Starfield’s biggest flaw was in trying to make a grand space game given that Bethesda’s strength is sandboxy, exploration focused, RPGs.
I am of the mind that exploration fundamentally does not work in a space game because the scale is too big. There’s waaaay too much space on even a single planet to populate with meaningfully interesting things to find. So there’s maybe one or two interesting handcrafted things per planet and you spend all your time in system and galactic scale maps to find them, rather than stumbling across them while out on a walk.
The only space games that work imho, are either ones with tiny planets like The Outer Wilds, or ones that are more linear and driven by very good writing and space is more of a backdrop than the actual millions of km you have to travel through and explore (like The Outer Worlds, or Mass Effect).
So I think Bethesda has a higher chance of success in literally any other, more limited, setting, given that writing isn’t their strong suit, but all that being said, I still don’t know if they’ll course correct.
There is also the mediocre story, but hopefully they’ll learn the lesson that no, we don’t want something as automagically powerful as a dragonborn or whatever, it worked for skyrim sure, but it’s a not something needed in every title.
Working from a zero prisoner to hero was always the goal and should be again.
I think Skyrim’s was better because there was less central control. I know that stuff like the whole Werewolf quest was just made by a passionate designer and dev who made it after hours, but that during Starfield development a lot more got run up the chain and there was less individual freedom.
I suspect that stems from the massive procedural generativeness but am not sure.
I think the issue is that they still have their developers write their own quests rather than hiring a team of dedicated writers like other studios do nowadays.
The games will never be narratively coherent when everyone is pulling in a different direction.
Then, you look at what most people are playing right now, and it’s Skyrim.
As a side note, Morrowind is also quite big still. /r/Morrowind has 178k members and is very active. Project Tamriel Rebuilt regularly getting updates. OpenMW getting more popular.
I’d say the bigger problem is just that the Bethesda RPG model is completely outdated. It feels like something you’d play a decade ago, but what used to be it’s contemporaries have absolutely eclipsed it by this point. If I wanted to play just a fun easy fantasy romp, I’d go for Dragon’s Dogma 2. If I wanted an actual RPG with bones that could offer me a challenge, I’d play Elden Ring. If I’m just looking for a well-written story, I’d go play something by CD Project Red.
Bethesda’s games aren’t well written, aren’t that interesting to play, and basically cannot offer any real challenge. The only real saving grace for Skyrim has been the modding community, which has been able to continually breathe life into what would otherwise be very tired game design.
I just don’t think Bethesda has it in them anymore. Except for Id and formerly Tango Gameworks, Bethesda proper and a lot of the other studios it had, have just been missing the mark. Like a lot of big studios, they get big, start to regurgitate what they’ve already done, and then fail to capture people’s attention after a while.
Why do you think Valve’s employees haven’t pushed for many new games? Anticipation got too high and they didn’t want to compete with the legacy of Half-life or Portal. Half-life Alyx came out and it was decent, but it didn’t move the story forward that much. It was mostly about doing a good VR game. Now, they have Deadlock coming out and it has nothing to do with any of it’s previous games.
At a certain point, it’s like reading a book from an author that’s run out of ideas or hearing a song from an artist that doesn’t have anything relevant to say anymore. It’s time to move on and make room for someone wants to do something new. Only problem, these big ass companies are now mostly about making money and not about making games. They will ride whatever wave they can until they crash and burn.
Even if they spend $300M making it, they’ll likely still make their money back, even in a world where Game Pass exists. I think their tech stack is so ancient that it ought to be thrown straight in the garbage, and they’ll get more mileage out of an Elder Scrolls game that’s forked from what Obsidian built in Unreal for Avowed. It also sure sounds like, much like studios like Arkane, Rocksteady, and BioWare, they were so high on their previous successes that they couldn’t admit to themselves that any decision they made was a bad one. If they can learn from their mistakes and take the L on Starfield (an L that would be considered a W for most other developers), then Elder Scrolls can potentially meet fans’ expectations. If they keep making games the way they’ve always made them without trying to adapt to the times, they’ll follow the same path as Fallout 4 and Starfield.
