34
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
34 points (100.0% liked)
Indie Game Dev - News and Promotions
189 readers
144 users here now
This community provides a platform where you can start discussions, ask questions and get help about anything related to game development and publishing.
Reddit Subreddit
Rules
- Post only in English.
- Avoid aggressive and confrontational behavior.
- You can share posts on the same topic a month apart.
founded 10 months ago
MODERATORS
Morrowind is the third Elder Scrolls game though, which means it inherited a good chunk of its weirdness. Bethesda decided to run with it and go weirder instead of leaning on well-worn tropes - whereas with Oblivion, they decided to go the opposite direction and turn the weird setting back into stereotypical Western medieval fantasy. That whole doing-the-safe-thing is one of the reasons why the big publishers are floundering right now; there's a dearth of fresh new experiences that can't be gotten anywhere else. And that drought is going to continue so long as the CEO's of these companies continue to ignore the gaming side of the gaming industry and try to run it like any other tech industry. We have to go to indies for that sort of experience now - and indies can't afford to build a sprawling, hand-crafted world like Morrowind.
I gotta disagree. There is an endless cavalcade of weirdness in the Indie gaming scene. Like, how do you just breeze by Undertale/Delta Rune? Or The Stanley Parable? Or Disco Elysium? Even just the vanilla Nintendo titles manage to keep it fresh, with SMB Wonder and Tears of the Kingdom and Pokémon Legends putting all sorts of spins on the fantasy genre.
Elder Scrolls tends to aim for a prodigious amount of content in a given release, with both volume of territory and depth of story giving their games a lot of replayability. But the idea that you can't play a cat girl sorcerer in any other title? Come on.
What we're seeing is the death of the nostolgia-inducing titles. It's the IP that's being squandered, not the broad artistry or gameplay.
Everyone starts somewhere. Blizzard wasn't always a multi-billion dollar studio. They built up the Warcraft and Starcraft settings brick by brick. Everyone from SquareSoft to FromSoft started with these small, somewhat boutique games and kept piling on more history and more story as they expanded and evolved.
Larian is currently undergoing the kind of expansion that these older studios were experiencing back in the 90s/00s.
4A Games has been putting out hits with it's Metro series
Kojima Productions has delivered two Death Stranding iterations and doesn't seem to be slowing down.
Owlcat's following in Bethesda's footsteps, with early isometric games that grow more complex and animation intense as they grow.
CD Projekt has been churning out big budget hits for over a decade.
You can't just blink past all these guys.