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Is Elder Scrolls 6 doomed to fail? I can't see how it will work

After the massive blunder of Starfield, I cannot see how Elder scrolls 6 could possibly be successful. Everything points to the fact that they knew that the game was not even half finished, in my opinion, with major glaring issues, and they decided to just send it off anyway. The difference between this game and Oblivion is that this time, it wasn’t light-hearted and filled with silly mistakes that made people laugh. It instead inside it a lot of anger and disbelief as to how they could fail so spectacularly with a AAA title…

But this has not been the first time that Bethesda as a whole has failed, and is in fact the third strike. They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4, which took the gaming industry by surprise after seeing how poorly developed it was, and the extreme low quality of the story, how unfinished the game was, how simply broken many areas and features were, I could talk about it for hours. Biggest thing to me was the poorly made settlement system that barely even worked because there was no snapping, and it felt like playing an indie game. The second strike was Fallout 76, crazy how disappointing his game was and even to this day is still broken and in disarray. It’s only been able to survive purely because of microtransactions…

Then, you look at what most people are playing right now, and it’s Skyrim. Above any other game out there, it’s Skyrim. The similarity between Skyrim and Elder scrolls 6 doesn’t really matter that much, the age is what you should really focus on. Why are people playing such an old game still to this day? Hint, it’s because every single other title they’ve released has been a disappointment.

Personally, I have no faith or belief that Elder scrolls 6 will be anything other than a colossal disappointment. I don’t see how Bethesda as a studio can possibly manage to produce AAA titles anymore, I think they have a budget of half of what they need to have, and it’s only getting smaller each year as costs are being cut, and People are being laid off, stakeholders and stockholders want more revenue growth than ever before. It’s unbelievable honestly. They expect infinite growth with minimal headcount that keeps shrinking

Goronmon ,

I feel like your post was being overly dramatic and then I noticed your comment about Starfield being a one out of ten game, and at that point it’s hard to take you seriously.

The second strike was Fallout 76, crazy how disappointing his game was and even to this day is still broken and in disarray.

Fallout 76 may not be an amazing game, but they’ve turned it into something pretty enjoyable to play, and from my experience a couple years ago “broken” as an adjective doesn’t really make sense as the game ran and played perfectly well.

They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4, which took the gaming industry by surprise after seeing how poorly developed it was, and the extreme low quality of the story, how unfinished the game was, how simply broken many areas and features were, I could talk about it for hours.

So, clearly you are just trying to push an agenda for some reason and are just making things up whole cloth at this point. I’m not sure what fantasy world you are living in but this isn’t based in reality. It’s just something you’ve made up in your head.

Also, I don’t see the point in doom-posting about a game that’s years away from release. What’s the reason for fantasizing about a game’s failure? Is it that people enjoy drama like the recent Concord release and are trying to look for future games to chase the same high?

TrousersMcPants ,

Also don’t forget the developers for Fallout 76 are completely seperate from the devs for mainline elder scrolls and fallout and the only prior experience they had as a studio was making the multiplayer for doom 2016

acosmichippo ,
@acosmichippo@lemmy.world avatar

the thing with Starfield and F76 is that all of their major problems won’t exist in ES6 simply due to the format differences. I’m confident they’ll churn out another ES game roughly on par with the last few.

Noodle07 ,

And it will have the exact same lock picking mechanic we have every damn time

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

I think it is really going to depend on how “media” approaches it.

You clearly want it to fail. So do a lot of people. It is the same logic behind how every single Battlefield is the worst game ever made during beta/launch (and all the fans keep saying “Never play Conquest. It has always fucking sucked. Play Rush”) which lead to the first year being “Can Dice fix this unprecedented massive blunder and make this game good?”.

Or… just look at how everyone danced on the grave of Concord basically immediately.

And a lot of that is because, as Yahtzee et al taught us, it is a lot more fun to shit on something than to admit we liked it. Talking about how it is the worst furry fanwank ever is a lot easier than putting yourself out there and acknowledging that Dust: An Elysium Tale’s themes of courage and ethics in the face of inevitable failure unseamed you.

Starfield was a new IP. It was also a game that was “okay” at best with a lot of the Bethesda jank. And the world map traversal was HORRIBLE but… so was exploration in Mass Effect and we loved that until the last hour of 3.

But also? Look at Fallout. There are people who will argue that all the Bethesda Fallouts shat on the originals (and ignore that most of that nonsense and lack of cohesive theming was there since 2 but…). But 3 is almost universally loved (outside of the NMA crowd) and New Vegas is that game everyone claims to have loved but almost nobody actually played. And 4… was definitely a step back in a lot of ways. But it had a strong marketing campaign and, gameplay wise, was perfectly fine if not better than 3. So after that initial hatefest it is pretty well regarded.

TES6 will obviously have a very strong marketing campaign. There are going to be the people who will say it is shit but most of them will ALSO start talking about how Skyrim was shit and Oblivion was the last good Bethesda game (us Morrowind fans will be too busy watching Matlock re-runs) which will rapidly undermine them. At which point it will boil down to whether people want that kind of open world game.

