I’m honestly baffled as to why people have had any faith in Bethesda Game Studios for years. Even if you liked Fallout 3 or 4, what they did with 76 should’ve obliterated any remaining trust.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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- Fallout 3 releases and it's good
- Fallout New Vegas releases and it's great
- Fallout 4 releases and it's disappointing but it's okay because it's just a blip. They had some good new ideas in there, they were just balanced out in the other direction by a lot of bad ones. Bethesda's track record is still solid, if somewhat tarnished.
- Fallout 76 releases and it's disappointing but that's because they've never made (and shouldn't have made) an MMO before. A lot of the coverage is centred around the shoddy launch, which doesn't really matter for a non-MMO title.
Fallout New Vegas was made by Obsidian
i know but i'm roleplaying a semi-informed fan
i think it's fair to say that at least a portion of bethesda's reputation is built off that game
Fallout 3 was garbage compared to Fallout 1 and 2
Fallout 3 isn’t even comparable to the originals, it’s a completely different game.
The story, the world and the roleplaying are comparable and Fallout 3 is way worse in that regard. New Vegas reached the old heights again.
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I went and played Fallout 1 because I loved 3 so much... It took a few false starts (1 intelligence was a terrible call for a first playthrough lol, it ended bad)
Now I see it, 1 and 2 were so brilliant with the role playing and story that I can't go back to 3! 😊 So many choices, strong characters, just brilliant.
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As someone who went to the midnight launch of Skyrim and finished the main quest that night, ever since that moment I've been disappointed in Bethesda's direction. Skyrim was fairly uninteresting, though the mods now can bring it some life (but still can't make it as good as Morrowind, especially the huge UI downgrade we got with the switch to consoles). Fallout 4 does have some redeeming qualities I think, though generally it was also disappointing. Starfield is the last piece I think most people needed to wake up and see that they don't want to make good games anymore. They only care about making a game they can market to as many people as possible, so they can't do anything interesting with it.
The issue is most Bethesda has made at least one of many people's favorite games. Many of the people behind them still work at the company, so they could do it again. I think there's always some hope they can look at what makes games good (both their own and things like Baulder's Gate 3) and realize making generic crap isn't going to cut it anymore. It worked for Skyrim and somewhat for FO4 (though that still has some fairly unique aspects), but people have so many options for better games.
Morrowind is the reason I'm in the game industry and has impacted my life more than any other single piece of media. It's been heartbreaking for me to see the treatment Elder Scrolls has gotten. I was so excited for Skyrim it was the only game I've ever preordered, it's the reason I originally got a Steam account, and the whole game is a let down start to finish.
I was hesitantly optimistic for FO4 when I bought it, it was off-putting but I worked through the disappointment of running into invisible walls so often, and when I finally got the gear and the freedom to power armor my way to the roofs I was pumped until I discovered they put fuck all up there. Morrowind was designed with jumping and flying and they made a 3D world that was fascinating to explore, Skyrim is completely flat, FO4 pretends to have 3D space but it's a contentless liar. I'm so jaded now I didn't even get to the hesitantly optimistic step with Starfield I just assumed it was going to be empty filler
I wasn't hesitantly optimistic about Starfield, rather hesitantly pessimistic. I knew they were going to fuck it up, but I thought there could be something interesting somewhere at the core. There wasn't though. Even if there are good mods, which I'm not sure of at this point, I don't think Starfield can be worth playing. I love sci-fi, so I would put up with a shit game if they actually cared about the sci-fi concepts, but they didn't even bother with that. They acknowledged the concept of things like generation ships, but then didn't care about what made them interesting, for example.
The fact that Morrowind built it's world as a world and then gave you tools to play in it is what makes it work so well. People in the world can levitate and breathe under water, so some people used that in the world, so you'll find that the world utilizes it. Also, the spaces are built as real spaces mostly, but all later games built "roller-coasters" where there's a start point and a fixed path you have to take and an exit. You don't get to use your brain to find other options. You're supposed to turn off your brain and follow the quest marker and that's all. It really sucks.
