With a dash of Morrowind writing. And, while it'll never happen so long as Todd is around\*, faction design. It was nice actually having to be a mage in order to progress in the mages guild. And I liked the fights between factions. FO4 kinda had that last part, if nothing else, so who knows.
\*Okay since multiple people are making assumptions, I never said Todd wasn't around during Morrowind times. I know he's been with Bethesda since Arena. It was never implied otherwise. His /current/ design philosophy however is very different from back then. That is the current issue.
I remember once I broke the Imperial City mages school zone by casting fury or whatever on the apprentices so much that the mages school faction became hostile to the city guard faction and fighting would immediately break out when I loaded that zone. Good times.....
You know what? Forget Elder Scrolls 6. Just give a complete remaster of Morrowind and Oblivion please. Change nothing but the graphics. Add an option to have the Oblivion duplication glitches. That's all I need from Bethesda.
Edit: many valid points have been raised. I had forgotten about a lot of the more frustrating features of the older games.
As for everyone who is, for some reason, feeling threatened and defensive, relax, this is purely hypothetical and no is messing with your hopes and dreams for the future of gaming.
People have been trying to remake Morrowind in the Skyrim engine for years now and it's been interesting seeing them talk about how core the differences are between the games. People forget stuff like every swing of a sword in Morrowind being a D&D style dice roll which could result in a straight MISS even if you visually appear to strike the enemy.
That's why I want Bethesda to do it. I still remember the first time I had to spend 30 seconds spamming the attack key only to keep missing, and how spells would fail. It just wouldn't be the same.
Because fatigue actually matters in the game, even for spell-casting. Use combat skills you’re proficient in and keep your fatigue up and you’ll do a LOT better. Obviously, leveling up helps too.
I feel like the leveling system in Morrowind and Oblivion punishes you for focusing on the play style you specialized skills for though. Oblivion didn't "click" for me until I read a detailed guide explaining the leveling system and I should only specialize skills I don't plan on actively using so I can control when I level up. Feels like the exact opposite of intuitive.
Morrowind's leveling system isnt great but you cant even compare it to the shitty mess that is Oblivions. The fact that enemies scaled to your level made it so stupid. Even in skyrim there is some scaling but its much broader and certain enemies wont go past a certain level. Like standard wolves for example dont go above level 5 or something like that and other enemies like the dragon priests have a high minimum level of like 50.
Plus, at some point it was immersion breaking. What were supposed to be flea ridden highwaymen spawned all decked in glass armor if the player character was high level. Hilarious, but dissonant.
There was a small shop with a second floor balcony. I duped so many potions the NPCs were literally waist deep in them. The clinking sound was insane. Then the game crashed 😹
On Xbox, I made the mistake of taking up residence in Ralen Hlaalo's house in Balmora after the quest about his murder, and I used his body as a loot container. I also decorated every surface in his house with weapons, armor, and knick-knacks, to the point that it all spawned an Overflow Loot Bag in the middle of the floor and opening it caused my game to crash.
I honestly loved decorating in Morrowind, it was so much better than trying to force the physics system to cooperate in the later games.
My go-to was the Nerano Manor, I decked that place out so hard.
I don't need a 1:1 remake of Morrowind, but make the world interesting. Vvardenfell's riot of giant mushrooms,, guar, and kwama felt so distinct.
And let the quest journal give you directions to where to go, with an optional Go This Way arrow, rather than making it mandatory. I know where Caisus's house is because I asked at the bar, and I like it that way.
I'd be happy with the middle-ground. Give me a quest marker AFTER I ask around about where something is.
Some of those Morrowind areas were miserable to navigate. I wouldn't mind a rework of some of the towns.
Interestingly, Diablo 4 sort of does this. You get a quest, and there is a giant blue circle on the map showing the general area to explore. In TES6, if you got more information, the circle could shrink.
That's a big problem in games with quest markers. Even if you can turn them off, the game doesn't actually give you enough information to go do it yourself in a lot of quests.
Well yea because those games are driven by the quest marker.
If you make a mode to disable the marker, I’d hope it’s a given that directions would improve
It may not ever get finished, but the Skyblivion mod team has put a target date for like end of 2025 for release.
It looks amazing.
Edit: changed Skywind to Skyblivion.
I remember doing something similar, did a sneak attack on someone in the Arcane University and I guess only the guy I hit aggroed. Guy ran up and hit me, which I asume triggered a cascade of someone helping me, then other people helping the guy, and basically turned into an all out brawl. Pretty sure I saw two of the imperial battlemage guard guys fighting each other.
Getting locked out of one faction because you joined another one was really cool. My favorite moments in New Vegas were when you would randomly get a “Quest Failed” for some quest you never took because an important character died. It just made the game feel huge and encouraged replayability
I'll never forget killing a seemingly random NPC I came across in a backwater town who had some nice armour, or maybe I just accidentally got caught stealing from them and one thing lead to another...
>**With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.**
I understand why they made it impossible to kill main quest related characters in Oblivion and beyond, but I really think they lost some of that role-playing flavor by doing it.
Hard agree.
It's entirely possible to complete Morrowind and kill every single NPC you come across, but it basically requires that you become a God in the process.
Compared to Morrowind I feel like Oblivion put you on rails the entire game. You HAVE to become the Hero of Kvatch, you HAVE to help Martin and ultimately you HAVE to fulfil Martin's destiny.
But Morrowind? Nah. You can kill Caius Cosades the moment you meet him, and then smoke all his moon sugar to boot, and then you can immediately go to Vivec and kill a physical god because he betrayed you in a previous life.
After that it gets complicated, but even if you kill a certain Dwarf before you talk to them you can still develop yourself to survive Keening and Sunder and fulfil your destiny as Nerevarine while murdering everyone that ever called you an N'Wah.
I wish they would just have a "finish him" mechanic for the main quest characters. When you kill them they get knocked down, and an "are you sure you want to kill this guy" dialogue pops up.
But then they probably have to come up with a back door way to finish the main quest, which no one wants to spend time figuring out.
just dont make the damn main quest so reliant on NPCs. It's an open world game, I should technically be able to defeat the big bad on my own (now, whether I'll have to figure everything out myself or not, thats the fun part)
Run randomly across the map, get into a fight with a random powerful being, "thank you for saving the realm" shows up on-screen. Well, guess I won? Lol.
in Morrowind it's "Run a bit after getting out of tutorial area, find a wizard who fell from the sky, snatch a scroll from him, launch yourself into the sky, whoops"
Another example of NV dunking on Bethesda built Fallout games. I don't recall any immortal npcs or any hardlock states being possible from killing npcs in NV.
IIRC the only story beats you need to hit are the platinum chip and securitrons (to secure power, new vegas aint gonna be defended by a single dude), and getting rid of all the possible threats of power, most notably the Legion and NCR after the securitrons.
And even then it's a sensible event chain, the only case I see failing is if YOU don't want power... and I'm not sure that you can't avoid the securitrons
Wasteland 3 is good like this. There's a way to finish every quest even if you are a murder hobo.
Same with Divinity and BG3, now that I think about it.
Nothing beat the RP in my head where I was hella pissed at Benny for shooting me in the head in New Vegas. I walked into the Tops and the dude tried to ask for my weapons. I did my best impression of Jesse Ventura from Predator and minigunned *everyone* on the ground floor. Benny didn't even have a chance, he was hamburger. I wiped his blood off the Platinum Chip and went on my merry way.
Oh, it can still happen in Oblivion. Right before the Battle of Bruma, Martin's immortality gets switched off for some reason (because as Champion, 'I must protect him'). So it turns into a mini escort mission, on top of making sure nobody accidentally runs into your sword otherwise every NPC immediately swarms you screaming "Murder! Murder!" while letting their future emperor get gibbed by a Dremora.
....I used the cheat that turns off combat for every subsequent playthrough.
Oh, you want to join the mage's college? sure no problem, hell you can be the dean for all I care, no don't worry about your obligations to our success, we'll handle that while you support the assassin's guild. hell, we'll make you the most important person to the assassins while we're at it. Why not kill the emperor because that'd be cool. no you can still join the imperial army after that, even though the Emperor's royal guard has been told who you are before the assassination. since you're brand new to the army, we'll send you to do all the new important tasks.
I want morrowind looting and treasure. There was badass loot tucked away and hidden all over the place, it made exploring really worth it. Oblivion and skyrim had leveled loot in most cases, which ended up punishing you for going to higher level places early because you could get a lower stat version of the loot that would otherwise be much stronger if you loot it at a higher level. This means going for loot is pointless until you are already higher level. Like in oblivion you hit a certain level and suddenly every bandit has full daedric armor. It kind of makes it pointless to kill the bandits until you hit that level. Whereas in morrowind there is effectively(unless you kill divayth) only 1 full set of daedric armor and the last two pieces are hidden in the two expansions. The beauty is that you will find those last 2 pieces naturally if you are a keen explorer because they are both in places where you go "I wonder what's over there". All this makes the full set very satisfying to build. The other games make it so you won't find any daedric gear until a certain level up, and then suddenly it is everywhere and valueless.
A lot of the best loot in morrowind is just sitting out there for you to find at any time if you can learn to master the game and that was one of the best parts of that game. They removed this from the future games and went level based. The best items are from quests and the strength of the item is often rolled based off of the level you finish the quest at. It really makes doing some of the quests feel crappy because you know that if you wait until a higher level the reward will be stronger versions of the items you get as a reward. Even Fallout and Starfield seem to use some level of this system as well. Morrowind was better. An item was as strong as your skills allowed it to be and it didn't matter when you looted it.
Just give me a reason to explore and don't waste my time with same-ish randomly generated dungeons with leveled loot that make them pointless at low levels to explore. If I go all the way to the end of some elaborate dungeon, there better be some loot to find that is useful in some way. Skyrim often had this problem. You explore up and down and don't really find anything good in most dungeons. Or, you explore the dungeon at too low of a level and just find crappy loot when you could have waited 10 levels and found good loot. And unless you do a ton of planning and research or have tons of experience with the game you often won't even realize you are ruining your potential reward by doing certain quests at the wrong times.
The games can be summarized like this
Morrowind: Step 1: Do whatever you want, whenever you want. As long as you don't die you are winning and the best loot in the game is hidden all over the place so you *will* eventually find a piece if you take the time to look for it.
Oblivion: Step one: level up to level 35. Step two: start playing the game because the loot is now actually worth looting
Skyrim: Step 1: level up to level 35. Step 2: start playing the game because the loot is now actually worth looting
I still remember stumbling into a random room in the Ghostgate and finding a ton of glass weapons and armor. To this day it remains one of my favorite gaming memories because it made the hell that was getting there and trying to avoid cliffracers worth it. (Not that cliffracers were hard but when I was younger their screams terrified me)
I still remember my first character. I was a 10 year old who loved Warcfaft 3 and called my Orc Barbarian "Son of Thrall" (yeah I know, I was a total loser).
I died to the rats in the first fighters guild quest and realised I hadn't saved so my character got trashed.
I played it on my original Xbox but I fell in love with that game so badly.
One of my favorite Morrowind experiences was entering into a random burial cave and levitating to a very hidden ledge where I found one of the daedric helms, completely by accident. Removing vertical movement from ES games was a huge mistake.
Yea, bandits in full glass and daedric armor was so stupid. Like wtf, game? Where did they get it from? Is it tucked under every boulder or smth.
auto-leveled enemies suck ass, there's no reason to level up, cause there's no areas with tougher enemies.
Morrowind's faction system spoiled me. I've been waiting for something similar for a long time in an action RPG, except now I want more inter-guild relations, both in terms of rivalry and cooperation, more points where you have to choose to progress in one or the other... you know, like how it would work in real life.
