Since they announced that it will be PC and XBOX only- I stopped giving a shit. I refuse to buy a new hardware that once was accessible without having to.
You’re probably not missing much. Morrowind is the last good Elder Scrolls game they ever made. But that has also been PC/Xbox exclusive since 2002 so may as well write the series off completely.
Don’t even need to get into ranking them, it’s just completely asinine to say Oblivion and Skyrim are not even good at all. Circlejerk nonsense from someone who probably hasn’t played any of them.
I bet I’ve played a lot more of them than you have.
It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t having fun with Skyrim, and I thought it wasn’t as good as Oblivion. The games weren’t getting any better, just prettier. The writing and worldbuilding was getting objectively worse, too.
Morrowind is the only one I keep going back to, it’s the only one that has some semblance of soul.
i agree that skyrim is not as good as oblivion, but that isn’t what we were talking about.
Do you stand by the statement that Morrowind was the last “good” elder scrolls game? In other words, you think Oblivion and Skyrim are not good at all?
It’s gonna take twice as long as Starfield all to contain the same jank in an even larger, more barren, world where nothing is interesting and you’re just going through the motions because that’s what Todd Howard thinks games are.
People have actually made it through Starfield? I tried so hard, but couldn’t make it past 20 hours (which isn’t a lot for a Bethesda RPG). The story is just sodamnBORING.
Oh boy, you’re lucky. I trudged through for 70h out of sheer morbid curiosity. The boring main story goes straight into “icecream on forehead” when the starborn show up. The ending is just a shit cherry on top of that, with Emil Pagliarulo’s best “fuck you for asking questions” ever
It really does feel like Starfield completely killed any excitement for Bethesda games, everything since Oblivion has been a step in the wrong direction IMO.
Including Oblivion. I enjoyed it but it was a huge disappointment to me coming out of Morrowind. Bethesda reputation for me has been on Morrowind credit this whole time.
Even Morrowind was a simplified version of Daggerfall, even though it was groundbreaking when it was released. They decided that the direction to take was to simplify the mechanics progressively, to make the series more appealing to more people, as opposed to adding interesting complications back as their tech develops. They succeeded in their mantra of “keep it simple, stupid”. I don’t have any hope that the next game will be more interesting. It will look prettier, of course.
It’s smaller but I would not say it was dumbed down like Oblivion was to Morrowind. Morrowind feels more or less the same as Arena or Daggerfall, except in how character progressiom works and that you didn’t have to swing your mouse around trying to hit things with your weapon.
It literally still has all the deeper mechanics like performing rituals during certain times of the day/months/year and what not. Just not a procedurally generated world with RNG quests or dungeons. And thank God for that because Daggerfall and Arena both could literally break by generating a dungeon you couldn’t actually finish.
Idk, having only played Oblivion and Skyrim, I feel like (generally speaking) the simplifications in Skyrim were for the better. Take custom spells for example. Only a few spells really even made sense to make and it was better to make them in very specific ways. It’s not like the games are super difficult. Fucking around with spells and more complex enchantments was cool but too easy to cheese.
Oh, and the leveling. Holy fuck what an over complicated mess. Where you could accidentally over level but also under level. Insane. Good riddance.
Complex systems are not inherently good. They’re good if they provide meaningful choices and are fun to use. But ES has always been about the story and exploration more so anyways (in my opinion).
Oblivion had quality of life improvements that made it a better game IMO. Yes Morrowind was bigger and deeper, but it was also a frustrating game that didn’t age very well.
Normally, I would say that I don’t care when a game comes out, as long as it’s a genuinely good, complete experience. But knowing Bethesda, it’ll be another 5 years before we see anything, and then we’ll get an embarrassingly buggy title, that hasn’t innovated on anything since Fallout 3 came out.
I used to forgive them for anything, knowing that the modding community would just patch things anyway, but we’ve seen how Starfield was rejected by a ton of people with skills.
I think too many people forget that Skyrim was actually popular enough without mods to bring enough modders to the table to fix the rest of it. Bethesda seems to have forgotten that they actually have to deliver a mostly fun and mostly playable game for a proper modding scene to take root.
That really is a pretty substantial part of it too. Modding at its core requires a good game, and everything else comes from people wanting to change parts of it, that aren’t necessarily to their liking. Bethesda somehow assumed that people would be willing to reimplement half of the game at launch. That just won’t slide anymore, for 70$
Yep. And the good mods take a while to make too. If your game is dead 3 months after launch, who’s going to still be motivated to keep working on a big overhaul type mod?
Shadow of the Erdtree DLC comes out this month after being developed for 2 years. Even amazing games take forever to develop, I’m certainly not waiting half a decade for another fucking Starfield…
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.
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.
I used to be a Dragonborn like you, but then I got a fire arrow to my dedicated graphics card.
Now nothing newer than Oblivion will ever run on that machine.
In Morrowind I like the story and the music. But as I explored the battle mechanics, I couldn’t stand the randomness.
