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…
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 was 5 years and 8 months between the release of Oblivion and Skyrim. Oblivion was released on March 20, 2006, and Skyrim was released on November 11, 2011.
As much of a joke as all the re-releases are, I’m super happy Skyrim VR exists. It’s one of the best VR experiences with the right mods that make it an actual VR game instead of a cheap cash-grab…
Quest 3, no doubt. The Index is old and overpriced at this point. HP Reverb G2 has great picture quality, but the controller tracking isn’t great and the cable is super thick. Plus Microsoft stopped supporting its mixed reality stuff. Vision Pro is not for gaming, just forget about it even if you can afford it. PSVR 2 might be a choice now that it supports PCVR, but I dunno. Its future support is kinda in doubt.
The only real downside of Q3 is being owned by Meta, which is obviously blech, but it’s an amazing piece of technology otherwise, and the price is a steal, since it’s heavily subsidized to grow the market.
A cheaper version is expected to be announced soon, so that might be an alternative. But otherwise there isn’t much competition unless you’re looking into a very particular niche.
why are so many people absent mindedly pushing this buggy mess narrative? starfield was their least buggy release ever (i personally only encountered one terrible bug that was easily fixed with reloading a save)
its not like bethesda ever released a game as buggy as fallout new vegas or cyberpunk, besides 76 but, like new vegas and cyberpunk, it got fixed
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.
Just in terms of timeline, Dragon Age 4 was teased at about the same time with the same level of teaser trailer. It’s releasing this fall.
So a full modern RPG being fully developed in that time by a smaller studio, and for elder scrolls we haven’t heard squat.
Who knows how DA will turn out, but we know modern Bethesda quality thanks to starfield. Not having any news in 6 years proves this trailer was made just to shut fans up
Often times trailers that early are used as a hiring tool, too. Cyberpunk’s original CG trailer was back in like 2012, and that game came out in 2020, but we know from an interview at E3 before The Witcher 3 came out that there was a very small team working on Cyberpunk before Witcher 3 was done, and Cyberpunk at that point was mostly just design documents.
Who knows how DA will turn out, but we know modern Bethesda quality thanks to starfield. Not having any news in 6 years proves this trailer was made just to shut fans up
“Bethesda and Todd Howard announced Elder Scrolls 6 when they did because of fan demand, or in the words of Skyrim’s lead designer Bruce Nesmith, because ‘the pitchforks and torches were out.’” Source
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