They can take as long as they want. After Starfield, I have zero confidence that TES6 will be any good. Bethesda has some serious issues they need to sort out with their production pipelines and methodology and they need to rethink how they approach story-driven open world experiences.
Every time I see a Starfield video and see the camera turbozoom in on a character as they deliver a forced, robotic line with terrifying facial animations - I get teleported right back to 2006. It is very obvious this studio does not know what they are doing and has learned little from their previous releases and from other contemporary games.
Simulation? What? That's the one aspect that has been gotten worse with every Bethesda title. Their storytelling was always garbage. I never finished the main quest in Skyrim even, and the one in Oblivion was trash, the one in Morrowind barely existing. This was never the strong suit of their games.
I don’t agree that all of it has always been trash, but the quest writing mostly always has. For your Skyrim example, I went to the midnight release. I completed the main quest within a 24h period IIRC and I remember just being incredibly disappointed. I haven’t finished it again since. Honestly, Skyrim in general is a letdown besides the world they built, although they could have done a lot more to make it more interesting and feel more lived in and real instead of an amusement park.
Their writing in the past has been really strong in world building. They’ve had really interesting lore and reasons for us to be doing what we’re doing. Most of the people who did that are gone now though, and they have been for a while, so I don’t expect it in the future.
I should have said more, for once. I meant simulation more to describe the Bethesda house style, which seems to be this idea that having apples that can roll around on a table or whatever is immersive and engaging enough that you don’t need Michael Kirkbride hanging around putting weird metaphysical shit all over the place, actually. I wasn’t saying they were good at it, only that it appears to be what they think.
Agreed. TES just hasn’t had good world design and lore since Morrowind. If I remember correctly, he also wrote much of the books in the TES universe which are still used in Skyrim.
ESO might be an exception. I don’t think it has the best writing but it does have much more interesting lore and world design than Oblivion and Skyrim.
ESO has interesting stuff in it. Some of the basic quests in each region are written pretty well, or at least are entertaining. They need some of those writers on the ES6 team to at least have a baseline.
I mean it’s not really a hot take since it’s been the consensus among long-time TES fans since 2006. Shivering Isles is the only good lore/story contribution TES has had without Kirkbrides involvement, and even that was basically just trying to Mantle his style from Morrowind.
I’ve said it before, and I believe that Bethesda is going to completely mess up TES6.
There are several issues with Bethesda, the major problem being they seem to have lost all creativity and they’re trying to apply the same old formula to every single game with minimal changes. Then hope that modders will keep it on life support. And sadly that’s how I found myself having to play their games, because without many mods it was often awful to play on PC, and I still didn’t have fun thanks to repetitive content and forgettable story and characters.
Another is that they’re clinging on to that damn dilapidated game engine of theirs like it’s their precious baby. It’s an awful engine, insanely outdated, limited and performs terribly. Starfield is a great example of how awful it is, but every game before that has had major performance issues and limitations as well.
The only redeeming feature might be that TES6 probably won’t be a procedurally generated world. They really showed how repetitive and boring it can get with procedural generation. And a handcrafted world would have so much more character. They could perhaps use the procedural engine for dungeons, and enemies and their bases, or items found through the world, but not the world itself.
But I’m afraid it’s just going to be a near Skyrim carbon-copy. It’ll likely be an okay looking game with an okay looking game world, but I bet gameplay will be mostly unaltered from what they’ve been doing for over 20 years. Same old basic combat, same talking heads with lifeless animations, same sneaking and magic gameplay, etc.
Well before Starfield came out they said they couldn’t make TES6 yet because the technology didn’t exist. Starfield’s development, I assume, was partially about building this technology. That makes me assume it’s the procedural generation or the ships. If the former, I doubt it’s the main game world or TES6 is fucked. I would suspect maybe something like plains of oblivion that are proc-gen or something.
To me, one of the biggest things that make Starfield feel so bad is the planets are so boring, specifically because there’s too much to do (and it’s all meaningless). Every location is surrounded by the exact same amount of points of interest. There’s no barren areas and more habituated areas. It’s all this bland uniform container of “content” with nothing making any of it stand out. Proc-gen only works when it can be used to make a lot of boring empty space with a few interesting unique things to find. I don’t think they’ve figured that out yet.