I also really loved how it encouraged replayability. You couldn't do everything in one playthrough and it's made going back to Morrowind a lot easier over the years because I can always go 'well I haven't done this in awhile or ever'. Meanwhile with Skyrim, bless it's heart, I rarely bother with the factions on subsequent playthroughs because I already did them 13 years ago. And none were well written enough to warrant replaying.
Morrowind feels like a feature complete game that needs minor cosmetic and UI mods to be playable in 2024. My mod list is rarely larger than 30 and it's almost always just mesh and texture improvements. (And a mod to stop the Dark Brotherhood for awhile because, oh boy, getting jumped at Lv. 5 is not fun.) Meanwhile last I checked my Skyrim save has 240+ mods and it still doesn't feel like enough some days. Many of which are faction mods or just straight up quest mods.
Totally, you are enhancing the general experience with Morrowind mods but mostly QoL it sounds like.
With Skyrim you are making up for the lack of quests or properly filled out areas with mods. They are definitely different cases and reasons for modding.
The writing in morrowind was so good. I could sit there and read for hours playing through that game. Every paragraph of text was so great
And honestly not everything needs to be voiced- you could create a ton of memorable interaction with good writing that doesn’t need to be voiced.
Like, if it’s TES have an enchanted book that you pick dialogue choices with and then the book starts responding. So you are having a conversation, but it’s text based. Shake it up a little. Don’t just have shit dialogue after shit dialogue.
It's honestly not Todd that's the issue with that. They don't have a writing team and Emil Pagliarulo is the 'lead'. So you have people that aren't writers writing quests and dialog with one person who is either inept or stretched too thin in his role.
>I don’t think Todd is entirely to blame for the mid writing.
Emil is awful, but *someone* promoted him and refuses to fix the problem.
IDK if that's Todd's responsibility or someone else, but whoever it is is just as responsible.
At some point you have to just actually play the game and notice that the writing is dogshit. Whoever is on the management side of things at Bethesda fails to do this.
Tbf I'm more attributing Todd to the faction design side of things. Given his philosophy with regards to gaming I really can't see him going 'and now we're going back to Morrowind where if you wanted to be Archmage you needed multiple high level magic skills.' It goes against how he wants the games to be designed these days.
Morrowind UI was sublime. Inventory, stats, skills, map all readable on one screen, with resizable windows? Then you go to Oblivion where you have a single clunky list occupying the left half of the screen and then your dude on the right.
You will never get that again because the Morrowind UI works really well on a PC monitor 3 feet from your face but will never work on a TV 10 feet away.
Oblivion dungeons are a fond memory. Exploring that first Alyeid ruin.
Skyrim had some good moments too. Organically finding the little things in the world and piecing it together. I remember finding Stony Creek Cave and thinking "If was a miner in here, I would have totally stashed my stuff up the waterfall in the cave. Manage to get up there and SURPRISE!
There were also little things in Morrowind, like finding the rare people/bodies with Daedric arrows and throwing knives. I think I only ever found 7 arrows organically, anything else was loot.
I remember one day after playing Oblivion for a while, I was in an Oblivion gate traveling through, and I turned a corner going up a ramp into a larger hall. I immediately felt “This is suspicious” and moved against the wall. Instantly, a massive spiked sled held by chains from the ceiling whipped past my head. It was a cool feeling having my instincts save me lol
In Morrowind if you want to be the head of a magic faction you had to know magic. If you wanted to rise within the Morag Tong you had to learn the skills they value. This needs to be brought back.
It always cheapened the experience of Skyrim that you could be a heavy-armor duel-wielding tank and run the College of Winterhold.
Not only can you be the leader of the College without being a magic user, it was actually easier to do without being a magic user. The last dungeon in the quest line drains you of Magicka right before sending bad guys after you. If you aren't using magic, you might not even notice that it's doing it
Or simply having Tolfdir be the new arch mage, period. Which makes much more sense than electing a fresh student that joined the College a few days ago. You complete the College quest, Tolfdir is elected arch mage, he thanks you for your actions and makes you a full member of the College. You'll always be welcome in Winterhold whenever you want to continue the study of magic (mastery quests), but he knows you have an important mission of your own, so you're granted permission to leave the College and continue your journey. The end. All of this can be done just by changing a few dialogue lines at the end of the College quest and yes, the ending that we got bothers me much more than it should, lol.
Personally I'm a Morrowind #1, Skyrim #2 and Oblivion #3 guy.
Oblivion was such a disappointment after Morrowind for me. Especially with the scaling. Some of the factions were great, as were some of the quests, but man I hated the Oblivion gates, and most of the dungeons. For me Skyrim plays like an enhanced version of Oblivion, so it's hard to go back.
Morrowind is #1 as it simply has the most interesting world, and offers more of a true and fun sandbox than the other two. Of course it helps that I played it back then, I can understand that it's hard to go back to an old game with its weird gameplay mechanics for people who started with Oblivion.
Ah, see you just ignore the gates and fuck around Shivering Isles then absolutely never count the number of hours you've wasted on a game you still haven't bothered to actually beat.
They would need to hire good writers for that. Maybe emil will bring his A game but I doubt it and don’t expect for him to be fired he probably has his job as secured as Todd himself. So unless he retires. It’s not looking good overall.
Thank you. I seem the be the only one online who thinks oblivion was of better quality than skyrim. The graphics were good but beyond that nothing about skyrim captivated me or kept me engage like oblivion. I spent an entire high school summer doing nothing but side quests in oblivion without finishing the main quest or DLC.
I recently went back and played oblivion again. And I agree that oblivion had some great quests.
It also has terrible combat, and one of the worst leveling systems ever. The fact that you have to regularly use your non major skills if you want decent stats is terrible game design.
As much as I want to like Oblivion the terrible level scaling makes it hard to enjoy in the long term and non-combat skills hurt you.
The staggering during combat is really annoying too.
The level scaling killed any enjoyment I had in the game. The additional crashing my Xbox 360 every so often if I exited/entered a cave didn’t help matters. I probably got to a max of 30 hours in before bailing.
dungeons in skyrim are incredibly better than oblivion. i finished oblivion twice and never cared about most of them. finished skyrim just once but explored every location.
Yeah, most Oblivion dungeons are very clearly made with a basic pool of tiles that clicked together. Skyrim had much better variety and personality in locations.
But skyrims improvements in random locations meant it relied on them too much. Quests were generally less interesting and just had you go to a randomly selected location. Oblivions quests were awesome
they really hyped up the radiant quest system but it basically ended up just being "go to (location) and retrieve (item)" or "clear this dungeon" with minimal context thrown in, if any. Even the filler quests in Oblivion's guild questlines had more personality.
That was Morrowind for me. The downright alien landscapes kept things interesting for me and made me want to explore. Oblivion was forest, more forest, mountainous forest, and a little bit of swampy forest over by Leyawiin (which still didn't feel like a swamp compared to, say, Morthal in Skyrim). The only real variation in the base game was the Oblivion gates, and that was only one other type of locale. Skyrim, you can actually get decent variation. Not as good as Morrowind was, but each hold had its distinctive feel, and a decade's worth of graphics improvement sort of make up for it a little bit as well.
There is one exception regarding Oblivion though: I absolutely adore Shivering Isles. It actually capitalized on Oblivion's janky NPC actions to really fill in the atmosphere of a realm of Madness. The variation between Mania and Dementia was really cool, and how those Jyggalag crystals interacted with the landscape was cool as well. Basically every time I play Oblivion, I end up beelining it to Bravil and jumping in the lake because that's the only part of the game I want to play.
Player-made ***SETTLEMENTS*** don’t make sense for Elder Scrolls imo, but they should keep that building system for player ***HOUSING***.
It’s a fantastic level of customization that their previous games sorely lacked. It wasn’t fun having your own home, but it not really being customizable. Even Hearthfire had pre-placed furniture and heavy restrictions on what rooms you could build (some were mutually exclusive).
Not just for furniture either, I like being able to add additional rooms or craft a worshop shed out behind my house.
It's kind of funny how every time I play Skyrim, old houses are just worthless. Honeyside was amazing to me... until Hearthfire. The Hearthfire homes were amazing to me... until the Anniversary homes.
I find myself every day wishing I could actually build or edit in my homes, Fallout4-style. I use Myrwatch because it's the most complete but I don't love where a lot of the furniture is.
There's a bunch.
I'm currently using Myrwatch, a mage's tower near Morthal which has the most features.
There's Golden Hills Estate, where you can have a steward run a farm for you. You gain a bunch of plants that way (for cooking or alchemy) and the steward gives you a bag of gold every time you visit.
Shadowfoot Sanctum is down in the Ratway. I find it the coolest new home, but it's a bit short on features ~~and it's in an inconvenient spot.~~
The biggest thing that tends to differ besides location is displays: Myrwatch, for instance, has nowhere to display Dragon Claws like many of the other Anniversary homes.
EDIT: There's a secret entrance to Shadowfoot Sanctum that I didn't know about. It's now one of the *most* convenient.
> Shadowfoot Sanctum is down in the Ratway. I find it the coolest new home, but it's a bit short on features and it's in an inconvenient spot.
I love this place but man...it is such a PITA to get to and from so I never use it.
Was hendraheim also one of the ones added at anneversary? I randomly did things out of order and it ended up being my first house. It is fantastic.
Can’t you just fast travel to the Riften docks, jump into the water, and enter via the entrance in the water? It’s like 10 seconds from fast travel point to entering the Sanctum.
If you are on PC you can use a mod called Jaxonz Repositioner or something like that. There is probably a much newer mod that does the same thing for SE though. It lets you place any object anywhere and resize it. It could be a little clunky but it made decorating homes so much fun.
FO4 is my most played game by far because of settlement building. I fell in love. Haven't gone back to Skyrim since. I kept hoping for a settlement mod but there's only this one estate you can build up over time, not what I'm looking for since you cannot change the layout. Hearthfire was amazing at the time but super boring compared to what you can do in FO4. I was stoked for Starfield base building and was let down spectacularly and will probably never touch that game again unless outpost modding really takes off. But maybe not even then because the world is so boring.
If Skyrim had proper base building I would be playing the shit out of it. I know I'm in the minority here but I very much want to build houses and villages in TES6. Since FO4 all other Bethesda games are missing something for me now. The world feels so much more alive when you can build your own towns and see them in the distance and interact with the people there. It becomes your world.
FO4 settlements were lighting in a bottle though it seems. Starfield is proof Bethesda has no clue why this feature was so popular. Outposts are God awful. That game broke me and I no longer believe Bethesda can make another great game. Everything was a step back. So technically I don't care about TES6 anymore but base building would be top of my list for my personal forever game.
Hearthfire was perfect. I want this room to do X. Ok, go get the materials. Boom, you now have a room that can do X. And it looks ten times better than what you could do with an hours worth of time if the system was fully customizable. I want to explore and do quests, not wire fuckin lightbulbs.
Honestly, I hope that Bethesda finds a way to let us do both. I would love to see pre-fab (somewhat customizable) homes for the people who don't want to spend the time to make their own and have fully customizable plots of land for people who do.
Agreed, while I like the idea of something being fully customizable I know I'm not creative enough to design a home that isn't more than bare bones function. Give me a decent looking room where some of the furnishings have function and I'm happy
Easy solution, presets and customization. Little work to have the best of both worlds for people that want it, and people that don't.
This way if you don't want to, no fucking around with the house/settlement. But if you do, you can just go ham.
