"Streamlining" has been their mantra since Oblivion. TES6 is going to be even more watered down than everything else, but also crammed full of useless things. I'm willing to bet they'll let you build a town. But the town will do nothing and won't have any impact at all in the game.
It will do something. It will be a resource sink for a while, and then it will become a resource faucet. Nothing more interesting than that.
Nah, you just described Starfield. They're going to decide that was too easy and gate building behind even more story/skills/tasks for less reward.
I also described Fallout 4.
The town bit is so uncannily spot, Christ
Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith explained that Larian’s success is an “exception” to the last decade of gaming trends, but one that shows a shift in desire from gamers.
There's been no shift, we've just been ignored and under-served for around two decades. But, sure, keep ignoring us.
It's what AAA companies do best!
You'd think the sensible business decision would be to see an under supplied gap in the market and fill it, but God-forbid they do something sensible.
but that gap has less potential revenue than a sucessfull live service gacha horse armor battlepass.
so we need to take another shot at the monetisation jackpot,
surely this time we will make it big.
did you know:
99% of devs quit before they make a sucessfull live service
Did you know approximately 1-4% of the population are projected to be sociopathic?
Obsession with character sheets comes from the misapprehension that the R in RPG stands for “roll” and not “role” imo.
Obsession with character sheets comes from pen and paper and a desire to simulate every aspect of the world. Without the tools to tweak your ability to interact with the system you can pretend to be a master thief, but unless the game reinforces that with its behaviour you're just pretending. Like you can pretend to be a vampire in Skyrim, sure, but it's more fun when you've actually got the curse and the game reinforces that.
Fundamentally a stat sheet is just a way to tell the game what your character is like in a way that it understands and can reinforce that's more granular than definition by class or by what skills you've used. And every game has one, whether you can see it and change it or not.
It's why "everyone" ends up as a stealth archer in Skyrim. Because stealth and ranged attacks are something every character would try to do, Skyrim's design means if you as much as try something it makes you better at it, even if you want to be a clumbsy barbarian.
Which ironically makes it so you can't just roleplay, you have to avoid trying anything that isn't what your character is best at. It means you can't hide from a patrol you can't handle, you have to just charge in and swing, because the game will change your character otherwise and you can't tell it not to.
When Elder Scrolls had a character sheet, you designated specific skills that would contribute to leveling. Stealth archers were only as common as the people who preferred that play style.
Archery did kinda suck in ES3 though. Point being, incidental play didn't sabotage your character authorship. Character sheets are great.
Personally, I find that to be good news. I prefer ES's "just do the thing to get better at it" approach over arbitrary experience points to get better at whatever you decide to upgrade when you level up.
It also doesn't mean there won't be stats. The engine still depends on stats whether or not Bethesda makes UI for it or allows granular control of it. FO4's perks, for example, set various attribute and hidden skill points in the background to hard values because that's how the game handles the extra "power attacks" you can make. Instead of how it was displayed to the user in Oblivion, where you get these extra attacks at 25, 50, 75 and 100 points in a skill, you just upgrade the perk and it sets those values to the necessary milestone.
None of these simplifications stop it from being a good action adventure game. I think at this point if you still consider them to be RPGs first and not straight up action games, you're only setting yourself up for disappointment. They haven't been good RPGs since Oblivion first shifted the series to being more action-oriented.
I'd say the focus in Bethesda games has always been exploration and world building. I don't care too much about the roleplay system so long as exploration and looting feels good.
The Magic System was simplified, but was made more reactive with things like igniting oil spills
Man, fuck oil spills. You walk into the first dungeon, you set fire to an oil spill with a spell. Then you'll try dropping one of those laterns, which are always conveniently placed above the Exxon Valdez. And then, that's it, the fun is over, the joke is told, that's all you can do with oil spills.
I'd also really like to know what other examples there are of it being more reactive. You can't freeze the ground to make enemies slip. You can't zap a river to fry some fishes. You can't set fire to wood.
It really feels like some dev thought to themselves, we've got oil lamps, maybe we could have some of that drip out, and then the Sweet Little Lies guy said fuck yes, put lakes of oil into every dungeon, so I can claim we've made the magic system more reactive or some shit.
I mean for god's sake, you had a spell in each hand but they didn't do spell combos.
cmon man
It can be too reactive as well. I love BG3, I did 3 full runs. But I never used the grease spell again after the first run. They made it flammable to the entire puddle. What that means in practical terms is every tiny candle can turn the entire puddle into a small amount of fire damage. The prevalence of flame sources also means this will nearly always happen. So instead of getting a bunch of prone enemies that are easier to hit, I have mildly annoyed enemies.
So now that question is in the back of my head whenever I see this. What kind of damage and reactivity are we talking about here?
I can't play Divine Divinity 2 anymore. Every. Single. Fight. is just lighting puddles on fire, and freezing them. Or you throw poison on the puddle, and then light it on fire! Wooo
Making it so holding a fire source sets any surface you stand on on fire is so cursed tactically.
Just cancel this game or give it to larian studios already, I don't want elder scrolls 6 anymore
that sucks i was really wanting to play a new elder scrolls, but Dreamscape_ has spoken everyone 😔
Baldur's gate 3 characters aren't even that complicated. You pick stats at the start from a limited range of options, and then make very few choices when you level up. Some levels you don't pick anything at all. This ain't path of exile.
I got a mod for bg3 that gives you a feat every level and holy shit did that make it more interesting.