I found it extremely funny that todd said that planets are empty and boring, because irl, planets would be boring and and empty wastelands. Why do you make a boring game then todd? Are you stupid? Is that your dream game? Imagine you can make any videogame that you want and you go: i want it to be set in the middle desert.
Oh so there are gonna be pyramids, bandits and other points of interest?
No the desert is pretty empty and boring.
Oh, sounds pretty good.
I do not understand why Bethesda fans even deal with that shit. They must laugh their asses off every time someone doesn’t refund starfield.
Honestly, I mostly agree they should be mostly empty and boring. They aren’t though. They’re absolutely full (of really boring stuff). There are no empty spaces. If there were then finding something would feel special. However, anywhere you land it shows you at least like ten points of interest nearby. I don’t think there’s anywhere on any planet that isn’t inhabited despite supposedly no one colonizing most of the planets. Every location is generic, so none of its unique and you never find anything special.
Excitement and fun is built on the juxtaposition of the opposite. If everything is equally interesting, nothing is interesting. For example, in some space games finding life on other planets is exciting, because it’s rare. In other games there’s life on nearly every planet and it’s boring because it’s not different than anywhere else. To use loot drops as an example, if every drop was a legendary, legendary drop would be boring. You need most drops to be bland common items so the legendary drop stands out.
Unreal Engine is old as fuck too (1995). The engine doesn’t matter if they put the work in to fix the issues. The problem is they don’t seem to be making that a priority.
It’s all this bland uniform container of “content” with nothing making any of it stand out.
The big irony here is that they could damn well make weights for the procgen to create spots with dense “habitation” and others with zero points of interest. But nope, just generate a map, plop down 5-8 POI, call it a day. The “big cities” like New Atlantis stand out in the worst way possible, a small square of buildings surrounded by absolutely fucking nothing. They effectively copied the worst aspects of No Man’s Sky
Yep. It isn’t even a new thing for proc gen. That’s how it’s almost always done. You use perlin noise (usually multiple layers) to create different areas with different types of content. They just didn’t do this, except for resource patches which are the least important thing to worry about.
Agreed. They need to retire that dogshit engine and write a new one. I know that’s a huge and expensive undertaking, which is why they probably won’t. TES6 will sell like hotcakes on its name alone.
I had been looking forward to TES6 for so damn long, but at this point the most exciting thing we can look forward to is the crazy glitches that speedrunners will discover. That is, if they’re not just the same glitches we’ve alll seen time and again.
Not if they keep on their BS. Let’s look at Fallout 4. The engine is absolutely the weakest part of the game. Can’t even keep 60fps in the city on any settings or on consoles. Frame times are all over the place. And the game isn’t even that pretty, it’s very ugly and textures are real bad. The story was pretty awful and boring, the writing in every way was forgettable.
So that’s why ES6 is screwed. It’s been downhill since Skyrim and even releasing a better looking Skyrim in 2028 on the PS6 isn’t going to cut it. It’ll be the most expensive budget title out there.
It is very obvious this studio does not know what they are doing and has learned little from their previous releases and from other contemporary games.
I think they’ve learned that they don’t have to care about that to be successful. We have to keep reminding ourselves that success by these studios does not have to be defined by ‘making a good game’. Starfield was a great success financially and there’s no reason they should change gears from that perspective.
The article doesn’t say that now… Which means you’re probably a real time traveler. Please tell EA to go with Titanfall 3 instead before you come back.
Sony is gonna go after that creator, there’s no way they can hold to maintain it once Sony kicks into full corporate mode.
I’m not a fan of the required accounts, but I feel like people are making such an enormous deal out of it as if they’re being asked to sign a pact with the devil and hand over a liver and kidney.
Just don’t buy the game and move on, financial damage hurts more than screaming murder and then proceed to walk into the knife anyway.
I think it’s because PSN isn’t available in a number of countries, so it’s an arbitrary obstacle to an otherwise fully functional game that doesn’t and shouldn’t need an account. Requiring external accounts to play a game is nothing new, but I’m happy to see people reaching their threshold for these ridiculous practices and openly complaining. If people didn’t complain and simply didn’t buy the game, how would Sony know why people aren’t buying it?
