Has Beth lost its edge on RPG gaming?

[Kendo 2]

Unreal isn't that mod friendly when compared to what Bethesda modders are used to.  Frostbite4 isn't mod friendly at all.  But even the older Unreal engine versions are graphically superior to anything Bethesda can do with Gamebyro or Gamebyro rips.

 

Looking at FO4 it is real short on story and RPG so Bethesda might be letting those play second fiddle to what gets console players and graphics whores to buy games; scenery.

[Zor2k13]

There you go then, perfect environment for milking customers to death over mods when ONLY beth tools would work for modding and the mods would be really simple too nothing elaborate so they retain more control over the game. This would allow them to move the interest from one game to the next like with COD each year.

[TheOzoneHole]

If what I've heard is true, I hope they go with Unreal 4 (or 5 if it is out by then) for their next TES game.  From what I know of the UR4 engine, and this comes from the other people I work with, so at least second hand, is that it is a pretty easy engine to mod.   That said, I would kind of like to some combat that is either going all the way back to the Morrowind style with multiple attack types and hidden stats modding a RNG check (yeah, like that'll ever happen in a modern Triple A game) or they switch over to a style from something like Assassins Creed 1 & 2.  What I REALLY want to see is them finally realize that a Mage starts out weak and becomes OP at high levels. That is something that I don't feel that they have done right yet.

[Kendo 2]

Mesh modding for Unreal isn't any more complicated than it is for Gamebyro.  Existing Blend scripts can do it.  That's not the case for Frostbite.  That requires 3Dmax and that program isn't free.  But engines don't have anything to do with RPG elements in game. 

 

Creative writing, compelling story line, well thought out dialogue, consequences for actions...those are the things that matter to me when i'm looking for an RPG.  As it stands right now by my goofy standard Mass Effect is more of an RPG than FO4 is.  If FO4 is Bethesda's 'new way' then they're doomed in the RPG field.

[RitualClarity]

Mesh modding for Unreal isn't any more complicated than it is for Gamebyro.  Existing Blend scripts can do it.  That's not the case for Frostbite.  That requires 3Dmax and that program isn't free.  But engines don't have anything to do with RPG elements in game. 

 

Creative writing, compelling story line, well thought out dialogue, consequences for actions...those are the things that matter to me when i'm looking for an RPG.  As it stands right now by my goofy standard Mass Effect is more of an RPG than FO4 is.  If FO4 is Bethesda's 'new way' then they're doomed in the RPG field.

KTOR was more of a RPG to me than any of the Bethesda games ever was. Never before had I had a game like that. Story was great, great twists and supprises. Mass Effect (pick one) also has great story and living characters as well. Many feel more alive than Bethesda characters. (in recent games Skyrim, Fallout 4. )

[TheOzoneHole]

Believe me Kendo, I don't disagree.  Both ME1 and KotOR are better RPGs than either Skyrim or FO4.  Heck I'd go so far as to say that Dungeons of Dredmore is a better RPG than FO4.  I'm not as concerned with graphics as I am with a quality story, but BGS seems to have gone down the "keep it short and you won't have to cut it short before you can use it" theory of story writing.  Morrowind's main quest and the tie ins between the Fighter's Guild and Thieve's Guild; or the Dark Brotherhood and even the Thieve's Guild from Oblivion I really enjoyed from a story perspective.  I'd really like to some something that is almost as "hands off" as the main quest from Daggerfall. (I freely admit that I've never actually finished Daggerfall. I keep getting distracted and forgetting where in the MQ I'm at.)   

 

And the ease of adding meshes to UR4 is part of my point; this is Bethsoft we're talking about. Modding will be required to make the game worth the money unless they make MAJOR changes to their design philosophy.

[Kendo 2]

I doubt Bethesda will use the latest modern engine.  They didn't do that when they got on their Gamebyro kick; Unreal as a beta was available when they started deving Morrowind.  They could have used it and updated game engines to coincide with Unreal updates the way Bioware did.  But they didn't take that route.

