After the massive blunder of Starfield, I cannot see how Elder scrolls 6 could possibly be successful. Everything points to the fact that they knew that the game was not even half finished, in my opinion, with major glaring issues, and they decided to just send it off anyway. The difference between this game and Oblivion is that this time, it wasn’t light-hearted and filled with silly mistakes that made people laugh. It instead inside it a lot of anger and disbelief as to how they could fail so spectacularly with a AAA title…
But this has not been the first time that Bethesda as a whole has failed, and is in fact the third strike. They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4, which took the gaming industry by surprise after seeing how poorly developed it was, and the extreme low quality of the story, how unfinished the game was, how simply broken many areas and features were, I could talk about it for hours. Biggest thing to me was the poorly made settlement system that barely even worked because there was no snapping, and it felt like playing an indie game. The second strike was Fallout 76, crazy how disappointing his game was and even to this day is still broken and in disarray. It’s only been able to survive purely because of microtransactions…
Then, you look at what most people are playing right now, and it’s Skyrim. Above any other game out there, it’s Skyrim. The similarity between Skyrim and Elder scrolls 6 doesn’t really matter that much, the age is what you should really focus on. Why are people playing such an old game still to this day? Hint, it’s because every single other title they’ve released has been a disappointment.
Personally, I have no faith or belief that Elder scrolls 6 will be anything other than a colossal disappointment. I don’t see how Bethesda as a studio can possibly manage to produce AAA titles anymore, I think they have a budget of half of what they need to have, and it’s only getting smaller each year as costs are being cut, and People are being laid off, stakeholders and stockholders want more revenue growth than ever before. It’s unbelievable honestly. They expect infinite growth with minimal headcount that keeps shrinking
I’d like to think they’ve learned some lessons from their last few releases but who knows…
They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4
Eh, not really. Fallout 4 has its share of fans and while the roleplaying and story was weak, I thought the world was well laid out and fun to explore. But yeah, none of their games are as good as Skyrim which says a lot because that game has a ton of issues itself.
I think ES6 can still be good but it needs a lot of change from Bethesda’s side. For one, they should either trash the engine or fix its issues. It’s unbelievable that everything in Starfield has a loading screen between it, ran poorly, and was still a buggy mess. The enemy AI was apparently unchanged for the last 20 years or so, because every NPC is still clunky and has trouble moving from A to B.
If anything I think starfield was exactly the kick in the nuts that Bethesda needed. Hopefully it motivates them to do better next time.
They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4
Eh, not really. Fallout 4 has its share of fans and while the roleplaying and story was weak, I thought the world was well laid out and fun to explore
When I say failed, this is of course my own opinion. I personally feel like it was a failed game because of how simply unfun it is. I had to mod the game to extreme amounts just to get it to be believable and as enjoyable as Skyrim, Oblivion, other Bethesda games. It simply was not fun and its released state due to the horrible dialogue, basically lackluster and meaningless world. No matter where I explored, it wasn’t really rewarded at all with anything.
It’s unbelievable that everything in Starfield has a loading screen between it, ran poorly, and was still a buggy mess
It’s unbelievable that everything in Starfield has a loading screen between it, ran poorly, and was still a buggy mess
Corporate greed and incompetence, plain and simple. It took a mod creator a week or two to cook up a solution for that and make the game free of loading screens, he did that FOR FREE. Bethesda is out here with millions in Budget, they couldn’t have figured that out? Unbelievable. It’s the same crap every single game, too. They’re just lazy. Most Beth games that have been released has had a mod released that makes it 100% open world with no load screens
There is no mod to make Starfield free of loading screens, the cell structure of the engine demands loading screens. A mod exists that introduces real space faster then light travel between planets in a system yes, but that mod a) destroys the storytelling and lore of the game completely b) it still has the loading screen to land on the planet and c) changes a quick load screen with a boring travel through empty space.
