ve wanted to try VR. Any recommendations?
Quest 3, no doubt. The Index is old and overpriced at this point. HP Reverb G2 has great picture quality, but the controller tracking isn’t great and the cable is super thick. Plus Microsoft stopped supporting its mixed reality stuff. Vision Pro is not for gaming, just forget about it even if you can afford it. PSVR 2 might be a choice now that it supports PCVR, but I dunno. Its future support is kinda in doubt.
The only real downside of Q3 is being owned by Meta, which is obviously blech, but it’s an amazing piece of technology otherwise, and the price is a steal, since it’s heavily subsidized to grow the market.
A cheaper version is expected to be announced soon, so that might be an alternative. But otherwise there isn’t much competition unless you’re looking into a very particular niche.
The Skyrim releases will continue until morale improves.
-Todd Howard
I have a feeling they’ll be pushing different releases of Starfield so they can act like it was good.
why are so many people absent mindedly pushing this buggy mess narrative? starfield was their least buggy release ever (i personally only encountered one terrible bug that was easily fixed with reloading a save)
its not like bethesda ever released a game as buggy as fallout new vegas or cyberpunk, besides 76 but, like new vegas and cyberpunk, it got fixed
New Vegas gets a pass because it was made in 18 months.
not too much of a pass though, because it was obsidian who gave the timeframe
Since they announced that it will be PC and XBOX only- I stopped giving a shit. I refuse to buy a new hardware that once was accessible without having to.
You’re probably not missing much. Morrowind is the last good Elder Scrolls game they ever made. But that has also been PC/Xbox exclusive since 2002 so may as well write the series off completely.
ESO is fun. But that’s not even by the same team lol
Yeah it is.
last good
Aite I loved Morrowind, it’s one of my top games of all time but both Oblivion and Skrim are stellar. SkrimVR with mods is insanely fantastic.
this bethesda anti circlejerk has gotten way out of hand. i hated starfield too but that doesn’t change how awesome oblivion and skyrim were.
I fully agree, like what the fuck
I never played Starfield and Morrowind is so amazing but
Morrowind will NEVER be better than modded Skyrim, that the fuck, it’s so magical.
Don’t even need to get into ranking them, it’s just completely asinine to say Oblivion and Skyrim are not even good at all. Circlejerk nonsense from someone who probably hasn’t played any of them.
I bet I’ve played a lot more of them than you have.
It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t having fun with Skyrim, and I thought it wasn’t as good as Oblivion. The games weren’t getting any better, just prettier. The writing and worldbuilding was getting objectively worse, too.
Morrowind is the only one I keep going back to, it’s the only one that has some semblance of soul.
i agree that skyrim is not as good as oblivion, but that isn’t what we were talking about.
Do you stand by the statement that Morrowind was the last “good” elder scrolls game? In other words, you think Oblivion and Skyrim are not good at all?
Completely agree. I didn’t want to be hostile like I would be if I was back on Reddit but that’s fucking insane bullshit that’s insanely wrong lawl
Its almost like treating opinions as facts leads to bullshit replies like this one.
The poster has an opinion and explained it well. They actually think Skyrim and Oblivion are bad games, what’s so hard to believe?
They should just release a new game with the graphical fidelity of Fallout 4, but with better performance and animations. They could probably cut their dev budget in half if they made a game with Skyrim’s scope and FO4’s graphics.
No one plays Bethesda games for their graphical fidelity so they really need to stop wasting time there.
People can always mod them for increased graphics to their hearts content after the fact anyways
Frankly, they could rebuild skyrim with the fallout 4 mechanics for base building, shared item storage for crafting, weapon modding, and for shits and giggles throw in steam centurions being unobtainable dwemer power armor frames.
Fuck, sell me basic ass skyrim but integrate the top 30 mods on nexus into the base game. It’s honestly not hard to do better then they’re doing.
I’d be willing the buy another expansion for Skyrim. I want to return to Skyrim so badly but I’ve done literally everything that game has to offer
Get VR.
Motion sickness. I can use vr for simulators though
Gonna have Skyrim on NerveGear before this comes out lol
I personally think if something is in pre-production you shouldn’t announce it at all.
They announced it back then because at the time people were afraid they were only going to make Fallout games.
It would not surprise me at all if we are another six years away.
They could take 30 years to make it, but it would still be made by Bethesda and it would still suck.
I like the bugs. The Giant Space Program was nice
and then they’d re-sell it a bunch of times after that too.
Because it was such a bad game that people gladly bought it again?
I have great memories of Morrowind
I have great memories of Skyrim. And FO3. And New Vegas. And Fallout 4. And Fallout 76 actually got not bad. And Elder Scrolls: Online had one of my favorite quest chains in a game. And…
Ok so, I didn’t enjoy Skyrim as much as I enjoyed Morrowind, in fact I never finished it; I skipped Oblivion 'cause at the time it came out I… had other things to deal with.
I liked FO3 (weirdly, I liked it better than FONV), but in my opinion the new ones don’t hold a candle to the first two.