 

I've done some static mesh work for a private release H-Game (not my project) that uses Poser models and Unreal3.  It's simple FBX format work and there is also an editor for it.  It is as easy to do as Oblivion or FO3 meshes and easier than Skyrim.  The sad thing is the results are superior.

 

Hopefully Bethesda will get their shit together with both the technical side of things and their story boards.  Wishful thinking, I know.

[Benmc20]

When I think of classic RPGing I think of Daggerfall and Oblivion and the Fallout series, along with of course Baldur's Gate, Zelda and the Dragonwarrior series, then later Final Fantasy.

 

Skyrim seemed to uphold many of the RPG elements of previous games but it also focused heavily on modern graphics which certainly must have cut into the RPG budget. That problem seems intensified in FO4, which is extremely weak in RPG and relies heavily on the implementation of FPS and Minecraft-like settlement building.

 

I've been looking over Metacritic and although I know that users took a giant dump on Fallout 4, it definitely shows Beth dropped a turd in the RPG community. As a game it's highly playable (114 hours since Nov. 10) but the RPG community haven't enjoyed the narrowed choices (4 per NPC max) and the linear storylines. As pointed out in many FO4 reviews, it often doesn't matter what the fuck you even do, the results are the exact same.

 

 

 

For instance, when you're asked to side with the mayor of Diamond City or Piper, either choice gets you into the city and both act the exact same way toward you.

 

 

 

On Metacritic Fallout 4 gets an 84/100 which is decent but not only is it not Game of the Year it's not even RPG of the Year:

 

Witcher 3: 93/100

Pillars of Eternity: 89/100

 

Amazingly, the RPG community has even turned their backs on major titles with great graphics for better storylines such as Undertale (93/100).

 

I wonder if Elder Scrolls 6 will be a return to classic RPGing or whether Beth will continue to develop these graphics intensive FPS games where your choices don't matter and they've already decided who you are (mother or father looking for your son) and what you must do.

You've just forgotten Morrowind [:sad_frog] ... Best TES ever.

[Benmc20]

Are you trying to say FO3 was better?

One thing made this game better than FNV : you see the actual birth of your PC. Never had after this true identification of my character. My only regret : the vault 101 sequence was too short :/.

[Goblin Guy]

Well, until they *rush games out the door and dropping their bombs games on the modders' shoulders like they did with Skyrim, they'll keep losing this so called "edge".

Not to mention the Fan Dumb (I know that not everyone is like this), who blindly buys games because "Hey, it's from [insert dev/publisher name here], so it must be good!" instead of suggesting changes for the better, and I'm not talking about the graphics: there's the gameplay, the story, the characters, how much immersive the game can be and so on.

If they ever listen to us again.

 

"But I don't play games for the story. If I wanted story, I'd watch a movie or read a book."

 

As to quote a certain merchant: "Some people call it junk. I call it treasures." Games can be considered a form of art, so there's no excuse to not add an interesting, engaging story that, you know, could make people interested in the game and possibly play it for more than an hour, which is one of my major reasons that made me like from FO:NV, where the stuff you do actually matters and has effects in your gameplay, like that certain game with talking skeletons and annoying dogs.

 

Talking about New Vegas, so far, I only crashed when I kept changing cameras while I was running around. New Vegas, a game which ironically wasn't developed by Bethesda (They just published it AFAIK. Correct me if I'm wrong).

 

PS.: FO:NV Ultimate without/almost no Mods >>>>> Skyrim with 3k+ mods merged with the Merge Plugin + Bashed Patch + DSR + PatchusMaximus + EBD + Requiem + Sands of Time + Frostfall + adnauseum. I mean, really, Bethesda ?

 

*(Which has becoming quite a common practice between developers thanks to some greedy publishers.)

[Kendo 2]

Heh-heh.   Fan Dumb.  Best description ever.