It is like changing a stage change cut to black in a move with a real time travel scene with nothing at all happening but watching the people drive.There is no mod to make Starfield free of loading screens, the cell structure of the engine demands loading screens
That’s a fair point - it doesn’t completely get rid of the game’s need to load the next area, but it does a good job of hiding when the loading is happening.
but that mod a) destroys the storytelling and lore of the game completely
How, exactly?
c) changes a quick load screen with a boring travel through empty space.
This is an absurd and honestly ridiculous complaint. ‘boring travel through empty space’ dude it’s a literal SPACE exploration game, how can you complain about travelling through space, in a space game? Wtf? What do you think Space is? Candyland, filled with gas stations and theme parks along the ride? It’s an empty, insanely large expanse. Some people want that. You could say the same thing for any Fallout/Elder Scrolls game, too. ‘Boring ride through the country’ < oblivion and Skyrim. ‘Boring walk to the next area’ <Fallout
You could say the same thing for any Fallout/Elder Scrolls game, too. ‘Boring ride through the country’ < oblivion and Skyrim. ‘Boring walk to the next area’ <Fallout
Exploration is one of the most enjoyable parts of those games. It’s not boring in ES or FO because of all the things you find along the way. Walking from A to B and getting distracted for 2 hours at random POIs you find is a hallmark of these games.
This aspect was completely absent in Starfield, idk how they fucked up exploration so much.
it’s a literal SPACE exploration game, how can you complain about travelling through space
Traveling != exploration. Eliminating the load screens just leaves you in boring space with no POIs to discover along the route.
Exploration is one of the most enjoyable parts of those games. It’s not boring in ES or FO because of all the things you find along the way.
Maybe the first playthrough, sure. But after the first time I played through Fallout 4 (65% explored POIs), I tried to replay it, and it felt stale that quickly. Just going from starter area > concord was such a snooze. Autorun and watch netflix. Oblivion was a little more captivating and scenic, and so was Fallout 3. You’d find random little homes blown up, robots, people trying to stab you with a rusty knife. Fallout 4 and 76 are just so empty and devoid.
Traveling != exploration. Eliminating the load screens just leaves you in boring space with no POIs to discover along the route.
Fair point… No Man’s Sky kinda figured out a way to make it more fun, you can do it much more interactively with the hyperdrive and warping through small spaces in a system. But there’s rocks to find, sometimes pirates that shoot at you. >
How, exactly?
One of the major points of the game is that the only way to travel faster then light is with Gravjumping, there is no way to travel faster then light in real space. There is a large part of the main quest all about that. And that is the reason why everyone gravjumps everywhere The mod introduces faster then light travel in real space, and by this destroying one of the most important points in world building and lore of the game.
This is an absurd and honestly ridiculous complaint. ‘boring travel through empty space’ dude it’s a literal SPACE exploration game, how can you complain about travelling through space, in a space game? Wtf? What do you think Space is? Candyland, filled with gas stations and theme parks along the ride? It’s an empty, insanely large expanse. Some people want that. You could say the same thing for any Fallout/Elder Scrolls game, too. ‘Boring ride through the country’ < oblivion and Skyrim. ‘Boring walk to the next area’ <Fallout
That is how most people play those games yes, that is why fast travel (or other ways of fast transportation like teleportation magic or carts/boats) exists and it is used because most of the time travel is BORING as fuck and I want to do things in my game not commute between places. Not every travel is exploration, I don’t explore the city when I travel from home to work and back and very often in games travel is not done to explore but to get from point A to point B because your quest or task demands that. And starfield is not a space exploration game (because you literally can’t find anything new in space in the game, everything you can find is either on or around planets but not in open interplanetary or interstellar space.) it is an RPG with a big focus on star system and planet exploration. Traveling through empty space (and staring onto a point in the blackness of space that very very slowly gets bigger) is one of the most boring wastes of time I could think of. Traveling through space is like traveling over an huge, empty and flat saltlake in the middle of the night. There is literally nothing to see there, the only interesting things are the start of the travel and the destination. Ok, there are people into that I am sure, games like desert bus exist after all, and if you like that then have fun with the mod. It is a single player game after all and I will never tell anyone how to play their single player games (or even multiplayer games if it is ok for every other player). You do you!