I feel like people *really* underestimate how much the people that like these systems like them. And it doesn't really have to take away things as it's just allowing you to place in-game assets, the system already exists, though with them moving to a new engine I guess you can argue otherwise.
Yeah Fo4 is their only game with settlements and Elder Scrolls never had that feature, so I'm a little confused by OP's post. Starfield having a base building aspect and Hearthfire having a limited player home building feature were not bad things. We just also need the better writing, quests, and RPG elements of older Bethesda games.
I am fine with *ONE* well thought out settlement with quests and progression like Raven Rock in the Solstheim DLC for Morrowind. That one was pretty cool and rewarding.
What was not cool in Fallout 4 were the lame radiant quests attached to settlements that had zero intention of developing anything and sitting around angry until the player personally builds them a farm and a bed.
I prefer the heavily detailed and well-designed houses/rooms of Skyrim to... well, basically any "design your own home from scratch" system that any game has ever used. My only gripe was the room exclusion ("this one or that one") and maybe size (Skyrim housing would have been perfect if I could have used ALL of those rooms).
Like no reason you can't just have presets. Let people do custom that want custom, and do presets for those who don't. Just balance it by making any items that are placed as decorations be requirements (or equal crafting resources?).
I just hope the game is good, period. Starfield has me reaaaaally questioning Bethesdas ability to make a decent game now. Some of their mechanics are still straight out of 2007
>Some of their mechanics are still straight out of 2007
Starfield is missing features that existed in games since 2002. NPCs reacted to having a gun pulled on them in GTA Vice City and the cops would react if you started throwing grenades in the middle of the city. In Starfield nothing.
their focus seems to be more about finding ways to reach new people and less about improving things. which as a consumer is kind of insulting. like i've given you hundreds of dollars over the years and i'm still worth less to you than some dickhead who has never played a single one of your games. great, that makes me feel really good bethesda, thank you for not prioritizing the people who gave you all your success and wealth.
Victims of their own success. I'd say this is a classic [Ringelmann effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect) situation: they have like 5-10x as many employees as they did when Skyrim and Fallout 3 were being developed, and larger teams are slower and less productive (see Starfield and TES6). On the plus side, employees aren't being overworked so that's nice.
First thing I tested in New Atlantis. After chuckling at the awful trees. I wanted to see how people reacted and adjusted to my behavior. Nothin. Not a damn thing. It's like a wax museum.
> It's like a wax museum.
This is also how I felt about the dialogue while trying to "romance" a character.
Like, even the dialogue that's just the two of you becoming closer friends is so...cardboard cutout. Nevermind that it has zero meaningful triggers. It's just like arbitrarily in the middle of a dungeon they'll be like, "Hey, it's now been 4 in-game days since our last dialogue, let's stop and talk about my dead mother for half an hour."
I remember when Bethesda's Radiant AI system they were touting pre-release for Oblivion. All the weird things it would do like a guard getting hungry so he would leave his post to hunt, but then other guards got unhappy that the guy abandoned his post so they left to go find him. Only for every guard to do that so there were no guards. Once there were no guards the town AI started looting everything....eventually they toned it down so hard it basically might as well have not existed in the first place.
But I thought "surely it was a learning experience and they will take that and really innovate into the next game" only for them to abandon the idea completely and regress their overall AI capabilities in subsequent games.
> but then other guards got unhappy that the guy abandoned his post so they left to go find him
Could be fixed by weighing their priority to not abandon duty higher, the bigger problem were criminal NPCs getting slaughtered, hell didn't even have to be career criminals, just someone hungry without money would steal too. Game desperately needed a system where NPCs can go to jail. It's a shame that they abandoned the whole concept for more in rails scripting, how can a game from 2006 be more ambitious than its sequels?
Blew my mind that named NPCs in the major cities didn't have a living place or schedule. Quest NPCs would stand still in the same spot all day and night. In an open world RPG in 2023.
This is unfair. The guards react instantly to you using your futuristic mind control chip of which a single prototype exists (in your head) to cause other people to turn hostile, and will come at you guns blazing
I was riding the Starfield hype train with everyone else before it released. Love Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 3. I paid for early access to Starfield. Then I got to play it and was taken aback - *that's* what they just spent 7 years making?! The game has a lot of defenders (so does Star Citizen,) but frankly the game sucks. I'm sorry, but it does.
> frankly the game sucks
It's a super-mediocre space game that plays like it was developed by an ambitious, but still somewhat amateur, new studio.
The NASA-punk aesthetic is fun, the UC Vanguard questline is neat, Andreja rocks, and the ship-building can be fun with some mods.
The rest of it is pretty weak.
In particular, the writing and lore-building is some of the worst I've seen in any game in decades, which is bitterly disappointing for those of us that really liked early Bethesda.
I won't be buying Bethesda products anymore without a steep discount on Steam, since their trajectory has been sharply down since Oblivion. Sucks to have spent twenty years chasing that Morrowind high and have Bethesda do nothing but vaguely (or bitterly) disappoint in that time.
I have very little faith in them at this point. I loved Oblivion and Skyrim back in the day and even enjoyed Fallout 4 quite a bit, but at that point the lack of depth in the story / character interactions started to stick out compared to the best games in the genre.
After seeing what they did with Starfield (especially given how long it was in development) they would need to do a complete 180 to have the next Elder Scrolls or Fallout live up to their legacy.
Procedurally generated content can be awesome, it's just often not done well. A lot of games get very lazy in the *design* of their procedural content. It's not enough to just slap a bunch of random stuff together; that stuff needs to work with itself, and the games systems, to strengthen each other.
The trouble about Starfield, and tbh Bethesda's RPG games in general, is the design kinda really sucks. If it weren't for the quests and exploration of *interesting content*, the games would have nothing to them. So procedurally generating environments doesn't do any favours, as it reduces one of their key strengths— interesting content— and the game design isn't anywhere near interesting enough to make up for it.
Right, it works really well for that genre. Doesn't work as well when it's crammed into an ostensibly narrative-driven game for what seems to be a quick way to generate "content" at scale.
I love the exploration sandboxes of Skyrim and Fallout 4 but when it comes to being deep RPG systems, choices and consequences, reactivity, allowing creative problem solving from the player, expressing character through dialogue, satisfying combat, and I'm sure others I'm forgetting right now...
Like you, I have very little faith in modern Bethesda. I'm happy Fallout 4 exists as a great way to get people into the Fallout franchise, especially after the show's popularity, but it really isn't a true Fallout. I feel like New Vegas fans are so zealous in our love of it because of all the modern Fallouts, it's the one that's the "most" RPG and the "most" those things I mentioned earlier out of all the modern Fallouts. So for those of us who enjoy the more RPG Fallouts, it's like we have no choice *but* to love New Vegas how we do. Bethesda wants to make games where you can naturally max all your stats and get every skill and be amazing at everything in one play through, for many of us RPGs are about making characters that have weaknesses and tradeoffs and builds.
Bethesda wants to keep Elder Scrolls and Starfield? Fine, it's their original IP. But let a studio that wants to make a modern Fallout that's more like the old ones and New Vegas make one. Bethesda is going all-in on procedural stuff lately, and I don't see how they can leverage that in Fallout unless they use it to make the wasteland *massive,* and I absolutely do not trust them to fill it to the brim with intriguing stuff for the player if they go that big. Proc gen stuff is great to regenerate small areas to make them new again, so I could see some caves and settlements and such being re-done every playthrough, but Starfield had all those planets, Elder Scrolls could potentially generate different realms for the player to hop into and explore, but I don't see how Fallout can exploit that type of procedural generation and have it still be Fallout.
I also think with modern shooting mechanics and Fallouts emphasis on combat and especially gunplay, Bethesda (who is now owned by Microsoft, and so is ID) has absolutely no excuse to have anything other than stellar gun and melee combat. Elder Scrolls should also have stellar melee combat. Please tell me how Fatshark can outdo Bethesda in both areas so hard, especially gunplay since Darktide is Fatshark's first game with gun combat and it's amazing?! Some might say it's an RPG and combat isn't the focus, and I'd not only disagree, I'd say it's important enough that you're doing the game a disservice by considering it less important. As far as combat goes, 3 and New Vegas are barely playable, and Fallout 4 is the absolute bare minimum for decent shooting mechanics. Fallout 4 is the be to beat, but frankly it needs to be much better than that.
“Passion project” that was just Skyrim with a space theme and improved, but still very dated graphics.
If that’s a passion project. I’m genuinely concerned what a return to form would be with a TES6.
Tons of systems need to be completely redesigned from scratch, AND they have to dedicate more resources to the narrative teams because it’s pretty obvious they didn’t do either of those things in Starfield. Such a massive disappointment.
People fail to realize the modding community is excited to create mods for great games that already have a strong foundation. Just look at all the top modded games on Nexus. They were already kicka$$.
The modding community is not excited to fix someone's boring mess of a game.
I've noticed a lot of younger gen z folks using replacement language for curse words, and saying "ahh" instead of "ass" and things like that. I think tik tok started hurting your chances for video/comment visibility if you used them, or at least that's what gen z folks were led to believe, and now it all has just bled over to them doing it on EVERY social media site, without them realizing that cursing on Instagram or Twitter has 0 effect on anything.
My expectations are non-existent. I don't expect anything. I'll be surprised if it runs well and doesn't have bugs out the wazoo. I'll be even more surprised if it actually releases this decade.
It's the super long timelines that have killed my hype and expectations for these franchises. A new game coming out after ~15 years feels more like a reboot of the series than a new installment. I don't have anything close to the same "oh boy I can't wait for the next one!" feeling I did from Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim.
ES6 will be like "oh cool, I used to love this franchise in high school. Maybe I'll try this one out after my annual colonoscopy."
Don't get me wrong, I still hope it's good and I'm sure I'll play it at some point, but the eager anticipation is completely gone for me.
My expectation is to be disappointed. Running well and not having bugs is very low on the priority list. All I want is RPG elements, multiple choices and branching storylines. Everything else is filler.
ES6 needs to do something that worked for skyrim.
Actually coming the fuck out.
FFS we are getting to the 5th year anniversary of the announcement, and at best right now we have... a screenshot.
I mean, Bethesda were trying to prove a point with that.
They have NEVER announced games too early. Normally months before launch (with the exception of Oblivion, as it was used to market the Xbox 360).
People demanded they MENTION the next Elder Scrolls.
They did.
People complain like fucking crazy they did it too early, proving that Bethesda's previous marketing method was the right option.
Bethesda doesn't announce things based on community demand. They announced it to do damage control for fallout 76, which they announced during the same show, and knew would be poorly recieved. An ES6 announcement partially saved them from the onslaught of hate over a multiplayer fallout game
>They have NEVER announced games too early. Normally months before launch (with the exception of Oblivion, as it was used to market the Xbox 360).
Bethesda initially announced that they were working on Starfield at *E3* (remember that?) in *2018*. 5 years before it came out.
Fallout 3 was announced in 2004 and not released until 2008.
Now TES6.
So if you ignore more than half of their announced and/or released games over the last two decades, then sure, they "never" announce early.
Interesting take I didn't quite see it the same way. Bethesda love having interactable props (candle sticks, desk fans, plates) in their games. However usually this is just inventory junk i drop on the ground worth 1 gold. Fallout turned it into usable material that I had to factor into my scavenging in the wasteland. This played very well (imo) into the post apocalyptic feel when people are shooting at you with home made guns and you just need one more screw to put on a suppressor. It was accessible instantly with a few perks to improve it later in the game.
Starfield tried to do something similar but still had a ton of unusable props and made you buy/mine the stuff you actually needed and also locked a lot of the settlement stuff behind levels/perks which meant I played through twice before touching it and then never really used it. It did however again imo have some pretty good questlines even if the land scape was barren.