[Jazzman]

I think we all get branded when it comes to music, gaming and perhaps more. What we experience first and like it, we like for the rest of our life. Why? No idea, perhaps it is natural conditioning, the memories of intense feelings that are hardly to be beaten later on. We say, the music of today is nothing compared to the one that came before, simply because we don't get these intense feelings anymore. Make no mistake, Morrowind had lovely trees, not yet prefab stuff as in Oblivion, but the characters looked also like lovely trees, at least until the coming of Rhedd who taught us a few things about the mysteries of the polygons. Much in Morrowind called for the player's imagination, like the mating kagouti or the House of Earthly Delights (a whorehouse for those who do not know), not to mention the funny but helpless attempts by many to ride a wild Netch bull. However, the better the graphics becomes the less explaining text must be read and, thus, is left for individual imagination. The plot gets prefab in all its variations. We don't imagine much when we watch a cool movie, we just consume it, don't become part of the story anymore. In the end we say, nice graphics but the rest is crap for the quick money, the whole thing has nothing. Actually we feel almost nothing, and that's the point. Time has changed, but man never changes. For youngsters the new stuff is probably as awesome for intense as the older stuff is for those who came before. That's fate, or should I say, life huh.

[ANGRYWOLVERINE]

The trouble with calling games a form is art is the developers start to think of themselves as artists, above the fray who can scorn criticism even if it is constructive  and say it's their perogative to make a game that is less than stellar.

Casey Hudson and ME3 come to mind.

Bioware played the artistic freedom card with the ME3 ending debacle and now has to go to Andromeda aka flee there to escape  it.

 

Bethesda knows they can make anything nowadays and it will sell so they have 0 incentive to get better at their craft.They can be as lazy as they want to be now because not only will they have pc modders to fix their mistakes and fill out their omissions in games but console modders to do the same for the console players.

 

So it's likely their games will get worse and not better.

 

I fear for ESVI.

[Jazzman]

The trouble with calling games a form is art is the developers start to think of themselves as artists, above the fray who can scorn criticism even if it is constructive  and say it's their perogative to make a game that is less than stellar.

Casey Hudson and ME3 come to mind.

Bioware played the artistic freedom card with the ME3 ending debacle and now has to go to Andromeda aka flee there to escape  it.

 

Bethesda knows they can make anything nowadays and it will sell so they have 0 incentive to get better at their craft.They can be as lazy as they want to be now because not only will they have pc modders to fix their mistakes and fill out their omissions in games but console modders to do the same for the console players.

 

So it's likely their games will get worse and not better.

 

I fear for ESVI.

Hope you know already that Bethesda apparently makes fun of their customers complaints that will never stop, huh?

People are complaining a bit about the (refugee camp-like) bed situation... people are (still) living in (ugly) shacks..., no matter how much material and time is invested by the player in the new life conditions of chronically dissatisfied settlers, remember? Well, that's one way to deal with the problem - somebody gets the finger.

 

The ME-3 ending was special, actually meant to be the artistic final of the trilogy to memorialize the makers, a fatal mistake in itself past the average customer. However, in the last minute the producer got cold feet and turned da Vinci's bleeding Mona Lisa into a confusing visage in the mist by Salvatore Dali, playing Saint Paul ('I do not lie, folks!') in front of the community that could smell the lie, see the crippled corrections and omissions made in the end sequence to hide the bitter truth for any player - the beloved protagonist simply pegged out in the run towards the beam, still in London. Under public pressure the makers offered quick balm in the corrected endings to cure the wounds they had caused. If it has worked or not, only time will tell, the Andromeda nebula doesn't talk to us yet.

[Swanky]

Haven't played FO4 yet, but people seem pretty split about it. A lot of people I talked to seem pretty content with what they got, while a good portion of players - and pretty much all of them have played Bethesda games before - are complaining about the game in some way. At least Bethesda seems to have gotten hold of the worst bugs prior to release of the game. Working with an engine you're accustomed to can seriously help with that and many developers are sticking to their engine, Bethesda, Bioware (ME1 used the same engine as ME3), NetherRealm... the list goes on. Bought the Legendary Skyrim version a few months back and couldn't play the game without mods because there would be so many gamebreaking bugs. So yes, a big open world is bound to have problems and bugs, but not to this extent.