None of their games are as good as Morrowind yet that hasn’t stopped them from selling like hotcakes.
Morrowind was also an almost unplayable buggy mess when it came out.
One of the first places you go to if you do the main quest is the Balmora mages guild, and when you went downstairs in the release version, you regularly fell through the floor.
And alchemy, crafting and spellcrafting were so broken you could just spend half an hour on it to turn yourself into a god.It wasn’t well balanced but it was a good RPG experience. Oblivion had a bunch of elements stripped out, but it was still an RPG, the wonky alphabetical voice acting aside. Skyrim felt like a cookie-cutter action adventure game, all the roleplay had flown out the window.
Yup, and they fixed it. When Fallout 76 came out, it had the exact same major issues and bugs that Fallout 4 did, that the community literally fixed themselves with their unofficial patches. Bethesda was so unbelievably lazy They could not even copy and paste the unofficial bug fixes off Nexus mods, to me, that’s startling. At least with Morrowind, they fixed stuff
Honestly I think that if ES6 is to Skyrim what FO4 is to FO3, it will probably be good.
The danger is if they try to replicate Starfield or FO76, ie. cut corners like crazy, be blinded by dollar signs in their eyes.
I feel like in comparison to Starfield, ES6 should be smaller and more compact which should alleviate a lot of the other complaints I’ve seen.
At this point the hype alone will sell it. There may be some apprehensive players since starfield, but I don’t think it’ll impact them too much.
Also elder scrolls being their big IP, they kind of don’t have the wiggle room to screw this up.
exactly, I’m a huge ES fan who hated Starfield, but it is not causing me any grief over ES6. Almost all of the Starfield issues I had were due to the vastly different world(s) structure.
I’m so exited for Avowed to show me how else a skyrim like game can look and feel.
Idk, Outer Worlds was really lame, imo. It was honestly more boring than most the Bethesda RPGs for me because it was basically trying to do the same type of thing as them but with way smaller worlds so it’s just not as interesting.
much better than Starfield though!
I think I played more of Starfield, frankly
I’m hopeful but cautious.
For me the big issue with Starfield was the obsession with massive maps/worlds etc that were either empty or filled with junk. The travel system and loading screens also made the game as a whole completely disjointed.
The only reason I’m hopeful is the continuous map as opposed to content being spread way too thin on thousands of planets. If they get the content more dense then hopefully it’ll be at least half decent.
I’m totally with you on Bethesda / Microsoft trying to get the most money out of the least effort and that’s my biggest reason I’m not getting hyped for it. The goal for them is currently the most cash rather than making the best game possible. Annoyingly this has infected pretty much all big game studios these days. Ironically, that approach is better for the short term but horrendous for the long term outlook.
I’ll be sticking to the golden rule though: NO PREORDERS!
Why do you think they keep rereleasing Skyrim? It’s the last good game they made.
If you want Elder Scrolls 6, look to spiritual sequels made by other companies. Bethesdead.
Any suggestions for spiritual sequels?
I liked Outer Worlds, I found it pretty good, if a little one note in its writing.
Outer Worlds is way closer to a Fallout spiritual sequel (or beat Starfield to the punch) than an Elder Scrolls game.
Did they ever fix the reputation system? I managed to instantly piss off an entire city while I was in the middle of it because I accumulated one too many “We don’t like you” points in the middle of a quest. Completely ruined my immersion and was a hard stop for me.
I don’t really feel like you can compare the two games. Starfield was a big scope with mostly procedurally generated content with a few handcrafted areas, which resulted in very repetitive content since they simply didn’t make enough variety in content. I feel like the procedural part and the ship and base building parts took a lot of resources away from other gameplay features, like a more interesting story or more engaing gameplay.
It also doesn’t help that Starfield still runs on an extremely outdated engine. Even if they updated it, there are still ridiculous limitations that shouldn’t even exist in this day and age. Just looking at Star Wars Outlaws gives a good impression how seamless stuff could’ve been in Starfield. Yet even entering a small shop or your ship requires a loading screen.