I'm always stupidly, but reservedly, hopeful that any studio will realize people play their games most frequently to engage them in interesting ideas, not to disengage from them or they'd watch a movie. BG3, making as much money as it has and being as classic an RPG as it is, has given me hope that larger studios will realize their mistakes. If Bethesda put their budget behind a classic RPG then they'd do huge numbers and make another new classic, but I know they won't.
IMO the problem at this point is leadership. They've realized people will buy their shit if they sell a cheap, surface-deep fantasy with interesting visuals and let folks do a very limited number of different things in a single playthrough. Because of that, there's no nuance to their worlds. They want to make a sandbox game with no reactivity.
Unless leadership resigns I won't expect anything else than the equivalent of a gas station meal.
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This 💯🔥
I'm at the stage where you stop complaining about videogames and you just stop buying them.
I've realised that all the people who worked in the videogames industry that made it special have either sold out, dropped out, or aged out at this point. Keep your expectations low my friends.
It did for me. Haven't touched anything new of theirs since.
Edit: was also a paying ESO customer at the time; dropped the sub and uninstalled.
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Good. Then, you can only be positively surprised.
No, you can be many more things than that. Skyrim killed my hype for anything else Bethesda made, but I was still hopeful for a cool sci-fi game with Bethesda issues. I didn't expect much from Starfield, but I was still left with a sense of disappointment. It's not that I expected anything good, but I was still somewhat hopeful that it could be interesting, but it refused to be. There wasn't any surprise element to what I felt, just a tinge of loss at what we could have had if the company tried to make good games still instead of making marketable games.
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Without upgrading to a new enginge, something that the entire industry has been begging Bethesda to do now for at least a decade, ES6 will feel exactly the same as pretty much all of their games since Oblivion, with the same "go here, kill everything indiscriminately, pick up trinket, deliver trinket" gameplay loop. ES lore is top tier and I'm always down for more of that, but they need to update their shit.
How would a engine change affect the game design philosophy of Bethesda?
Performance? Visuals? Alright. But game design?
Creation Engine powers Starfield and Fallout New Vegas. Quests can be complex, dynamic, with multiple endings, with lots of ways to approach them. Or they can be flat fetch quests. The tools allow both and everything in between.
Bethesda just chooses to use the current game design framework and would choose the same on any other engine.
They are actually updating their game design principles. They stopped using game design documents, they simplified the quests, they try to make sure every play through gets to see as much content as possible. Maybe they should stop updating.
A newer engine would get rid of chests hidden into the ground for storing NPC’s items.
I mean, this is an obviously laughable example but you can be sure that other quirks of the engine are holding back creativity and performance.
As I said Creation Engine did mot stop another studio from being creative.
They are not being hold back by Creation Engine in game design, they are stuck in a design philosophy and production strategy that until now has and got them lots of praise and sales.
They use the chest trick because saves reworking the inventory and container system. That would take time and left the game almost the same, so they don’t.
If they used Unreal engine they’d have to build a new inventory and container system from scratch, who knows if they would end up taking the hidden chest idea (it mostly works) and porting it?
The “Update your engine Bethesda” discussion is valid from many points of view, but most of the problems with current Bethesda releases are cultural. They don’t test nearly enough, they don’t have a “fun” game until a couple months before release, they don’t coordinate the content and mechanics production in any way, the quest writing is a free for all.
And until now things worked out. So they refuse to address those issues.
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Personally, I found it particularly damning, how generic all of it was. They had a really interesting, diverse world with Morrowind. Then Oblivion was already a severe step backwards with relatively generic high fantasy. And Skyrim felt even more samey to me.
Well, and now with Starfield, I already start sleeping when I hear the name. What is it supposed to be? ~~Astrology~~ Astronomy Simulator 2024? Did really no one in that management meeting have a better idea for the premise other than that it's ~~Fallout~~ in space?
To some degree, obviously it's not supposed to be fantasy, so maybe they'll actually be more creative with that, again, but with them now belonging to Microsoft, too, I just fully expect design by committee.
Did you play Starfield? It's definitely got plenty of ideas. It just chickened out of some of them and wrote checks it couldn't cash for others. (Also, I think you meant astronomy, not astrology.)
All the new ideas in Starfield fall into one of two categories:
- The technology doesn't exist to implement it.
