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.
It’s not like they don’t know how to make a good game. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Take Skyrim, make a new land with new characters and new quests, make it 4 times as pretty, fix the biggest bugs. Maybe make the quests a smidge more complex. Boom.
Oh it can be done. The only question is: is Bethesda the one to do it?
…Larian Studios has entered the chat
I was a pretty hardcore Bethesda fan for years, long before Skyrim. But they have burned me too many times now for me to have any faith in ESVI.
Yeah I know, I played Morrowind, Oblivion, and unfortunately Skyrim. I expect it to be pretty and large, but not have much unique, good stuff, the side quests will be “go steal this same vase 6x from different people oh look you run the Thieves Guild now,” and the main quests might be neat.
I’m not sure I’ll be picking it up tbh.
Thank God they lowered the expectations after Starfield.
And Fallout 76, and in some sense, Fallout 4
I know I’m in the minority, but I fucking love Starfield.
It’s a galactic scale zen garden when I need peace.
It’s a shooter/space combat sim when I choose violence.
There’s things that aren’t good about it, it needs so many more factions, followers, and NPC interaction points to fill the fish bowl that’s there, but there’s so much to love too, IMHO.
In a time where MOST major studio games have turned to no effort live service dogshit, I think hating on flawed but grand games like Starfield as just more unsalvagable garbage is just an invitation to studios to keep churning out actual garbage like Suicide Squad since there’s no pleasing modern gamers so don’t bother trying, just lean entirely on an IPs nostalgia.
Yeah, I was gonna say. I’m sure it’ll meet my expectations, and I’ll be disappointed.
It’s been a long time since 11-11-11.
I don’t blame the MD tbh, if I had to try and make Starfield worth buying I’d fucking quit
Fire Emil and you’ll be on a good start to un-fucking yourselves, Bethesda
How many people who worked on Morrowind, Oblivion, and/or Skyrim are still working there? This is a question I feel does not get asked enough when it comes to beloved franchises. People talk about their favourite game developers and how they “sold out” or whatever. I don’t think I see enough recognition that sometimes the best people at a company just leave.
bethesda has one of the least amount of turnover for any gaming company. so you can check the credits for morrowind then check for skyrim then check for starfield and you will see a lot of familiar names
The reality is that it’s been 20 years since many of those “best games ever”. 20 years is a huge chunk of your working life. It’s just not realistic to keep the same people that whole time, or even a percentage of them.
People don’t want to think about the reality of it, they just want content to devour.
Awesome, I hate marketers.
I think it will meet my Creation Store fan expectation, and that’s not something I am looking forward to.
The real Bethesda fans will know the game is going to be wonky as hell when it comes out. Mods and fan fixes/tweaks are the real bread and butter. Bethesda just creates the world. The fans make it awesome.
A game should not have to rely on mods to be decent. Base Skyrim is still not a bad game.
Base Starfield is molten shit.
if base starfield is molten shit, does that make red dead redemption 2 just “okay”
Base skyrim isn’t a bad game, but it’s a game that no one would have talked about 2 years after it was released. Instead it’s been 13 years and it’s still ranking around 50th most played game this month.
Every single one of Bethesda’s fan favorite games are great games without mods.
Mods are little more than the whipped cream on top of what needs to be an already enticing sundae. Starfield was a perfect example of the fact that mods won’t save a game on their own, and that the days of the level of modability old Bethesda games had are now gone.
Are you kidding me? There’s been continents with professional voice acting and 40+ hours of gameplay added to Skyrim. More than once. Not to mention all the patches and tweaks and balancing and UI adjustments.
Skyrim would have fallen off the top 100 games on steam a literal decade ago without mods and fan made stuff. Instead it’s still ranked like 50th.
You realize they still sell many, many copies on all the platforms that aren’t PC and don’t have meaningful mod availability?
Skyrim isn’t selling a bunch of copies on Switch for $30 on sale because of PC mods it can’t use.
You can’t judge much of anything based on switch owners and third party availability of games.
Except it has the same outcome on every other platform it’s on, for the exact same reasons.
how can people so easily forget how big of a phenomenon skyrim was, pretty sure 90% of the playerbase never even tried mods
hell i still play it vanilla to this day
Yeah and you get to that point when fans rally around a beloved game renewed by mods over literally decades. If your game is dogshit from the start, that just doesn’t happen. It literally happened with Starfield as some of the most well known Bethesda game modders abandoned the game entirely.
Honestly if they had just put a little more thought into the loot progression and made a couple systems more interesting it would have been a much better game.
The randomized empty open world planets wasn’t great but they also did that in Daggerfall so I don’t think it was totally unprecedented and still had some value if there was a better incentive to explore (in my opinion better and more interesting loot would have kept me exploring).
What pissed me off the most was the fact that when you built the armillary it literally showed up on the OUTSIDE of your spaceship and you couldn’t build it indoors in your settlements. What the fuck? You literally killed people for some of those artifacts. Why would you keep them outside for fucks sake?
The randomized empty open world planets wasn’t great but they also did that in Daggerfall so I don’t think it was totally unprecedented
Well, in case of daggerfall you could actually move through the land to the next city/town without a single loading screen. And in theory you could move from one end of the land to the other end (but the game would likely crash due to procedural generation or memory issues before)
i think a rogue would stab you in the back killing you instantly before the game would crash
True but Daggerfall was definitely made with fast travel in mind as the main way to get around.
It’s too late for me to care. I grew up with TES. I played daggerfall when I was 15 on my pentium. Then every few years a new amazing game came out. Then after sky rim it stopped. I’m in my 40s now and don’t have the time. This game should have come out in 2016 at the latest.
I mean… Skyrim is ok, I wouldn’t say it’s amazing…one of the weakest installments of TES. And then they beat every last cent out of it.
This game should have come out in 2016 at the latest.
Absolutely. I’m surprised they didn’t try to release a version for calculators…
I think at this point I am more excited for, and have higher expectations of, Skywind.
