• Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      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.

  • Dem Bosain@midwest.social
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    4 months ago

    Games have been steadily driving away from story-oriented to action-oriented since they began. I expect ES6 to be some type of Dark Souls clone.

    • shrippen@feddit.de
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      4 months ago

      Which is funny, because computer games didn’t have any kind of story at the beginning (look at pong, tetris, qbert, asteroids etc.)

      • Dem Bosain@midwest.social
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        4 months ago

        Yeah, but those were meant to be quick, quarter-driven games. Think of Zork and those games (all text). Think of the old Sierra games (King’s Quest 1 had text commands, KQ5(?) was point-and-click).

        As computer speed and graphics have grown, story has often suffered.

        • HarkMahlberg@kbin.social
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          4 months ago

          This makes no sense. Zork and Asteroids are practically contemporaries. Last of Us and Dota 2, Persona 5 and PUBG, Street Fighter 6 and Baldur’s Gate 3, each of these pairs released the same year. We can probably point to as many story-driven games as action-driven games, every single year, since 1977.

          On the time scale you’re talking about, there’s almost no correlation between time and the quality of video game storytelling. If anything, it has been improving (insofar as bigger games with bigger budgets have more grandiose stories being written for them).

        • Kiosade@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          You can practically see how people got less educated and the attention spans dropped through the lens of video game history. Those early point and click adventure games (and others) did NOT hold your hand, and expected you to think outside the box. Then, over the next 4 decades, things slowly got more and more handholdy, because people (ALL people, not just the youngins) just aren’t quite the same as they used to be.

          • Sordid@beehaw.org
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            4 months ago

            I mean… there’s not holding your hand and then there’s the game not bothering to inform you that you’re softlocked because you failed to notice and pick up a one-pixel item four hours ago in an area you can no longer return to. I remember those old point-and-click adventure games very well, and I have very little desire to go back to those days.

          • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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            4 months ago

            On the other hand, an alternate perspective is:

            • The average action game today has more going on in its story department than point and clicks did 30 years ago, and that’s not even accounting for games with a much larger emphasis on story like an RPG.
            • Baldur’s Gate 3 and the last two Legend of Zelda games are great examples of actually thinking outside the box, not thinking of explicit answers that were hard coded into old adventure games as valid answers. Those types of games back then got a reputation for “moon logic” for a reason, and I’m not sure we’re better off with games that give you a soft fail state for missing an essential item in an early area like old Sierra games.
            • What you might call “handholdy”, others might call “better UX” in a lot of cases, though there are certainly plenty of games that are a reaction to more guided designs; not just the above examples of Zelda and Baldur’s Gate but also the likes of Elden Ring, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, and Outer Wilds.
            • People’s attention spans didn’t necessarily drop, and it’s even harder to show that people are largely less educated than they used to be, but even if both of those things were true, neither would be demonstrated by the types of video games that came out over the past 40 years. People have built entire functioning computers inside of Minecraft, and Red Dead Redemption II certainly, without question, is doing more with its story than any adventure game from the 90s or earlier.
    • squiblet@kbin.social
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      4 months ago

      One of my favorite series, Phantasy Star, moved from a turn-based RPG in the 80s to an action RPG since 20 years ago (PSO, PSO2). What if I don’t want to play an action game? I don’t get what happened to the old style of RPG.

      • Kiosade@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        AAA games started getting too expensive and therefore risky to make since the PS3 (if not the PS2 era), and so the big companies started playing it safe by chasing trends rather than try something new and avante-garde (aside from Nintendo of course). Action-RPGs drew a wider audience, and therefore more money, so it would be silly for them to choose the option that makes less money. Capitalism ruins everything.

      • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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        4 months ago

        We just got Baldur’s Gate 3 last year, and Persona 5 is a mega hit. Turn-based RPGs are very much still alive.

        • squiblet@kbin.social
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          4 months ago

          Is that how those work? I’ve been thinking about BG3. I suppose the first RPG I ever played was a Gold Box SSI game set in the Forgotten Realms so I’d probably like it.

          • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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            4 months ago

            I don’t mean to sound rude, but it seems strange to pine for something lost that not only isn’t lost but also you don’t seem to have looked very hard for. There are some high profile turn based RPG hits all the time. Pokemon games are still turn based RPGs, and that’s the most successful entertainment property of all time.

            • squiblet@kbin.social
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              4 months ago

              Mainly I was pining for turn-based Phantasy Star. I’d accept DnD. I was out of the gaming world from 2005-2020. I could have looked harder, it’s true, and that’s why I’m asking questions.

              • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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                4 months ago

                Your best bet is to just go on Steam and start filtering by tags. You can click on a search and search for both “JRPG” and “Turn-based combat” tags, and that will give you a good list of games in the ballpark of Phantasy Star.

    • Nate Cox@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      Of course, the DS games are filled to the absolute brim with meaningful, world-building lore. ES6 could really take from that example.

        • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
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          4 months ago

          Dark Souls lore has actual themes deeper than “we need an excuse for the player’s power fantasy”.

          • The_Terrible_Humbaba@beehaw.org
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            4 months ago

            Most of what people call DS’s lore is made up of complete guess work from the fans, and pretty much everyone you ask will have a different idea of the lore. Even the YouTube DS lore masters will contradict each other on a lot of things, or have a different version of the events.

            It’s perfectly fine for people to enjoy that, but it’s definitely not as deep as people make it seem.

            As for ES, the lore is actually quite deep and has been developed for a lot longer than DS lore. As a couple of examples, you have Pelinal Whitestrake and the Dwemer, the latter of which is also the subject of a lot of speculation and fan theories. Just between those two, and not counting fan theory and speculation, you probably have more lore than in all of Dark Souls.

            • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
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              4 months ago

              So if lore is not explicitly stated, it is bad, becapse of guess work, unless it’s in TES, because then it sparks “fan theories”.

              Look: Lore is really a “quality over quantity” kind of deal. I know that there are entire books in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. But just because there’s a lot of it doesn’t make it great. And just because some author in Morrowind took some ketamine back in 2000, doesn’t absolve the later TES games, where the whole world boils down to “the player is the most important being in the world”.

              TES games are basically a solipsism simulator, whereas DS drips with atmosphere and themes of decay, hope and even teaches you a bit of zen.

              The fact that it’s so vague but still makes people be so invested in the world speaks to the strength of the writing.

              Yes, you will have nuggets of genius in TES games. But that’s because

              A) Morrowind’s writing was really weird and actually good and they still reference that a lot B) they throw everything at the wall and then you’re bound to have something good if you have some talent employed.

              You still have to wade through so much trite, boilerplate fantasy shit, though.

              • The_Terrible_Humbaba@beehaw.org
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                4 months ago

                So if lore is not explicitly stated, it is bad, becapse of guess work, unless it’s in TES, because then it sparks “fan theories”

                I never said DS lore was “bad”, I just said it wasn’t really that deep, because most of it was based on guess work from fans and YouTubers who need a reason to keep making videos. I like DS, and I’ve played the whole trilogy, including DLCs, but a lot of the “lore” is actually fan fiction. Then I said that in comparison, TES is much deeper - or more “expansive”/“developed”, if you prefer those terms - while also offering room for fans theories. That’s all.

                Basically, learning DS lore is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle that is missing most of the pieces, whereas learning ES is like reading history books, which can never give you all the answers.

                Some people will like one or the other more, for different reasons; but I’d say TES lore is definitely deeper, since it has a lot more to dig into.

        • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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          4 months ago

          But what there is of it is hand-crafted to perfection.

          There are also fundamental differences in plot mechanics between Western and Eastern RPGs.

          In a Japanese game the plot lines don’t wait indefinitely for the player to pick them up — you get brief windows of opportunity and then they move on.

          It makes things a lot more realistic because you don’t have any of those silly circumstances where you’ve already done tremendous things in one plot line only to be treated like a newb in another.

        • Sordid@beehaw.org
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          4 months ago

          And also because lore youtubers gotta eat, but there’s only so much lore in each game, so they grasp at straws to come up with far-fetched theories that were definitely not intended by the writers.

