Todd Howard says TES6 needs to be playable for "a decade at least"

Is there any hope for TES6?

  • Yes

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • No

    Votes: 33 100.0%

  • Total voters
    33
Time is ultimately the best critic.
Look at New Vegas for example, in the last few years, the internet has had some kind of wake up call that it's actually a pretty good game. This may be due to the lack of interest Fallout 4 got once it came out, but looking at it now, you'll find more places who encourage New Vegas than 3 or 4.

Fallout and Skyrim type games are kind of escapist open world fantasies. Skyrim probably aged the best out of any of them because it still looks good and what people return to is Skyrim as a place to exist in, not so much a story to be re-read or experienced. Fallout 3 hasn't aged well graphically and especially in the more cerebral content of the game, it can feel a bit derpy going through the quests and dialogue. On the other hand, good/interesting dialogue and detailed "choose your own adventure" style quests that have a multitude outcomes will always age well because those things can rely on themselves and not the graphics or anything else. I'll always love Fallout 3 but I don't think I will ever replay it.
 
I disagree when it comes to the visuals. I think New Vegas didn't age well. Hell I had the feeling it was already totally outdated when the game was released. I guess Obsidian did their best given the circumstances, Bethesda breathing down their neck, a relatively short development time and this fucked up engine. Oh god do I hate this game engine Bethesda is using or well what they make out of it. This is just my opinion of course but I could not fire up Vegas again. I just can't. The animations, the textures it already made me puke when I played New Vegas for the first time. It would make me cut my wrists if I had to see it now.
 
All Bethesda games look dated even when new. I think they usually have a strong enough art direction to carry them for the most part (except Fallout 4, that game is just ugly). Dated Graphics aren't that big a deal to me tho, as long as the game is good, which, most of Bethesda games aren't.
 
Dated graphics are absolutely no problem at all! I could start Jedi Outcast 2 tomorrow and still have tons of fun with the game even if the engine is like what 15 years old by now? It's just really the way how Bethesda is using their engine ... which always seems a bit weird. Of course you're right with Skyrim. The art direction really does carry the game.
 
I don't really have any hope for anything Bethesda will do anymore tbh. It will probably be filled with never ending fetch quests.
 
We can all cook up a game that, if made properly, was moddable, was supported, on a new engine, with an intriging plot with numerous side-plots and their quests, that could last a decade. Expansion packs - or DLC - would aid in this by opening new parts of the world.

But Beth can't do it. They already hit the decade-long game, SOMEHOW, with Skyrim. So that's what they'll replicate.
 
This is IMO one of the biggest problem with modern Bethesda. They want to make their games last for not 40-60 hours, which is the common duration for a proper RPG. They want their games to last obscene amounts of time just to flex their numbers.

And of course it will be at the expense of proper writing and interesting quest design. It will be just Skyrim 2: Electric Bogaloo. I won't be playing it, but at least I hope that if they are going in that way, they don't even bother doing writing. That would be better than their excuses for a "story".

Also the creators of Daggerfall and Indigo Gaming are now working on something, so there's still hope.
 
It's really a shame Bethesda doesn't believe in the concept of replayability. Their games have been hardly ever replayable since Morrowind (that's not to say you can't replay Morrowind and have a good time), but got so much worse with recent games. They have this mentality that the player must experience all content in one playthrough and resort to dumb shit like being able to join all factions, regardless if it makes sense.

Granted, this mentality is so much more prevalent in the Elder Scrolls series compared to their Fallout games. Fallout 3 and 4 do have some multiple outcomes in quests, but they either hardly affect anything, most outcomes are absolutely stupid or too simplistic to the point it's literally "pick between these two rewards".
 
They want their games to last obscene amounts of time just to flex their numbers.
It's not to flex their numbers, it's to get Creation Club money.

If you have a game people play for 10 years and have microtransactions, you will always get some profit from those. If you have a game that people don't play for that long, then it's less profit and probably wouldn't be worth having Creation Club at all.
 
It's not to flex their numbers, it's to get Creation Club money.
Yep, that's also something to have in mind.

I mentioned the flexing thing because with Skyrim they did it a lot. "This game lasts for hundreds of hours". "The map is gigantic, the biggest in all gaming history" (COUGH DAGGERFALL COUGH). With F4 and 76 they did the same. "Look at how big our map is. 16 TIMES THE DETAIL". I really dislike the "if it is bigger, it must be better" mindset, it encourages quantity over quality.

And oh boy the Creation Club. I understand that DLC sized mods and complex stuff like Project Nevada can't fit in, because they usually require a Script Extender and that's a big nono from consoles but for fuck's sake, what in the world is with the content in that place. And it's not the fault of the mod makers, it's Bethesda's fault.
 
I really dislike the "if it is bigger, it must be better" mindset, it encourages quantity over quality.
It's what some people really want though. They'd rather have a sandbox with less quality content that they can goof off in rather than something carefully crafted. I get it, I just don't dig it.

Everyone I know that liked Skyrim a good bit also really enjoyed Fallout 3 and Oblivion simply because they could walk anywhere and find something to do. I remember a YouTube video that did a test on Oblivion vs other games with open worlds. They found that Oblivion had some sort of event or quest every 3-5 minutes after walking in a specific direction and only that direction. I think they also looked at Gothic and then compared how they felt about the content that popped up often in both, but that's not the point. The point is that you give people something every 3-10 minutes to discover or do and a lot of people will respond to it. Doesn't have to be well crafted, just something you can beat in about 10-20 minutes and have enough of those pop up.

Most people here aren't going to like Skyrim and the likes, but plenty of people do. Like when the meme about rereleasing so often was popular? They responded and said if we don't want releases of Skyrim everywhere then we should stop buying them. So people really must like the game (and want it on every system they own) while we are in the minority.
 
So people really must like the game (and want it on every system they own) while we are in the minority.
Yeah, and I don't blame them (I personally don't like calling someone a "Bethesdard" or fanboy/girl in general because what you like is subjective). As you noted, Bethesda is really good at "engineering" a type of world that will absorb you (or try to). In the surface it's neat because quests have some semblance of context and that's enough, but try to go deeper than that and to put it nicely, it's just boring and poorly thought (let's remind that they don't even have a proper writing team. And again, it's not their fault because they are not good at writing, they are mostly level designers). And that's enough for people to praise as the best RPG's of all time.

And while we are a minority, at least there is still some hope, with good RPG's releasing every now and then (heck I'm actually studying C# and Unity to make my own RPG). We are few but we truly care about this genre.
 
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