Ideally, Sony would handle the legal hurdles needed to allow PSN in multiple countries. But I imagine, as the publishers have invested tons of money into producing those singleplayer games, part of what they want in return is investment into the “PlayStation ecosystem”. Much like how Microsoft doesn’t care if people play their games on an Xbox, they just want an account.
Basically, I don’t think Sony is really in the business of putting down huge financial risks just to get the $60 entry tag of the rare singleplayer game they put out. Those games are meant to get you buying other Sony content as well.
People have already engaged. There’s nothing left to say to this other than I wholeheartedly disagree and this is a bigger deal than you’re making it out to be.
I disagree with all the tracking companies are forcing on us. While some of it is necessary and can be very beneficial that isn’t how our data is largely being used. With that I just don’t buy Sony, Ubisoft, or other companies products any longer. I do miss out on playing some games my friends are all talking about but I do not cave just to be in the hype.
Treat these companies like that crazy ex. You know they are bad for you and what you are signing up for if you keep coming back.
Last bit is what they are potentially going to do with that data in the future. If they can build your online profile tailored to you they are going to milk you in ways you can’t even fathom. Creating a reason to get you to part with more money. This is not a future I believe any gamer wants when the games are made to make you pay more for the experience. Before anyone says it isn’t like that, tell it to all the AI companies scrapping pre-AI data now. We aren’t making a deal with the devil, we are helping them create the devil.
The problem is that the requirement to have an account is in fine print most people would never read. Therefore you might accidentally buy a game without knowing you need it and can’t just “not buy the game and move on.” I’m fucking sick of having to create an account with every goddamn game company out there to play single player games on a PS5 or on Steam.
What if they were to, say, upload it to GitHub, and make sure as many copies of the mod got out as possible, so that if it does get taken down someone else can repost the branch and repeat the whole process over again
Skyrim will always hold a special place in my heart, it’s almost like a simpler time.
Starfield damaged Bethesda for me though. To spend 25 years on it in total and for it to be as it released was very disappointing. I mean basics like no city maps or land vehicles? Every base you come across having the same bodies in the same place with the same loot? I want to love it, they can do things I can’t even imagine (I can’t program Jack shit) but for that to be the end point of their decades of labour just doesn’t add up for me.
They’re not too scared to make Elder Scrolls VI. It’s their next project. It’s just not coming until probably 2028 at the rate they’ve been working lately, and it’ll feel 15 years out of date this time instead of only 10.
What’s really crazy is to compare Bethesda with CDPR. I’ve been replaying the Witcher 3 and it just struck me how I won’t have to wait 15+ years for the next entry. And to look at how much more efficient they’ve been in the past.
For a timeline, Witcher 2 released in May 2011 and then the Witcher 3 released in May 2015. Took 3.5 years to develop. Cyberpunk released December 2020, only 4.5 years after W3 had its last major DLC. Then in 2023 they released a very large update for Cyberpunk, about 2/3rds the runtime of the main game. And then in 2025 we’ll probably get the next Witcher game. They have like 3 games in active development now.
So what’s the difference with Bethesda? Well Skyrim sold 30 million units and Witcher 2 sold about 8 million. Less than a third the income. Yet if you compare CDPRs staff to Bethesdas at time of their next games, CDPR had doubled Bethesda’s work force. And guess what happened? Witcher 3 sold 40 million while fallout 4 sold 25 million. Thats despite Witcher 3 costing an estimated $81 million while Fallout 4 sits closer to 1.5x that at $125 million.
Then you talk about engines and it gets even worse. CDPR arguably started with a worse engine and I shouldn’t need to explain how much they’ve destroyed BS in that regard as well. Witcher 2 looks worse than Skyrim by a lot imo. But by the time their next game rolled around, it was an industry leader in graphics. And cyberpunk 2077 is like the next Crysis now while starfield is… oh boy. And guess what? After all that work on their engine, they abandoned it. Why? Because their resources are better spent making games and systems in an engine someone else updates for them. Bethesda meanwhile not only can’t juggle the ball of updating an engine and game dev, but they’re not even smart enough to swap engines.