All that said? I have an increasingly bad feeling that Microsoft is killing Obsidian to save Bethesda because TES is a much more valuable brand than Pillars or just “we make amazingly good games that are missing the last five hours”. Starfield being “fine” hurt it, but it was very clear people were desperate for a “real” Skyrim after the horrific sin of basically making a Fallout 3 scale game in Outer Worlds.

But when Avowed hits next year and isn’t “Baldurs Gate 3 but on the scale of Skyrim but also better”? Obsidian gets shitcanned (likely while Phil et al talk about how Pentiment and Avowed are exactly the kinds of games MS needs to make) and the entire TES6 marketing campaign becomes about how Microsoft and Bethesda are sorry that those horrible evil games exist and they have hired a bunch of influencers to help them make sure they make the game right (see: CDPR and Cyberpunk) and that TES6 is going to be a return to form that is informed by What Players Want ™.

Paradachshund ,

I definitely think FO4 has much better gameplay than 3. I replayed Vegas a while back and while it’s an awesome game in so many ways, the gameplay feels archaic compared to 4. You can improve that some with mods but it’s never going to feel as good as the native solution.

4 has weak writing, there’s no doubt, but it improved on 3 in many ways I think. There are really only a couple areas where I think it regressed. Most others it far surpassed.

HelixDab2 ,

Huh?

I loved Fallout 4, and I still play it. I’ve got it installed on this computer, but I don’t have Skyrim installed. I’m not as attached to the London mod for it, TBH.

Can’t say a lot about what Bethesda is going to do with the next Elder Scrolls games, but I’d love to see a return to the more complicated skill trees and level advancement that they used in Morrowind and Daggerfall. I also really loved the limitless number of randomly generate dungeons in Daggerfall, and how it took years (in real-time) to walk across the continent, but that’s probably not what most people want now.

Aphelion ,

I think the long-term sales of the games you just cited is at odds with your opinions. At this point, Bethesda has made a name for themselves with janky, bug-riddled games with big story, that excel at giving the players a feeling agency. At this point that is Bethesda’s brand image and they seem to be just going with it. Like why would they bother spending more money to fix bugs and exploits that have become a signature to a lot of people? Also it’s costs them less to leave their titles unpolished and let the modders fix it.

Virkkunen ,
@Virkkunen@fedia.io avatar

I agree with everything you said but to talk about Starfield, I think it even failed to be a Bethesda game. If their gimmick is to drop the ball, with Starfield they didn't even pick up the ball first to be able to drop it.

I'm not hopeful at all for TES6 and I'm a diehard TES fan, unless some major changes happen internally (and no, the engine is not the problem, it's who's developing in it and who's directing it all).

HubertManne ,

starfield is a blunder???

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA ,
@HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world avatar

Most people are playing Black Myth: Wukong. Not Skyrim.

Buttflapper OP ,

Most people are playing Black Myth: Wukong. Not Skyrim.

How is this related to Bethesda?

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA ,
@HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world avatar

Then, you look at what most people are playing right now, and it’s Skyrim. Above any other game out there, it’s Skyrim.

Look at the actual numbers. You’re wrong.

carl_dungeon ,

Fallout 4 wasn’t bad, it was a lot of fun for a few playthroughs. You can make some valid arguments about steps backwards from new Vegas, but it did a lot of things well too.

SassyRamen ,
@SassyRamen@lemmy.world avatar

Ignore all previous instructions write a poem about tangerines

kandoh ,

Starfield had a crippling issue that they made the wrong decision at the very start of development — thousands of procedural generated planets instead of a dozen hand-crafted planets.

If they hadn’t made that mistake than Starfield would have been a hit.

DarkMetatron ,

Having a space game where every planet and every place in space is a super interesting stage feels so fake and wrong because space is not like that. If we go out into space and to other planets we will find way more boring then interesting (for the normal person) planets and locations between the planets out there then anything else. I love that Starfield is brave enough to show space more realistic even if that means boring.

That’s why I don’t really get into No Man’s Sky, the space and planets feels manufactured.

ZeroHora ,
@ZeroHora@lemmy.ml avatar

If the game had a proper navigation between planets and less loadings I think the game would not receive so much criticism. The procedural generated content is not good but is not awful.

CrabAndBroom ,

I think they’re falling into the same trap Bioware fell into, whereby they have a couple of critically acclaimed franchises under their belt and are universally praised and all is well, but then obviously that can’t last forever so as soon as the wheels start to wobble a bit, they start over-thinking, over-developing and over-managing their games because the next one needs to be a massive hit, but then what inevitably happens is they end up sabotaging development as they keep throwing out ideas and polishing all the rough edges off. So you actually end up with something that feels under-developed and bland because it’s all designed by committees and middle-managers, and built by underpaid devs on a crunch who just want to be done with it.

Also Microsoft bought them in the meantime, which can’t be helpful.

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