Elder scrolls could do something like it, I always enjoyed building my house and modding in various things to do so. In fact in ES and fallout I can see settlements fitting in a lot better than starfield! It has the potential to give factions some real weight and ground presence like fallout 4 did. I would just want it to be done right.
One of the largest issues with settlements for me was that Bethesda never has a very intuitive storage system. Skyrim always had better mods for this than Fallout. One of the major things I did with my F4 settlement was just barricade up red rocket and use the garage door to have a cosy apocalypse base and it *really* immersed me!
I think settlements work really well in Survival Mode. I'm replaying fallout 4 for the first time in years. I hated settlements on my first run. But in Survival mode they are a core of the gameplay loop, they act as a checkpoint or bonfire cause you can only save on sleep. Resources are scarce so crafting, cooking, and clean water are all essential to not dying. I'm still not super into the whole base building thing, but having stash houses over the map is a godsend for resting, curing ailments and stocking up on supplies.
Survival mode really makes settlements feel good. They become more than “I like this area cause it’s nice” and closer to “How do I establish a system of safe houses I can keep well stocked so I don’t starve to death.” Made going up North actually challenging as the settlements get more spread out and you really need to manage your food and water out there.
I didn't mind settlements in FO4 and if the ES6 did something similar I wouldn't be too disappointed. My biggest gripe with starfield was I had went into it with fallout mechanics in mind. Most of the loot other than guns and armor was rather useless except to sell and decorate, couldn't breakdown misc objects for materials. Also the settlement system was a little too bare bones, too removed from the rest of the game. While I do love we can get into our ship and go somewhere else it's just loading screen after loading screen. Frankly No Man's Sky does all of it so much better as a space exploration game.
Here’s the thing; I like building settlements because I like city builder and simulation games, but if it doesn’t provide a useful purpose in game that lines up with the amount of time it takes to get into it, it’ll just be a gimmick.
Scavenging was one of my favorite parts of Fallout 4. It gave me a reason to delve into the different buildings/dungeons and made me carefully inspect the environment for things I was on the lookout for. In essence, it IS part of the gameplay loop of Explore > Fight > Loot > Sell. The idea of going out to a location, exploring it, clearing it out, and bringing the loot back to my customizable base is what set Fallout 4's gameplay loop apart, from say something like the Assassin's Creed games that have a similar Explore > Fight > Loot > Sell loop (yes I know they are vastly different games).
I don't think Starfield's "scavenge the things and build things with them" loop was executed very well, but I think other parts of that game messed with that loop. Give me a Skyrim-esque setting, with a fort-building or camp-building option, with the scavenging mechanics of Fallout 4 and I'll be a happy camper :)
Agree, I LOVE scavenging and rebuilding settlements. It became one of my favorite things to do late game when I was finished with most of the quests. One of the things I hate about Starfield the most is how they butchered the base building. If they kept it the same as Fallout 4 it might have been a bad game but still redeemable and playable.
I think they are trying to make their games appeal to "everyone" and lots of people allegedly don't like classic rpg stuff. They've been streamlining out features to expand on side stuff. That's what I see anyway, I didn't play star field because I was super let down by fallout 4.
I don't think the next ES game is for me if they cut out rpg stuff in favor of base building or other features I would consider superfluous. I'd be delighted if they took ideas from New Vegas and implement them in their rpgs. I liked skyrim but the nord vs empire conflict was as inconsequential as each of the factions in fallout 4.
Yeah Baldurs Gate captures the classic tabletop RPG but Disco actually delivers a focused and enthralling RPG storyline that's more like something Bethesda could deliver if they'd put effort into hiring writers.
Ehhh, yes, and no. BG3 uses 5e, which is itself, a less complicated version of D&D, and they simplified a lot of of the systems even further in that game as well.
I would say it's more appropriate to say that people like rpg mechanics, as long as they're not complex.
I completely agree with this. There are tons of popular games with light RPG elements that let you craft a character the way you want without having to spend a lot of timing reading to understand how mechanics will interact.
I think another thing that the wider population likes is feeling like you are breaking the game. BG3 had a lot of that.
I've always liked the idea of optional complexity. You want to spend a thousand hours in a cave tinkering with a system to become a demigod? Awesome. You'd rather just go sightseeing and blast stuff? Also valid.
> trying to make their games appeal to "everyone"
This right here is why most sequels trend towards suckiness.
This doesn't *always* fail so badly. I'd argue Skyrim itself was a clear example of dumbing down things to appeal to a wider audience. But there it worked quite well. Maybe too well. I have a bad feeling the company is going to take away the wrong messages from all of that.
Hamburgers might be good. Milkshakes might be good. Batter-fried cod might be good. But if someone comes along and thinks blending all that together will somehow appeal to a wider audience, the result is going to suck. Furthermore, when everyone does it then all the products start smelling the same. And that smell isn't good.
The thing these companies seem somehow unable to appreciate is that many gamers like certain products or series because of what makes them unique, not in spite of it.
It’s a problem with the big AAA game industry (and tbh the media industry as a whole) over the last decade or so. When you try too hard to make a game for everyone you end up making a game for no one.
Funny I actually think Bethesda games can be BETTER by expanding on the very system you think is a distraction.
Its a world. You are in it. You never once thought it silly that you can become **leader of a guild** and then not actually have to do any leading, like at all?
Yeah I pretty much skipped settlements in my first playthrough of FO4 and missed nothing. A lot of people seem to enjoy them though.
It's weird to see people asking to remove things while at the same time complaining how games get dumbed down.
what OP is getting at is that he/she would rather Bethesda ditch the settlements so they can devote more resources to improving quests and other core elements of the game.
I agree in theory with OP that If getting rid of settlements improved the quests by 2-3x then I would be on board with that. but that's to each gamers preference.
I don't think quests writers work on settlements.
It's a common thing where people thing all people are interchangable and can work on anything, but this is rarely the case.
I built like one or two settlements in FO4 and then ignored the system except as another shop and later some light modding.
I agree, it takes away from the core loop. I didn't mind the mods where you let the survivors build their own settlements as you provide resources. That felt more in tune with the theme of conquering the wasteland.
I think this is my problem with modern games, you tend to have to do every damn thing. The world sits still until you bother with some boring mini game or half baked idea.
But that wasn't really the case in Fallout 4. Yes, you wanted to find your son, but it was obvious you had been refrozen and it had been anywhere from 10 minutes to 100 years since that happened. There wasn't recent sitings of the kid until you get to Diamond City, so stopping and take time to build cities and reluctantly help people in need have a safe home made a lot sense to me.
Hell, it is the perfect Setup in Starfield if it had better and more comprehensive settlement system. Flesh out a whole LIST questline and there is so much room to build out consistent with the lore in the world.
If anything I find it unrealistic (I'm gonna dare say that on a Fallout game) that you find your son in two days. It makes sense (especially in survival mode) that you take your time, need people to trust you before they help you, etc...
Survival mode in FO4 is what got me hooked on the settlement system, the mechanics made your settlements matter and it incentivized building up a FOB to plan your expeditions
Starfield was such a sad step back from that system
I wouldn't mind a settlement system if it weren't 100% custom. Like how you can upgrade your house but instead they give you a plot of land. Then you can upgrade to a farm or keep or whatever but not actually build it yourself. Just drop some gold and get a nicer place automatically configured.
This seems like a good compromise. I have absolutely zero interest in building things myself. Like seriously, none.
That being said, collecting resources and setting your worker bees on it is a different thing entirely, and would probably be fun, rewarding and immersive
I just want morrowind/oblivion with modern graphics and more lore. But we all know they are just pandering and will create something the existing player base doesn't want.
I think Starfield proved that Bethesda has no idea what it wants to do with the settlement system.
In fallout, Settlements could be fun, but were clearly content tacked on near the end. They didn't integrate into the rest of the game at all well, and aside from the joy of designing your own place, there were few rewards to investing deeply in settlement making.
In Starfield, they designed the system with the bones of the settlement system in place, but came up with even LESS reason to engage in building them, while simultaneously nerfing the hell out of the variety and creativity that it could be used with. The end result was a total waste of time for players and designers alike.
At this point, they need to just drop the system. They obviously have no clue what to do with the concept or how to make it fun.
One question is why are they so stingey with resources generation from settlements? Like in fallout 4 you could assign colonists to harvest scrap or grow crops but the limit on gathering those resources was insanely small. so why bother to build more colonies when you get the same number of resources? That is completely opposite to basically every other colony Sim game. Why would I build colonies if not to grow an army of workers to make useful stuff for me. If I spend 10 hours building colonies I should come back to significant resources. They need to remove limits on resource generation and create real incentives to make colonies.
While everything you said is good and well I would kill for the ability to build my own little town that can get raided by raiders and other things from elder scrolls lore. Have my own little black smith I can hire to make me swords and my own mage to enchant my stuff while I feed them materials and other things. Sounds fucking sick to me
The “build a town” stage is a long-standing tradition of old school dnd-inspired fantasy rpgs where an adventurer would eventually loot enough dungeons that they have far more money than they’ll ever need, so might as well build a castle and train the next generation of adventurers.
Seriously, I haven't even really done much of the main quests, just out here building a nice place to store all my power armor suits and legendary weapons. It's also fun to incorporate the junk into your build, like I've been collecting a full set of pool balls and pool cues just to make my bar feel a bit cosier
Nah they need to focus on what made Oblivion fun. Good quests
With a dash of Morrowind writing. And, while it'll never happen so long as Todd is around\*, faction design. It was nice actually having to be a mage in order to progress in the mages guild. And I liked the fights between factions. FO4 kinda had that last part, if nothing else, so who knows. \*Okay since multiple people are making assumptions, I never said Todd wasn't around during Morrowind times. I know he's been with Bethesda since Arena. It was never implied otherwise. His /current/ design philosophy however is very different from back then. That is the current issue.
I remember once I broke the Imperial City mages school zone by casting fury or whatever on the apprentices so much that the mages school faction became hostile to the city guard faction and fighting would immediately break out when I loaded that zone. Good times.....
You know what? Forget Elder Scrolls 6. Just give a complete remaster of Morrowind and Oblivion please. Change nothing but the graphics. Add an option to have the Oblivion duplication glitches. That's all I need from Bethesda. Edit: many valid points have been raised. I had forgotten about a lot of the more frustrating features of the older games. As for everyone who is, for some reason, feeling threatened and defensive, relax, this is purely hypothetical and no is messing with your hopes and dreams for the future of gaming.
People have been trying to remake Morrowind in the Skyrim engine for years now and it's been interesting seeing them talk about how core the differences are between the games. People forget stuff like every swing of a sword in Morrowind being a D&D style dice roll which could result in a straight MISS even if you visually appear to strike the enemy.
That's why I want Bethesda to do it. I still remember the first time I had to spend 30 seconds spamming the attack key only to keep missing, and how spells would fail. It just wouldn't be the same.
Because fatigue actually matters in the game, even for spell-casting. Use combat skills you’re proficient in and keep your fatigue up and you’ll do a LOT better. Obviously, leveling up helps too.
I feel like the leveling system in Morrowind and Oblivion punishes you for focusing on the play style you specialized skills for though. Oblivion didn't "click" for me until I read a detailed guide explaining the leveling system and I should only specialize skills I don't plan on actively using so I can control when I level up. Feels like the exact opposite of intuitive.