      • Dem Bosain@midwest.social
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        4 months ago

        I’ve never played, but the videos I’ve seen look like a button-mashing nightmare. And I think you underestimate the Elder Scrolls lore.

        • Poggervania@kbin.social
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          4 months ago

          Bruh, TES games are button mashers if anything. Dark Souls and any other related games has got TES games beat by lightyears in that department.

          TES lore, on the other hand, is just as interesting as Dark Souls lore for different reasons - mainly how wacky and weird the stuff Kirkbride wrote for Morrowind and Oblivion, like the fact gameplay mechanics like saving and loading, console commands, and even mods are legitimately canon thanks to CHIM, or the factoid that Pelinal Whitestrake might have been a time-travelling gay cyborg depending on how you interpret his descriptions. And who can forget that Vivec, a living god, has a spear that is implied to be the penis of Molag Bal after Vivec gave him a blowjob and bit his dick off. Then you got shit with Lorkhan, the Dreamsleeve, and of course Talos being 3 different people at the same time.

    • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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      4 months ago

      I’ve got to say…both of those sentences are an absolutely wild perspective. The first on the history of the medium, and the second for thinking that Bethesda will make anything other than the type of game they’ve always made for the past 30 years.

      • Sordid@beehaw.org
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        4 months ago

        I agree about the history thing. I’m old enough to remember a time when games were derided as mindless schlock and even stories considered laughable by modern standards were lauded as profoundly impressive. At most one could argue that emphasis on story in games has followed something of a bell curve over time, but I don’t think even that is really true.

        But I think your time frame of Bethesda lacking ambition and innovation is a bit too broad. 30 years would include things like first-person shooters with an official Terminator license and groundbreaking graphics and controls (3D enemies and mouselook, which people usually attribute to Quake, but that came later) or hyper-realistic racing games with extensive customization of the car’s drivetrain and suspension. It wasn’t until they hit it big with MW that Bethesda lost their balls and started just remaking the same game over and over with different coats of paint.

  • verdare [he/him]@beehaw.org
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      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.

    • kaboom36@ani.social
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      4 months ago

      Meanwhile I actually like fallout 76, I was thinking about playing starfield but after watching my friend play it, for about 14 hours before we realized it was a dry well, I’ve given up on Bethesda ever making anything that might appeal to me ever again

    • Primarily0617@kbin.social
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      4 months ago
      • 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.
        • Primarily0617@kbin.social
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          4 months ago

          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

      • Igloojoe@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        Elder scrolls online??? They didn’t “make” it, but they were damn familar with the mmo scene.

        • Friendship@kbin.social
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          4 months ago

          As you mentioned, they didn’t make ESO. Entirely different studios involved in the two games. They probably should have spent some time with the Zenimax developers before trying FO76 though.

      • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
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        4 months ago

        F4 has only had staying power simply because of the modding community. It’s succeeded despite Bethesda. Modders took an extremely mediocre game and made it something much more rich and interesting.

      • Poutinetown@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        FO4 settlement mechanism is amazing. It’s literally a 1st person city builder. I can’t think of any game similar to that yet.

        • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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          4 months ago

          It’s crazy to me how close that system was to being great and then seeing what they did with outposts in Starfield. While I didn’t really care for how it worked in vanilla, the ability to customize your base was awesome. Babysitting settlements was a chore, but SimSettlements fixes that. Starfield you can’t do much to customize it and it essentially useless from a mechanics standpoint, except for grinding a bunch of levels by cheesing time compression planets, but I’ll just use the console if I want to do that.

          • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
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            4 months ago

            The problem with Starfield’s settlements is that they are entirely resource mining operations. They aren’t really settlements in the way Fallout’s are. You have to spend a phenomenal amount of time to get the perks needed to make it even remotely useful or manageable, and by the time you get there, it’s not even worth it (which is true for most of Starfield’s mechanics, IMO).

        • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
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          4 months ago

          The problems is that’s not what Fallout is. It’s not a settlement sim. But when I played F4 for the first time, it felt just like Fallout Shelter with a quest tacked onto it, which is not at all what I wanted. Especially the way the game strongly pushes you into the Minutemen. It makes it extremely tedious for a new player. After the first time, I walked away from the game and didn’t come back to it for over a year. I decided to give it a go and completely ignored the Minutemen, and it was such a better game. But you have to know you can do that.

