Where Bethesda went wrong

I would argue that in a way, Bethesda's games have been going downhill since Morrowind. Sure, Oblivion is awesome and Skyrim is probably the best TeS game overall, but there's something they lack compared to Morrowind. This is even more apparent when we compare Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 to earlier Fallout games. The fundamental issue is greed, or rather a terrible corporate structure which puts pressure on Bethesda to focus more on making money than making a good game, and this is never a good long term strategy. Just a few years ago Bethesda Game Studios was viewed with a high level of respect from gamers, however they have now tarnished that reputation by showing very little respect to their fan base.

Consider this example; a business which decides to cut costs by lowering the quality of its product, hoping it will produce better profits for them. At first it seems to work, the money comes flowing in and people barely notice a difference. So they continue to etch away at the quality of their product, before long they have something on par with a home-brand product and they've utterly destroyed any prestige attached to their company name. As expected people stop buying the product and the company eventually goes out of business, all because they didn't see any reason to respect the consumer, instead they thought it was wise to sacrifice their product quality and reputation for some quick easy profits.

Bethesda saw how much money they could make from the console market and ever since then they've focused less on PC gamers despite the fact their core fanbase started as PC gamers who loved to mod their games. This first became apparent to me with Fallout 4, they had removed the scroll bars from inventory menus despite previous Fallout games having that feature. With Fallout 76 it's even worse on PC, you have to use a bunch of weird keys to move through menus, it's very clearly designed for console users and little effort has been made to make it usable on PC. Fallout 4 had more than 2x the sales on console, so they focus mainly on the platform which makes them money, who cares about those annoying PC gamers right?

I was super hyped for Fallout 4 because Fallout 3 is my favorite game, but the game was unable to live up to that hype, and the fundamental issue was a dumbing down of the game mechanics to make it less of a story driven RPG and more of a shooter you can casually play on the console, which makes sense if your target audience is console gamers. However that's not what a Fallout game is, that's not what a TeS game is, games such as Morrowind were born as PC games which are still played today because of PC modders. When Fallout 76 was announced the hype I should have felt wasn't there because I didn't view Bethesda as the same company I once did. This is the last thing you want to happen to your brand.

Obsidian did a spectacular job of showing where Bethesda went wrong and they did it with one simple trailer for their new game The Outer Worlds. It really doesn't have much to do with them using a bad engine, because the Creation Engine is not the same engine used in earlier Bethesda games, and as a modder myself I appreciate the effort they've put into making their games highly moddable. I worry however that they are coming to view modders as more of a nuisance than anything else now that they have paid mods from the Creation Club, every time they release new CC content it breaks the script extender and multiple mods, and they just don't care.

I hope Fallout 76 has shown Bethesda how their exploitation of a highly respected game franchise doesn't always end with people throwing their money at you. I'm actually one of the people who liked the idea of an online Fallout game, but you can't just design a huge empty world with no PvP element and call it a game, the only thing to do is collect stuff but it doesn't even have a player driven economy and the storage weight limits are tiny. They've exploited the Fallout franchise to the point where people are more excited about Fallout New Vegas mods such as New California, which was recently released (and worth playing). It is important that the same thing doesn't occur to The Elder Scrolls series.

Bethesda seems to care more about the TeS franchise so I'm less worried about it, but I'm still concerned that their only motivation will be money and they will ignore large fractions of their fan base as a result. Bethesda can reclaim their reputation but in order to do it they need to focus less on money and listen more to the concerns of gamers. Or they can focus on money and be just another run-of-the-mill game developer with nothing that sets their games apart from the rest. Obviously it's important to make a profit, but it's just as important to maintain the thing which made your company great in the first place. The thing that Morrowind had was soul, it was built with passion and not greed.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