The thing is, even if Bethesda used a different engine they would have suffered big problems to find workarounds for. Let us say they used the UnrealEngine 3 for that. There are reasons why Mass Effect focused on the streamlined corridor levels, and those are not entirely made up of story and run-and-gun gameplay concepts. While the engine is greatly capable of streaming, you couldn't just put emphasis on such an open world that the Creation engine does. The empty open worlds of Mass Effect lagged horribly on Xbox360. Maybe you can do those things now, Arkham Knight uses UE4 as far as I know and the city is pretty big and diverse, and a toned down version is running fluid on consoles even. Yet everything will feel narrowed down at some point. In addition, a lot of work is required to make all the assets for the game, including more focus on materials and shaders. The texture system in Skyrim is quite simple and while there are a ton of options for UE users as well, the process of creation will take a lot of manpower. Manpower that Bethesda does not have if the rumors are true. Unfortunatly, developers still seem to have to strike a balance between eye candy and performance, and not just on the consoles. My GTX970 is good but runs almost in the red when I crank every Arkham Knight setting up. I don't think they are toning down potential PC releases because of consoles anymore, given today's console and streaming standards and technologies and I'm glad developers are realizing that computers are still more powerful so they're slowly giving us back or customization options, it's just that the engines, maybe even technologies itself still need a lot of time before being capable to display the same level of detail from small contained sceneries.

 

Gameplaywise... this one is a lot tougher.

I like to replay kinda old RPGs, back from the 90's when I used to play Crono Trigger and Lufia2, classic RPGs by all means. You run around and beat up bad guys and get loot for it. Hasn't changed in about 25 years. Given how many characters are in today's games however it is crazy how many possibilites there are to take account of, not only in programming but also in forethought by writers and designers. That's one of the points why I love the Mass Effect series. Its characters are feeling alive. They make their own decisions, and they react according to your own. But it only works because of the mainly straight forward story approach. We all know that the story itself isn't even as deep as half a glass of water but the characters still make it shine. I consider Mass Effect less of an RPG and more of an action game with a lot of options and even more conversations. But you don't have stealth options. You can talk your way out of portions of shooting, but only so often.

Bethesda games are usually slower paced and give you at least a bit more freedom on how to approach certain situations. So while you can play the way you want, there is not a lot of feedback from anything you are doing. This was a bit different back in the Fallout 3 days but that game had a lot less characters than Skyrim. But even in Skyrim I am feeling of doing the same kind of loop over and over again. Find cave / ruin -> explore -> slaughter everything in the dungeon -> find loot -> go to town -> rinse and repeat. Hell they even added radiant quests, that, while nice, are adding to the feeling. Given their reuse of assets everything feels samey after a while so I rarely bother to explore that 20th dwarven ruins. Still, it's not so bad as with the Borderlands series (which has a better way of loot grinding to keep you in the loop and also great, great writing from the first game's DLC onwards).

I actually found New Vegas pretty good in terms of character interaction while I was not so fond of its war story because of which I found New Vegas to be more of a Sci-Fi western instead of a post-apocalyptic struggle for survival. Yet, New Vegas was done by Obsidian and not Bethesda itself...

 

So has Bethesda lost their edge?

I don't think so. They have made good improvements over the years, it's just that they never had an incentive to create the immersion through a living world. Their worlds are only big but often feel empty. Sure reviewers always write of stories told through the arrangement of places and clutter (for FO games), but a living, breathing world is consisting of living beings that are reacting. As anyone as how they are feeling on the state's presidential race and you will get an opinion, but Beth games often neglect this point. People will chater about it but they won't have a real opinion. Maybe it would be best to cut back on characters and focus on fewer people to give them a lot more personality.

 

Personal opinion aka TL;DR.

Bethesda does a lot of things right but they need to give things more depth again by making character designs in both personality and gameplay having more impact, being more diverse and meaningful. The amount of bugs in Bethesda games has gotten better but is still annoying. Graphics are still limited by today's computer standards.

 

 

 

[ANGRYWOLVERINE]

 

 

The trouble with calling games a form is art is the developers start to think of themselves as artists, above the fray who can scorn criticism even if it is constructive  and say it's their perogative to make a game that is less than stellar.

Casey Hudson and ME3 come to mind.