          Also it wasn’t until modding was opened up that the settlement system got good, IMO.

            • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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              4 months ago

              But at the same time, most of the people who played Fallout 3 never played 1 or 2. By the standards of the time, and for what the game presented itself as, it was pretty cool.

        • Gamma@beehaw.org
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          4 months ago

          Fallout 3 isn’t even comparable to the originals, it’s a completely different game.

    • Khrux@ttrpg.network
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      4 months ago

      I was weirdly forgiving of Fallout 76 (never played it, I’m not too hot for multiplayer games) because it was made so soon after fallout 4. It always felt like one of those DLC that got so large that it got released as a standalone game, which practically any large game studio has done and Bethesda did with Arcane’s Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider.

      A huge soft spot I have for the elder scrolls comes from the heroic fantasy exploration with enormous orchestral music and adventure in every direction, something people say about Starfield is that it’s large and sparse, which is accurate for a grounded space game but goes against what makes half of Bethesda games fun. Fallout falls in the middle of the pack being far more pulpy than Starfield and in 4, I feel this was a large issue with it feeling bland; it’s pulpy wackiness was toned down when it should have gone up.

      I don’t expect Bethesda to give me the video game equivalent of game of thrones but I do expect the Saturday morning cartoon that I’m equally fond of, and they still hold all the ingredients to make that recipe. Unfortunately Starfield was always tonally wrong for that, but ES6 is perfect for it.

      Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still only buy ES6 a year or so after release, maybe 2-3 if it’s really crap, but I think a fair few of the ways that they’ve deviated from the working formula post Skyrim may not be an issue here.

    • randomaside@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 months ago

      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.

  • iAmTheTot@kbin.social
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • AdmiralShat@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      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…

  • djsoren19@yiffit.net
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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      4 months ago

      Skyrim was still so, so ahead of it’s time when it came to an open world RPG

      Not in a world that already had Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls in it.

      You can labor the “open world” point but in any other metric DS & DeS stood above it: quest lines, action, feel, mechanics etc.

      • djsoren19@yiffit.net
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        4 months ago

        Look I love Dark Souls; it is an incredibly flawed game, and Demon’s Souls is even moreso. Dark Souls was so far ahead of it’s time that it still needed time to bake in the oven. Then with how claustrophobic DS2 and DS3’s worlds were by comparison, I don’t think FromSoft really surpassed Skyrim until Elden Ring.

        Both games are some of the greatest of all time though, so a lot of it will just come to preference. I think a lotta Dark Souls players have been spoiled by the remaster though, the original release struggled hard under the weight of Miyazaki’s ambition.

    • Primarily0617@kbin.social
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      4 months ago

      It feels like Skyrim was the game they’d (and by they I mean Todd) always wanted to make, and Skyrim was the first time they had the resources and technology available to make it more or less exactly as they envisaged.

      Fallout 4 probably would’ve been in the exact same situation of the technology finally catching up to their ideas, except they completely botched the landing by adding in voiced characters.

    • Kbin_space_program@kbin.social
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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        4 months ago

        Morrowind had (and still has) just as vibrant a modding community as ES4 or 5. Tamriel Rebuilt alone is still the largest modding project for any Elder Scrolls game.

        All of that expertise was developed on and for Morrowind.

        We don’t have the SF version of the Creation Kit yet, but all previous versions are largely similar, and FO4 modders will likely have no issue working on SF.

  • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • Mars@beehaw.org
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • LaSaucisseMasquee@jlai.lu
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        4 months ago

        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.

        • Mars@beehaw.org
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          4 months ago

          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.

          • Poggervania@kbin.social
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            4 months ago

            Actually, you can argue that they are still limited by what the engine can do - which, in turn, means it affects game design due to the fact they might want to implement an idea, but either they would need a hacky way to do it (like trains in Fallout 3 being a fucking equippable hat with an NPC running underneath the map, which is probably why their Fallout games don’t have drivable vehicles) or simply cannot due to technical limitations of the engine.