If we reword the question as “Is Elder Scrolls 6 doomed to be a mediocre experience?” then my money would be on “yes”. Bethesda generally seem to aim to make games just as good as they need to be to make money. Capitalism over creative expression.
If the game is good enough to get people to buy it and consider buying the next one, that’s all the effort it’s worth putting in (as far as publishers are concerned). It’s not a new approach, they’ve just had a lot more practice at it than game developers/publishers had in the '90s.
Temper your expectations as unless you’re willing to buy a few million copies yourself, they can’t justify the cost of caring what you think.
…and no, I do not approve of this system one jot. It’s gross and antithetical to creativity. I’m glad we have a lot more independent developers who aren’t as beholden to neoliberal capitalism these days.
I agree with everything you said but to talk about Starfield, I think it even failed to be a Bethesda game. If their gimmick is to drop the ball, with Starfield they didn’t even pick up the ball first to be able to drop it.
I’m not hopeful at all for TES6 and I’m a diehard TES fan, unless some major changes happen internally (and no, the engine is not the problem, it’s who’s developing in it and who’s directing it all).
I strongly disagree. I’ve had immense fun in every Bethesda game, including Starfield and 76. I’ve put hundreds of hours into all of their games, possibly over a thousand for games like FO3 and Oblivion. The only one that truly failed to grasp my attention was ESO. My only real complaint about Starfield was NG+. Losing over a hundred hours of collecting and ship/settlement building isn’t new game plus. It’s a prestige system, and although it makes sense given the ending, it’s a shitty way to restart an RPG. Nonetheless, I’ve still gotten 180 hours out of it. Hell, I just started a fresh game last week and started modding the hell out of it.
With Bethesda, their games are about the fun you make. Sorry if you didn’t enjoy the experiences, but maybe some of them just weren’t meant for you. Personally, I’m looking forward to ES6 and sinking a few hundred hours into it. If it’s a bad game, so be it, but I honestly can’t wait to see what they do!
Starfield somehow built a game tailor made for NG+ and not only didn’t take advantage of it with their faction system, they also got rid of my favorite guns and all of my currency, which discouraged me from engaging with it at all.
If they don’t shit the bed somehow, I think TES6 will still be successful. Skyrim was pretty much just the video game equivalent of plain salted potato chips in retrospect. So long as they can at least meet that level of quality doing something they know, I think it’ll do fine. They don’t need to make a masterpiece or anything, modders will just be pleased to have a new prettier medium and a new map to loot plants from.
All of that said, uuurghhh, I have so little excitement for more elder scrolls slop. Bethesda seriously needs a total mixup in leadership and direction for me to get hopeful again.
I think it is really going to depend on how “media” approaches it.
You clearly want it to fail. So do a lot of people. It is the same logic behind how every single Battlefield is the worst game ever made during beta/launch (and all the fans keep saying “Never play Conquest. It has always fucking sucked. Play Rush”) which lead to the first year being “Can Dice fix this unprecedented massive blunder and make this game good?”.
Or… just look at how everyone danced on the grave of Concord basically immediately.
And a lot of that is because, as Yahtzee et al taught us, it is a lot more fun to shit on something than to admit we liked it. Talking about how it is the worst furry fanwank ever is a lot easier than putting yourself out there and acknowledging that Dust: An Elysium Tale’s themes of courage and ethics in the face of inevitable failure unseamed you.
Starfield was a new IP. It was also a game that was “okay” at best with a lot of the Bethesda jank. And the world map traversal was HORRIBLE but… so was exploration in Mass Effect and we loved that until the last hour of 3.
But also? Look at Fallout. There are people who will argue that all the Bethesda Fallouts shat on the originals (and ignore that most of that nonsense and lack of cohesive theming was there since 2 but…). But 3 is almost universally loved (outside of the NMA crowd) and New Vegas is that game everyone claims to have loved but almost nobody actually played. And 4… was definitely a step back in a lot of ways. But it had a strong marketing campaign and, gameplay wise, was perfectly fine if not better than 3. So after that initial hatefest it is pretty well regarded.
TES6 will obviously have a very strong marketing campaign. There are going to be the people who will say it is shit but most of them will ALSO start talking about how Skyrim was shit and Oblivion was the last good Bethesda game (us Morrowind fans will be too busy watching Matlock re-runs) which will rapidly undermine them. At which point it will boil down to whether people want that kind of open world game.