Also in a later retries after Oblivion and Skyrim I missed the real talking more than the graphics enhancements.
A bit unfair, I know. Maybe I’m not that game connoisseur myself.
yeah but the talking was annoying af. it felt like they had like four people voicing the entire game. meanwhile a small independent studio like supergiant makes a much smaller game fully voice acted but doesn’t feel exhausted as quickly as Skyrim, with thousands of lines both written and performed fantastically. i can’t excuse anything Bethesda is doing anymore. they’re getting worse with every game, both in terms of writing and gameplay.
Yes, mostly Wes Johnson with a bit of a very annoyed Sean Bean.
But I have a soft spot for the over the top Sheogorath, the unnecessarily aggressive guard shouts and the calm voice of the Khajiit women.
Some of the other few voices I can’t stand, especially the blacksmith of Chorrol (“A pleeeeasure to serve you”).
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.
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.
I don’t believe, they’re actually 6 years into the development. Back then, they just announced that at some point, there would be a TES6, but they’ve been busy developing Starfield since then.
As part of Starfield, they did do some engine upgrades. You know what that looks like…
Their announcement for the 30th anniversary implies that it is in early pre-alpha right now. Chances of it running on the same exact engine as Starfield are practically 100%
Wonder if it’ll be ready for the 30th anniversary of Skyrim
Anyway
Chances of it running on the same exact engine as Starfield are practically 100%
You can still make improvements in pre-alpha for sure. Not massive overhauls of existing systems, but there’s no reason you couldn’t fix bugs, incrementally improve existing features and add new ones.
Sure, you could, but given beths track record in that regard, why would they? They have been perfectly happy shipping Skyrim to new platforms with the same bugs for nearly a decade.
Who knows, honestly. I’m not holding my breath for this game anymore. When it comes out, i’ll check it out, but if it’s in the same pitiful state as Starfield, then idk
Elder Scrolls especially Morrowind will always have a place in my heart but I’ve moved on. If they ever release a better game I will come back. What ever is running Starfield won’t be it.
I’ve found New World and as far as MMOs go, it’s the best I’ve played in comparison to Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2 (in depth) and a few others (<40 hours).
But New World has the lore, baby. That’s what seals the deal. Superior gameplay: check. Great art design: check. The lore is the final block and New World is so interesting. I didn’t think a fantasy setting could have new and interesting lore but they succeeded.
How the Lost came into creation from
Tap for spoilertrying to cure the Corruption
is so tragic. I’m still learning what Angry Earth is all about tho.
And it’s just fun! Like, I would have never guessed that I’d enjoy running around in a pilgrim hat getting killed by a giant turkey with laser eyes. And who would have guessed you could successfully merge the giants from Nasusicca Valley of the Wind with 1500s Caribbean aesthetic?
But if you’re thinking: “We’re talking about single player games, dumbass.” Yea, I know, I like New World so much that I wish the same dev team would make a proper single player game in the exact same setting.
I hope they’re using this time to learn lessons from their Starfield flop and gather the talent and budget needed to improve upon Skyrim. A modern engine probably wouldn’t hurt.
However, my expectations are very low at this point.
They haven’t learned from Oblivion, Skyrim, or Fallout 4. Probably others.
Or really, they learned they can just keep releasing games on a hacked-up Morrowind engine, and make huge piles of money. So that’s what they’ll keep doing.
Yup. ES6 is going to sell like condoms on an STD themed swinger convension no matter how many bugs are going around.
And the saddest part is that too many have learned nothing about AAA titles, and will preorder the game, making the game a massive financial success even before releasing anything of quality.
The nostalgia boner is that it was a very unique game, and nothing has come out quite like it since. It’s not even like Daggerfall or Arena. For someone looking for that experience, Oblivion and Skyrim were massive disappointments.
Going from a volcano that is spewing flesh mutating disease while riding giant bugs around to Tolkienesque Medieval Fantasy Landscape #3045 gave me whiplash. (The Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine save the package though.) And losing the ability to kill whoever I want? Spears???
Skyrim is better. It mangles what could have been a good story by retconning lore and making Alduin into big evil bad, just as Oblivion was about basically Satan invading the world. Morrowind’s villain may not be right, but his motives are 100% understandable and he has a good point. (In Oblivion: why would you join a cult dedicated to killing everyone for no reason?)
As a Morrowboomer, I’m willing to accept the series changed, but there just hasn’t been something to replace what I hoped for ES4. They don’t make games with that vibe anymore. The closest thing I’ve had to scratching that itch would be Planescape Torment, Pathologic, or Zeno Clash.
I think it’s safe to assume they know that and would bear it in mind when choosing or building an engine. Their games are famous for modding, after all.
That's a years if not decade+ long project though, including major investments of time and money that you could pour into actual games. You can't just stomp a new game engine out of the ground, especially not with how complex video games in of itself have become, and if you want it to be as moddable as their current one.
