Extremly hesitant on beths next game

[Crni Vuk]

Maybe, honestly, no one here knows in detail what relation Pete and Todd really have, and how much their work is interlacing. However, as we know from Oblivion - see their developement diary, it is obvious that Pete is quite often present in their meetings. However, if Bethesda works like most bigger software and/or design companies out there, than they have probably monthly meetings or maybe even twice a month or every two weeks or something. To discuss the goals they set out for the individual teams, the concept artists, programmers/coders, animators etc. So their marketing department has probably a rather high influence on the design process as whole, but this depends on who's runing the whole show - Todd. At least as far as some parts of it goes, Pete might have a very high influence on the design process as whole!

It is not rare that your marketing guru will come to the (game) designers, and ask for stuff and changes that can be easier exploited with advertisment - what ever if it makes sense or not. Happend even to Fallout where they asked Tim for certain changes because they are easier to sell to the audience. But Tim basically told them (in a nice way), to fuck off. Considering Bethesda though, I would assume that Pete has quite a lot of say, at least in the early stages of the design process.

Sadly this joke is closer to the truth than I would like to admit ... why? Because I saw it happen first hand. People demanding bullshit stuff, for bullshit reasons.

 

[Dr Fallout]

Hey that video. Still don't really get it, but is that the point?

 

[Crni Vuk]

What is it that you don't understand?

*maybe it is easier to understand the point, if you replace red lines in that video with user interface, imagine some suits with marketing and business studies trying to explain you how to make the user interface of your software. Coming up with suggestions that make no sense and are outright inconvenient for the user. Just because of some market study or because it might look pretty. Like the Perk interface of Fallout 4. Or the Skyrim item, magic and skill menue. Sure as hell it is pretty to look at! I won't deny it. But it is an absolute travesty to navigate trough.

 

[ZigzagPX4]

What is it that you don't understand?

*maybe it is easier to understand the point, if you replace red lines in that video with user interface, imagine some suits with marketing and business studies trying to explain you how to make the user interface of your software. Coming up with suggestions that make no sense and are outright inconvenient for the user. Just because of some market study or because it might look pretty. Like the Perk interface of Fallout 4. Or the Skyrim item, magic and skill menue. Sure as hell it is pretty to look at! I won't deny it. But it is an absolute travesty to navigate trough.

If sales prediction analysts tell the CEO that the way for games to profit is by putting bugs in, then the bugs are going to get put in, regardless of how completely and utterly stupid it is. And if the developers don't want to put the bugs in, they deal with it, or get replaced.

This is what happens when games become mainstream. It becomes part of business. And the business world is very much fucked - has been for years.

The only hope is if the publisher themselves are either respectful of the developers (it's still the developers than answers to the publishers, though) or if the head of the publisher has a vested interest in taking themselves. My guess is once the generation who revels in gaming is at the top of publishing companies like those, we're going to be seeing a change in attitude. In the meantime, we just have to deal with the mess of politics and business getting in the way of a good game.

 

[Dr Fallout]

What is it that you don't understand?

*maybe it is easier to understand the point, if you replace red lines in that video with user interface, imagine some suits with marketing and business studies trying to explain you how to make the user interface of your software. Coming up with suggestions that make no sense and are outright inconvenient for the user. Just because of some market study or because it might look pretty. Like the Perk interface of Fallout 4. Or the Skyrim item, magic and skill menue. Sure as hell it is pretty to look at! I won't deny it. But it is an absolute travesty to navigate trough.

Ah, now I get it!

 

[Magnus]

As someone who hates Morrowind (foggy shithole of a swamp), tolerates Oblivion (repetitive forest) and loves Skyrim (NORWAY!) I gotta say I'm hoping for Skyrim 2. I'll be all right as long as it's set in Skyrim, everything else Bethesda has made is shit.

I liked Fallout 4 for a few weeks when it came out, but as soon as I had found all the weapons it was shit. Never even made it to Diamond City.

 

[Dr Fallout]

As someone who hates Morrowind (foggy shithole of a swamp), tolerates Oblivion (repetitive forest) and loves Skyrim (NORWAY!) I gotta say I'm hoping for Skyrim 2. I'll be all right as long as it's set in Skyrim, everything else Bethesda has made is shit.

I liked Fallout 4 for a few weeks when it came out, but as soon as I had found all the weapons it was shit. Never even made it to Diamond City.