Bioware played the artistic freedom card with the ME3 ending debacle and now has to go to Andromeda aka flee there to escape  it.

 

Bethesda knows they can make anything nowadays and it will sell so they have 0 incentive to get better at their craft.They can be as lazy as they want to be now because not only will they have pc modders to fix their mistakes and fill out their omissions in games but console modders to do the same for the console players.

 

So it's likely their games will get worse and not better.

 

I fear for ESVI.

Hope you know already that Bethesda apparently makes fun of their customers complaints that will never stop, huh?

People are complaining a bit about the (refugee camp-like) bed situation... people are (still) living in (ugly) shacks..., no matter how much material and time is invested by the player in the new life conditions of chronically dissatisfied settlers, remember? Well, that's one way to deal with the problem - somebody gets the finger.

 

The ME-3 ending was special, actually meant to be the artistic final of the trilogy to memorialize the makers, a fatal mistake in itself past the average customer. However, in the last minute the producer got cold feet and turned da Vinci's bleeding Mona Lisa into a confusing visage in the mist by Salvatore Dali, playing Saint Paul ('I do not lie, folks!') in front of the community that could smell the lie, see the crippled corrections and omissions made in the end sequence to hide the bitter truth for any player - the beloved protagonist simply pegged out in the run towards the beam, still in London. Under public pressure the makers offered quick balm in the corrected endings to cure the wounds they had caused. If it has worked or not, only time will tell, the Andromeda nebula doesn't talk to us yet.

 

 

 

They can laugh all they want to until they come out with the next Aliens Colonial Marines.Then the laughter stops.

[Istill]

 

 

I've really tried to let this game sink into me, but everytime I really try, the game has its broken moments and reminds me why I despise the game. And this all goes back to when I bought TES Anthology, installed Skyrim. Tried to play Skyrim with no mods so I could appreciate the game for what it was. Nonstop CTD and freezes. I went through 12 reinstalls in the first month alone with Skyrim that it was just so devastating that I gave up and modded the game and played it like that.

Playing any unmodded Bethesda game is masochism. Bethesda don't make games, they make frameworks for modding (imho, of course). On the other hand, their lack of almost any aspect of decent game development - from technical aspects to creating good stories or interesting characters with believable dialogue lines - makes the modding community spring into action. That's where the fun begins. And that is what gives their games longevity, beauty and depth.

That goes for all their games including Morrowind - again, imho. Though I cannot speak for Arena, Daggerfall etc. Haven't played those.

 

 

I didn't like Skyrim's guild quests where none of it had an impact on you with the other guilds. If you chose to be a dark brotherhood, you could also be a companion, mage of winterhold

Especially the fact that you can wear the DB armour and noone cares. Just a little detail, but it is quite representative of how little your decisions have an impact on what happens in the game.

Why not implement a system that makes it gradually harder and eventually impossible to even enter cities without getting instantly attacked by guards if you're not disguised and your undercover ruse has been broken too often? Just as an example. With "Wanted"-flyers, an overall sense of paranoia etc.

 

Bethesdas strongest suit is the creation of worlds that are compelling to explore. That's it.

 

But we have to say that their worlds became boring in recent years. For instance F3 had its secrets right? Was a little empty but had secrets. Skyrim is just too repetetetive and boring, whenever you go you will find the same, items, enemies, decorations... Every dungeon is designed the same way, it tries to tell a story where's non, they forgot that not every place has to be special, they tried made every cave special.

[InKal]

Fallout is based on the old Jason Robards and Don Johnson movie 'A Boy and His Dog'.

 

which is based on Harlan Ellison's excellent short story.

 

 

 

Bethesda games stronk LOL

 

seriously 

 

Stronk:

1) Level design

2) Exploration 

3) Monster design

4) overall good gameplay, very NICE gameplay imo and no, not a hiking simulator ;]

5) Creation Kit 

 

weak (starting with Oblivion)

1) main story

2) overall writing

 

weak (starting with Skyrim)

1) main story 

2) overall writing

3) dumbed down game mechanics 

 

ekhem, guys you need to be a little more sensible criticising Bethesda. almost entire Loverslab is basically based/founded on Bethesda games for crying out loud. 