I agree almost 100% with you on this. I did play Oblivion, but Skyrim has the more interesting world IMO which makes it a slightly better game. The strength of Bethesda games that makes them good, in my opinion, is the same every time: explore a large interesting world with your own created character. This explains (in part) why people like Morrowind so much: the world is just so weird and interesting.
The problem is they don’t know how to improve on that concept. Instead they are mostly adding features that either don’t add anything to it or actively detract from it. For example, Fallout 4 received settlement building and weapon crafting. But, the time I’m spending on my town, I’m not actually out exploring. If I can craft weapons, I care less about the cool weapons I find in dungeons. Now, Starfield got rid of most of the crafted world altogether in exchange for procedural planets that aren’t interesting to explore at all.
Aan an aside, I don’t think it even makes sense to compare the first two fallout games with the Bethesda ones. Fallout 3 and beyond are not really sequels, they’re a completely different series set in the same universe.
I think you’re right. Maybe they should make a game based on Scavengers Reign.
I would argue they’re not even the same universe. While F1 had its share of of people living in post-war rubble, by F2 the world was mostly newly-build cities or primitive societies but there was a sense of progress, like having actual money (and by Tactics paper money was in everyday use). Then F3 comes and everyone is living in a pile of rubbish, with unreadable burnt pre-war books on their shelves like they want to pretend the world is how it used to be, nevermind that generations have passed, and everyone is back to trading in caps.
Yeah, that’s weird of the new Fallout games, there’s people sleeping on 200-years old mattresses (what are they made of, asbestos?). I get the destruction, and I understand how they may not be able to rebuild civilization to the old standards for a long while, but ffs, at least patch your walls!
There’s an industry to make new guns but people just step over the skeleton in the lobby of the half-collapsed hotel the three dozen residents call “Halftower” without a drop of irony.
Lemmy is way too edgy to enjoy good games that are also popular.
Lenny indeed lacks some casual fucks, almost every thread has some extreme opinions. I had someone unironically try to explain to me why it would be beneficial to the human race to go extinct.
Excuse me, I’m a casual fuck thank you.
Ah you’re a fellow Heroes of the Storm enjoyer?
It was still a glitch fest, but at least the world was top notch.
Me replaying New Vegas, lol I had it crash on me like 7 times during my playthrough. Classic Bethesda engine
7 is pretty damn good for that engine. Were you doing a speedrun?
*netch
*netch bully
You’re madness forking right.
What the hell man. Don’t nix hound me about this.
You mean you didn’t enjoy sending giants flying?
In morrowind?
I liked Daggerfall, too, despite serious glitch issues. I just saved a lot and it was fine.
I also liked Skyrim and oblivion. Not sure how people can think they suck.
Those games don’t suck. But Bethesda is so washed now
God what a fucking boring and wrong opinion to be have
They literally said Starfield was in the making for 25 fucking years. And you see how that ended up
I don’t think they ever said that. It’s their “first new IP” in 25 years, and was “in production” since 2013, likely just planning stages. In reality, production only really started after FO76, when more people were available to do actual work.
They did in one of their marketing videos
Yeah, a pretty cool game that hoards of nerds have a weird hate boner for.
Game developers do not owe anyone anything, but you’d never know it from this comment section
This is a forum about games and you’re calling people nerds? Lol, go play more Madden.
And it’s not a “pretty cool game”, it’s a step back. But hey, some people are just impressed with scale and graphics.
Sports games suck (almost always) so no thanks. I’m sorry that you’re this sensitive to people who don’t take every opportunity to talk shit about Bethesda. It is a fact that they’ve released some incredible games and also that they actually don’t owe anyone anything at all
I love Bethesda, what are you on about? See, that’s why making assumptions is bad lol.
No they don’t owe anyone anything. Unless you consider the fact that a company owes fans a good product or else they lose those fans. Like I said, I love Bethesda, but I’m not a blind fan boy. I can see them slipping with each new release. Do you think Fallout 76, with its issues and lies they told about it never having P2W is good? So you think a huge number of barren planets adds and entertainment value? They need to start doing better because they can’t rely on their past success forever.
They just released this teaser to shut everyone up at the time
It’s like people have completely forgotten that fact. That snippet was at the very end of a 30 minute Bethesda presentation that had Fallout 76 with its multiplayer being a significant move away from their traditional formula, Elder Scrolls Blades (which is a mobile game nobody remembers) and the reveal of Starfield, a completely new franchise. Of course fans are going to question where is TES 6.
And a few months later Blizzard showed what happens when you don’t tease Diablo 4 after revealing Diablo immortal.
DON’T YOU GUYS HAVE PHONES???
But what really hurts is that diablo immoral is a HUGE money printer.
I played Blades for a little while until it got too ‘gimme gimme’ about me paying. Then I stopped. Not paying to win.
It’s just the time necessary to figure out how to create a ladder climbing animation
Anyone else not like the capital E in Elder? Looks like a G.
Can’t wait to play this in 2030.
Probably working out how to add stealth archer mechanics to a MTX.