To WotC's credit, making character choice really shallow is probably why the game succeeded so well. A lot of people don't really want a lot of choices, especially when some are traps.
Hardest part was item management
Yeah, I quickly installed a Containers mod to deal with items. They automatically grab the items (based on how the item is tagged in the backend) so your inventory is just sorted into “melee weapons”, “jewelry”, “books”, etc… The only downside is that encumbrance can sneak up on you, because your inventory doesn’t look full when you open your character sheet. Luckily, sorting by weight still works, so you can see which containers are the heaviest and start with those.
Bag of holding mod is clutch imho
I’m curious what people are hoping for. When was the last time Bethesda made a good game? I would bet maybe 5% of ppl working on Skyrim are still there. It’s unlikely they will be able to correct course, and we’ll get a new Starfield
I thought Fallout 4 was good. As a first-person looter shooter. Shitty story-line and same problems as every game on the engine; but still great fun strictly as a shooter. Setting is on point, it's easy to get immersed in the world, all that. It just isn't a great role-playing game nor does it have a super compelling story after Kellogg's fight.
Even Fallout 76 is kinda good? Like if it wasn't for the whole multiplayer angle, it could have been a good Fallout 4-2.
Starfield is such an anamoly. It's technically (and by that I mean the tech itself) one of the best releases they've ever had. Shit runs smooth as butter even on unsupported hardware. But then the game itself is just... So boring. There's no life to the world like in every single one of their other games outside the major cities. Most of the universe is just empty, and even with the RNG POIs, because they are pre-made things that can just pop up anywhere, they have literally no environmental story-telling. And it also kinda feels like they lied about being sci-fi fans because every reference is as generic as possible. It's like someone who has never seen sci-fi in their life came up with everything in the game after a single night of barely paying attention to the top 10 sci-fi movies they found on a random BuzzFeed list.
I'm guessing some people are just looking for more of Skyrim. That's basically what Starfield was, in a sci-fi setting, so I'm confident Bethesda can still deliver it. I'm not confident people want what comes along with that, though (bland story, outdated engine, empty characters, outdated mechanics, lots of loading screens).
Oof. I liked character stat screen in morrowind. I hate tjat newer bethesda games hide it.
Skyrim turning star-signs into shrines was a brilliant move. Didn't oversimplify their effects, didn't put the quiz before the lesson, didn't give you any reason to delete a character and start over. And by making them in-world objects, at disparate locations, you couldn't just open a menu and rewrite yourself. So much streamlining, especially in the Elder Scrolls, paves over interesting systems in the name of approachability. But occasionally they nail it.
Well it's good to have confirmation TES ended with Skyrim and we won't have to port oblivion to yet another game, ever, for any reason.
Even Skyrim wasn't that great compared to its predecessors, the storylines all culminated to the point where you were the dragonborn, master wizard, super thief and ultimate warrior. The quests where pretty dull for the most part and a lot of the unique world building of TES had been replaced with generic RPG themes.
I mean sure dumb down the character/points systems so the game is more appealable to the masses but the quality of Bethesda's games have been taking a nosedive for awhile.
The last game I bought from them was fallout 4 and it was a massive letdown. I never bothered with a second playthrough because I couldn't stomach all the fetch/bad quality quests.
After watching the shitshow of fallout 76 and starfield I know I made the right choice to never buy anything from this money grubbing shitty company again.
I kinda wanna get Fallout 4, but only so I can play Fallout London.
the storylines all culminated to the point where you were the dragonborn, master wizard, super thief and ultimate warrior.
This is true of both Oblivion and Morrowind, isn't it?
I think I wanna fire up Morrowind!
So aside from Baldurs gate 3, who's actually making good RPGs these days?
Owlcat is.
Wrath of the Righteous, and Rogue Trader are great RPGs
Great rpgs but damn do they have issues with bugs, designing puzzles and some quest pathing/designing.
Make fun games with so many head scratching moments on why they decided to do things
I can see that, and those are common complaints. But I'm happy they even bother to put puzzles in their games. And most of them you can figure out from notes or environmental clues. I think it makes the games better, you can skip most of the puzzles anyways. Or just look up the solution.
I have more issues with the menus and character outlines, circles, and dotted lines everywhere. Also, the gamepad control for Rogue Trader gives me motion sickness.
I love their Adventure Path conversion that is basically straight up a single game worth of content per act. Although the way that the way that they implemented the rules is basically like having a DM that is your partner's ex.
For a generous definition of "these days", check out the pillars of eternity games. They're very good and clearly a love letter to Baldur's gate. Unfortunately the team is now making a Skyrim-like for some reason, but I hope they come back and finish the main game story sometime.
There's also that solasta game that's DND 5e but on a smaller budget from a few years ago.
Inexile though its been a bit since wasteland 3 and owlcat games.
I've been wanting to check out Rogue Trader now that that's out. I loved Kingmaker and Wotr from Owlcat (with the caveat that I always disable the crusade and kingmaking modes...)
Its pretty solid but... limited. You can tell just by looking at the map that they intend to fill it out with DLC over the next couple years. Which is honestly on brand for a TRPG based game especially a games workshop IP.
Is it bad that I dont consider it all that bad since expansion modules have been a thing in RPGs for decades and DLC are just a further evolution therein?
Good to know they keep going their own way. We got more than enough carbon copy games nowadays, always excited for something unique.
are you suggesting that the elder scrolls series, specifically the next one coming out made and published by bethesda/ microsoft, is going to be unique?
Uniquely bland and devoid of any soul.
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