Morrowind, dated but still the best NPC dialogue of all Bethesda TES game's, oblivion had a better engine but was lacking the huge number of guild's and quest tree's that Morrowind had and it felt smaller even though it was actually larger, there was somehow so much less to it's world beautifully crafted though it was.
Skyrim, a great game but it lacked soul, I can't put it any other way it had lost so much that was present in morrowind, it was technically excellent with superior graphic's, an even more updated engine, better AI - though not actually much better than Oblivion's and it was a much smaller leap than Oblivion was but once again too few quests, the quest tree felt a bit ruined due to the much poorer dialogue than in the original morrowind, remember the wood elf mage in Balmora whom would say "You must be a thief because you've stolen my heart" if you had a high enough speech skill.
Also though almost all of the Mod's for morrowind have long since gone they used to be genuinely great as they were made in a slightly less copyright conscious time and had sound track's that were definitely copyright material the huge number of mod's that once existed for morrowind and some of those being the likes of Quarl's underground which if you could get it to work was actually bigger than the main game and far more fun though with some heavily adult content.

Oblivion almost captured that but as in morrowind now so many of those early mod's have been removed form the main modding sites over concern's about copyright etc.

Where Skyrim has flowered is the incredibly huge amount of mod's it has spawned and were it will really bloom IF bethesda do not throw a spanner into the wheel is when the Morrowind is finally completed because it shall give you the opportunity to once again explore the elder scroll's 3 but this time in the updated engine.

Where Bethesda have lost there way in my opinion is more in there Fallout department, there last offering Fallout 4 was substandard compared to New Vegas but of course New Vegas was actually produced under licence by another game studio, one that created the fantastic Kotor2 game.

Still if they can get past making online only MMO's with the intention of launching there own version of micro transactions in them (something for which I absolutely hate EA) then the next Elder Scroll's game might and I do say might just redeem them - If it stay's a single player game that is.

It's a shame that the company that spawned so many mod makers with Morrowind (you know some hardcore TES fan's still swear by there older game's) then seemed to abandon there own founding ethos.





www.youtube.com...
Remember these are fellow Morrowind fan's and NOT Bethesda themselves but if the video's play true the conversion may become the best elder scroll's game of all time.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

I’ve heard nothing but bad things about fallout 76.
I bought myself an Xbox one X today and a one S for one of the kids.
My X came as the fallout bundle ( I already have BF5, or I would of choose that)
But after reading all the horrid reviews, I’m not even tempted to download the game onto my hard drive, to see for myself.
Instead I’m just gonna sell it, make a couple bucks back.
Someone’s got to want that game for Xmas.

Modern gaming is knackered, on all platforms. We're being farmed now.

I'm this close to buying an old Atari ST

a reply to: Macenroe82

I was probably a bit harsh on it, I actually play it every now but I'm mostly just doing it to explore the world, they always have well designed worlds even if they reduce the quality of everything else. They could fix it by adding some NPC's and better quests, but I highly doubt they'll do that. The only other way to save it is go full Rust-style and enable some real PvP action, which would give base building more of a purpose. This was the main concern I wrote about just before Fallout 76 was released, I warned that it would create great dissatisfaction among gamers because it was trying to pull off a weird balancing act which would not appease anyone.

Theyre using the same engine as fallout 76 for starfield and the new elder scrolls. Im genuinly worried.

a reply to: JourneymanWelder

I'm pretty sure they've said the engine will have a much more advanced animation system, which is one of the only real issues with the current Creation Engine. It has fairly realistic shading capabilities these days, it really comes down to the quality of the textures and meshes, which is why modders can make Bethesda games look better just by using better textures. In my experience, the majority of bugs comes down to developers and modders making a mistake while building content with the Creation Kit, the bugs aren't inherently part of the engine and can be fixed with community patches. There a few bugs that have existed for a while in the engine, such as the physics being tied to the frame rate, but they've been forced to fix a lot of that since the release of Fallout 76 because it's an online game and the game world needs to be consistent for all players.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

Was a big Bethesda fan but am now enjoying the Fallout of 76 , Bethesda have been given a free pass by gamers for far to long which has led to the asset stripping cobbled together mess that is Fallout 76 , they made a rod for their own back and are now being flogged with it.