All that said? I have an increasingly bad feeling that Microsoft is killing Obsidian to save Bethesda because TES is a much more valuable brand than Pillars or just “we make amazingly good games that are missing the last five hours”. Starfield being “fine” hurt it, but it was very clear people were desperate for a “real” Skyrim after the horrific sin of basically making a Fallout 3 scale game in Outer Worlds.
But when Avowed hits next year and isn’t “Baldurs Gate 3 but on the scale of Skyrim but also better”? Obsidian gets shitcanned (likely while Phil et al talk about how Pentiment and Avowed are exactly the kinds of games MS needs to make) and the entire TES6 marketing campaign becomes about how Microsoft and Bethesda are sorry that those horrible evil games exist and they have hired a bunch of influencers to help them make sure they make the game right (see: CDPR and Cyberpunk) and that TES6 is going to be a return to form that is informed by What Players Want ™.
I definitely think FO4 has much better gameplay than 3. I replayed Vegas a while back and while it’s an awesome game in so many ways, the gameplay feels archaic compared to 4. You can improve that some with mods but it’s never going to feel as good as the native solution.
4 has weak writing, there’s no doubt, but it improved on 3 in many ways I think. There are really only a couple areas where I think it regressed. Most others it far surpassed.
I loved Fallout 4, and I still play it. I’ve got it installed on this computer, but I don’t have Skyrim installed. I’m not as attached to the London mod for it, TBH.
Can’t say a lot about what Bethesda is going to do with the next Elder Scrolls games, but I’d love to see a return to the more complicated skill trees and level advancement that they used in Morrowind and Daggerfall. I also really loved the limitless number of randomly generate dungeons in Daggerfall, and how it took years (in real-time) to walk across the continent, but that’s probably not what most people want now.
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Starfield’s biggest flaw was in trying to make a grand space game given that Bethesda’s strength is sandboxy, exploration focused, RPGs.
I am of the mind that exploration fundamentally does not work in a space game because the scale is too big. There’s waaaay too much space on even a single planet to populate with meaningfully interesting things to find. So there’s maybe one or two interesting handcrafted things per planet and you spend all your time in system and galactic scale maps to find them, rather than stumbling across them while out on a walk.
The only space games that work imho, are either ones with tiny planets like The Outer Wilds, or ones that are more linear and driven by very good writing and space is more of a backdrop than the actual millions of km you have to travel through and explore (like The Outer Worlds, or Mass Effect).
So I think Bethesda has a higher chance of success in literally any other, more limited, setting, given that writing isn’t their strong suit, but all that being said, I still don’t know if they’ll course correct.
There is also the mediocre story, but hopefully they’ll learn the lesson that no, we don’t want something as automagically powerful as a dragonborn or whatever, it worked for skyrim sure, but it’s a not something needed in every title.
Working from a zero prisoner to hero was always the goal and should be again.
Yeah the writing in Starfield is pretty bad.
I think Skyrim’s was better because there was less central control. I know that stuff like the whole Werewolf quest was just made by a passionate designer and dev who made it after hours, but that during Starfield development a lot more got run up the chain and there was less individual freedom.
I suspect that stems from the massive procedural generativeness but am not sure.
I think the issue is that they still have their developers write their own quests rather than hiring a team of dedicated writers like other studios do nowadays.
The games will never be narratively coherent when everyone is pulling in a different direction.
I’d like to think they’ve learned some lessons from their last few releases but who knows…
Umm, Skyrim was a huge blunder too and had serious bugs at first.
Most people are playing Black Myth: Wukong. Not Skyrim.
deleted by creator
Look at the actual numbers. You’re wrong.
As a side note, Morrowind is also quite big still. /r/Morrowind has 178k members and is very active. Project Tamriel Rebuilt regularly getting updates. OpenMW getting more popular.
I’d say the bigger problem is just that the Bethesda RPG model is completely outdated. It feels like something you’d play a decade ago, but what used to be it’s contemporaries have absolutely eclipsed it by this point. If I wanted to play just a fun easy fantasy romp, I’d go for Dragon’s Dogma 2. If I wanted an actual RPG with bones that could offer me a challenge, I’d play Elden Ring. If I’m just looking for a well-written story, I’d go play something by CD Project Red.