You hate Morrowind... WHYYYYY!!!!

Anyway, good for you to see the light!

 

[Magnus]

As someone who hates Morrowind (foggy shithole of a swamp), tolerates Oblivion (repetitive forest) and loves Skyrim (NORWAY!) I gotta say I'm hoping for Skyrim 2. I'll be all right as long as it's set in Skyrim, everything else Bethesda has made is shit.

I liked Fallout 4 for a few weeks when it came out, but as soon as I had found all the weapons it was shit. Never even made it to Diamond City.

You hate Morrowind... WHYYYYY!!!!

Anyway, good for you to see the light!

I tried Morrowind for the first time in 2010 or so. Could not get past how absolutely awful it looked. What really killed me was the draw distance. I don't mind dinky textures and models, but not being able to see further than 10 meters is bullshit. Then there's the horrible combat, horrible dialog, horrible everything. It just left no lasting impression on me.

I don't hate Fallout 4 exactly, I'm just bored with it. I still think it's a lot better than Fallout 3. Fallout 3 does nothing right, Fallout 4 does a few things really well and then fails on the rest. If a hardcore RPG mod comes out for it I still may give it a go, but I don't think it can top Requiem for Skyrim.

I'll concede that at this point I wouldn't want to play Skyrim without mods, it is rather bland unmodded, and you do get that same feeling of boredom as you do in Fallout 4 because of the abhorrent level scaling that makes no sense. At least Morrowind did that right. But Skyrim is still a prettier, more handcrafted game with (much, much) better melee combat and character customization options. Better cities, better quests, better loot, better scenery, etc.

 

[MercenarySnake]

Eh I found Skyrim boring, I think it has to be one of the most boring provinces in my opinion. Always wanted to kill 95% of the population of Skyrim because they were all such dicks like the immortal kids.

 

[Tom Bishop]

I quite liked Skyrim. The lack of attributes bothered me, as did the quest design (dungeon crawls galore!) but I liked the setting and lore, which felt like a nice step up from the generic feel of Oblivion. In Oblivion's defense, however, it had much, much better side quests, even though the main quest was boring as hell, and as I said, the setting was an ill-advised step backwards into generic European medieval fantasy. Morrowind has the best main quest and setting of all the TES games, and there's tons of room to freely build your character, but it really suffers in terms of general gameplay, what with the needlessly-convoluted dialogue, the janky combat, etc.

 

[Magnus]

I quite liked Skyrim. The lack of attributes bothered me, as did the quest design (dungeon crawls galore!) but I liked the setting and lore, which felt like a nice step up from the generic feel of Oblivion. In Oblivion's defense, however, it had much, much better side quests, even though the main quest was boring as hell, and as I said, the setting was an ill-advised step backwards into generic European medieval fantasy. Morrowind has the best main quest and setting of all the TES games, and there's tons of room to freely build your character, but it really suffers in terms of general gameplay, what with the needlessly-convoluted dialogue, the janky combat, etc.

Oddly enough, Oblivion has a much better physics engine than Skyrim. I agree that Skyrim has boring quests, but I play it for the combat. I consider it a hack-and-slash. Requiem puts the attributes back in and makes the combat very tactical. I am celebrating my 1000 hour Skyrim anniversary today

 

[cordelionreaver]

As someone who hates Morrowind (foggy shithole of a swamp), tolerates Oblivion (repetitive forest) and loves Skyrim (NORWAY!) I gotta say I'm hoping for Skyrim 2. I'll be all right as long as it's set in Skyrim, everything else Bethesda has made is shit.

 

[Crni Vuk]

I quite liked Skyrim. The lack of attributes bothered me, as did the quest design (dungeon crawls galore!) but I liked the setting and lore, which felt like a nice step up from the generic feel of Oblivion. In Oblivion's defense, however, it had much, much better side quests, even though the main quest was boring as hell, and as I said, the setting was an ill-advised step backwards into generic European medieval fantasy. Morrowind has the best main quest and setting of all the TES games, and there's tons of room to freely build your character, but it really suffers in terms of general gameplay, what with the needlessly-convoluted dialogue, the janky combat, etc.