- The talent at Bethesda is incredibly ill-suited to implement it.
The Bethesda response to fans saying their main storyline was trash was to make a game where the main storyline is the primary focus and draw of the game? That's a bold move.
The NG+ stuff is a cool idea, but again, Bethesda just fundamentally lacks the talent to implement it. You can't hit what they were aiming for with a handful of gimmicks. I wouldn't even trust the team behind New Vegas, or whoever writes at Larian, to do it justice.
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The sad thing about Oblivion is that there are in-game books in Morrowind and previous games that describe the empire as being in the middle of a bamboo jungle. The vibe comes off as the Roman Empire in South East Asia.
Instead we got generic high fantasy with the occasional guy wearing Roman armor.
Eh, Bethesda flip-flop on that kind of stuff all the time. IIRC in Arena, the Imperial City was just in generic temperate woodland, then it was retconned in some in-game books to a jungle, then retconned again in Oblivion back to generic woodland. Same thing with the armor of imperial soldiers. Generic fantasy plate in early games, Roman in Morrowind, generic fantasy plate in Oblivion again, Roman again in Skyrim... They just can't make up their minds.
I will say this, though: It's okay to retcon old lore, but only in order to make it more unique and interesting. Retconning stuff to make it more generic and bland is a high crime.
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I loved Morrowind when I was 12, replayed it recently and it was just as good as I remembered. I was hyped on Starfield and bought it blind for 40e. I don't usually make mistakes like these but I got cocky this time. I still can't fathom how uninteresting Starfield was. I literally dropped it out of boredom. How can you manage to do this with a space game ? seriously ? how do you create something so bland from a premise so exciting ? with the funds and time you have ?
It's called design by committee
If you didn't see this after Fallout, namely 76, I dk what to tell you.
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Morrowind and Oblivion are probably both on my top ten list of best games ever, if not top 25. I used to be a huge Bethesda fan. Starfield is perhaps the most disappointing game I have ever played. I tisk say worst, mind you, I said disappointing. Any excitement I had for ES6 is well and truly gone.
Morrowind and Oblivion into Skyrim, fallout 3/NV into 4 really opened my eyes into the enshittification before that was even a term I had read anywhere. It was a company who got too big for its breeches and thought it knew better..
To be honest, Bethesda’s best work is probably behind them. They will sell a few more games based on brand recognition and because we are suckers, but I don’t expect much. I’m old enough to have seen many of my favorite developers go through this. It’s difficult to have overwhelming success and keep knocking it out of the park with every release. Expectations for something better than the last thing are so high, the pressure to do something new, the culture change that comes with huge growth, and they eventually lose that magic that captured us in the first place.
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If they really have been working on it since it was teased a few years ago, then I have to assume it will just be Skyrim: Again (Again)
It's a shame that it probably won't even be that much of a visual improvement, if Starfield is any indication
People in the future will realize that Skyrim was made in a perfect sweet spot at Bethesda. It was made recently enough that the controls make sense and it feels good to play, but Skyrim was still so, so ahead of it's time when it came to an open world RPG. Back then, Bethesda's writers really had a knack for making incredibly interesting settings, and just seeing an entire digital world so wonderfully realized was considered ground-breaking.
A decade later, and the same model has become stale. The gameplay is still there, but the soul is not. Idk if most of those old writers have just left Bethesda or retired after so many years in the industry, but the magic has left the studio. I'm not even really looking forward to ES6 as much as I am the upcoming Avowed from Obsidian, because their games still have plenty of soul.
Not a sweet spot.
Morrowind was amazing because it is a hand built world. Oblivion had the same core error as Starfield: an overreliance on procedural generation.
For Skyrim they did it right. Just the right amount of procedural generation with enough manual work that things worked out.
You can't overlook the modding scene either. Oblivion had a great mod community with a lot of people getting into it and cutting their teeth there. So when Skyrim came out they were experts and made a lot of amazing mods, particularly framework mods.
But almost all of them are done and gone or corrupted into paid mods(e.g. Elianora, Kinggath(FO4)). So Starfield will never get a good modding scene because the core modding community doesn't exist now.
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