A company who exploit their customers deserve the blow back when it comes , selling a $200 edition of a substandard game with a plastic helmet and an advertised canvas bag that turns out to be nylon is unforgivable and cements Bethesda's place in the hall of shame along with EU , Ubisoft and Activision.

At least we still have CD Projekt , a company of gamers who make games for gamers , shame they are the only mainstream software house who still give a damn.

Suck it up Bethesda , you earned it.

Todd Howard , it just works.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

Right there with ya. Morrowind was always my favorite installment of the series. When Oblivion came out I played it, and just couldn't get into it. I've tried playing it a few times in the past, and still just can't get into it. When Skyrim came out I tried it, and same thing. It's all streamlined for console and for people who like the thought of playing an immense immersive game while not actually playing one.

Morrowind may not be as nice and new as far as graphics go, but I still thought the artwork was awesome. I got so into the side mission I forgot all about the actual main story for like two weeks. The music was great, the expansions were great. Everything about that game was and still is great to me. If I had the time for videogames I would probably go play it right now.

I played Fallout 3 when it came out, but I got tired of it pretty quickly. I just couldn't get into it. I felt like I was forcing myself to finish the game just so I could say I did. I didn't care much for any of the non main story stuff wither. When Fallout 4 came out everyone was talking about how good it was that they were building on the stuff that everyone liked from the third one. But all that stuff was the stuff that I couldn't get into.

Most videogames are like that now a days for me though. They focus all the emphasis on the visuals. Games these days look awesome, and sometimes they get the music on point. But the stories are #. They aren't engaging. I don't care about the characters. I don't care about the story.

THEN when the games costing anywhere between $50 to $100 I just said never again. Especially when I thought about getting a new console, and saw that all the new games that come out now have microtransactions or are unfinished when released. So, basically people are buying overhyped, # games that aren't finished, and then are also nagged with "BUY NOW"


And they put out unfinished games on purpose with the intent of having people buy "season passes" for game content that should have either been included in the game or isn't worth the monthly payment lol.


LOLOL monthly payment on a game that shouldn't be subscription based. With server based games that makes sense. But if I were to play Tomb Raider or the new Spiderman game I don't care about comparing completion times with people. Even the last three Star Ocean games were trash.

My faith in ever finding games worth buying a console again is nonexistent. I would rather go and play the videogames from the 90s.


With each new console it has always been new games will look so much better. There is so much more we can pack into the games. But there isn't any quality story being put into new games. It all goes into details that don't make a bit of difference. Oh wow, you can see the dust in the air. Or, the water looks so real now. I don't care about that. I have a brain with a decent imagination. I can fill in the extra details with a polygonal face. But why should I be willing to shell out money on a # game that isn't going to emotionally move me, and that I'll never play again when I can spend less than half of that at the movies on a movie I'll never see again.

And trust me the graphics in movies are always better.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

Repeating quests in fallout 4 suck!!!!!


I don't want to repeat the same missions over and over with no real pay off. It's just regular exp grinding.

a reply to: RealityIsAbsurd

Skyrim would have been better than morrowind if they had kept the customization.

You can make a morrowind character way more unique and powerful.

They didn't even let us have flying spells in skyrim. like wtf?

In morrowind I enchanted a ring with super jump and feather fall.
I could jump from balmora to caldera in one leap. It was awesome!

I keep hoping someone would remake morrowind but with modern graphics. So same game just looks like skyrim.

a reply to: scraedtosleep

Agreed. Come to think of it. I think the lack of customizing your own gear is what pissed me off. I remember creating all kinds of spells, gems, and amulets.


Don't even get me started on ESO.

This vid seems relevant and is a decent watch about how the elder scrolls have gone down hill.