[Jazzman]

At least, you guys don't complain about the bed situation in Bethesda vanilla games with increasingly better graphics in an open what, an open Potemkin world. Never ever blocked-up doors looked that realistic as in Fallout 4, and were so many. Fortunately, the AI is as stupid as ever, so we directly feel comfortable in a familiar battle atmosphere, or is it?

[GrimReaper]

So yes, a big open world is bound to have problems and bugs, but not to this extent.

 

 

How'd one know what is the allowed amount of technical problems with big open world games? As far as I know, Bethesda is the only developer that risks developing games like that, devs like Rockstar, CD Project and Ubisoft use many shortcuts and smoke-and-mirrors to make their games look like open worlds when in reality they are mostly barren wastelands because nothing is persistent unless it is scripted to happen. They generally tend to spawn the world around you with generic NPCs that get despawned as soon as they are out of sight. This whole thing works until you take a closer look at how the game works, because then you find out that almost everything is just a non-interactive staged show.

 

The only other game series that I can think of is the Gothic series, and those were filled with gamebreaking bugs to the brim. Especially the third one which tried to make a big open world instead of very small open worlds was an absolute disaster, unplayable to the point where Bethesda's release versions look like a piece of art.

[Swanky]

Unfortunatly, I haven't played any of the Witcher titles yet, and I only took a very brief look at Bioware's Dragon Age titles. Both have pretty big sceneries, although it would seem that at least the Dragon Age titles are dividing the map into various sections. I have played Gothic 1 and 2 and both were pretty brilliant. Yes, a lot of bugs, but with Skyrim I had no less than 2 gamebreaking bugs and countless other annoyances like crashes, glitched ragdolls and the like, to be more precise: an AI package error with some villagers from Morthal caused me to have crashes everytime I ventured near that town, causing me to loose 3 hours of progress and even more to find out what was happening. And I couldn't progress the negotiations later on because I had appearantly started the Civil War quest line and one NPC was not reacting at all due to the scripts of said War storyline. I had to use the console to continue. I had quest givers not being in place, and some other stuff. Yet I have never encountered any of the like in Gothic, maybe due to its simpler nature, Questgivers usually staying in one place, not a lot of folk on the roads and the like - like you said: smaller sceneries, maybe. But I'm not counting on it. All I'm saying is, after all that time Bethesda should have fixed at least those gamebreaking bugs. But they didn't.

[Kendo 2]

Bethesda's 'superior' approach to ambient NPC ai is as outdated as their engine is, and directly reflects their unwillingness to move into this decade.

 

Games that use Unreal and Frostbite also use flock NPC ai.  This is efficient and is the reason why most of those games don't require optimization or a galaxy's worth of memory to do the same thing the antiquated Bethesda Gamebyro-rip engine does.  Bethesda's solution is to use a two-tiered ai system (because that's all they can muster) and the result is a memory hog game with NPCs bumping into one another and getting stuck in solid objects.  The only issue I've seen with flock ai is NPCs walk through one another.

[GrimReaper]

Unfortunatly, I haven't played any of the Witcher titles yet, and I only took a very brief look at Bioware's Dragon Age titles. Both have pretty big sceneries, although it would seem that at least the Dragon Age titles are dividing the map into various sections. I have played Gothic 1 and 2 and both were pretty brilliant. Yes, a lot of bugs, but with Skyrim I had no less than 2 gamebreaking bugs and countless other annoyances like crashes, glitched ragdolls and the like, to be more precise: an AI package error with some villagers from Morthal caused me to have crashes everytime I ventured near that town, causing me to loose 3 hours of progress and even more to find out what was happening. And I couldn't progress the negotiations later on because I had appearantly started the Civil War quest line and one NPC was not reacting at all due to the scripts of said War storyline. I had to use the console to continue. I had quest givers not being in place, and some other stuff. Yet I have never encountered any of the like in Gothic, maybe due to its simpler nature, Questgivers usually staying in one place, not a lot of folk on the roads and the like - like you said: smaller sceneries, maybe. But I'm not counting on it. All I'm saying is, after all that time Bethesda should have fixed at least those gamebreaking bugs. But they didn't.