Oddly enough, Oblivion has a much better physics engine than Skyrim. I agree that Skyrim has boring quests, but I play it for the combat. I consider it a hack-and-slash. Requiem puts the attributes back in and makes the combat very tactical. I am celebrating my 1000 hour Skyrim anniversary today

I think if you accept Skyrim for what it is and like that, you can get a lot of joy out of it. However, I personaly think that what seperates Morrowind from Oblivion and Skyrim, is the fact that Morrowind feelt like it was hand crafted. It has a lot of rough edges and it sure as hell doesn't look like a modern game - but com on, it's 2015 by now the game is what 15 years old by now? But it contained at least some complexity and depth. It felt unique.

 

[Spacemunkey]

Morrowind did something that no Bethesda game has done since, not make me feel like an idiot for ignoring the main quest. After you deliver the package to Caius he tells you to piss off and join a guild, freelance, etc.; None of this world is ending right away rush along crap. TBH had FO4 simply had you wake up to an empty vault with no direction, sense of time, or dead spouse, forcing the player to find out what happened I would have found it much more enjoyable than feeling like a shit parent who would rather collect trash than find my son.

 

[cordelionreaver]

Morrowind did something that no Bethesda game has done since, not make me feel like an idiot for ignoring the main quest. After you deliver the package to Caius he tells you to piss off and join a guild, freelance, etc.; None of this world is ending right away rush along crap. TBH had FO4 simply had you wake up to an empty vault with no direction, sense of time, or dead spouse, forcing the player to find out what happened I would have found it much more enjoyable than feeling like a shit parent who would rather collect trash than find my son.

That is why I don't like save the world plots in rpgs. It doesn't make sense to collect flowers for someone when the world is about to end.

 

[PossibleCabbage]

Morrowind did something that no Bethesda game has done since, not make me feel like an idiot for ignoring the main quest. After you deliver the package to Caius he tells you to piss off and join a guild, freelance, etc.; None of this world is ending right away rush along crap. TBH had FO4 simply had you wake up to an empty vault with no direction, sense of time, or dead spouse, forcing the player to find out what happened I would have found it much more enjoyable than feeling like a shit parent who would rather collect trash than find my son.

That is why I don't like save the world plots in rpgs. It doesn't make sense to collect flowers for someone when the world is about to end.

The worst is when games explicitly stress the importance of advancing the plot as a critical world-ending thing is going to happen if you don't, but then there's no actual consequence for rifling through every container or going to do something unrelated for 25 hours. If it's really not that urgent, stop telling me how urgent it is.

This doesn't require a penalty or a fail state, just if you're supposed to be somewhere in short order, and you're not then have an NPC wonder what the heck was keeping you, or something like that. You don't need to punish the player, just have systems that pay attention to what the player is (or isn't) doing and comment on them.

 

[Dr Fallout]

Morrowind did something that no Bethesda game has done since, not make me feel like an idiot for ignoring the main quest. After you deliver the package to Caius he tells you to piss off and join a guild, freelance, etc.; None of this world is ending right away rush along crap. TBH had FO4 simply had you wake up to an empty vault with no direction, sense of time, or dead spouse, forcing the player to find out what happened I would have found it much more enjoyable than feeling like a shit parent who would rather collect trash than find my son.

Yeah I liked that, it made you feel more ready if you joined up way later, more prepared for the task ahead.

 

[Millim]

In all honesty, Skyrim was the worst Bethesda game for me.
Morrowind and Oblivion I find are two very good games (despite their flaws) and in Oblivion's case, the whole World just feels richer than Skyrim.
I like the more experimental elements of Skyrim's Design, but the whole game felt way too cold and depressing. Plus, going into Hellish Oblivion portals is much more interesting than fighting Dragons.
The best thing about Skyrim through is that score.

 

[Dr Fallout]

I preferred Morrowind's soundtrack, more diverse and alien.

 

[ZigzagPX4]

I preferred Morrowind's soundtrack, more diverse and alien.

All of Morrowind, not just the music was diverse and alien. Bethesda makes worlds, not stories. The reason they even screwed up their world-building (as in the environments, not the background), which is their speciality, is because they tried too much to duplicate what the "cool kids" of games, Minecraft and Destiny, were doing.

If they had just focused on what they did best, they might've ended up with a pretty decent, average story and an atmospheric open-world that rivalled STALKER. Too bad their compromises and sales-chasing means they won't be famous for that now. They'll be famous for being just like everyone else, another company lost into the mires of lifeless development. Another one bites the dust...