Morrowind's leveling system isnt great but you cant even compare it to the shitty mess that is Oblivions. The fact that enemies scaled to your level made it so stupid. Even in skyrim there is some scaling but its much broader and certain enemies wont go past a certain level. Like standard wolves for example dont go above level 5 or something like that and other enemies like the dragon priests have a high minimum level of like 50.
lol scaling in Oblivion. Go to a bandit camp and there's 18 motherfuckers in daedric armor
Plus, at some point it was immersion breaking. What were supposed to be flea ridden highwaymen spawned all decked in glass armor if the player character was high level. Hilarious, but dissonant.
I hated the scaling in Oblivion. I'll never forget playing Morrowind and strolling into that vampire cave near the starting city. 😂💀
Oblivion’s levelling system possibly the worst of any RPG I’ve ever played. Still one of the best games ever made
Ah yes, the duplication glitch, I still remember spawning hundreds of wheels of cheese on hills for entertainment.
There was a small shop with a second floor balcony. I duped so many potions the NPCs were literally waist deep in them. The clinking sound was insane. Then the game crashed 😹
On Xbox, I made the mistake of taking up residence in Ralen Hlaalo's house in Balmora after the quest about his murder, and I used his body as a loot container. I also decorated every surface in his house with weapons, armor, and knick-knacks, to the point that it all spawned an Overflow Loot Bag in the middle of the floor and opening it caused my game to crash.
I honestly loved decorating in Morrowind, it was so much better than trying to force the physics system to cooperate in the later games. My go-to was the Nerano Manor, I decked that place out so hard.
I don't need a 1:1 remake of Morrowind, but make the world interesting. Vvardenfell's riot of giant mushrooms,, guar, and kwama felt so distinct. And let the quest journal give you directions to where to go, with an optional Go This Way arrow, rather than making it mandatory. I know where Caisus's house is because I asked at the bar, and I like it that way.
I'd be happy with the middle-ground. Give me a quest marker AFTER I ask around about where something is. Some of those Morrowind areas were miserable to navigate. I wouldn't mind a rework of some of the towns.
Interestingly, Diablo 4 sort of does this. You get a quest, and there is a giant blue circle on the map showing the general area to explore. In TES6, if you got more information, the circle could shrink.
That's a big problem in games with quest markers. Even if you can turn them off, the game doesn't actually give you enough information to go do it yourself in a lot of quests.
Well yea because those games are driven by the quest marker. If you make a mode to disable the marker, I’d hope it’s a given that directions would improve
>that directions would improve But that takes work.
Ohh yea I forgot... We don't do 'work' here..
It may not ever get finished, but the Skyblivion mod team has put a target date for like end of 2025 for release. It looks amazing. Edit: changed Skywind to Skyblivion.
No thats skyblivion with the 2025 release date, skywind hasnt announced a release date
Having a blast playing Morrowind with OpenMW these days. Personally I don't need a Bethesda remake, I wouldn't trust them to make it right either.
Tamriel Rebuilt is a true gem, the quests are of very high standard, locations made with love, highly recommended!
I remember doing something similar, did a sneak attack on someone in the Arcane University and I guess only the guy I hit aggroed. Guy ran up and hit me, which I asume triggered a cascade of someone helping me, then other people helping the guy, and basically turned into an all out brawl. Pretty sure I saw two of the imperial battlemage guard guys fighting each other.
Getting locked out of one faction because you joined another one was really cool. My favorite moments in New Vegas were when you would randomly get a “Quest Failed” for some quest you never took because an important character died. It just made the game feel huge and encouraged replayability
I'll never forget killing a seemingly random NPC I came across in a backwater town who had some nice armour, or maybe I just accidentally got caught stealing from them and one thing lead to another... >**With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.**
I understand why they made it impossible to kill main quest related characters in Oblivion and beyond, but I really think they lost some of that role-playing flavor by doing it.
Hard agree. It's entirely possible to complete Morrowind and kill every single NPC you come across, but it basically requires that you become a God in the process. Compared to Morrowind I feel like Oblivion put you on rails the entire game. You HAVE to become the Hero of Kvatch, you HAVE to help Martin and ultimately you HAVE to fulfil Martin's destiny. But Morrowind? Nah. You can kill Caius Cosades the moment you meet him, and then smoke all his moon sugar to boot, and then you can immediately go to Vivec and kill a physical god because he betrayed you in a previous life. After that it gets complicated, but even if you kill a certain Dwarf before you talk to them you can still develop yourself to survive Keening and Sunder and fulfil your destiny as Nerevarine while murdering everyone that ever called you an N'Wah.
I wish they would just have a "finish him" mechanic for the main quest characters. When you kill them they get knocked down, and an "are you sure you want to kill this guy" dialogue pops up. But then they probably have to come up with a back door way to finish the main quest, which no one wants to spend time figuring out.
just dont make the damn main quest so reliant on NPCs. It's an open world game, I should technically be able to defeat the big bad on my own (now, whether I'll have to figure everything out myself or not, thats the fun part)
Run randomly across the map, get into a fight with a random powerful being, "thank you for saving the realm" shows up on-screen. Well, guess I won? Lol.
in Morrowind it's "Run a bit after getting out of tutorial area, find a wizard who fell from the sky, snatch a scroll from him, launch yourself into the sky, whoops"
Another example of NV dunking on Bethesda built Fallout games. I don't recall any immortal npcs or any hardlock states being possible from killing npcs in NV.
IIRC the only story beats you need to hit are the platinum chip and securitrons (to secure power, new vegas aint gonna be defended by a single dude), and getting rid of all the possible threats of power, most notably the Legion and NCR after the securitrons. And even then it's a sensible event chain, the only case I see failing is if YOU don't want power... and I'm not sure that you can't avoid the securitrons
Yes Man is the only immortal NPC as far as I know.
Wasteland 3 is good like this. There's a way to finish every quest even if you are a murder hobo. Same with Divinity and BG3, now that I think about it.
Nothing beat the RP in my head where I was hella pissed at Benny for shooting me in the head in New Vegas. I walked into the Tops and the dude tried to ask for my weapons. I did my best impression of Jesse Ventura from Predator and minigunned *everyone* on the ground floor. Benny didn't even have a chance, he was hamburger. I wiped his blood off the Platinum Chip and went on my merry way.
Oh, it can still happen in Oblivion. Right before the Battle of Bruma, Martin's immortality gets switched off for some reason (because as Champion, 'I must protect him'). So it turns into a mini escort mission, on top of making sure nobody accidentally runs into your sword otherwise every NPC immediately swarms you screaming "Murder! Murder!" while letting their future emperor get gibbed by a Dremora. ....I used the cheat that turns off combat for every subsequent playthrough.
But Oblivion doesn't let you continue if Martin dies, does it? You can keep playing Morrowind, just can't do the main quest.
Oh, you want to join the mage's college? sure no problem, hell you can be the dean for all I care, no don't worry about your obligations to our success, we'll handle that while you support the assassin's guild. hell, we'll make you the most important person to the assassins while we're at it. Why not kill the emperor because that'd be cool. no you can still join the imperial army after that, even though the Emperor's royal guard has been told who you are before the assassination. since you're brand new to the army, we'll send you to do all the new important tasks.
I want morrowind looting and treasure. There was badass loot tucked away and hidden all over the place, it made exploring really worth it. Oblivion and skyrim had leveled loot in most cases, which ended up punishing you for going to higher level places early because you could get a lower stat version of the loot that would otherwise be much stronger if you loot it at a higher level. This means going for loot is pointless until you are already higher level. Like in oblivion you hit a certain level and suddenly every bandit has full daedric armor. It kind of makes it pointless to kill the bandits until you hit that level. Whereas in morrowind there is effectively(unless you kill divayth) only 1 full set of daedric armor and the last two pieces are hidden in the two expansions. The beauty is that you will find those last 2 pieces naturally if you are a keen explorer because they are both in places where you go "I wonder what's over there". All this makes the full set very satisfying to build. The other games make it so you won't find any daedric gear until a certain level up, and then suddenly it is everywhere and valueless. A lot of the best loot in morrowind is just sitting out there for you to find at any time if you can learn to master the game and that was one of the best parts of that game. They removed this from the future games and went level based. The best items are from quests and the strength of the item is often rolled based off of the level you finish the quest at. It really makes doing some of the quests feel crappy because you know that if you wait until a higher level the reward will be stronger versions of the items you get as a reward. Even Fallout and Starfield seem to use some level of this system as well. Morrowind was better. An item was as strong as your skills allowed it to be and it didn't matter when you looted it. Just give me a reason to explore and don't waste my time with same-ish randomly generated dungeons with leveled loot that make them pointless at low levels to explore. If I go all the way to the end of some elaborate dungeon, there better be some loot to find that is useful in some way. Skyrim often had this problem. You explore up and down and don't really find anything good in most dungeons. Or, you explore the dungeon at too low of a level and just find crappy loot when you could have waited 10 levels and found good loot. And unless you do a ton of planning and research or have tons of experience with the game you often won't even realize you are ruining your potential reward by doing certain quests at the wrong times. The games can be summarized like this Morrowind: Step 1: Do whatever you want, whenever you want. As long as you don't die you are winning and the best loot in the game is hidden all over the place so you *will* eventually find a piece if you take the time to look for it. Oblivion: Step one: level up to level 35. Step two: start playing the game because the loot is now actually worth looting Skyrim: Step 1: level up to level 35. Step 2: start playing the game because the loot is now actually worth looting
I still remember stumbling into a random room in the Ghostgate and finding a ton of glass weapons and armor. To this day it remains one of my favorite gaming memories because it made the hell that was getting there and trying to avoid cliffracers worth it. (Not that cliffracers were hard but when I was younger their screams terrified me)
I still remember my first character. I was a 10 year old who loved Warcfaft 3 and called my Orc Barbarian "Son of Thrall" (yeah I know, I was a total loser). I died to the rats in the first fighters guild quest and realised I hadn't saved so my character got trashed. I played it on my original Xbox but I fell in love with that game so badly.
One of my favorite Morrowind experiences was entering into a random burial cave and levitating to a very hidden ledge where I found one of the daedric helms, completely by accident. Removing vertical movement from ES games was a huge mistake.
Yea, bandits in full glass and daedric armor was so stupid. Like wtf, game? Where did they get it from? Is it tucked under every boulder or smth. auto-leveled enemies suck ass, there's no reason to level up, cause there's no areas with tougher enemies.
Bring back what REALLY mattered in Morrowind… …*Mudcrab merchant.*
Morrowind's faction system spoiled me. I've been waiting for something similar for a long time in an action RPG, except now I want more inter-guild relations, both in terms of rivalry and cooperation, more points where you have to choose to progress in one or the other... you know, like how it would work in real life.
I also really loved how it encouraged replayability. You couldn't do everything in one playthrough and it's made going back to Morrowind a lot easier over the years because I can always go 'well I haven't done this in awhile or ever'. Meanwhile with Skyrim, bless it's heart, I rarely bother with the factions on subsequent playthroughs because I already did them 13 years ago. And none were well written enough to warrant replaying. Morrowind feels like a feature complete game that needs minor cosmetic and UI mods to be playable in 2024. My mod list is rarely larger than 30 and it's almost always just mesh and texture improvements. (And a mod to stop the Dark Brotherhood for awhile because, oh boy, getting jumped at Lv. 5 is not fun.) Meanwhile last I checked my Skyrim save has 240+ mods and it still doesn't feel like enough some days. Many of which are faction mods or just straight up quest mods.
The writing for the guilds in Skyrim felt like YA fanfiction lol.
Totally, you are enhancing the general experience with Morrowind mods but mostly QoL it sounds like. With Skyrim you are making up for the lack of quests or properly filled out areas with mods. They are definitely different cases and reasons for modding.