Bethesda made me dislike open world games. I liked morrowind and even oblivion. Fallout 3 and new Vegas(I know not bethesda) were pretty great. Then...I played skyrim...and started to realize just how #ty these games were. I kinda noticed it playing through oblivion, but it was new and shiny and all that, but skyrim took it to a new extreme. Everything you do is completely and utterly pointless. There's no point to the dungeons, there's no point to just about any item you find, the game is jampacked full of meaningless characters and crap that add nothing to the game.

You go through a dungeon, it's pretty much a straightforward path right through, you fight some #ty monsters, do a pointless puzzle or follow some storyline crap, get your pointless treasure then a convenient backdoor opens up that takes you back to the beginning, rinse and repeat a couple hundred times.

Then you've for all the crafting, house decorating, inventory management #. The last straw was when I realized one day i'd been playing for 3 hours and i'd done nothing but craft items and arrange my inventory...for three #ing hours....that was it...I was done...i've never beaten it and i'm never going to play that pile of # or any other elder scrolls game again...i've got better things to waste my time on. I could clean my house and i'd have more fun and actually be productive as opposed to wasting more time in those #ing games.

The same kind of goes for most open world games i've seen come out. My dad's got a copy of RDR2, I tried it last time I visited him. I think I spent more time managing the multiple meters for both you and your #ing horse than I did actually doing cowboy #. It was like playing grand theft auto...if your cars had gasoline and when the gas runs out your car just #ing explodes....and just more pointless crafting and random useless # scattered around.

It's really started to make me appreciate those games that just try to be games. They don't try to simulate every #ing fart a random passerby does, they're not full or random useless # that does nothing. It's just you and the game. Everything is either trying to kill you or powers you up. The only goal just to complete the game.

I'm just glad that despite all the big expensive AAA # being squeezed out these days there's still tons of indie games being made that remember they're games.

Morrowind was risky, bold, and massive. It launched with many issues, but at it's core was pure "soul", like you said.

Video games have changed since then. No corporate suit is going to allow devs to make another morrowind.

And yea... RPGs have greatly improved since then but o god I hate the hours of management and learning curve.

The cool thing about morrowind was that it just threw you into a cut throat janky rpg world with a small intro and some clothes. Then you just gotta figure it out (in a good way).

originally posted by: Macenroe82
a reply to: ChaoticOrder

I’ve heard nothing but bad things about fallout 76.
I bought myself an Xbox one X today and a one S for one of the kids.
My X came as the fallout bundle ( I already have BF5, or I would of choose that)
But after reading all the horrid reviews, I’m not even tempted to download the game onto my hard drive, to see for myself.
Instead I’m just gonna sell it, make a couple bucks back.
Someone’s got to want that game for Xmas.

Dude, not sure if you are new to gaming or what, but gaming reviews are often times just like movie reviews.... and they have gotten far worse over the years. Hating on a game like fallout 76 in a review is perfect clickbait, which is what most review sites want nowadays, for ad revenue.

The game is the weakest fallout game yet out of FO3, FO:NV, and FO4. However, if you enjoyed any of the other fallout games, you should get your monies worth on this one. Especially now, since they've fixed quite a few bugs and issues that existed at launch.

The main problem with the game IMO is they didn't seem to know where they were going with it. They obviously wanted to do something new by making it multiplayer.....but I don't think they clearly knew how to execute that, and how to make a game like fallout multiplayer. IMO you have to decide firmly what you want to create. Do you want a single player game, like all of the other fallouts, a co-op game that plays like single player but allows for cooperative, squad like play, traditional multiplayer, or an MMO? It seems like they tried to add elements from ALL of those categories, and that seriously made the game seem to be.....stuck somewhere in the middle, and not in a good way.

There are no NPCs really, the story is given to you through holotapes, and the world just gets boring when all you are fighting is super mutants, robots, bugs, and scorched....with no real engaging story. The ENTIRE story is you learning about what happened......there is no real immersive story.