 

Dragon Age 1, 2 and even Inquisition work much like the old Infinity Engine games, meaning NPCs do fuck all but move from point A to B, if they move at all. The Witcher 3 is the first game of the series that features an open world, but is built like GTA, Assassin's Creed and Far Cry. No persistent NPCs (with the exception of a handful of important NPCs), everything gets spawned and despawned as needed. The world is a stage and if you don't look closely or don't care about this kind of thing, it works perfectly.

 

Gothic 1 and 2 had their fair share of gamebreaking bugs, just google a bit and you'll find workarounds and console commands for most of them. And yeah, the world was much smaller, but as far as I remember it was pretty alive, with people having a daily schedule and all that. I hope you see the similarities now - Gothic 3 was literally unplayable when it was released. I had to start over at least once in each Gothic game (which taught me to always use multiple saves) and Gothic 3 produced a broken savegame every other hour or so, especially when a scripted event happened the chances were pretty high that something went wrong. Risen went back to smaller, isolated worlds, but was full of bugs, too. Games from Piranha Bytes are well known for being unstable and riddled with bugs, much like Bethesda's games, but much, much worse.

 

Squashing bugs in such a huge game (not necessarily speaking content-wise) is a task that could very well take an eternity. Just look at the unofficial patches for Skyrim - there were some game breaking problems introduced with some versions of them that weren't in the original game and the last update was on the 23rd of February 2016, that's more than 4 years after the release of the game and they are still going. Sure, they're modders and not the devs, but it should give you an idea of how long the game should've been postponed to make sure most of the bugs are gone.

 

I'm not being an apologist for Bethesda here, at least I'm not trying to be. It's just that with these games, you have to know what to expect. If you can deal with that, fine, if not, the option to not buy it is always there. Hoping that someday developers are able to fully finish and flesh out any game, however big it may be is something that would be wonderful, but I doubt It'll happen.

 

And if you prefer the staged shows of other open world games, be my guest, nothing wrong with that. But there's more than enough games like that, there's no need for Bethesda to go down that path as well. It's good that they try their own thing, even if they are copy-pasting a lot from their previous games.

[Kaz Aanh]

what happened falloutbros??

 

Skyrim still at the top after 5 years? fallout 4 beaten by some neckbeard 8bit farm simulator? is it over?

 

I will laugh so much if Bethesda used and milked Fallout 4 to fund TES6 development.

 

[Chaos63]

Unfortunatly, I haven't played any of the Witcher titles yet, and I only took a very brief look at Bioware's Dragon Age titles. Both have pretty big sceneries, although it would seem that at least the Dragon Age titles are dividing the map into various sections. I have played Gothic 1 and 2 and both were pretty brilliant. Yes, a lot of bugs, but with Skyrim I had no less than 2 gamebreaking bugs and countless other annoyances like crashes, glitched ragdolls and the like, to be more precise: an AI package error with some villagers from Morthal caused me to have crashes everytime I ventured near that town, causing me to loose 3 hours of progress and even more to find out what was happening. And I couldn't progress the negotiations later on because I had appearantly started the Civil War quest line and one NPC was not reacting at all due to the scripts of said War storyline. I had to use the console to continue. I had quest givers not being in place, and some other stuff. Yet I have never encountered any of the like in Gothic, maybe due to its simpler nature, Questgivers usually staying in one place, not a lot of folk on the roads and the like - like you said: smaller sceneries, maybe. But I'm not counting on it. All I'm saying is, after all that time Bethesda should have fixed at least those gamebreaking bugs. But they didn't.

 

The Civil War questline is to this day an infuriating coin flip, even with all the official and unofficial patches. It speaks volumes that after so many years AND the final patch, the main fucking quest is still bugged. If it wasn't for Loverslab and all the sex and roleplay mods it offers, Skyrim would be nowhere near my HDD.

But hey, why bother fixing your game when you have a mod community to do it for you, right?