Bethesda has all the signs of a dying studio and Microsoft is the sucker for buying them. And it’s a waste of talent more than anything. Talented people exist at Bethesda whose resources and career development would be far better off being applied on UE4.
Given the technical problems with Cyberpunk at launch, I don’t know that it’s a great idea to champion them. Both studios have had a similar release cadence in the same time periods.
When Microsoft bought Bethesda, they bought Zenimax, which includes far more than just the likes of Elder Scrolls.
It's almost created this double underdog scenario for CDPR. First, they released Witcher 2 and then 3, where their game quality jumped incredibly drastically from the first game.
Then they brought their reputation crashing down to earth on Cyberpunk's release, but fixed the game well enough that it now feels like an underdog overcoming odds in the public memory. They've basically fully recovered their public image, which I'm unsure if they deserve. People can like how it turned out now, but they shouldn't forget.
Yeah they fixed it up pretty good and I think that’s why people moved on. Just pretty bad for the Playstation fans considering it unlaunched from the ps4 until the following year while the ps5 was still unobtainium.
On machines that were actually strong enough to run it, it was mostly fine. I played on PC and while I admit the later balancing update was probably necessary, I didn’t run into most of the real nasty bugs people liked to talk about. I had a great time putting in 100 or so hours in version 1.
A solid 80% or more of all the problems Cyberpunk had at launch stemmed from trying to launch it on last-gen consoles. It absolutely was not intended for PS4 or XB1 and targeting those platforms was a mistake. Once they pulled availability for those and buckled down on getting it prettied up for next gen, the quality jumped by a mile within the next year and a half of updates.
The launch was rough, I grant you that, and maybe I’m just simping for CDPR but even at the time I was in the vocal minority saying, hey this game really isn’t that bad if you give it a chance and run it on hardware that it was intended for.
And of course now with its updates and DLC it’s just genuinely a great game.
I actually didn’t know this but I did play through that recently and I actually have really good things about how that game looks even to this day. I know they did some touching up and I’m assuming updated textures for the enhanced version but it aged a lot better than many other games from that era did
This is, more than likely, exactly what will end up happening.
They know Creation Engine is not fit for the task. They know the writing is stale and uninspired. They know that it’ll more than likely be aimed towards mainstream success, rather than being a good rpg, making it even more simplified.
I really hope i’m wrong, but I’m not holding my breath for TES6 anymore
There usually aren’t many complaints of something being woke if the product is actually good. I think the main takeaway is that nobody wants to be lectured, and told they are wrong for having a different opinion, and amateurish writing can easily come across as preachy or being a self-insert.
If that childish word salad sounds “preachy” to you, you need to go to a different preacher! Yours can’t even english.
How can this sound preachy to anybody? Has the fascist right lowered their own standard of education enough to where they think Marvel-style dialogue is normal?!
I will likely get downvoted into oblivion for saying this (as usual), and I will prelude by saying that I generally never care if there are gay, trans or whatever stuff in games. But transgenders and pronouns were never ever a thing in the Dragon Age franchise, and now they suddenly feature these so prominently. They just handled this very badly.
The fact that writing is generally just plain bad for this game, these inclusive options also seems to affect the rest of the game as well. And it indeed makes it look like they focused on the wrong narrative so much. The way Skill Up reviewed the game was perfect, his best summary was “it’s as if HR is standing in every room” or something along those lines. Like nobody is allowed to insult, or be insulted, in this franchise that used to be pretty dark and grim.
Every Dragon Age game has had pronouns because that’s how fucking language works. Your brain has just been poisoned by right-wing outrage over “pronouns”.
Also, “transgenders” isn’t a word. “Transgender” is an adjective, not a noun, not that I expect that to mean anything to someone who freaks out about “pronouns”.
I picked up Veilguard because I enjoyed Origins and Inquisition. The second game… at this point, I don’t think I took it right and its my problem and I need to give it another chance.
I’m still very early into the game, but the only “woke” thing I’ve seen so far is variable gender identity during character creation.
