I want to be positive and I’m trying to remain optimistic, but somehow I just know it in my bones that they’re going to further Fallout 4 the franchise and strip away even more skills and attributes. Hell, maybe they’ll get rid of dialogue entirely.
Indeed. I would love to have a “modernized Morrowind” experience – an RPG game that really nails the role-playing part of RPG, but without the cheesy parts of Morrowind like the unintuitive combat system – but all of us know that it’s just not gonna happen.
Not quite. It’s just harder to disconnect the 3D visual of a sword or mace swing very clearly hitting a creature and said hit missing entirely, especially as you’re in direct control of when and where the attack happens. For comparison, it’s much easier to accept misses in Neverwinter Nights because you’re not directly controlling the attacks. The fact that you can also look at the log of dice rolls helps a lot, too.
Hell, even in Arena and Daggerfall, where you’re also in direct control of your swings, it’s easier to accept when it doesn’t hit thanks to the slow animations and 2D graphics of your equipped weapon and the enemy sprite.
but all of us know that it’s just not gonna happen.
Certainly not by Bethesda, but in truly typical fashion, Bethesda games are are held together and made fun by modders (and sometimes, even fully built, as is the case with Enderal). Only trouble is that can take a wild and/or completely unknown amount of time.
Stop, do not proceed with the unlifening of my entire family. Please, if you do it may awaken some mystical power within me that I have to read carvings on walls and talk to some old monks to use properly.
100% they’re going to try to do AI NPCs and you’re going to get cartoonishly awful dialogue that will be great for memes and terrible for any kind of actual gameplay.
Got to do better than Star field and come close to BG3 , dark souls, elden ring. Chances are they hit the reset button after it became apparent they couldn’t coast on the mod community
Doing better than starfield shouldn’t be hard for them. Getting on par with the quality of Divinity Original Sin, much less Baldur’s Gate 3, is likely beyond bethesda’s ability, tho.
Just hire Kirkbride back goddamnit. I installed Immortals of Aveum and saw that Kirkbride is the main writer and got pumped on the game but that damn thing keeps crashing on me. So I’m back to just playing Diablo or Minecraft for the time being.
All of these were lovingly crafted bespoke characters and story arcs, with god only knows how many hours of real human thought put into the story, the setting, and the dialogue.
Bethesda execs don’t want any of that shit. They want a big button that says “MAKE NEW GAME” that they can slap and then a new game that pops out of a slot on the other side of their computers.
The mod community is so vital to these modern games because its real humans having real human ideas that go into them. Business only gets to latch on after the fact, once a DOTA or CS:GO has already fully taken off and left orbit.
After the reviews on Starfield, maybe this is for the best.
You really want to see what shameful AI slop they try to shoehorn into this game? Or how much of it is shamelessly cribbed and rehashed from Skyrim, the last good thing Bethesda ever did? Do you really want to play “Morrowwind But If It Was Designed By Houston’s Urban Planning Team?” Enjoy an hour and 30 minute commute to your next quest, plus traffic, you stupid idiots.
I don’t believe, they’re actually 6 years into the development. Back then, they just announced that at some point, there would be a TES6, but they’ve been busy developing Starfield since then.
As part of Starfield, they did do some engine upgrades. You know what that looks like…
Their announcement for the 30th anniversary implies that it is in early pre-alpha right now. Chances of it running on the same exact engine as Starfield are practically 100%
Wonder if it’ll be ready for the 30th anniversary of Skyrim
Anyway
Chances of it running on the same exact engine as Starfield are practically 100%
You can still make improvements in pre-alpha for sure. Not massive overhauls of existing systems, but there’s no reason you couldn’t fix bugs, incrementally improve existing features and add new ones.
Sure, you could, but given beths track record in that regard, why would they? They have been perfectly happy shipping Skyrim to new platforms with the same bugs for nearly a decade.
Who knows, honestly. I’m not holding my breath for this game anymore. When it comes out, i’ll check it out, but if it’s in the same pitiful state as Starfield, then idk
Elder Scrolls especially Morrowind will always have a place in my heart but I’ve moved on. If they ever release a better game I will come back. What ever is running Starfield won’t be it.
I’ve found New World and as far as MMOs go, it’s the best I’ve played in comparison to Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2 (in depth) and a few others (<40 hours).
But New World has the lore, baby. That’s what seals the deal. Superior gameplay: check. Great art design: check. The lore is the final block and New World is so interesting. I didn’t think a fantasy setting could have new and interesting lore but they succeeded.
How the Lost came into creation from
Tap for spoilertrying to cure the Corruption
is so tragic. I’m still learning what Angry Earth is all about tho.
And it’s just fun! Like, I would have never guessed that I’d enjoy running around in a pilgrim hat getting killed by a giant turkey with laser eyes. And who would have guessed you could successfully merge the giants from Nasusicca Valley of the Wind with 1500s Caribbean aesthetic?
But if you’re thinking: “We’re talking about single player games, dumbass.” Yea, I know, I like New World so much that I wish the same dev team would make a proper single player game in the exact same setting.