And on top of that the game just runs like absolute garbage on the old engine. When Todd Howard just answered with “just buy an RTX4000 card” it spoke volumes about the lack of optimisation that came with that game.
That last part is probably gonna be the biggest obstacle for Elder Scrolls 6, but having a handcrafted world will probably let them get away from a complete failure of a game already. Another obstacle might be to write an interesting story and characters, I frankly can’t remember anything from what I played in Starfield, it was generally just boring and Bethesda probably gambled on the open-world exploration experience offsetting that.
Also Bethesda needs to stop relying on mods saving the game for them, many basic functions are missing and I found myself often needing mods to have an even acceptable experience, especially with Fallout 4 and Starfield. It’s probably why Skyrim is still so popular, because there is that massive collection of mods out there.
Starfield was a big scope with mostly procedurally generated content with a few handcrafted areas, which resulted in very repetitive content since they simply didn’t make enough variety in content.
The budget for Starfield was scales of magnitude larger than No Man’s Sky, and will likely never have even half the updates that game did. Bethesda never carries a game that far, not even Skyrim
Also Bethesda needs to stop relying on mods saving the game for them, many basic functions are missing and I found myself often needing mods to have an even acceptable experience
Agree, and it’s sad they won’t even learn from them either. Every single Bethesda release isn’t open world. A modder has to make that FOR them. Unbelievable man. That’s not even remotely complex, any game developer should be able to figure that out easily, could just go look up one of the already made mods for open world, copy paste, done.
To be honest I never found the procedural generation in No Man’s Sky good either.
It’s a better game by far, but once you have been exploring a few systems you often start finding repetitive content there as well. But there’s definitely more variety than Starfield and it’s mostly seamless too. And NMS came out about 7 years before Starfield.
I think the biggest issue is Bethesda clinging on to their engine for dear life like it’s their precious baby, and they’re keeping it on life-support with minimal updates.
Starfield’s biggest flaw was in trying to make a grand space game given that Bethesda’s strength is sandboxy, exploration focused, RPGs.
I am of the mind that exploration fundamentally does not work in a space game because the scale is too big. There’s waaaay too much space on even a single planet to populate with meaningfully interesting things to find. So there’s maybe one or two interesting handcrafted things per planet and you spend all your time in system and galactic scale maps to find them, rather than stumbling across them while out on a walk.
The only space games that work imho, are either ones with tiny planets like The Outer Wilds, or ones that are more linear and driven by very good writing and space is more of a backdrop than the actual millions of km you have to travel through and explore (like The Outer Worlds, or Mass Effect).
So I think Bethesda has a higher chance of success in literally any other, more limited, setting, given that writing isn’t their strong suit, but all that being said, I still don’t know if they’ll course correct.
There is also the mediocre story, but hopefully they’ll learn the lesson that no, we don’t want something as automagically powerful as a dragonborn or whatever, it worked for skyrim sure, but it’s a not something needed in every title.
Working from a zero prisoner to hero was always the goal and should be again.
Yeah the writing in Starfield is pretty bad.
I think Skyrim’s was better because there was less central control. I know that stuff like the whole Werewolf quest was just made by a passionate designer and dev who made it after hours, but that during Starfield development a lot more got run up the chain and there was less individual freedom.
I suspect that stems from the massive procedural generativeness but am not sure.
I think the issue is that they still have their developers write their own quests rather than hiring a team of dedicated writers like other studios do nowadays.
The games will never be narratively coherent when everyone is pulling in a different direction.
I think there are two core issues. Their creation engine has struggled to keep pace since the PS4 era and Todd’s ego.
The engine part can be fixed by either licensing something else or investing big time to bring that fossil up to speed.
With Todd’s ego, I hope Starfield thought him a lesson or they make someone else top dog.
I like starfield.
If we reword the question as “Is Elder Scrolls 6 doomed to be a mediocre experience?” then my money would be on “yes”. Bethesda generally seem to aim to make games just as good as they need to be to make money. Capitalism over creative expression.
If the game is good enough to get people to buy it and consider buying the next one, that’s all the effort it’s worth putting in (as far as publishers are concerned). It’s not a new approach, they’ve just had a lot more practice at it than game developers/publishers had in the '90s.
