How many people who worked on Morrowind, Oblivion, and/or Skyrim are still working there? This is a question I feel does not get asked enough when it comes to beloved franchises. People talk about their favourite game developers and how they “sold out” or whatever. I don’t think I see enough recognition that sometimes the best people at a company just leave.
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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The reality is that it's been 20 years since many of those "best games ever". 20 years is a huge chunk of your working life. It's just not realistic to keep the same people that whole time, or even a percentage of them.
People don't want to think about the reality of it, they just want content to devour.
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Honestly if they had just put a little more thought into the loot progression and made a couple systems more interesting it would have been a much better game.
The randomized empty open world planets wasn't great but they also did that in Daggerfall so I don't think it was totally unprecedented and still had some value if there was a better incentive to explore (in my opinion better and more interesting loot would have kept me exploring).
What pissed me off the most was the fact that when you built the armillary it literally showed up on the OUTSIDE of your spaceship and you couldn't build it indoors in your settlements. What the fuck? You literally killed people for some of those artifacts. Why would you keep them outside for fucks sake?
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TES6 isn't out yet? neat. wouldn't know, cuz fuck Bethesda
I fell off the Bethesda train around Oblivion. They peaked with Morrowind and it has been downhill since.
I think at this point I am more excited for, and have higher expectations of, Skywind.
It’s too late for me to care. I grew up with TES. I played daggerfall when I was 15 on my pentium. Then every few years a new amazing game came out. Then after sky rim it stopped. I’m in my 40s now and don’t have the time. This game should have come out in 2016 at the latest.
I mean.... Skyrim is ok, I wouldn't say it's amazing...one of the weakest installments of TES. And then they beat every last cent out of it.
This game should have come out in 2016 at the latest.
Absolutely. I'm surprised they didn't try to release a version for calculators.....
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Anything that makes marketers sad is a win for the world, honestly
They're usually just liars acting as a filter between the game and the interested customers.
Instead of just showing the game, they cut what doesn't look good and make it appear as something more than it is. That's their job.
It's not adding value. Peak marketing executed perfectly is just misleading enough to increase sales beyond what just seeing the game would do, without making the customers mad enough to have a negative impact.
I make a rare exception for actual artistry, like some of the WoW expansion cinematics. It's still pretty misleading, but they're pretty.
As for the next Elder Scrolls, I don't think Bethesda has the devs to make it fun or interesting. From what I've seen from them, they are not particularly competent.
Maybe they shouldn't use marketers. From what I see, marketers are the reason for unreal hype. Look at cyberpunk, marketers told poeple that it was going to be basically a real life simulator and then people were upset that it was only a really fun RPG. (Aside from the launch issues this was also a big thing at launch).
All modern games hype is directly because of marketers.
Here's a novel thing. Just show us what the game is like. No stupid marketing lingo, no flashy graphics, just what the game is like. Give us the opening mission. There, pay me a marketing fee. No stupid high expectations, no lying about features that don't actually exist, just telling the consumer honestly what they're buying.
pay me a marketing fee
Average pay is like 50-60k [per year] for a[n average of a] 40 hour week [job], less if you're like social media coordinator or something. It's not like it's crazy money.
And why hate on people that are usually artists, writers, creatives etc spending half their life using their talents in a bland corporate way to make money to pay the bills so they can spend 10% of their life actually creating art?
Plus, everyone's job is easy when you reduce it to simplistic terms
I can be a back end developer: just organize the data and show it on my screen. Don't show me a login page, don't ask for my preferences, don't give me help articles, just organize the data
I can be a firefighter: just put out the fire, don't ride around in a big truck, don't slide down a pole just put out the fire.
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Remember the time when we had demoes that we could test before commiting to a buy? We should come back to that. Arguably Steam's return policy could be used as a demo although it only gives access to the beginning of the game and the plethora of cinematics and tutorials, and does not focus on a core part of the gameplay.
Steam's recent update to carve out a category for demo's is kinda what you are asking for. At least it is in the right direction, if devs follow it.
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After Starfield my expectations are so low that the only way I'd be disappointed is if it's worse than Skyrim. And Skyrim wasn't even that amazing in hindsight.
The best they made, for me, was Morrowind.
While I enjoyed the rest of entries and I'm very fond of the Shivering Isles, IMO it was the originality of it, its story and art, but also the freedom it granted.
My advice would be to go back to that time and instead of massive places, just build a fun place to explore.
The hand-craftedness of morrowind. That was why is was so good. There was always something hidden. You saw the dev's hand in every area knowing someone would explore it even though it's off the beaten path. The vendors actually carried or stored their inventory and it could be stolen without some theft marker telling the guards across the world "this is Balti Ser's wooden fork, remove from player!'
Oblivion and later: paintbrush go brrrr
And the combat was laughably terrible. Still my favorite entry as well. I just felt so unhindered after getting through the first bit.
The one thing that really made it stand out to me was the caves. Some were short, most had hidden places in them that would normally be a pain to get to, and the larger ones were works of art.
I remember well going for a quest, seeing a cave and then falling through a rabbit hole into a death cult while being a laughably underpowered magician.
It felt closer to what I commonly experience with D&D than other games, mostly due to the combination of freedom and curated world.
That said, yes combat was dull, uninspired and probably the weakest part of the series.
I honestly don't even think vanilla Skyrim was that good of a game. It had nice world building, but the combat sucked, the main story was kinda whatever, it was glitchy and a lot of systems were poorly thought out. It's only ever been the promise of a good game which was mostly found in mods.
Skyrim was good because sandbox, music, culture and mood. The parts that made it bad, were endearing.
Combat sucked and you had to spend way too long in the garbage ass inventory/ menus which just ruined the immersion. Im passing on Bethesda games until they fix that dumb shit, but I don't think they will anytime soon. All of their games seem like a soulless copy-paste the theme into the same boring engine.
I expect nothing and I know that they will still dissapoont me. Marketing isn't weeping because they don't know how to sell the expectation, they weep because they don't know how they can convince anyone to even look at that game.
Same. Pretty sure I own every Bethesda rpg right up through Fallout 4 and Skyrim. I just couldn’t be bothered with Fallout 76 bullshit, and the handful of my friends that played Starfield said it was just sad.
I don’t much care what they release next. It won’t hold a candle to BG3.
Really? After the absolute clownshow that was Starfield, my expectations for TES6 are extremely low.
My expectations for a TES game are low by default. They just provide the world, the modders provide the game.
I had low expectations before, but Starfield killed them completely. Starfield actually helped me get over worrying about TES6, because I just lost interest.
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Do what was done with Skyrim but make the dungeon puzzles less terrible, remove the horrific bugs, and make the setting a desert or lush forest. Boom, billion dollar game. Send me money, Todd.
I seriously doubt they do actual surveys. The only one’s raising the bar are AAA developers.
I know at least Gopher (and probably several others on YouTube or elsewhere) literally spelled out the equation for success for TESVI, or at least the beginnings of it.