After the reviews on Starfield, maybe this is for the best.
You really want to see what shameful AI slop they try to shoehorn into this game? Or how much of it is shamelessly cribbed and rehashed from Skyrim, the last good thing Bethesda ever did? Do you really want to play “Morrowwind But If It Was Designed By Houston’s Urban Planning Team?” Enjoy an hour and 30 minute commute to your next quest, plus traffic, you stupid idiots.
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.
Well, at least they won’t need to make “thousands of planets” worth of “content”, so the game might at least look consistent
Still, after Starfaild, my expectation is for TES6 to have something that kinda almost resembles Dark Messiah of Might and Magic’s melee combat; only Archery, Melee, Magic and Armor skills to level up; Emil Pagliarulo’s “greatest” story yet with double the time travel and multiverse bullshit; twice the amount of stories that get nowhere and that nobody in the world cares about; removal of stealth
Heck, if they went back to Oblivion’s concept of having the npcs with predefined lives and goals and slapped a free version of chatgtp onto the npc interactions, it would be cool.
I hope they’re not biting off more than they can chew. I mean, the scope of the whole project sounds bigger than Daggerfall, which means it’s unlikely they’ll finish on time and, when they do release something, there’s a high chance it’ll be lacking tons of features at launch.
massive, procedurally-generated world with plenty of variety in the environments and locales. Dungeons and cities are crafted to feel unique from one another, offering limitless options for layouts and aesthetics. The world itself is ever changing; cities can grow, deteriorate, or be entirely destroyed by war, and the sky, landscape, and flora change with the seasons.
Unless they’re Dwarf Fortress level masters of procgen, I won’t expect much more than typical single pass “random perlin terrain”
It will be lacking features, this kickstarter is just to fund a year of early access development to shop it around to publishers to get started on the real work
I hope stealth gets a major rework, at least. Or maybe not stealth itself but how the AI handles interacting with it. No NPC should ever guess that it was just the wind when there’s an arrow sticking out of them or their colleague is lying dead in plain view (or even just doesn’t respond when they call to them).
They should use strategies and tactics that work against stealth. Patrols (including their own stealth patrols sometimes), roll calls, better lighting, positioning of guards to cut off entrance points, traps (and not just the dungeon traps, but NPCs setting new traps when they suspect stealth, where the trap could be as simple as a trip wire attached to metal rings that will jingle if someone disturbs them), spells that locate nearby people, using senses other than sight and hearing, dark vision. Sometimes stealth missions should be forced to end and come back later because the residents realize someone is trying to sneak around and kill or rob them and go on high alert with effective tools to negate stealth. Just sometimes, sometimes it should work like it does in Skyrim where a guard just doesn’t want to deal with whatever is shooting arrows at him and maybe just yells threats instead of using a stealth counter (just get rid of that memory of a goldfish thing).
I mean, stealth is fun, but it’s not as fun when every single character I make ends up becoming some kind of a stealth archer because the NPCs are effective at generating opposition to everything but that.
I want to be positive and I’m trying to remain optimistic, but somehow I just know it in my bones that they’re going to further Fallout 4 the franchise and strip away even more skills and attributes. Hell, maybe they’ll get rid of dialogue entirely.
Indeed. I would love to have a “modernized Morrowind” experience – an RPG game that really nails the role-playing part of RPG, but without the cheesy parts of Morrowind like the unintuitive combat system – but all of us know that it’s just not gonna happen.
Not quite. It’s just harder to disconnect the 3D visual of a sword or mace swing very clearly hitting a creature and said hit missing entirely, especially as you’re in direct control of when and where the attack happens. For comparison, it’s much easier to accept misses in Neverwinter Nights because you’re not directly controlling the attacks. The fact that you can also look at the log of dice rolls helps a lot, too.
Hell, even in Arena and Daggerfall, where you’re also in direct control of your swings, it’s easier to accept when it doesn’t hit thanks to the slow animations and 2D graphics of your equipped weapon and the enemy sprite.
but all of us know that it’s just not gonna happen.