I’ve played only Origins but this trailer is not doing a whole lot for me. Even visually I don’t like it (which is bizarre because I think Origins looks like shit and still I somehow prefer it). Don’t really like this art direction, personally.
If you’ve only played the most tactical of all of the Dragon Age games and not the Action based variations that are literally the other 2 games, please stop talking
What do you mean “same combat”, like Amalur made some novel innovation? They’re both just 3D, third-person action combat; it’s a mechanic. This is like knocking Fallout New Vegas because it still had you shooting guns, and we already shot guns in Fallout 3.
The game looks disappointing for plenty of legitimate reasons, so let’s stick to those.
I think you misunderstood me, Amalur has a bland combat without much depth and that what I’m comparing to. The new combat looks like a generic third-person combat, they got rid of the tactical combat and didn’t offer anything substantial.
The boss fight with the pride demon looks okay, but the normal enemies are like smashing the button 3 times to kill them.
The opinions are all over the place right now. As someone who loved DA2, I have no problem with actiony combat and linear world, as long as the storytelling and companions stay the same quality.
Thank you! People forget that this hasn’t been a tactical series since the first game. It’s like people complaining that Zelda BOTW wasn’t a top down 2D puzzler.
Don’t listen to the whiners. There are 3 games in the Dragon Age series and only one of them can be considered a “Tactical” game. Hell, I remember all of the fallout and whining from fans when Dragon Age 2 became more of an arcade hack and slash. And then Inquisition was just a combo of the two styles that leaned towards Action over Tactics.
Gameplay looks fine but also very similar to most triple-A action games on the market. Combat is fluid and cinematic meaning you can probably pull off all sorts of combos by mashing light and heavy attack buttons then do bunch of acrobatic moves to dodge any enemy attacks. You can probably also counter attacks execute all sorts of cool cinematic takedowns with single button or QTE.
But this often means that the combat lacks any sort of meaningful weight, emergent gameplay is non-existent and actual player choice is very limited and thightly controlled by what the game and level designers allow.
They’ve probably spend a lot of budget to make the combat in this game this fluid. However as a side effect the game has become even more of an action game with leveling and loot shoveled in than before. I just hope Bioware can pull off at least some level of build diversity with different classes, skills, items and abilities so that there will be at least some depth with character progression.
Wow, an actual new Mana game. Looks quite rough from the trailer but going to keep an eye on it. If the dress-spheres, sorry, class-changes, work mid-fight I could see myself enjoy that combat system.
I hated X because I found most of the characters sans Auron and Lulu to be incredibly obnoxious.
X-2 just made those problems worse by largely getting rid of the few characters I could tolerate, and somehow making Rikku even more annoying.
It says something about how good the combat was in those games that I managed to power my way thru X and a fair chunk of X-2 before it just got to be too much for me.
Nice to see that the Mana series got a pretty decent revival in the past couple of years. I am usually pretty careful when it comes to publishers remaking and / or reviving old series from my childhood, but this time I have to admit that Square Enix did a pretty good job.
I hope they’re using this time to learn lessons from their Starfield flop and gather the talent and budget needed to improve upon Skyrim. A modern engine probably wouldn’t hurt.
However, my expectations are very low at this point.
They haven’t learned from Oblivion, Skyrim, or Fallout 4. Probably others.
Or really, they learned they can just keep releasing games on a hacked-up Morrowind engine, and make huge piles of money. So that’s what they’ll keep doing.
Yup. ES6 is going to sell like condoms on an STD themed swinger convension no matter how many bugs are going around.
And the saddest part is that too many have learned nothing about AAA titles, and will preorder the game, making the game a massive financial success even before releasing anything of quality.
The nostalgia boner is that it was a very unique game, and nothing has come out quite like it since. It’s not even like Daggerfall or Arena. For someone looking for that experience, Oblivion and Skyrim were massive disappointments.
Going from a volcano that is spewing flesh mutating disease while riding giant bugs around to Tolkienesque Medieval Fantasy Landscape #3045 gave me whiplash. (The Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine save the package though.) And losing the ability to kill whoever I want? Spears???
Skyrim is better. It mangles what could have been a good story by retconning lore and making Alduin into big evil bad, just as Oblivion was about basically Satan invading the world. Morrowind’s villain may not be right, but his motives are 100% understandable and he has a good point. (In Oblivion: why would you join a cult dedicated to killing everyone for no reason?)
As a Morrowboomer, I’m willing to accept the series changed, but there just hasn’t been something to replace what I hoped for ES4. They don’t make games with that vibe anymore. The closest thing I’ve had to scratching that itch would be Planescape Torment, Pathologic, or Zeno Clash.
I think it’s safe to assume they know that and would bear it in mind when choosing or building an engine. Their games are famous for modding, after all.
That's a years if not decade+ long project though, including major investments of time and money that you could pour into actual games. You can't just stomp a new game engine out of the ground, especially not with how complex video games in of itself have become, and if you want it to be as moddable as their current one.