Temper your expectations as unless you’re willing to buy a few million copies yourself, they can’t justify the cost of caring what you think.
…and no, I do not approve of this system one jot. It’s gross and antithetical to creativity. I’m glad we have a lot more independent developers who aren’t as beholden to neoliberal capitalism these days.
Fall Out 4 was fine, definitely didn’t fail. Your expectation of games is way too high.
If you ignore game breaking bugs at release, sure… fine
every beth game has always had game breaking bugs on release
Even if they spend $300M making it, they’ll likely still make their money back, even in a world where Game Pass exists. I think their tech stack is so ancient that it ought to be thrown straight in the garbage, and they’ll get more mileage out of an Elder Scrolls game that’s forked from what Obsidian built in Unreal for Avowed. It also sure sounds like, much like studios like Arkane, Rocksteady, and BioWare, they were so high on their previous successes that they couldn’t admit to themselves that any decision they made was a bad one. If they can learn from their mistakes and take the L on Starfield (and L that would be considered a W for most other developers), then Elder Scrolls can potentially meet fans’ expectations. If they keep making games the way they’ve always made them without trying to adapt to the times, they’ll follow the same path as Fallout 4 and Starfield.
Starfield was garbage IMO. I didn’t even pay for it and wanted my money back in less than 3 hours.
But I AM still hopeful for Elder Scrolls 6. The weakness of Starfield is exploration is barely a thing; incredibly boring procedural generation is the cause. There is little to no value getting excited exploring the world and the incredible world of Skyrim is what makes it good.
I seriously doubt Bethesda is dumb enough to try procedural generation with the next elder scrolls game, and if they are then it will be dead in the water just by association. But a game similar to Skyrim will likely still find a stronger audience, even if just for the return to form.
incredibly boring procedural generation is the cause. There is little to no value getting excited exploring the world and the incredible world of Skyrim is what makes it good.
Honestly, they could’ve fixed it by adding custom settings for enemy generation. In Skyrim, Obliv, Fallout games, I’ve always downloaded a “more enemies” mod to encounter more things out in the wild/wastes. Even when I found monsters in Starfield, they just wandered by, there’s no danger. If they would’ve simply polled the gaming community, we would’ve told them how to fix it. :\
I strongly disagree. I’ve had immense fun in every Bethesda game, including Starfield and 76. I’ve put hundreds of hours into all of their games, possibly over a thousand for games like FO3 and Oblivion. The only one that truly failed to grasp my attention was ESO. My only real complaint about Starfield was NG+. Losing over a hundred hours of collecting and ship/settlement building isn’t new game plus. It’s a prestige system, and although it makes sense given the ending, it’s a shitty way to restart an RPG. Nonetheless, I’ve still gotten 180 hours out of it. Hell, I just started a fresh game last week and started modding the hell out of it.
With Bethesda, their games are about the fun you make. Sorry if you didn’t enjoy the experiences, but maybe some of them just weren’t meant for you. Personally, I’m looking forward to ES6 and sinking a few hundred hours into it. If it’s a bad game, so be it, but I honestly can’t wait to see what they do!
Starfield somehow built a game tailor made for NG+ and not only didn’t take advantage of it with their faction system, they also got rid of my favorite guns and all of my currency, which discouraged me from engaging with it at all.
If they don’t shit the bed somehow, I think TES6 will still be successful. Skyrim was pretty much just the video game equivalent of plain salted potato chips in retrospect. So long as they can at least meet that level of quality doing something they know, I think it’ll do fine. They don’t need to make a masterpiece or anything, modders will just be pleased to have a new prettier medium and a new map to loot plants from.
All of that said, uuurghhh, I have so little excitement for more elder scrolls slop. Bethesda seriously needs a total mixup in leadership and direction for me to get hopeful again.
Then, you look at what most people are playing right now, and it’s Skyrim.
As a side note, Morrowind is also quite big still. /r/Morrowind has 178k members and is very active. Project Tamriel Rebuilt regularly getting updates. OpenMW getting more popular.