            This is like saying a good wood carver can still be good if they have shoddy tools, when the reality is that a good craftsman is only limited by the quality of tools they have. If I can’t fully realize my wood carving because my knife is too blunt and do the best I could with what I have for an inferior design, is that my fault or the tool’s fault?

            • Mars@beehaw.org
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              4 months ago

              I thing you are looking at this backwards.

              They have the money and resources to change engine. They CHOSE not to. Because they can make the game they want to make faster and more efficiently on Creation Engine. If they could not make the game they want they would be forced to move to another game engine.

              If their idea for Elder Scrolls 6 can be made in CE they won’t change engines. If it does not, they aren’t some indie studio, they have the resources to swap.

              • Poggervania@kbin.social
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                4 months ago

                Two things: 1) You’re making it sound like swapping engines is incredibly easy (it’s not, and you have to train staff on how to utilize it from the ground up and that can take a while), and 2) you’re probably right on why they keep using CE, and the sad reality is that Bethesda absolutely intentionally designs uncooked barebones games because they realized they can just have the fandom make actual interesting content, or QoL changes. They also know that Creation Gamebryo Engine does limit them a lot to what they can do, but rather than going through the cost and time of changing over engines, they just let the fandom create the script extenders that are available for literally every single game of theirs since Morrowind so modders can literally do things the base game can’t let them do.

                So this is more of a case where the craftsman has shoddy tools, but they don’t care because they’ll churn out a piece-of-crap and have their audience improve it for them for free. And then the craftsman will have the gall to try and get a cut of the audience’s work somehow.

                • Mars@beehaw.org
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                  4 months ago

                  It’s not easy to change engines. But they could afford it, if they could justify it.

                  I think you overestimate how many people actually install or care about mods. Many people just seems to like what Bethesda does.

                  Oblivion was a smash hit on Xbox without mods. Since that the main sellers seems to be the console versions.

          • saigot@lemmy.ca
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            4 months ago

            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.

            And if they used a new engine they would have to rework the inventory and container system, and if they did that perhaps they would innovate on that system in some way since they are making big changes anyway.

            • Mars@beehaw.org
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              4 months ago

              They don’t want to. They have a formula, and the public and the market have spent decades saying that it’s good enough and want “Skyrim in Space”

              If they want to change how inventory works they can, in whatever engine they are using. But why would they?

              Also, I find pretty ironic to expect “Innovation” in a game with a number 6 attached to it, from a studio known for doing 3 franchises so similar to each other in gameplay and features that are used to describe each other. And to blame the tech for the lack of it.

    • Wengerite@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      4 months ago

      The exploration aspect has never been as good as in 76. It’s the best designed fallout map, and I’m just pissed they couldn’t save it for a single player game.

  • Joker@discuss.tchncs.de
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    4 months ago

    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.

  • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    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 ?

  • emerald@beehaw.org
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    4 months ago

    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

  • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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    4 months ago

    For the author and everyone else. If they’re not throwing away their entire tech stack and workflow for how they build this sort of game and starting from scratch, they’re making a huge mistake. At least start with what Obsidian built for Avowed and work from there.

    • HarkMahlberg@kbin.social
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      4 months ago

      I think they have so much technical debt that if they tried to move away from their current stack, it would be the end of them, almost overnight. They don’t have the manpower and know-how to move to Unreal or Unity or otherwise. If they did, they would have done so by now.

      • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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        4 months ago

        I don’t see a technical debt problem getting any better by ignoring the problem for longer. No better time to start than when they’ve got Microsoft’s war chest to help aid the transition.

      • Sordid@beehaw.org
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        4 months ago

        That’s fair enough, but then they shouldn’t make a game blatantly unsuited to the tech they do have. Just make another Morrowind with a fresh coat of paint like they’ve been doing for the last twenty years. It’s what the fans want anyway.

    • FarceOfWill@infosec.pub
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      4 months ago

      This is a bit unfair, for all its gigantic problems the creation engine is much better at supporting modding than unity or unreal.

      Perhaps a more deterministic scripting engine would be better but it’d be easy to lose the one thing that makes their games good. I still can’t believe they thought starfield would work with the modding tools MIA four months out