This is pretty long response lol so I’ll tackle each point individually.
Plenty of niche games have “overwhelmingly positive” reviews on…
Your whole argument on niche games getting good reviews, I actually fully agree with. The problem is that those reviews are literally the only metric we have to discern whether or not the people that played it enjoyed it - anything else is pure speculation. Including your point about people not liking it if they felt it didn’t feel enough like Skyrim, or people saying they like it just to appease others. It’s frankly bizarre that you’d make an argument for Steam Reviews not 100% showing the accuracy of people’s opinions, while simultaneously making statements like those with zero anything to back them up.
At the very least the reviews tell us that people who played it say they liked it. That’s just a fact. And considering that that’s all we have, I think it’s fair to use it. Anything else, again, is just pure speculation.
I know it can be hard to keep reading after you see something that MAKES YOU SO ANGRY but you should try.
This was weird lol.
“7x the amount of mods that Morrowind has”. First, that ignores how many quests and mods were lost to time.
No, it doesn’t. Skyrim has over 70k mods while Morrowind has roughly 11k. Even if there were over one hundred missing quest mods for Morrowind, which I doubt, it still wouldn’t affect that massive difference.
But also? of course it has more mods. The same way that basically every new game in a franchise SHOULD sell more than the previous one did. The audience for gaming has exploded over the decades.
This… just isn’t how modding works. Most new games releasing will have some reshades and a trainer, max. Once in a great while you’ll get some nudity. The size of the audience doesn’t change that - most games releasing simply don’t garner much mod support.
By your logic a game like Call of Duty should have a massive modding scene, as the new entry will be newer and have a massive audience, an audience multiple times bigger than any Bethesda game. But no, that’s just not how that works. Hell, even a game like The Witcher 3 only has half the number of mods that Morrowind does.
Also I’m confused as to the point of those links. Are you arguing that gaming has… gotten more popular over the years? Yeah no shit. As I said earlier, numbers going up doesn’t magically guarantee a thriving modding scene.
So if we assume roughly the same market share were playing TES games in both eras (and it is pretty safe to say that Skyrim is a MUCH more mainstream game than Morrowind was…), we would expect at least a 3.5x increase in the amount of mods.
As I went over before, no. Lol absolutely not. I don’t believe that you actually think this could possibly be true. Lets apply your logic to other mainstream games releasing nowadays and see if that logic holds water (hint, it doesn’t).
The Forgotten City has “overwhelmingly positive” reviews on Steam with many people praising it for its Bethesda-like systems, so I’m not sure what you mean. Maybe you felt it wasn’t enough like Skyrim and disliked it for that, but clearly you don’t speak for others.
Also, no other Skyrim quest mod, out of the near 2 thousand quest mods for the game, had a full game built off of them. So while that does happen sometimes (ie Dayz), it’s exceedingly rare and far from some sort of “tradition” as you put it. If anything that was far more common a decade or two ago than it is now. The original Star Wars Battlefront mod was quite a long time ago after all.
And no I’m not mad, I’m just confused as to how you could think Skyrim has only bug fixes, UI, and graphics mods, when in reality it has nearly 7x the amount of mods that Morrowind has and is the primary example of a thriving modding scene. Idk if you just spouted that out without knowing, or what.
Wtf are you talking about, Skyrim has dozens of amazing quest mods, and hundreds of quest mods overall.
It has major gameplay overhauls, it has custom skeletons for animation, it literally has mods that rework the animation system entirely. Modders added a survival system almost a full decade before Bethesda did.
There are mods that add new continents ffs, what’re you talking about? One of the quest mods was so good it literally got turned into its own game.
Edit: There are currently 60k mods for Skyrim Special Edition, and about 70k for the original Skyrim. Meanwhile Morrowind has 11k. Wtf are you talking about??
Maybe Mass Effect? The 2nd and 3rd especially for the “a” in arpg, imo.
Also, I know you said Western but since you mentioned Elden Ring I’d also recommend Dragon’s Dogma and Monster Hunter. Maybe Devil May Cry, but that’s a bit more hack n slash.
God of War 2018 is a great one too if you’re on PlayStation or PC. Probably the easiest game I listed, while also having some optional crazy difficult fights in the side/postgame content. Valkyrie Queen was harder for me than most Souls bosses lol.
Elianora never made a “Skyrim Clutter mod”, but she did make dozens of immaculate player homes that have extremely well thought out clutter within them.
This isn’t a huge surprise either, as she worked with Bethesda in making some of the CC content.
Most games’ mods are restricted to reshades and trainers. A game having a thriving modding scene, like Skyrim, is actually pretty rare. So Baldurs Gate having a mod that adds tons of races is pretty cool, and potentially a good sign of things to come.
Lol I’m not surprised you didn’t read past it, maybe you should.
My point is that the engine itself can be worked on to be better. That it, in and of itself, isn’t the sole issue, as throwing it away isn’t the only solution. But because Bethesda hasn’t worked on it as much as they need to, it’s causing problems.
Edit: And for the record, I’m actually sympathetic towards Bethesda and want them to stick with the engine.
There’s no specific functionality (except maybe ladders lol) it’s more just the engine as a whole. The fact that certain bugs can be found in all of their games from Morrowind to Fallout 4 is unacceptable imo.
And the fact that someone managed to literally put the world of Fallout 4 into Skyrim, and have it just work seamlessly, really speaks volumes.
I actually wrote an explanation for someone else a while ago, so I’ll put it here if you’re curious:
The problem isn’t the engine itself, it’s that Bethesda hasn’t given it the attention it needs.
Unreal Engine 5, for example, is built from the original Unreal Engine. But there has been so much work put into it that it’s nearly impossible to tell. Meanwhile, the creation engine literally has some of the same issues that the Gambryo engine had back during Morrowind.
To Bethesda’s credit, this isn’t entirely their fault. There’s a reason that proprietary engines have been dying out in favor of engines like Unreal, and that’s because maintaining and improving game engines is incredibly time consuming and expensive. And unless you’re directly profiting off of your engine, like Epic does, you don’t have a massive incentive to endlessly polish it. Doing so is time you could be spending working on your next game, which you do directly profit off of.
Personally, I want Bethesda to keep using the Creation Engine, or whatever they turn it into next, because of its incredible mod support. However, it’s nowhere near as polished or advanced as other engines, and understandably probably never will be. There’s really no easy solution imo.