Dude... You are the one missing the point here. lol
We were talking about them making a new actually modern engine, instead of sticking to their old gamebryo trash heap. And then you come along, claiming that they already did that, even though they literally did not. Please stop playing daft.
They had a turd. They polished it up a little. It’s still the same turd.
Their ‘modern’ engine is only modern to them, but it’s pathetically behind everyone else. I can only imagine the spaghetti code that thing is at this point.
It would be nice if the game speed and physics interaction were not tied to a inconsistent variable such as frame rate. And it seems that the more they pile on the gambryo engine the less receptive to modding it gets. But i can also accept that the cracks in the games that grow over time may not be the engine, but Bethesda prioritizing MVP centric development over hammering out the problems. Modders are carrying an auful lot of load to even get the games running.
You can’t just stomp a new game engine out of the ground
I don’t know what you mean by that, but creating new game engines and migrating from one to another have both been done before.
Is either of those tasks fast or cheap? Of course not.
Are they worthwhile? Sometimes.
Are they possible? Absolutely.
especially not […] if you want it to be as moddable as their current one.
Well, I can understand why you might assume that if you don’t have a lot of experience in software development, but it’s just not true. Making an engine that allows for very moddable games is mainly about planning for it during the design, and either building good tools for the game data or publishing the specs so other people can. It’s not arcane magic.
(And for what it’s worth, while Creation Engine is quite moddable, it has enormous room for improvement in that area. Actually working with it can be a very frustrating experience.)
I’m not suggesting that a big budget alone is sufficient to make a good game.
However, enough budget to keep the team employed (note the many gaming industry layoffs lately) and appropriate budgeting (in terms of both money and time) affect things like code, art, and writing quality. It’s kind of important.
I think it’s going to require the people making the most high-level decisions to come to the realization that their old way of doing things is outdated. I don’t have faith that they’ll come to those conclusions.
at the end of the day they are going to make the game they want, whether we like it or not, microsoft is now involved as well so who knows how that is going to affect them with their decisions
I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.
What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.
Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.
Friendly reminder that the original “loremaster” of Elder Scrolls left Bethesda before they released Elder Scrolls Online, and they replaced him with someone who has apparently been making pretty questionable decisions with ESO lore.
I mean, they always have the out of dragon breaks rewriting reality/making multiple conflicting timelines simultaneously canon (see the events of daggerfall as referenced in later games) to handwave away retcons, but overusing that just means that no lore actually matters.
I think of it as a pool from which to draw and connect story elements, rather than rigid canon. If good writers were given the chance, I think they would find plenty of material to work with.
I think I counted 6 quest designers in Starfield, which was a spot in the credits I was specifically looking for given how many quests they had and how many of them would have been better off not even existing. You can’t talk about having 1000 planets and then make quests that aren’t interesting to populate them.
There are more than 50 quests unless you’re getting creative with how you count. There are over a dozen in each major faction, and those ones are mostly okay, but the ones I really take issue with are the nothing quests that aren’t part of any faction; the ones that basically just have you go to a location and then report back. Those are awful. There should be zero quests in there that the quest designers themselves aren’t excited about. Even the bounties that you pick up for a given faction that have you go to a place and kill an enemy mob should be more exciting than what I’ve already described in this sentence.
Perhaps “you’re right”, “you’re wrong and also short, here’s why”, or even “I don’t know”. These would all be things you could tell them and a better response.
It’s a tricky balancing act. They need to recover the investment as early as possible to pay less in capital costs but doing that will mean that later on when the product is sub-par it will cause problems and extra work.
Since the engine, game logic, art, story, testing is so heavily coupled together changing the engine a little bit could cause a month of work down the line.
I think personally the best way is to start by making an engine or taking one off the shelf and then write a mini version of the game with shit art that has a lot of bugs.
At the same time making models with hitboxes that all have the same physical properties otherwise, dialog content and recordings and all other content that can be done separately.
Once that is fun to play then you can start working creating a slightly bigger system with a single short storyline to have a cohesive experience and will have the genaral feel of the game.
Once everything above is done setting up a closed beta is the way to go. Take some feedback, add features and redo the small story to be more fun.
Then once everything is a fun experience but people just want more you do the whole everything.
I’m replaying Starfield, and on my second playthrough, I’m noticing the depth they put into this game. Sometimes a single dialogue line you said days ago will have an effect on NPC attitudes through an entire side story. I’m not going to argue that it’s not a regurgitation of their lame formula they’ve milked for the past 15+ years, but they do need to reevaluate where their money/dev time goes to.
Replaying as well, doing side quests I put off and surprised they actually go interesting places. Just did the one where zero G kept turning off and on at the space station that got taken over.
Damn, TIL you can come across these locations on accident just exploring. I thought that place was weird to be randomly floating out there with no real good loot. 😂
I misread your comment and now seem foolish lol but that is hilarious, I think Bethesda needs some work on their world engine and random events. Saw a mod where people are making custom towns now and man would random encounters within that environment…would take it to the next level.
Add comment