You want to play a “woman” who looks masculine, with atypical male traits, even a penis, and a deep voice? You know what, I’m glad the option is open to people. It doesn’t vibe with me personally, but I’m glad that people I care about can make a character that is “them,” because who hasn’t made themselves in an RPG at some point in their life, best they were able.
Again, I’m early to it, but that is all of the “woke” shit I’ve seen.
For the record, I have friends and family in the LGTBQ+(whatever, doesn’t matter) that I support.
I don’t want hate in my heart, and I’ve worked very hard to overcome some biases that came from my more “southern” upbringing. Hell, one of those biased views from the past is now openly trans, and I was the only family member they talked to because they couldn’t talk to anyone else.
I’m imperfect, as all humans are, but it isn’t hard to fucking TRY, just a little, to realize that someone else’s self image and happiness doesn’t affect mine other than what pronouns I use to refer to them. Fuck, its not hard. Just don’t be a dick.
Imho it’s marketing. The game is bad, writing is bad, gameplay is boring after a while, it seems (except for technical optimization) the game itself is a big mobile game. The “woke criticism” is exploited by ea to sell more, since it create engagement and hide the real flaws of the game
Never heard of this. It took me some time to even figure what their comments meant.
It’s almost comical to see how obsessed people are about this stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, the commercialization of minority themes and the preachy attitude can get annoying, but it’s hardly a dealbreaker if the gameplay and/or story are good.
Games are full of extremely stupid and lazy tropes.
That’s it. The Alan Wake 2 “race change” actually allows for some interesting links between Quantum Leap and the Alan Wake stories, but it was seen as a DEI situation. If a game is bad, it’s generally bad for reasons beyond DEI or wokeness.
I never got the big deal with Skyrim. I’m not saying it’s bad, but I don’t get why people went all crazy for it. Bethesda over streamlined the Elder Scrolls series with Skyrim for the mainstream audience. By removing and/or simplifying game systems.
EDIT You can be the leader of all the guilds with a single character. Just why?
I got super prepared for Oblivion to be as complex and difficult as Morrowind and was severely disappointed by it even at launch. Skyrim was slightly better than Oblivion in terms of mechanical complexity (dual wielding, how magic works, the forts, etc), but also even more streamlined in others (like how skills and leveling work).
I’ve played the absolute shit out of all 3 (as well as FO3, NV and 4) though. There is just some inexplicable draw to them. And it’s that very thing that Starfield lacks that had me rush the MQ and just stop playing once it was over.
Deep or not, I hated the levelling system of Oblivion with a passion. Needing to micromanage which skills I increase for each level so I can get a good attribute increase was such a micromanagement pain, especially when everything kept scaling up your level. Often I felt like I was getting weaker, not stronger, when I leveled.
I’d much prefer they replace the system with something different (like how it works in fallout 3) than what they did in Skyrim where they just carved out all the annoying bits and left barely anything behind though.
Oblivion’s leveling didn’t change from Morrowind, it also had that flaw that could really fuck you up if you didn’t optimize getting extra points in the minor skills before the major skills.
I enjoy that Skyrim made leveling up simply a matter of gaining X points across skills, but how they ditched the attributes and went for +10 on one of Health, Stamina or Magicka made it feel kinda dumb.
By removing and simplifying systems they made the game more easier for random people who’ve never played a game or haven’t played since the NES. My english teacher that year was hijacking her son’s playstation just to play skyrim.
Agreed. Modding doesn’t “fix” Skyrim either. It adds surface-level content and tweaks but the fundamental bones of the game are still there and they are heavily flawed. One of the few exceptions I can think of are things like Skywind but that’s only because it removes Skyrim’s story entirely, overhauls many of its mechanics, and uses the world/lore/story of one of Bethesda’s better games.
And in the case of Starfield - it’s entirely beyond salvaging with mods. Mods will not be able to fix the biggest problems with that game because they are literally the very way the game was made. To fix them would require basically remaking the entire game from scratch.
The vanilla Skyrim is good not great, but solid. It’s the mods that make this game truly exceptional. With mods, you can shape Skyrim into whatever you want, and that’s why, I think, so many people love it.
