Veraxus
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Daggerfall remains, to this day, one of the best games ever made. I still have my original boxed copy, and several pre-patched CDs that Bethesda would mail out back in the day. I replay it a few times a year, because it’s held up so well and there is nothing else that scratches the same itch.
I frequently wonder what Bethesda would be like today if Peterson, Lakshman, and Lefay had stayed at the company and Todd had been chased out, instead. Those three created The Elder Scrolls from scratch - lore, gameplay concepts, all of it. They had a TES Bible covering the story from Arena to Oblivion… and one by one, Todd excised all their influence from the franchise.
I miss the oppressive, grimdark atmosphere and lore, the complex world simulation, the unprecedented freedom, the unflinching maturity, and the epic, massive dungeon crawls.
I don’t see anyone trying to make a game like that again, ever. Certainly not Todd Howard’s Bethesda.
Daggerfall had some basic guiding principles that have been slowly stripped away by every new release…
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It was unapologetically grimdark. The lore was dark, sinister, and scary… very Robert E Howard meets Lovecraft.
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It was obsessed with simulation. They wanted a world that functioned logically… hour to hour, day to day, season to season, character to character, and as seamlessly as possible.
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It strove for tabletop-level freedom without limits. You could climb, sneak, swim… across rooftops, in streets, in dungeons… there were no barriers whatsoever.
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It reinforced that decisions have consequences, with multiple paths if you followed the main story.
With Morrowind, they killed the grimdark and gutted the lore. They replaced the existential dread of the lore with “weirdness”. They took the mature, unflinching tone out behind the shed… replacing it with T-rated YA content. Oblivion finally completed the transition from grimdark to sterile high fantasy. This is especially heinous because the Elder Scrolls Bible laid out the franchise from Daggerfall through Oblivion, and Oblivion was supposed to be the final, the darkest, most oppressive game in the series, being literally about the end of the world.
While Morrowind strove to preserve some of the simulation, the grand multi-season scope pared this back somewhat. From there, it never evolved or advanced at all, with each new game using the same minimal, basic simulation.
The tabletop level freedom was completely axed as a guiding principle. Instead, the gameplay became much more gamey. No longer would you sink if you tried to swim while carrying too much weight, climbing has been completely non-existent, dungeoneering mechanics - and dungeoneering as a major gameplay loop - were removed en masse… and all while the seamless open world has had more and more seams - loading zones, invisible walls, etc - added.
And finally, all consequences were removed as basic principles. You could join any and all guilds or factions, your choices had no ramifications or outcomes or branching paths… there was not so much as an attempt to maintain an illusion of impact on the story or simulation.
These are the things people are talking about when they complain about each new TES game being lesser than the one before. And worst of all, they took all this withering away of ambition and applied it to Fallout, gutting the IP’s very soul… and nobody really noticed this trend until Starfield, because it was a new IP that was less prone to being viewed through rose-tinted nostalgia.
Every Bethesda game that comes out (not just TES) is worse than the previous. Objectively. Because Todd Howard has removed every shred of fearless ambition from the company.
Two decades.
Daggerfall was way, way, way ahead of its time… but when Vijay, Peterson, & LeFay left Bethesda it was all downhill. Morrowind was a pale shadow of Daggerfall, and it only went downhill from there as each release stripped back progressively more and more of Elder Scroll’s ambition and personality. Who was responsible for all this anti-ambitious anti-progress? Todd Howard.
This kind of thing is the reason I’ve started moving completely away from Microsoft platforms, including Windows. Microsoft is getting more and more invasive and aggressive pushing advertising onto people in their own private spaces, and that is unacceptable.
Since I’m a PC gamer first and foremost, I don’t use XBox… and after this, I won’t. Ever. This was just MS dipping their toes in to see if they could get away with it.
Thankfully, with Valve continuing to rapidly improve Proton, just about any Windows game runs on Linux now with very little elbow grease. No Microsoft necessary.
I don’t think I can rank things that way any more. I think of my “best games of all time” category as “absolute masterpieces”.
So here are my “absolute masterpieces” in the order in which they come to mind, which is as good an indicator as any, I suppose.
- Daggerfall
- Fallout 1 & 2
- Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines
- Sekiro
- Bloodborne
- Alpha Centauri
- Disco Elysium
- The Longest Journey
- The Journeyman Project 2
- Asheron’s Call (the original)
- The Witcher 3
- Horizon: Zero Dawn
- Close Combat series
- The Outer Wilds
- Crysis (ONLY the original)
- Far Cry (ONLY the original)
- Planescape: Torment
- Ghost of Tsushima
- Alien: Isolation
- Shadow of the Colossus
- Baldur’s Gate (the entire OG saga)
- Planetside (ONLY the original)
- Arx Fatalis
If you look at all the useless AR features that Apple has pushed into iOS over the years, you can tell that they’ve already been working toward this for at least a decade. They aren’t giving up on it any time soon… they’re playing the long game. Wearables are inevitable, and they want to be way ahead of the curve.