The writing in morrowind was so good. I could sit there and read for hours playing through that game. Every paragraph of text was so great And honestly not everything needs to be voiced- you could create a ton of memorable interaction with good writing that doesn’t need to be voiced. Like, if it’s TES have an enchanted book that you pick dialogue choices with and then the book starts responding. So you are having a conversation, but it’s text based. Shake it up a little. Don’t just have shit dialogue after shit dialogue.
It's honestly not Todd that's the issue with that. They don't have a writing team and Emil Pagliarulo is the 'lead'. So you have people that aren't writers writing quests and dialog with one person who is either inept or stretched too thin in his role.
Judging by his twitter conduct I would lean towards inept
I don’t think Todd is entirely to blame for the mid writing. Emil is the lead writer for f3, Skyrim, and f4.
>I don’t think Todd is entirely to blame for the mid writing. Emil is awful, but *someone* promoted him and refuses to fix the problem. IDK if that's Todd's responsibility or someone else, but whoever it is is just as responsible. At some point you have to just actually play the game and notice that the writing is dogshit. Whoever is on the management side of things at Bethesda fails to do this.
They know and they don't care.
Tbf I'm more attributing Todd to the faction design side of things. Given his philosophy with regards to gaming I really can't see him going 'and now we're going back to Morrowind where if you wanted to be Archmage you needed multiple high level magic skills.' It goes against how he wants the games to be designed these days.
Yeah, fun times when Unga Bunga the hammer-swinging barbarian can become Archmage despite that he can barely cast a fire spell.
Not only Morrowind writing, but Morrowind UI as well.
Morrowind UI was sublime. Inventory, stats, skills, map all readable on one screen, with resizable windows? Then you go to Oblivion where you have a single clunky list occupying the left half of the screen and then your dude on the right. You will never get that again because the Morrowind UI works really well on a PC monitor 3 feet from your face but will never work on a TV 10 feet away.
And that's the reason Skyrim UI sucks so hard. It was designed for console first.
I wouldn't really call it good for consoles either.
Oblivion dungeons are a fond memory. Exploring that first Alyeid ruin. Skyrim had some good moments too. Organically finding the little things in the world and piecing it together. I remember finding Stony Creek Cave and thinking "If was a miner in here, I would have totally stashed my stuff up the waterfall in the cave. Manage to get up there and SURPRISE! There were also little things in Morrowind, like finding the rare people/bodies with Daedric arrows and throwing knives. I think I only ever found 7 arrows organically, anything else was loot.
Exploring that first Ayleid ruin you set eyes on when you escape the sewer 🥰
Vilverin
I remember one day after playing Oblivion for a while, I was in an Oblivion gate traveling through, and I turned a corner going up a ramp into a larger hall. I immediately felt “This is suspicious” and moved against the wall. Instantly, a massive spiked sled held by chains from the ceiling whipped past my head. It was a cool feeling having my instincts save me lol
Skyrim was pretty fun but Oblivion was so much better imo.
Oblivions quests with Skyrims mechanics and Morrowinds factions would be glorious.
But with Morrowinds factions system!
In Morrowind if you want to be the head of a magic faction you had to know magic. If you wanted to rise within the Morag Tong you had to learn the skills they value. This needs to be brought back. It always cheapened the experience of Skyrim that you could be a heavy-armor duel-wielding tank and run the College of Winterhold.
Not only can you be the leader of the College without being a magic user, it was actually easier to do without being a magic user. The last dungeon in the quest line drains you of Magicka right before sending bad guys after you. If you aren't using magic, you might not even notice that it's doing it
It could’ve easily been fixed by having Tolfdir be interim arch mage until you’ve completed the mastery quests for each spell school.
Or simply having Tolfdir be the new arch mage, period. Which makes much more sense than electing a fresh student that joined the College a few days ago. You complete the College quest, Tolfdir is elected arch mage, he thanks you for your actions and makes you a full member of the College. You'll always be welcome in Winterhold whenever you want to continue the study of magic (mastery quests), but he knows you have an important mission of your own, so you're granted permission to leave the College and continue your journey. The end. All of this can be done just by changing a few dialogue lines at the end of the College quest and yes, the ending that we got bothers me much more than it should, lol.
For 90% of people it will be their first game
Personally I'm a Morrowind #1, Skyrim #2 and Oblivion #3 guy. Oblivion was such a disappointment after Morrowind for me. Especially with the scaling. Some of the factions were great, as were some of the quests, but man I hated the Oblivion gates, and most of the dungeons. For me Skyrim plays like an enhanced version of Oblivion, so it's hard to go back. Morrowind is #1 as it simply has the most interesting world, and offers more of a true and fun sandbox than the other two. Of course it helps that I played it back then, I can understand that it's hard to go back to an old game with its weird gameplay mechanics for people who started with Oblivion.
Ah, see you just ignore the gates and fuck around Shivering Isles then absolutely never count the number of hours you've wasted on a game you still haven't bothered to actually beat.
They would need to hire good writers for that. Maybe emil will bring his A game but I doubt it and don’t expect for him to be fired he probably has his job as secured as Todd himself. So unless he retires. It’s not looking good overall.
Nah they need to focus on what made morrowind fun. A good world
Nah they need to focus on what made daggerfall good. Map the size of actual france
Thank you. I seem the be the only one online who thinks oblivion was of better quality than skyrim. The graphics were good but beyond that nothing about skyrim captivated me or kept me engage like oblivion. I spent an entire high school summer doing nothing but side quests in oblivion without finishing the main quest or DLC.
I recently went back and played oblivion again. And I agree that oblivion had some great quests. It also has terrible combat, and one of the worst leveling systems ever. The fact that you have to regularly use your non major skills if you want decent stats is terrible game design.
As much as I want to like Oblivion the terrible level scaling makes it hard to enjoy in the long term and non-combat skills hurt you. The staggering during combat is really annoying too.
The level scaling killed any enjoyment I had in the game. The additional crashing my Xbox 360 every so often if I exited/entered a cave didn’t help matters. I probably got to a max of 30 hours in before bailing.
dungeons in skyrim are incredibly better than oblivion. i finished oblivion twice and never cared about most of them. finished skyrim just once but explored every location.
Yeah, most Oblivion dungeons are very clearly made with a basic pool of tiles that clicked together. Skyrim had much better variety and personality in locations. But skyrims improvements in random locations meant it relied on them too much. Quests were generally less interesting and just had you go to a randomly selected location. Oblivions quests were awesome
they really hyped up the radiant quest system but it basically ended up just being "go to (location) and retrieve (item)" or "clear this dungeon" with minimal context thrown in, if any. Even the filler quests in Oblivion's guild questlines had more personality.
The top comment on this page is people praising Oblivion over Skyrim so I think you are in good company 👍
That was Morrowind for me. The downright alien landscapes kept things interesting for me and made me want to explore. Oblivion was forest, more forest, mountainous forest, and a little bit of swampy forest over by Leyawiin (which still didn't feel like a swamp compared to, say, Morthal in Skyrim). The only real variation in the base game was the Oblivion gates, and that was only one other type of locale. Skyrim, you can actually get decent variation. Not as good as Morrowind was, but each hold had its distinctive feel, and a decade's worth of graphics improvement sort of make up for it a little bit as well. There is one exception regarding Oblivion though: I absolutely adore Shivering Isles. It actually capitalized on Oblivion's janky NPC actions to really fill in the atmosphere of a realm of Madness. The variation between Mania and Dementia was really cool, and how those Jyggalag crystals interacted with the landscape was cool as well. Basically every time I play Oblivion, I end up beelining it to Bravil and jumping in the lake because that's the only part of the game I want to play.
They need to focus on what made Morrowind fun, an amazing world with deep lore and political factions.
Player-made ***SETTLEMENTS*** don’t make sense for Elder Scrolls imo, but they should keep that building system for player ***HOUSING***. It’s a fantastic level of customization that their previous games sorely lacked. It wasn’t fun having your own home, but it not really being customizable. Even Hearthfire had pre-placed furniture and heavy restrictions on what rooms you could build (some were mutually exclusive). Not just for furniture either, I like being able to add additional rooms or craft a worshop shed out behind my house.
It's kind of funny how every time I play Skyrim, old houses are just worthless. Honeyside was amazing to me... until Hearthfire. The Hearthfire homes were amazing to me... until the Anniversary homes. I find myself every day wishing I could actually build or edit in my homes, Fallout4-style. I use Myrwatch because it's the most complete but I don't love where a lot of the furniture is.
Wait, what homes were added in anniversary? I haven't played that version yet but am considering it time for a replay of Skyrim.
There's a bunch. I'm currently using Myrwatch, a mage's tower near Morthal which has the most features. There's Golden Hills Estate, where you can have a steward run a farm for you. You gain a bunch of plants that way (for cooking or alchemy) and the steward gives you a bag of gold every time you visit. Shadowfoot Sanctum is down in the Ratway. I find it the coolest new home, but it's a bit short on features ~~and it's in an inconvenient spot.~~ The biggest thing that tends to differ besides location is displays: Myrwatch, for instance, has nowhere to display Dragon Claws like many of the other Anniversary homes. EDIT: There's a secret entrance to Shadowfoot Sanctum that I didn't know about. It's now one of the *most* convenient.
Oh shit am I gonna have to play skyrim again? damnit
> Shadowfoot Sanctum is down in the Ratway. I find it the coolest new home, but it's a bit short on features and it's in an inconvenient spot. I love this place but man...it is such a PITA to get to and from so I never use it. Was hendraheim also one of the ones added at anneversary? I randomly did things out of order and it ended up being my first house. It is fantastic.
Can’t you just fast travel to the Riften docks, jump into the water, and enter via the entrance in the water? It’s like 10 seconds from fast travel point to entering the Sanctum.
....*what*.
If you are on PC you can use a mod called Jaxonz Repositioner or something like that. There is probably a much newer mod that does the same thing for SE though. It lets you place any object anywhere and resize it. It could be a little clunky but it made decorating homes so much fun.
FO4 is my most played game by far because of settlement building. I fell in love. Haven't gone back to Skyrim since. I kept hoping for a settlement mod but there's only this one estate you can build up over time, not what I'm looking for since you cannot change the layout. Hearthfire was amazing at the time but super boring compared to what you can do in FO4. I was stoked for Starfield base building and was let down spectacularly and will probably never touch that game again unless outpost modding really takes off. But maybe not even then because the world is so boring. If Skyrim had proper base building I would be playing the shit out of it. I know I'm in the minority here but I very much want to build houses and villages in TES6. Since FO4 all other Bethesda games are missing something for me now. The world feels so much more alive when you can build your own towns and see them in the distance and interact with the people there. It becomes your world. FO4 settlements were lighting in a bottle though it seems. Starfield is proof Bethesda has no clue why this feature was so popular. Outposts are God awful. That game broke me and I no longer believe Bethesda can make another great game. Everything was a step back. So technically I don't care about TES6 anymore but base building would be top of my list for my personal forever game.
Love the housing in skyrim and elder scrolls online. I've spent literally days in gametime on them 😅
The housing in Skyrim was barebones, little to no customization outside of Hearthfire, and even Hearthfire was heavily restrictive
Hearthfire was perfect. I want this room to do X. Ok, go get the materials. Boom, you now have a room that can do X. And it looks ten times better than what you could do with an hours worth of time if the system was fully customizable. I want to explore and do quests, not wire fuckin lightbulbs.
Honestly, I hope that Bethesda finds a way to let us do both. I would love to see pre-fab (somewhat customizable) homes for the people who don't want to spend the time to make their own and have fully customizable plots of land for people who do.