Dude... You are the one missing the point here. lol
We were talking about them making a new actually modern engine, instead of sticking to their old gamebryo trash heap. And then you come along, claiming that they already did that, even though they literally did not. Please stop playing daft.
They had a turd. They polished it up a little. It’s still the same turd.
Their ‘modern’ engine is only modern to them, but it’s pathetically behind everyone else. I can only imagine the spaghetti code that thing is at this point.
It would be nice if the game speed and physics interaction were not tied to a inconsistent variable such as frame rate. And it seems that the more they pile on the gambryo engine the less receptive to modding it gets. But i can also accept that the cracks in the games that grow over time may not be the engine, but Bethesda prioritizing MVP centric development over hammering out the problems. Modders are carrying an auful lot of load to even get the games running.
You can’t just stomp a new game engine out of the ground
I don’t know what you mean by that, but creating new game engines and migrating from one to another have both been done before.
Is either of those tasks fast or cheap? Of course not.
Are they worthwhile? Sometimes.
Are they possible? Absolutely.
especially not […] if you want it to be as moddable as their current one.
Well, I can understand why you might assume that if you don’t have a lot of experience in software development, but it’s just not true. Making an engine that allows for very moddable games is mainly about planning for it during the design, and either building good tools for the game data or publishing the specs so other people can. It’s not arcane magic.
(And for what it’s worth, while Creation Engine is quite moddable, it has enormous room for improvement in that area. Actually working with it can be a very frustrating experience.)
I’m not suggesting that a big budget alone is sufficient to make a good game.
However, enough budget to keep the team employed (note the many gaming industry layoffs lately) and appropriate budgeting (in terms of both money and time) affect things like code, art, and writing quality. It’s kind of important.
I think it’s going to require the people making the most high-level decisions to come to the realization that their old way of doing things is outdated. I don’t have faith that they’ll come to those conclusions.
at the end of the day they are going to make the game they want, whether we like it or not, microsoft is now involved as well so who knows how that is going to affect them with their decisions
I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.
What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.
Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.
Friendly reminder that the original “loremaster” of Elder Scrolls left Bethesda before they released Elder Scrolls Online, and they replaced him with someone who has apparently been making pretty questionable decisions with ESO lore.
I mean, they always have the out of dragon breaks rewriting reality/making multiple conflicting timelines simultaneously canon (see the events of daggerfall as referenced in later games) to handwave away retcons, but overusing that just means that no lore actually matters.
I think of it as a pool from which to draw and connect story elements, rather than rigid canon. If good writers were given the chance, I think they would find plenty of material to work with.
I think I counted 6 quest designers in Starfield, which was a spot in the credits I was specifically looking for given how many quests they had and how many of them would have been better off not even existing. You can’t talk about having 1000 planets and then make quests that aren’t interesting to populate them.
There are more than 50 quests unless you’re getting creative with how you count. There are over a dozen in each major faction, and those ones are mostly okay, but the ones I really take issue with are the nothing quests that aren’t part of any faction; the ones that basically just have you go to a location and then report back. Those are awful. There should be zero quests in there that the quest designers themselves aren’t excited about. Even the bounties that you pick up for a given faction that have you go to a place and kill an enemy mob should be more exciting than what I’ve already described in this sentence.
Perhaps “you’re right”, “you’re wrong and also short, here’s why”, or even “I don’t know”. These would all be things you could tell them and a better response.
It’s a tricky balancing act. They need to recover the investment as early as possible to pay less in capital costs but doing that will mean that later on when the product is sub-par it will cause problems and extra work.
Since the engine, game logic, art, story, testing is so heavily coupled together changing the engine a little bit could cause a month of work down the line.
I think personally the best way is to start by making an engine or taking one off the shelf and then write a mini version of the game with shit art that has a lot of bugs.
At the same time making models with hitboxes that all have the same physical properties otherwise, dialog content and recordings and all other content that can be done separately.
Once that is fun to play then you can start working creating a slightly bigger system with a single short storyline to have a cohesive experience and will have the genaral feel of the game.
Once everything above is done setting up a closed beta is the way to go. Take some feedback, add features and redo the small story to be more fun.
Then once everything is a fun experience but people just want more you do the whole everything.
I’m replaying Starfield, and on my second playthrough, I’m noticing the depth they put into this game. Sometimes a single dialogue line you said days ago will have an effect on NPC attitudes through an entire side story. I’m not going to argue that it’s not a regurgitation of their lame formula they’ve milked for the past 15+ years, but they do need to reevaluate where their money/dev time goes to.
Replaying as well, doing side quests I put off and surprised they actually go interesting places. Just did the one where zero G kept turning off and on at the space station that got taken over.
Damn, TIL you can come across these locations on accident just exploring. I thought that place was weird to be randomly floating out there with no real good loot. 😂
I misread your comment and now seem foolish lol but that is hilarious, I think Bethesda needs some work on their world engine and random events. Saw a mod where people are making custom towns now and man would random encounters within that environment…would take it to the next level.
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Aktywne