Bethesda’s games aren’t well written, aren’t that interesting to play, and basically cannot offer any real challenge. The only real saving grace for Skyrim has been the modding community, which has been able to continually breathe life into what would otherwise be very tired game design.
I just don’t think Bethesda has it in them anymore. Except for Id and formerly Tango Gameworks, Bethesda proper and a lot of the other studios it had, have just been missing the mark. Like a lot of big studios, they get big, start to regurgitate what they’ve already done, and then fail to capture people’s attention after a while.
Why do you think Valve’s employees haven’t pushed for many new games? Anticipation got too high and they didn’t want to compete with the legacy of Half-life or Portal. Half-life Alyx came out and it was decent, but it didn’t move the story forward that much. It was mostly about doing a good VR game. Now, they have Deadlock coming out and it has nothing to do with any of it’s previous games.
At a certain point, it’s like reading a book from an author that’s run out of ideas or hearing a song from an artist that doesn’t have anything relevant to say anymore. It’s time to move on and make room for someone wants to do something new. Only problem, these big ass companies are now mostly about making money and not about making games. They will ride whatever wave they can until they crash and burn.
Good thing Gurm still has loads of great ideas, Winds of Winter will be incredible, and I’m sure it’s coming any day now!
Even if they spend $300M making it, they’ll likely still make their money back, even in a world where Game Pass exists. I think their tech stack is so ancient that it ought to be thrown straight in the garbage, and they’ll get more mileage out of an Elder Scrolls game that’s forked from what Obsidian built in Unreal for Avowed. It also sure sounds like, much like studios like Arkane, Rocksteady, and BioWare, they were so high on their previous successes that they couldn’t admit to themselves that any decision they made was a bad one. If they can learn from their mistakes and take the L on Starfield (an L that would be considered a W for most other developers), then Elder Scrolls can potentially meet fans’ expectations. If they keep making games the way they’ve always made them without trying to adapt to the times, they’ll follow the same path as Fallout 4 and Starfield.
If we reword the question as “Is Elder Scrolls 6 doomed to be a mediocre experience?” then my money would be on “yes”. Bethesda generally seem to aim to make games just as good as they need to be to make money. Capitalism over creative expression.
If the game is good enough to get people to buy it and consider buying the next one, that’s all the effort it’s worth putting in (as far as publishers are concerned). It’s not a new approach, they’ve just had a lot more practice at it than game developers/publishers had in the '90s.
Temper your expectations as unless you’re willing to buy a few million copies yourself, they can’t justify the cost of caring what you think.
…and no, I do not approve of this system one jot. It’s gross and antithetical to creativity. I’m glad we have a lot more independent developers who aren’t as beholden to neoliberal capitalism these days.
deleted by creator
I agree with everything you said but to talk about Starfield, I think it even failed to be a Bethesda game. If their gimmick is to drop the ball, with Starfield they didn’t even pick up the ball first to be able to drop it.
I’m not hopeful at all for TES6 and I’m a diehard TES fan, unless some major changes happen internally (and no, the engine is not the problem, it’s who’s developing in it and who’s directing it all).
I strongly disagree. I’ve had immense fun in every Bethesda game, including Starfield and 76. I’ve put hundreds of hours into all of their games, possibly over a thousand for games like FO3 and Oblivion. The only one that truly failed to grasp my attention was ESO. My only real complaint about Starfield was NG+. Losing over a hundred hours of collecting and ship/settlement building isn’t new game plus. It’s a prestige system, and although it makes sense given the ending, it’s a shitty way to restart an RPG. Nonetheless, I’ve still gotten 180 hours out of it. Hell, I just started a fresh game last week and started modding the hell out of it.
With Bethesda, their games are about the fun you make. Sorry if you didn’t enjoy the experiences, but maybe some of them just weren’t meant for you. Personally, I’m looking forward to ES6 and sinking a few hundred hours into it. If it’s a bad game, so be it, but I honestly can’t wait to see what they do!