Besides that though, the game is fun to play. You can easily sink 50-80 hours into the game and enjoy it for the most part......that is what I did. I don't play it anymore, but if they come out with new and exciting content, I might.

originally posted by: SlowNail
Modern gaming is knackered, on all platforms. We're being farmed now.

I'm this close to buying an old Atari ST

Get a really good quality PC and download a really good emulator, most of the software and even the old firmware on those old computers is classed as abandonware these day's so worth having a look.
These are just the top answers from a quick search - I am using Ecosia so you would find more with Bing and Google.
Always be careful of potential malware on these type of sites though.
www.emuparadise.me...
romsmania.cc...
emulator.games...
www.emuparadise.me...

a reply to: gortex

Even an SSD does not fix those problem's but let's be fair we still play the thing, one of the annoying thing's with the creation engine is that they limit there ugrid's so you have to tinker with your ini's to make the most of it and even then the range of the weapons in the game is cobbled, AI distance is crap (virtually non existent remember operation flashpoint - the original one - awful graphic's but huge rendered distances, killing a tank kilometers away and AI that was also non existent yet somehow managed to be so much better than Bethesda's supposed AI) with enemy's becoming confused if you snipe one of them and poor scripting meaning they shoot were they think you are and never work as a coordinated team.
I think were flashpoint had an advantage is that it used what was essentially a flight simulator engine.

In fallout 4 one of the most annoying bug's is textures and meshes failing to catch up if you move fast across the map and even if they do enemy's often take a minute or two (real time) to just suddenly appear were they were supposed to be had you not been running to get there.

I think what they are merely going to do for the next elder scrolls game is up the spec's on computer hardware but what they really need to do is hack there own engine source code, recompile it better and get rid of redundant code that causes problem's, fix the ever present memory leak's that plague there game's and implement some better AI, perhaps even have a look at how it was made for the stalker series of games.

So to be fair if I am still around when it come's out then I am far more looking forward to cyberpunk 2077 than I am even to the next elder scroll's even though I used to like the franchise a lot.

a reply to: LABTECH767

Operation Flashpoint was a great game , I sank many hours in to it even with its flaws it was just so different , it gave the player a chance to be a soldier not a bullet sponge.


From what I've seen 76 is at best a cash grab at worst a cynical cash grab , I'm shocked Bethesda released or even sanctioned this game when gamers want TES 6 , it's been 7 years since Skyrim.
Seems to me the studio has lost its direction.

I have no doubt cyberpunk 2077 will be awesome , I'm hoping for a release late next year or early 2020.

You kinda contradict yourself in the opening statement but I understand your perspectives in Bethesdas console vs pc gamer game development. Im a console gamer and believe the fallout and TES games have continued to improve dramatically with each iteration. I did like Morrowwinds enchanting and the free-er range on spell casting and spell making but all of the enmities were roughly the same scale and non dynamic as far as attacks. Even the level layouts were fairly cookie cutter UNTIL Skyrim and the quest lines and how they are laid out to the player have evolved over time. Monster scale and variety has kinda fluctuated but I think has improved overall, they used to just blindly and predictably attack you but raiders are ducking down for cover and bandits dodge a lot of my attempts to shoot them with a bow and arrow. I’m still playing Skyrim special edition on the ps4 and have a few friends who have played through a few characters with 300+ hours each time out so it’s highly replayable too.

Can’t speak to fallout 76, I loved fallout 4 but only played through once so far. I personally do not like online multiplayer anything so ya. I thought fallout 4 was the best looking fallout and the team obviously put a lot of effort into the story and gameplay in my opinion. You say it’s going down for some reasons specific to you and I think it’s going nowhere but up.

FALLOUT 5 and TES6 are probably going to result in a lot of job openings across the world cuz people will junky them up for days on end. More chicks will be single too lol. You can take that to the bank!reply to: ChaoticOrder