The technology is cool. I will say that.
But Meta/Zuckerberg is squandering it. There is a huge disconnect between the price of thing (OVER $500) and the value proposition. It’s bad at gaming. It’s still less powerful than even current-gen smart phones, let alone modern consoles or gaming PCs… and what little gaming content is out there makes that abundantly clear. Asgard’s Wrath 2 does it no favors given those realities. And what are the uses beyond gaming?
Exercise could be a compelling value proposition, but they aren’t leveraging even that obvious marketing angle. “You can do your supernatural workouts!” How many people know what that is? I do, but ask a rando on the street. They have no idea. And what are the other options beside Supernatural workouts? Oh, nothing? Nothing for my stationary bike? Nothing for a rowing machine? Nothing for treadmills? With all those funds, they are not exploring the practical applications at all and the product is failing as a result. Instead, Zuck STILL hasn’t given up on his Metaverse/Horizons MMO idea.
And that’s before we even get into Meta/Facebook’s inherent creepiness as a company.
I thought it was okay. It fizzled out pretty quickly for me as it felt half-baked and overly “gamey”, which kept breaking the immersion illusion for me. I never did finish it. But I started over when Phantom Liberty dropped last week and it feels soooo much better. The immersion doesn’t feel like it’s being killed by a thousand cuts… everything feels more natural and believable now. It still has it’s gamey moments, but they are a lot less obvious now.
For me it went from a 6/10 to 9/10.
In 1994 you were buying a physical, manufactured product which you owned.
Now you are temporarily licensing access to something that doesn’t exist, can’t be transferred or resold or backed up or modified, has unlimited reproduction potential for no cost, and sells at scales unimaginable in 1994 dwarfing all other consumer markets in total revenue.
Games are dramatically overpriced.
I can’t believe how this guy just keeps opening his mouth and telling us how Starfield used to be fun and interesting, but that they removed all that stuff until all that was left was this sterile Far Cry clone that feels more like a chore than a game.
I’m already mad at how unbearably boring the game is, and the more Todd Howard talks about the development, the more angry I get. It’s callously just rubbing salt in an open wound.
Unity “Vadering the deal” is enough reason that no business should choose Unity for anything whatsoever going forward. They are now a huge legal and financial risk to any business endeavor at all.
No matter how much they relent, developers should not get complacent and trust that things will stay this way. Unity will go back on the offense once the outrage quiets down a little. Don’t do it. Transition now before you end up in a worse situation.
UE5 is great. Honestly, it would have been the better choice even before Unity decided to curb-stomp their entire community and customer base.
But then, what did we expect after Unity merged with a company known for malware. Predatory practices are their whole business model.
This is where tools like Slack Huddles or Zoom come in handy. Need some face time? You are a click away. Need to collaborate on one screen? That’s one more click. Need to pair program? That’s a click.
There is nothing that is done face to face that can’t be done faster, better, and more efficiently using readily available digital collaboration tools.
“I’m old, stubborn, don’t know how to manage remote teams, and have no interesting in learning.” - Todd Howard
Every time this guy opens his mouth, it sheds so much light on Bethesda’s decades-old problems.
Edit: I’m looking forward to seeing what Ted Peterson, Vijay Lakshman, and Julian Lefay do with The Wayward Realms. These three are the actual fathers of The Elder Scrolls. Todd has been shitting on their legacy since Redguard.
Oh yeah! I was all-in on the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter and bagged the CE of Wasteland 3. Those do scratch the itch a bit, but Fallout’s universe is so much more interesting and weird. Wasteland is a lot more straight-laced, comparatively.
I’m fine with the visual presentation of Bethesda’s Fallout games, but I hate the gameplay. Fallout was the ultimate exercise in player agency and consequences… so many different ways to approach situations with so many possible outcomes. It’s not just shooting things. While New Vegas flirts with those principles, BG3 is the first game in 20 years to REALLY recapture that magic for me. That’s the kind of game I want more of, and that’s the kind of game I want Fallout to be.
Yes, please!
PSVR2 is a great headset, and I would love to free it from the shackles of PS5 exclusivity. If they officially supported PC, it would easily be the best PCVR headset you can get right now.