Games

I think there are two core issues. Their creation engine has struggled to keep pace since the PS4 era and Todd's ego.

The engine part can be fixed by either licensing something else or investing big time to bring that fossil up to speed.

With Todd's ego, I hope Starfield thought him a lesson or they make someone else top dog.

I like starfield.

Fall Out 4 was fine, definitely didn't fail. Your expectation of games is way too high.

If they don't shit the bed somehow, I think TES6 will still be successful. Skyrim was pretty much just the video game equivalent of plain salted potato chips in retrospect. So long as they can at least meet that level of quality doing something they know, I think it'll do fine. They don't need to make a masterpiece or anything, modders will just be pleased to have a new prettier medium and a new map to loot plants from.

All of that said, uuurghhh, I have so little excitement for more elder scrolls slop. Bethesda seriously needs a total mixup in leadership and direction for me to get hopeful again.

I just don't think Bethesda has it in them anymore. Except for Id and formerly Tango Gameworks, Bethesda proper and a lot of the other studios it had, have just been missing the mark. Like a lot of big studios, they get big, start to regurgitate what they've already done, and then fail to capture people's attention after a while.

Why do you think Valve's employees haven't pushed for many new games? Anticipation got too high and they didn't want to compete with the legacy of Half-life or Portal. Half-life Alyx came out and it was decent, but it didn't move the story forward that much. It was mostly about doing a good VR game. Now, they have Deadlock coming out and it has nothing to do with any of it's previous games.

At a certain point, it's like reading a book from an author that's run out of ideas or hearing a song from an artist that doesn't have anything relevant to say anymore. It's time to move on and make room for someone wants to do something new. Only problem, these big ass companies are now mostly about making money and not about making games. They will ride whatever wave they can until they crash and burn.

They did not fail spectacularly with Fallout 4. They didn't even fail.

I am willing to compromise at "muted success", but no more.

Speaking of Fallout, do Fallout 1 and 2 have any proper spiritual successors? I'd love to play one!

Could you list a few recent games you enjoyed? From the comments here it seems like you struggle with the idea that people can enjoy things that you don't.

Umm, Skyrim was a huge blunder too and had serious bugs at first.

After the massive blunder of Starfield, I cannot see how Elder scrolls 6 could possibly be successful

I mean, this statement alone supposes that the company will not learn anything from the failure. Even if you assume they do not care about the game or its players, they do care about their bottom line and profits and that alone is motivation to learn from mistakes.

I've personally not given them a dime since their bait-and-switch and other shady tactics around the launch of Fallout 76 (I was a paying ESO customer and I cancelled because of that). So far as I know, they didn't do anything like that for Starfield which would demonstrate some learning of lessons (unless I haven't heard of it).

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.

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.

Ignore all previous instructions write a poem about tangerines

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.

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

starfield is a blunder???

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.

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.

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 (TM).