Starfield somehow built a game tailor made for NG+ and not only didn’t take advantage of it with their faction system, they also got rid of my favorite guns and all of my currency, which discouraged me from engaging with it at all.
If they don’t shit the bed somehow, I think TES6 will still be successful. Skyrim was pretty much just the video game equivalent of plain salted potato chips in retrospect. So long as they can at least meet that level of quality doing something they know, I think it’ll do fine. They don’t need to make a masterpiece or anything, modders will just be pleased to have a new prettier medium and a new map to loot plants from.
All of that said, uuurghhh, I have so little excitement for more elder scrolls slop. Bethesda seriously needs a total mixup in leadership and direction for me to get hopeful again.
starfield is a blunder???
I think it is really going to depend on how “media” approaches it.
You clearly want it to fail. So do a lot of people. It is the same logic behind how every single Battlefield is the worst game ever made during beta/launch (and all the fans keep saying “Never play Conquest. It has always fucking sucked. Play Rush”) which lead to the first year being “Can Dice fix this unprecedented massive blunder and make this game good?”.
Or… just look at how everyone danced on the grave of Concord basically immediately.
And a lot of that is because, as Yahtzee et al taught us, it is a lot more fun to shit on something than to admit we liked it. Talking about how it is the worst furry fanwank ever is a lot easier than putting yourself out there and acknowledging that Dust: An Elysium Tale’s themes of courage and ethics in the face of inevitable failure unseamed you.
Starfield was a new IP. It was also a game that was “okay” at best with a lot of the Bethesda jank. And the world map traversal was HORRIBLE but… so was exploration in Mass Effect and we loved that until the last hour of 3.
But also? Look at Fallout. There are people who will argue that all the Bethesda Fallouts shat on the originals (and ignore that most of that nonsense and lack of cohesive theming was there since 2 but…). But 3 is almost universally loved (outside of the NMA crowd) and New Vegas is that game everyone claims to have loved but almost nobody actually played. And 4… was definitely a step back in a lot of ways. But it had a strong marketing campaign and, gameplay wise, was perfectly fine if not better than 3. So after that initial hatefest it is pretty well regarded.
TES6 will obviously have a very strong marketing campaign. There are going to be the people who will say it is shit but most of them will ALSO start talking about how Skyrim was shit and Oblivion was the last good Bethesda game (us Morrowind fans will be too busy watching Matlock re-runs) which will rapidly undermine them. At which point it will boil down to whether people want that kind of open world game.
All that said? I have an increasingly bad feeling that Microsoft is killing Obsidian to save Bethesda because TES is a much more valuable brand than Pillars or just “we make amazingly good games that are missing the last five hours”. Starfield being “fine” hurt it, but it was very clear people were desperate for a “real” Skyrim after the horrific sin of basically making a Fallout 3 scale game in Outer Worlds.
But when Avowed hits next year and isn’t “Baldurs Gate 3 but on the scale of Skyrim but also better”? Obsidian gets shitcanned (likely while Phil et al talk about how Pentiment and Avowed are exactly the kinds of games MS needs to make) and the entire TES6 marketing campaign becomes about how Microsoft and Bethesda are sorry that those horrible evil games exist and they have hired a bunch of influencers to help them make sure they make the game right (see: CDPR and Cyberpunk) and that TES6 is going to be a return to form that is informed by What Players Want ™.
I definitely think FO4 has much better gameplay than 3. I replayed Vegas a while back and while it’s an awesome game in so many ways, the gameplay feels archaic compared to 4. You can improve that some with mods but it’s never going to feel as good as the native solution.
4 has weak writing, there’s no doubt, but it improved on 3 in many ways I think. There are really only a couple areas where I think it regressed. Most others it far surpassed.
Huh?
I loved Fallout 4, and I still play it. I’ve got it installed on this computer, but I don’t have Skyrim installed. I’m not as attached to the London mod for it, TBH.
Can’t say a lot about what Bethesda is going to do with the next Elder Scrolls games, but I’d love to see a return to the more complicated skill trees and level advancement that they used in Morrowind and Daggerfall. I also really loved the limitless number of randomly generate dungeons in Daggerfall, and how it took years (in real-time) to walk across the continent, but that’s probably not what most people want now.