Certainly not by Bethesda, but in truly typical fashion, Bethesda games are are held together and made fun by modders (and sometimes, even fully built, as is the case with Enderal). Only trouble is that can take a wild and/or completely unknown amount of time.
Stop, do not proceed with the unlifening of my entire family. Please, if you do it may awaken some mystical power within me that I have to read carvings on walls and talk to some old monks to use properly.
100% they’re going to try to do AI NPCs and you’re going to get cartoonishly awful dialogue that will be great for memes and terrible for any kind of actual gameplay.
Got to do better than Star field and come close to BG3 , dark souls, elden ring. Chances are they hit the reset button after it became apparent they couldn’t coast on the mod community
Doing better than starfield shouldn’t be hard for them. Getting on par with the quality of Divinity Original Sin, much less Baldur’s Gate 3, is likely beyond bethesda’s ability, tho.
Just hire Kirkbride back goddamnit. I installed Immortals of Aveum and saw that Kirkbride is the main writer and got pumped on the game but that damn thing keeps crashing on me. So I’m back to just playing Diablo or Minecraft for the time being.
All of these were lovingly crafted bespoke characters and story arcs, with god only knows how many hours of real human thought put into the story, the setting, and the dialogue.
Bethesda execs don’t want any of that shit. They want a big button that says “MAKE NEW GAME” that they can slap and then a new game that pops out of a slot on the other side of their computers.
The mod community is so vital to these modern games because its real humans having real human ideas that go into them. Business only gets to latch on after the fact, once a DOTA or CS:GO has already fully taken off and left orbit.
My theory is that they’ve been reallocating teams into Zenimax Online studios for projects like ESO. TBH I’ve been playing it and it’s pretty cool compared to the dated feel of Vanilla Skyrim. If any of you own it, ESO Plus is free until June 19th, you just have to head to the Crown Store and click the free trial button.
I did try ESO for a few weeks but it just felt a little bit… Not TESy? Like the actual movement feels different, the combat feels different, it just feels like a bit of a different beast! It’s fun for what it is though, for sure. What do you play as? :)
I risk sounding like a fucking shill, but it’s a purchase to own the game, the subscription is only for ESO Plus which gives access to all DLCs without having to purchase them individually.
For sure the mechanics are wack, but it’s got fully voiced dialogue for tons of quests, it’s got material gathering and a bunch of other exploration based activities to do. It’s also got equipment and consumable crafting, but TBH not much of it is actually useful except for Provisioning.
Argonian Templar, stuck with the training gear until summerset isles and swapped to Psyjic Gear to prep for trials.
I’ve tried to get into ESO multiple times, always hyping myself up to just ignore the combat/difficulty and pacing and do it for the story alone, but it wears me down quite quickly every time. The vibe is just entirely off in every way. It’s like playing with a cheap McDonald’s toy with stiff legs and a weird button that makes it move it’s arms vs. a licensed action figure.
Save for my issues with the lack of real risk or challenge anywhere outside of running end-game group content solo, I always get irritable with the weird class themes the developers went with. I think if they had three guardian base classes (Thief, Warrior, Mage) and allowed players to spend their limited pool of points into other Elder Scrolls trees (Destruction, Alteration, Restoration, Conjuration, Blunt, Blade, etc.) it could have been balanced well enough and felt true to what we’ve come to expect from that universe. But instead it feels like they made the game as an entirely different MMO, then at the last minute agreed to put an Elder Scrolls skin on it.
I’d like to be a Warrior with minor specialization in Restoration and Alteration, but if I want to play that sort or archetype I basically have to be a Templar who uses sun spells and does all of his fighting with aetherial javelins, maybe joining the Mage’s Guild or something to simulate some sort of Alteration type buffs. Or I roll a Dragonknight who is themed entirely around fire and lava spells. Or I run around labeled a Sorcerer and use daedric spells/buffs to simulate Alteration, and ignore the rest of that classes abilities to branch out into melee and armor abilities. It’s all just so convoluted and unusual.
Beautiful soundtrack, though… Moth, Butterfly and Torchbug really does things to my heart, and leaves me hopeful that even without Jeremy Soule, TES6 may still have the type of score it deserves.
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