Most Bethesda RPGs are going for bredth instead of depth. They give you a giant world to explore and usually throw you into that world with complete freedom relatively quickly.
I generally agree that Skyrim (and Oblivion to be honest) aren’t particularly strong games when you look at pretty much any individual system, and the games don’t interest me much, but I totally get the appeal.
How about “if your game received a backwards compatibility patch that makes it look better for the current geberation, your remaster is coming in too early”
I noticed the announcement trailer doesn’t even show any footage of the original, which makes it the only remaster trailer I think I’ve ever seen that doesn’t do a split screen or other comparison at some point.
And the first thing they mention is new Spatial Audio and haptic triggers. It’s like selling a new car and bragging about the cup holders first.
God I hate when something good comes around that flaunts a rule and people make it a huge fucking deal and then are all shocked pikachu when the company is mad about it. If there’s something like this keep it fucking quiet you rubes. Share the github quietly, or just upvote it on NexusMods. Don’t go plastering it everywhere.
Yuzu got shut down because it got plastered everywhere, they essentially normalized privacy. Of course Nintendo was going to take them down. If you basically plaster it on their front door you’re begging them to take action.
Yeah of course - just have fun paying your own lawyer 6 figures to prove that in court while their team of lawyers try to convince a judge that it is illegal.
This isn’t the first time a similar mod is made for a game, and no one has ever been sued. I can think of SimCity 2013 and Hitman WoA having such hacks, as well as private WoW servers.
Okay well I’m not going to sit here and argue semantics. People have been sued by corporations before just for mods, that has happened a lot. All I was doing was simply pointing out that what they are doing is noble, but that we should never trust a corporation to not take the hammer out and try to destroy it, and keeping it quiet helps keep it out of their sphere for a while longer.
You might be interested to know that there are several hardcore modding scenes, where the point is to mod the game for fun. The mod guides are updated every month or so and includes thousands of mods. It takes days to install, and actually playing is optional. In most cases, a new save is required every update, so modders keep an additional playable state if they actually want to play the game.
Lexy’s LOTD is my fav one, it’s only over a thousand mods, has very detailed instructions, and a very friendly community.
I think it’s cool that something like this is getting attention, but if every single “games journalist” is gonna write about it Sony is going to have to file a lawsuit against them
In order for Sony to sell the game again and a PS5 (or PS5 Pro) to you - or at least, in a couple of years, the remaster to those who bought the original PC port. There are still about twice as many PS4 than PS5 consoles due to a lack of both exclusives and actual reasons to switch over to the newer system. It doesn’t help that more and more people are realizing that one should replace any mention of “the economy” in the media with “rich people’s yacht money”, given how little average people are benefiting from it anymore, which means disposable income is down. The PS4, despite being almost 11 years old now and still relying on a mechanical HDD (unless you upgrade it), is simply “good enough” in the eyes of many. Microsoft has the same issue, of course, except from a much weaker position in the market. The law of diminishing returns makes newer consoles a hard sell.
At the same time, PC gaming is highly accessible, PC hardware is lasting longer for gaming than ever before (in large part due to the longevity of the previous console generation keeping hardware requirements of most multiplatform games in check) and now that former exclusives are finding their way over at a reliable pace, there are fewer reasons for those that are primarily playing on PC to get a console just for the exclusives. As fantastic as Astrobot looks and as much as I appreciate the return of the classic 3D platformer with physics and shiny new graphics, it won’t make me purchase a PS5 any time soon or ever.
Sony is still producing both PS4 and PS4 Pro (whereas Microsoft discontinued both Xbox One consoles four years ago; they are still supporting the previous gen though), games are still being developed for them, despite first party studios having switched over to PS5 by now. Third party developers who were once happy about the low number of hardware variations they had to deal with now have to handle up to nine different systems if they want to release a game on all currently supported games consoles (ten when Switch 2 comes out) - plus PC and Steam Deck, which might just as well be another console as far as developers are concerned. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen cross-gen games that aren’t just yearly sports titles being made for this long into a new generation at such a large scale. We certainly haven’t had such a wide variety of systems since the early home computer era, even if their architectures and capabilities are much more similar now than they were back then.
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