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.
- 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 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.
NV is overrated, the writing of the originals was on another level
Agree to disagree.
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.
I recently did another playthrough, starting with 1. When I got to three, I spent a couple hours with it and just gave up. It’s just so shallow, bland, and lacking compared to 1 and 2.
New Vegas is the sequel 1 and 2 deserved, and Bethesda tries really hard to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Only as far as storyline and setting go. Other than that, it was an okay shooter.
Yeah… but storyline and setting is what made Fallout so great.
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.
That’s why I said “compared to 1 and 2”. 🙄
FO4 settlement mechanism is amazing. It’s literally a 1st person city builder. I can’t think of any game similar to that yet.
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.
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.
Elder scrolls online??? They didn’t “make” it, but they were damn familar with the mmo scene.
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.
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.
I never played the Fallouts so I guess I didn’t see most of the warnings signs
Good. Then, you can only be positively surprised.
They could just be not surprised.
My exact reaction to Starfield. Will almost certainly be the same for ES6
Or just have their negative belief confirmed.
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?
AstrologyAstronomy Simulator 2024? Did really no one in that management meeting have a better idea for the premise other than that it’sFalloutin 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.
I would absolutely trust Obsidian to handle the NG+ angle that Bethesda was aiming for, because they would have known that the right way to do it is to not let you do every faction’s quest line in the same playthrough.
I don’t even mean I wouldn’t trust Obsidian. I mean I wouldn’t trust the specific team they had working on New Vegas, which was an absurdly stacked deck that they seemingly haven’t been able to re-create since.
Films you can re-watch twice and have it be just as good the second time are rare. Bethesda wanted a film you could rewatch ten times while simultaneously larping as a cosmic god and trying to break everything you could.
But this isn’t a film. People replay systems-driven games all the time, because you can tweak the variables and make it feel new. RPGs have done this plenty of times. Interacting with a separate quest line that occasionally intersects with things you did in one of your previous timelines is something that there is absolutely a way to do, and Obsidian has made exactly that type of systems-driven RPG plenty of times.
if RPGs have done this plenty of times, then it’s not a new idea, and why are we talking about it in the context of the new ideas starfield had?
people replay games for the gameplay. bethesda wanted a game you could replay for the story, and then have it still work as a story when the player deliberately sequence breaks everything because of their omniscience
The thing that Obsidian has done plenty of times is system-driven reputations. The thing that would be new is bending that into new playthroughs on NG+ that interact with your past playthroughs.
since when has obsidian ever had a game you can play after the ending?
KOTOR you cant
new vegas you cant (come on, even fo3 let you play after the ending)
never finished outer worlds so im not sure on that
FO3’s after-ending story play was added in a DLC, I remember one of the devs being surprised at how many people wanted to play in a post-story world
Yeah, I did mean astronomy. Stupid charlatans co-opting postfixes.
I did not play Starfield; only watched some videos about it. Which is why I didn’t want to argue that it had no ideas, just that it’s overarching premise is incredibly mundane.
But thinking about it now, I guess, even that is the case for their other games. Like, the actual Elder Scroll items are basically irrelevant. And ‘Fallout’ is just a generic postapocalyptic setting. Maybe it’s just that it’s a new series, so it hasn’t yet established an own identity, which gives the weak premise much more weight.
Ultimately, they don’t want a strong premise, because it’s supposed to be sandbox-like. That’s what their fans want. But for answering why you should play specifically Starfield, when tons of space games exist which have done a better job at the space bits, it’s just not doing them any favors.
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.
If you didn’t see this after Fallout, namely 76, I dk what to tell you.
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 ?
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.
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
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.
I’ll preface this by saying that in no way do I expect that ES6 will shine more than Starfield and nothing I’m about to say should be construed as such.
I personally think that Starfield isn’t a good representation of what modern Bethesda will do with ES6. Starfield is the first time any of the major players had been involved in a totally new IP.
Skyrim was mechanically good enough, but it was only interesting because it was built in a world that was already rich with lore. It built upon a strong foundation of interesting concepts, conflict, and history to move a timeline forward and on top of that allowed for modders to easily expand it further.
Fallout 3 and 4 followed the same formula as Skyrim. Build a mechanically good enough game built on a rich world and allow modders to expand it.
Fallout 76 was the first departure from building on what was already there and it was a disaster because it wasn’t mechanically good enough.
Starfield is a new departure by making something that’s mechanically good enough but also needing to build a whole universe from scratch which left it feeling dull for many.
ES6 represents an opportunity for Bethesda to go back to the formula that worked for them until now. There is a big risk that they will further streamline the gameplay making it less deep as they have done with every generation, but it’s not a guarantee at this point in time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
We just got Baldur’s Gate 3 last year, and Persona 5 is a mega hit. Turn-based RPGs are very much still alive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lol, even the Yakuza series, which used to be brawlers turned to JRPGs in Like A Dragon.
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.
Which is funny, because computer games didn’t have any kind of story at the beginning (look at pong, tetris, qbert, asteroids etc.)
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.
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).
Shh, keep the facts out of this emotionally charged argument
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.
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.
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.
TES ain’t got shit on Dark Souls in terms of story… Or lore, at least.
Dark Souls lore seems deeper than it is because it’s less coherently presented than in TES.
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.
Dark Souls lore has actual themes deeper than “we need an excuse for the player’s power fantasy”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s a real time game, but if you try just mashing buttons, you will die quite quickly.
Lol “button mashing” will kill you instantly in Dark Souls
It’s SO LINEAR!!!
I want FREEDOM!!! I DONT WANNA JOIN THE DORKY NASA BOYS, I WANNA CANNIBALIZE THEM!!! ):< (this playthrough)
