What a cop-out.
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.
WoW’s talking heads, for example.
Not an improvement.
One great bonus of no voice acting is modding is a lot easier. It’s cool seeing how well Sim Settlements was able to use existing voice lines for the player and make them work, but I’m sure it was a lot of effort. Most small mods end up having to just use books and things like that because they can’t afford acting talent. If you just have text for characters speaking there’s no limit for them.
Step 1, this time don’t have an unskippable intro that lasts 30 minutes before you can start actually playing.
Or have it as a toggle after your first time watching it
Most annoying part of Fallout 3.
lol, you don’t have an issue with Elder Scrolls 6.
You have an issue with Skyrim.
Obviously. ES6 isn’t out yet. The point is that there are many things ES6 could improve over Skyrim if they tried.
Hey, you’re finally awake
noted! are you thinking 2 hours is long enough, or should we really try for three?
3 did this perfectly.
I mean maybe if you hadn’t been milking Skyrim for 13 fucking years, expectations wouldn’t be so unreasonably high, would they?
I sincerely doubt that.
Really? After the absolute clownshow that was Starfield, my expectations for TES6 are extremely low.
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.
My expectations for a TES game are low by default. They just provide the world, the modders provide the game.
Modern Bethesda and making good games, what a joke.
I mean, even if TES:6 is good it wont meet expectations because expectations are so wildly high.
Really after the mess that was their space game?
Don’t forget fall out 76
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.
They’re definitely not going to go back to any of the better earlier games before Skyrim.
Idk i never played the other games. I’ve heard many times that they are better. I play skyrim in VR only. I might look for mods to play the earlier games in VR as well.
I’d love to play VR. Someday
You can probably get a used Quest 2 for a good price. It’s definitely capable enough to get a feel for VR, and whether or not you should invest more in a better setup.
Maybe it’ll be as good. I would strongly recommend waiting for reviews in 2032 when it finally launches.
Skyrim launched 11.11.11
Expect ES6 on
2.2.22oh wait, missed that one, 3.3.33
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.
They are still making games based on 15 year old standards
If only. Daggerfall was great for its time, Morrowind was and still remains a classic masterpiece.
The enshittification started with Oblivion, and only got worse from there.
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.
They’re gonna block mod tools, just wait.
You’ll have to pay a subscription fee.
Considering how the modding community made Skyrim a long-term success, this would be a very foolish decision.
You say that as if it removes the possibility but I don’t think I need to provide specific examples of obviously foolish decisions ruining modern games. There are plenty to choose from.
Oh absolutely, and Bethesda is absolutely capable of that. It would be very myopic for them though. They can’t possibly be ignorant of the fact that modding is what kept Skyrim selling for a decade.
Preventing modding would be a substantial exercise in hubris (“we don’t need them”), or one of those intentional failure/tax writeoff things.
They’re going to try make paid mods a thing again.
If they did that nobody would even be able to play the game, you expect Bethesda to do their own patching!?
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.
The best they made, for me, was Morrowind.
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!’
Oblivion and later: paintbrush go brrrr
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 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.
Skyrim was good because sandbox, music, culture and mood. The parts that made it bad, were endearing.
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.
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.
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.
I seriously doubt they do actual surveys. The only one’s raising the bar are AAA developers.
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.
Maybe they shouldn’t use marketers. From what I see, marketers are the reason for unreal hype. Look at cyberpunk, marketers told mepple 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.
Steam’s recent update to carve out a category for demo’s is kinda what you are asking for. At least it is in the right direction, if devs follow it.
pay me a marketing fee
Average pay is like 50-60k for a 40 hour week, 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.
50-60k for a week‽.
That’s almost pretty much double the average monthly salary here.
a year to work a full time job I meant.
edit: I looked it up, average - 50th percentile - is actually $79k per annum. Still not crazy money for a full time job.
Anything that makes marketers sad is a win for the world, honestly
They’re usually just liars acting as a filter between the game and the interested customers.
Instead of just showing the have, 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.