Agreed, while I like the idea of something being fully customizable I know I'm not creative enough to design a home that isn't more than bare bones function. Give me a decent looking room where some of the furnishings have function and I'm happy
Agreed. Hogwarts Legacy is another game with a similar level of customization that worked really well.
Easy solution, presets and customization. Little work to have the best of both worlds for people that want it, and people that don't. This way if you don't want to, no fucking around with the house/settlement. But if you do, you can just go ham. I feel like people *really* underestimate how much the people that like these systems like them. And it doesn't really have to take away things as it's just allowing you to place in-game assets, the system already exists, though with them moving to a new engine I guess you can argue otherwise.
Which imo was good enough. Not everyone wants a side of minecraft with their RPG.
Screw this. Give me the option of creating a little village that can either live a peaceful community or be a war camp for conquering my neighbors.
Yeah Fo4 is their only game with settlements and Elder Scrolls never had that feature, so I'm a little confused by OP's post. Starfield having a base building aspect and Hearthfire having a limited player home building feature were not bad things. We just also need the better writing, quests, and RPG elements of older Bethesda games.
I am fine with *ONE* well thought out settlement with quests and progression like Raven Rock in the Solstheim DLC for Morrowind. That one was pretty cool and rewarding. What was not cool in Fallout 4 were the lame radiant quests attached to settlements that had zero intention of developing anything and sitting around angry until the player personally builds them a farm and a bed.
I prefer the heavily detailed and well-designed houses/rooms of Skyrim to... well, basically any "design your own home from scratch" system that any game has ever used. My only gripe was the room exclusion ("this one or that one") and maybe size (Skyrim housing would have been perfect if I could have used ALL of those rooms).
Like no reason you can't just have presets. Let people do custom that want custom, and do presets for those who don't. Just balance it by making any items that are placed as decorations be requirements (or equal crafting resources?).
I just hope the game is good, period. Starfield has me reaaaaally questioning Bethesdas ability to make a decent game now. Some of their mechanics are still straight out of 2007
>Some of their mechanics are still straight out of 2007 Starfield is missing features that existed in games since 2002. NPCs reacted to having a gun pulled on them in GTA Vice City and the cops would react if you started throwing grenades in the middle of the city. In Starfield nothing.
Bethesda just haven't evolved as a studio.
No theyve gone backwards
That's a type of evolution!
Devolution.
their focus seems to be more about finding ways to reach new people and less about improving things. which as a consumer is kind of insulting. like i've given you hundreds of dollars over the years and i'm still worth less to you than some dickhead who has never played a single one of your games. great, that makes me feel really good bethesda, thank you for not prioritizing the people who gave you all your success and wealth.
Victims of their own success. I'd say this is a classic [Ringelmann effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect) situation: they have like 5-10x as many employees as they did when Skyrim and Fallout 3 were being developed, and larger teams are slower and less productive (see Starfield and TES6). On the plus side, employees aren't being overworked so that's nice.
First thing I tested in New Atlantis. After chuckling at the awful trees. I wanted to see how people reacted and adjusted to my behavior. Nothin. Not a damn thing. It's like a wax museum.
> It's like a wax museum. This is also how I felt about the dialogue while trying to "romance" a character. Like, even the dialogue that's just the two of you becoming closer friends is so...cardboard cutout. Nevermind that it has zero meaningful triggers. It's just like arbitrarily in the middle of a dungeon they'll be like, "Hey, it's now been 4 in-game days since our last dialogue, let's stop and talk about my dead mother for half an hour."
I remember when Bethesda's Radiant AI system they were touting pre-release for Oblivion. All the weird things it would do like a guard getting hungry so he would leave his post to hunt, but then other guards got unhappy that the guy abandoned his post so they left to go find him. Only for every guard to do that so there were no guards. Once there were no guards the town AI started looting everything....eventually they toned it down so hard it basically might as well have not existed in the first place. But I thought "surely it was a learning experience and they will take that and really innovate into the next game" only for them to abandon the idea completely and regress their overall AI capabilities in subsequent games.
> but then other guards got unhappy that the guy abandoned his post so they left to go find him Could be fixed by weighing their priority to not abandon duty higher, the bigger problem were criminal NPCs getting slaughtered, hell didn't even have to be career criminals, just someone hungry without money would steal too. Game desperately needed a system where NPCs can go to jail. It's a shame that they abandoned the whole concept for more in rails scripting, how can a game from 2006 be more ambitious than its sequels?
Blew my mind that named NPCs in the major cities didn't have a living place or schedule. Quest NPCs would stand still in the same spot all day and night. In an open world RPG in 2023.
This is unfair. The guards react instantly to you using your futuristic mind control chip of which a single prototype exists (in your head) to cause other people to turn hostile, and will come at you guns blazing
I was riding the Starfield hype train with everyone else before it released. Love Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 3. I paid for early access to Starfield. Then I got to play it and was taken aback - *that's* what they just spent 7 years making?! The game has a lot of defenders (so does Star Citizen,) but frankly the game sucks. I'm sorry, but it does.
> frankly the game sucks It's a super-mediocre space game that plays like it was developed by an ambitious, but still somewhat amateur, new studio. The NASA-punk aesthetic is fun, the UC Vanguard questline is neat, Andreja rocks, and the ship-building can be fun with some mods. The rest of it is pretty weak. In particular, the writing and lore-building is some of the worst I've seen in any game in decades, which is bitterly disappointing for those of us that really liked early Bethesda. I won't be buying Bethesda products anymore without a steep discount on Steam, since their trajectory has been sharply down since Oblivion. Sucks to have spent twenty years chasing that Morrowind high and have Bethesda do nothing but vaguely (or bitterly) disappoint in that time.
I have very little faith in them at this point. I loved Oblivion and Skyrim back in the day and even enjoyed Fallout 4 quite a bit, but at that point the lack of depth in the story / character interactions started to stick out compared to the best games in the genre. After seeing what they did with Starfield (especially given how long it was in development) they would need to do a complete 180 to have the next Elder Scrolls or Fallout live up to their legacy.
Feels to me like they're just leaning more and more into procedurally generated content as time goes on.
Any time I see 'procedurally generated' it instantly turns me off the game. You just know there's not going to be any depth.
Procedurally generated content can be awesome, it's just often not done well. A lot of games get very lazy in the *design* of their procedural content. It's not enough to just slap a bunch of random stuff together; that stuff needs to work with itself, and the games systems, to strengthen each other. The trouble about Starfield, and tbh Bethesda's RPG games in general, is the design kinda really sucks. If it weren't for the quests and exploration of *interesting content*, the games would have nothing to them. So procedurally generating environments doesn't do any favours, as it reduces one of their key strengths— interesting content— and the game design isn't anywhere near interesting enough to make up for it.
I personally love rougelikes/roguelites which all feature heavy randomization but all still have tons of love poured into them
Right, it works really well for that genre. Doesn't work as well when it's crammed into an ostensibly narrative-driven game for what seems to be a quick way to generate "content" at scale.
I love the exploration sandboxes of Skyrim and Fallout 4 but when it comes to being deep RPG systems, choices and consequences, reactivity, allowing creative problem solving from the player, expressing character through dialogue, satisfying combat, and I'm sure others I'm forgetting right now... Like you, I have very little faith in modern Bethesda. I'm happy Fallout 4 exists as a great way to get people into the Fallout franchise, especially after the show's popularity, but it really isn't a true Fallout. I feel like New Vegas fans are so zealous in our love of it because of all the modern Fallouts, it's the one that's the "most" RPG and the "most" those things I mentioned earlier out of all the modern Fallouts. So for those of us who enjoy the more RPG Fallouts, it's like we have no choice *but* to love New Vegas how we do. Bethesda wants to make games where you can naturally max all your stats and get every skill and be amazing at everything in one play through, for many of us RPGs are about making characters that have weaknesses and tradeoffs and builds. Bethesda wants to keep Elder Scrolls and Starfield? Fine, it's their original IP. But let a studio that wants to make a modern Fallout that's more like the old ones and New Vegas make one. Bethesda is going all-in on procedural stuff lately, and I don't see how they can leverage that in Fallout unless they use it to make the wasteland *massive,* and I absolutely do not trust them to fill it to the brim with intriguing stuff for the player if they go that big. Proc gen stuff is great to regenerate small areas to make them new again, so I could see some caves and settlements and such being re-done every playthrough, but Starfield had all those planets, Elder Scrolls could potentially generate different realms for the player to hop into and explore, but I don't see how Fallout can exploit that type of procedural generation and have it still be Fallout. I also think with modern shooting mechanics and Fallouts emphasis on combat and especially gunplay, Bethesda (who is now owned by Microsoft, and so is ID) has absolutely no excuse to have anything other than stellar gun and melee combat. Elder Scrolls should also have stellar melee combat. Please tell me how Fatshark can outdo Bethesda in both areas so hard, especially gunplay since Darktide is Fatshark's first game with gun combat and it's amazing?! Some might say it's an RPG and combat isn't the focus, and I'd not only disagree, I'd say it's important enough that you're doing the game a disservice by considering it less important. As far as combat goes, 3 and New Vegas are barely playable, and Fallout 4 is the absolute bare minimum for decent shooting mechanics. Fallout 4 is the be to beat, but frankly it needs to be much better than that.
“Passion project” that was just Skyrim with a space theme and improved, but still very dated graphics. If that’s a passion project. I’m genuinely concerned what a return to form would be with a TES6. Tons of systems need to be completely redesigned from scratch, AND they have to dedicate more resources to the narrative teams because it’s pretty obvious they didn’t do either of those things in Starfield. Such a massive disappointment.
Improved is a stretch
With starfield they are just waiting for modders to make their game good for free
People fail to realize the modding community is excited to create mods for great games that already have a strong foundation. Just look at all the top modded games on Nexus. They were already kicka$$. The modding community is not excited to fix someone's boring mess of a game.
You can say ass on the internet
Now when I see that stuff, I just assume they're a kid and have helicopter parents.
don't swear on my christian minecraft server
I've noticed a lot of younger gen z folks using replacement language for curse words, and saying "ahh" instead of "ass" and things like that. I think tik tok started hurting your chances for video/comment visibility if you used them, or at least that's what gen z folks were led to believe, and now it all has just bled over to them doing it on EVERY social media site, without them realizing that cursing on Instagram or Twitter has 0 effect on anything.
Heck yes you can
Starfield is almost top 10 in the most amount of mods on Nexus, and CK still hasn't been released.
My expectations are non-existent. I don't expect anything. I'll be surprised if it runs well and doesn't have bugs out the wazoo. I'll be even more surprised if it actually releases this decade.
It's the super long timelines that have killed my hype and expectations for these franchises. A new game coming out after ~15 years feels more like a reboot of the series than a new installment. I don't have anything close to the same "oh boy I can't wait for the next one!" feeling I did from Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim. ES6 will be like "oh cool, I used to love this franchise in high school. Maybe I'll try this one out after my annual colonoscopy." Don't get me wrong, I still hope it's good and I'm sure I'll play it at some point, but the eager anticipation is completely gone for me.
My expectations are subterranean and I will still be disappointed
My expectation is to be disappointed. Running well and not having bugs is very low on the priority list. All I want is RPG elements, multiple choices and branching storylines. Everything else is filler.
It makes sense in fallout, for elder scroll I want an updated version of what skyrim had an build/buy/earn and then customize a house
ES6 needs to do something that worked for skyrim. Actually coming the fuck out. FFS we are getting to the 5th year anniversary of the announcement, and at best right now we have... a screenshot.
