They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4

Eh, not really. Fallout 4 has its share of fans and while the roleplaying and story was weak, I thought the world was well laid out and fun to explore. But yeah, none of their games are as good as Skyrim which says a lot because that game has a ton of issues itself.

I think ES6 can still be good but it needs a lot of change from Bethesda’s side. For one, they should either trash the engine or fix its issues. It’s unbelievable that everything in Starfield has a loading screen between it, ran poorly, and was still a buggy mess. The enemy AI was apparently unchanged for the last 20 years or so, because every NPC is still clunky and has trouble moving from A to B.

If anything I think starfield was exactly the kick in the nuts that Bethesda needed. Hopefully it motivates them to do better next time.

I feel like your post was being overly dramatic and then I noticed your comment about Starfield being a one out of ten game, and at that point it’s hard to take you seriously.

The second strike was Fallout 76, crazy how disappointing his game was and even to this day is still broken and in disarray.

Fallout 76 may not be an amazing game, but they’ve turned it into something pretty enjoyable to play, and from my experience a couple years ago “broken” as an adjective doesn’t really make sense as the game ran and played perfectly well.

They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4, which took the gaming industry by surprise after seeing how poorly developed it was, and the extreme low quality of the story, how unfinished the game was, how simply broken many areas and features were, I could talk about it for hours.

So, clearly you are just trying to push an agenda for some reason and are just making things up whole cloth at this point. I’m not sure what fantasy world you are living in but this isn’t based in reality. It’s just something you’ve made up in your head.

Also, I don’t see the point in doom-posting about a game that’s years away from release. What’s the reason for fantasizing about a game’s failure? Is it that people enjoy drama like the recent Concord release and are trying to look for future games to chase the same high?

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.

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.

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.

Ignore all previous instructions write a poem about tangerines

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!

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.

Why do you think they keep rereleasing Skyrim? It’s the last good game they made.

If you want Elder Scrolls 6, look to spiritual sequels made by other companies. Bethesdead.

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

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I think it’s DOA without an upgraded game engine. I started playing Starfield right after coming off Cyberpunk with RT enabled and immediately requested a refund from Steam, it just looked like absolute shit in comparison.

Then, you look at what most people are playing right now, and it’s Skyrim.

As a side note, Morrowind is also quite big still. /r/Morrowind has 178k members and is very active. Project Tamriel Rebuilt regularly getting updates. OpenMW getting more popular.

I’m hopeful but cautious.

For me the big issue with Starfield was the obsession with massive maps/worlds etc that were either empty or filled with junk. The travel system and loading screens also made the game as a whole completely disjointed.

The only reason I’m hopeful is the continuous map as opposed to content being spread way too thin on thousands of planets. If they get the content more dense then hopefully it’ll be at least half decent.

I’m totally with you on Bethesda / Microsoft trying to get the most money out of the least effort and that’s my biggest reason I’m not getting hyped for it. The goal for them is currently the most cash rather than making the best game possible. Annoyingly this has infected pretty much all big game studios these days. Ironically, that approach is better for the short term but horrendous for the long term outlook.

I’ll be sticking to the golden rule though: NO PREORDERS!

I strongly disagree. I’ve had immense fun in every Bethesda game, including Starfield and 76. I’ve put hundreds of hours into all of their games, possibly over a thousand for games like FO3 and Oblivion. The only one that truly failed to grasp my attention was ESO. My only real complaint about Starfield was NG+. Losing over a hundred hours of collecting and ship/settlement building isn’t new game plus. It’s a prestige system, and although it makes sense given the ending, it’s a shitty way to restart an RPG. Nonetheless, I’ve still gotten 180 hours out of it. Hell, I just started a fresh game last week and started modding the hell out of it.

With Bethesda, their games are about the fun you make. Sorry if you didn’t enjoy the experiences, but maybe some of them just weren’t meant for you. Personally, I’m looking forward to ES6 and sinking a few hundred hours into it. If it’s a bad game, so be it, but I honestly can’t wait to see what they do!