I mean, Bethesda were trying to prove a point with that. They have NEVER announced games too early. Normally months before launch (with the exception of Oblivion, as it was used to market the Xbox 360). People demanded they MENTION the next Elder Scrolls. They did. People complain like fucking crazy they did it too early, proving that Bethesda's previous marketing method was the right option.
Bethesda doesn't announce things based on community demand. They announced it to do damage control for fallout 76, which they announced during the same show, and knew would be poorly recieved. An ES6 announcement partially saved them from the onslaught of hate over a multiplayer fallout game
>They have NEVER announced games too early. Normally months before launch (with the exception of Oblivion, as it was used to market the Xbox 360). Bethesda initially announced that they were working on Starfield at *E3* (remember that?) in *2018*. 5 years before it came out. Fallout 3 was announced in 2004 and not released until 2008. Now TES6. So if you ignore more than half of their announced and/or released games over the last two decades, then sure, they "never" announce early.
Interesting take I didn't quite see it the same way. Bethesda love having interactable props (candle sticks, desk fans, plates) in their games. However usually this is just inventory junk i drop on the ground worth 1 gold. Fallout turned it into usable material that I had to factor into my scavenging in the wasteland. This played very well (imo) into the post apocalyptic feel when people are shooting at you with home made guns and you just need one more screw to put on a suppressor. It was accessible instantly with a few perks to improve it later in the game. Starfield tried to do something similar but still had a ton of unusable props and made you buy/mine the stuff you actually needed and also locked a lot of the settlement stuff behind levels/perks which meant I played through twice before touching it and then never really used it. It did however again imo have some pretty good questlines even if the land scape was barren. Elder scrolls could do something like it, I always enjoyed building my house and modding in various things to do so. In fact in ES and fallout I can see settlements fitting in a lot better than starfield! It has the potential to give factions some real weight and ground presence like fallout 4 did. I would just want it to be done right. One of the largest issues with settlements for me was that Bethesda never has a very intuitive storage system. Skyrim always had better mods for this than Fallout. One of the major things I did with my F4 settlement was just barricade up red rocket and use the garage door to have a cosy apocalypse base and it *really* immersed me!
I think settlements work really well in Survival Mode. I'm replaying fallout 4 for the first time in years. I hated settlements on my first run. But in Survival mode they are a core of the gameplay loop, they act as a checkpoint or bonfire cause you can only save on sleep. Resources are scarce so crafting, cooking, and clean water are all essential to not dying. I'm still not super into the whole base building thing, but having stash houses over the map is a godsend for resting, curing ailments and stocking up on supplies.
Survival mode really makes settlements feel good. They become more than “I like this area cause it’s nice” and closer to “How do I establish a system of safe houses I can keep well stocked so I don’t starve to death.” Made going up North actually challenging as the settlements get more spread out and you really need to manage your food and water out there.
I didn't mind settlements in FO4 and if the ES6 did something similar I wouldn't be too disappointed. My biggest gripe with starfield was I had went into it with fallout mechanics in mind. Most of the loot other than guns and armor was rather useless except to sell and decorate, couldn't breakdown misc objects for materials. Also the settlement system was a little too bare bones, too removed from the rest of the game. While I do love we can get into our ship and go somewhere else it's just loading screen after loading screen. Frankly No Man's Sky does all of it so much better as a space exploration game.
Here’s the thing; I like building settlements because I like city builder and simulation games, but if it doesn’t provide a useful purpose in game that lines up with the amount of time it takes to get into it, it’ll just be a gimmick.
Scavenging was one of my favorite parts of Fallout 4. It gave me a reason to delve into the different buildings/dungeons and made me carefully inspect the environment for things I was on the lookout for. In essence, it IS part of the gameplay loop of Explore > Fight > Loot > Sell. The idea of going out to a location, exploring it, clearing it out, and bringing the loot back to my customizable base is what set Fallout 4's gameplay loop apart, from say something like the Assassin's Creed games that have a similar Explore > Fight > Loot > Sell loop (yes I know they are vastly different games). I don't think Starfield's "scavenge the things and build things with them" loop was executed very well, but I think other parts of that game messed with that loop. Give me a Skyrim-esque setting, with a fort-building or camp-building option, with the scavenging mechanics of Fallout 4 and I'll be a happy camper :)
Agree, I LOVE scavenging and rebuilding settlements. It became one of my favorite things to do late game when I was finished with most of the quests. One of the things I hate about Starfield the most is how they butchered the base building. If they kept it the same as Fallout 4 it might have been a bad game but still redeemable and playable.
I think they are trying to make their games appeal to "everyone" and lots of people allegedly don't like classic rpg stuff. They've been streamlining out features to expand on side stuff. That's what I see anyway, I didn't play star field because I was super let down by fallout 4. I don't think the next ES game is for me if they cut out rpg stuff in favor of base building or other features I would consider superfluous. I'd be delighted if they took ideas from New Vegas and implement them in their rpgs. I liked skyrim but the nord vs empire conflict was as inconsequential as each of the factions in fallout 4.
Baldurs Gate 3 completely obliterated the idea that people dont like original RPG mechanics.
Not only that, but games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 are already RPG-lite leaning more into the action side of things.
Disco Elysium before that even.
Yeah Baldurs Gate captures the classic tabletop RPG but Disco actually delivers a focused and enthralling RPG storyline that's more like something Bethesda could deliver if they'd put effort into hiring writers.
Ehhh, yes, and no. BG3 uses 5e, which is itself, a less complicated version of D&D, and they simplified a lot of of the systems even further in that game as well. I would say it's more appropriate to say that people like rpg mechanics, as long as they're not complex.
I completely agree with this. There are tons of popular games with light RPG elements that let you craft a character the way you want without having to spend a lot of timing reading to understand how mechanics will interact. I think another thing that the wider population likes is feeling like you are breaking the game. BG3 had a lot of that.
I've always liked the idea of optional complexity. You want to spend a thousand hours in a cave tinkering with a system to become a demigod? Awesome. You'd rather just go sightseeing and blast stuff? Also valid.
> trying to make their games appeal to "everyone" This right here is why most sequels trend towards suckiness. This doesn't *always* fail so badly. I'd argue Skyrim itself was a clear example of dumbing down things to appeal to a wider audience. But there it worked quite well. Maybe too well. I have a bad feeling the company is going to take away the wrong messages from all of that. Hamburgers might be good. Milkshakes might be good. Batter-fried cod might be good. But if someone comes along and thinks blending all that together will somehow appeal to a wider audience, the result is going to suck. Furthermore, when everyone does it then all the products start smelling the same. And that smell isn't good. The thing these companies seem somehow unable to appreciate is that many gamers like certain products or series because of what makes them unique, not in spite of it.
It’s a problem with the big AAA game industry (and tbh the media industry as a whole) over the last decade or so. When you try too hard to make a game for everyone you end up making a game for no one.
Fallout 4's best thing was the modding of gun and armor paired with the exploration (which is Bethesdas main appeal, that's why Starfield is so lame).
Funny I actually think Bethesda games can be BETTER by expanding on the very system you think is a distraction. Its a world. You are in it. You never once thought it silly that you can become **leader of a guild** and then not actually have to do any leading, like at all?
I don't enjoy it But it's optional, so not a big deal
Yeah I pretty much skipped settlements in my first playthrough of FO4 and missed nothing. A lot of people seem to enjoy them though. It's weird to see people asking to remove things while at the same time complaining how games get dumbed down.
what OP is getting at is that he/she would rather Bethesda ditch the settlements so they can devote more resources to improving quests and other core elements of the game. I agree in theory with OP that If getting rid of settlements improved the quests by 2-3x then I would be on board with that. but that's to each gamers preference.
I don't think quests writers work on settlements. It's a common thing where people thing all people are interchangable and can work on anything, but this is rarely the case.
I built like one or two settlements in FO4 and then ignored the system except as another shop and later some light modding. I agree, it takes away from the core loop. I didn't mind the mods where you let the survivors build their own settlements as you provide resources. That felt more in tune with the theme of conquering the wasteland. I think this is my problem with modern games, you tend to have to do every damn thing. The world sits still until you bother with some boring mini game or half baked idea.
Always funny in games: OH THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END, WE NEED TO GO SAVE THE WORLD NOW! ...have any time for Gwent?
I’m a full believer that smaller stories can be rich and fulfilling. Not every game needs to have a main quest that involves saving the world.
But that wasn't really the case in Fallout 4. Yes, you wanted to find your son, but it was obvious you had been refrozen and it had been anywhere from 10 minutes to 100 years since that happened. There wasn't recent sitings of the kid until you get to Diamond City, so stopping and take time to build cities and reluctantly help people in need have a safe home made a lot sense to me. Hell, it is the perfect Setup in Starfield if it had better and more comprehensive settlement system. Flesh out a whole LIST questline and there is so much room to build out consistent with the lore in the world.
If anything I find it unrealistic (I'm gonna dare say that on a Fallout game) that you find your son in two days. It makes sense (especially in survival mode) that you take your time, need people to trust you before they help you, etc...
Survival mode in FO4 is what got me hooked on the settlement system, the mechanics made your settlements matter and it incentivized building up a FOB to plan your expeditions Starfield was such a sad step back from that system
I wouldn't mind a settlement system if it weren't 100% custom. Like how you can upgrade your house but instead they give you a plot of land. Then you can upgrade to a farm or keep or whatever but not actually build it yourself. Just drop some gold and get a nicer place automatically configured.
This seems like a good compromise. I have absolutely zero interest in building things myself. Like seriously, none. That being said, collecting resources and setting your worker bees on it is a different thing entirely, and would probably be fun, rewarding and immersive
I just want morrowind/oblivion with modern graphics and more lore. But we all know they are just pandering and will create something the existing player base doesn't want.
I just want the melee combat to be good, for once.
But another village needs our help!
I think Starfield proved that Bethesda has no idea what it wants to do with the settlement system. In fallout, Settlements could be fun, but were clearly content tacked on near the end. They didn't integrate into the rest of the game at all well, and aside from the joy of designing your own place, there were few rewards to investing deeply in settlement making. In Starfield, they designed the system with the bones of the settlement system in place, but came up with even LESS reason to engage in building them, while simultaneously nerfing the hell out of the variety and creativity that it could be used with. The end result was a total waste of time for players and designers alike. At this point, they need to just drop the system. They obviously have no clue what to do with the concept or how to make it fun.
One question is why are they so stingey with resources generation from settlements? Like in fallout 4 you could assign colonists to harvest scrap or grow crops but the limit on gathering those resources was insanely small. so why bother to build more colonies when you get the same number of resources? That is completely opposite to basically every other colony Sim game. Why would I build colonies if not to grow an army of workers to make useful stuff for me. If I spend 10 hours building colonies I should come back to significant resources. They need to remove limits on resource generation and create real incentives to make colonies.
While everything you said is good and well I would kill for the ability to build my own little town that can get raided by raiders and other things from elder scrolls lore. Have my own little black smith I can hire to make me swords and my own mage to enchant my stuff while I feed them materials and other things. Sounds fucking sick to me
The “build a town” stage is a long-standing tradition of old school dnd-inspired fantasy rpgs where an adventurer would eventually loot enough dungeons that they have far more money than they’ll ever need, so might as well build a castle and train the next generation of adventurers.
This guy gets it. This makes me want a game where you can do this and have your old character stay in the world after starting a new character.
The settlement system in FO4 is WHY I love FO4 and have trouble going back to skyrim.
Seriously, I haven't even really done much of the main quests, just out here building a nice place to store all my power armor suits and legendary weapons. It's also fun to incorporate the junk into your build, like I've been collecting a full set of pool balls and pool cues just to make my bar feel a bit cosier