I know there’s great love for Oblivion (I never played it when it was new), and of course Skyrim is the gold standard for new fans (I played the shit out of that and it was my first entry into the elder scrolls back when it came out 14 years ago…) but I really feel like this shadow drop of a half assed remake is just priming everyone to lower their expectations for the likely dumpster fire that is The Elder Scrolls VI.

I know its old hat nonsense of a complaint but whatever Bethesda used to be it stopped being that 20 years ago and we’re all just stuck thinking they’ll put out some new masterpiece when in reality all the talent they had back in the day has likely left for other jobs and they are now just a shitty company among countless other shitty companies putting profit over anything else and stifling anyone who might actually have good ideas on how to make good games (how unsurprising).

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[–] TommySoda@lemmy.world 15 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

It's a remaster of a game from 2006 with a fresh coat of paint and some QOL changes and that's basically all it ever could be. 70% of the game did not age well and they honestly did the best they could. If they did a complete remake and "modernized" the game all the old-school fans would be pissed. If they kept it as true to the original as possible besides a facelift they'd make it harder for new players to want to pick it up. I feel like a good 7/10 was the best they could shoot for under most circumstances.

And if you ask anyone where Bethesda fell off, depending on which game was their first, they will all give you a different answer. For me Morrowind and Oblivion are the best in the series and that's with over 500 hours in Skyrim. They've been dumbing their games down with each new iteration since the 90s as they try to "modernize" the newest game each time and reach new audiences. Like, good luck playing Morrowind or Daggerfall these days without losing your patience in a matter of hours. And Morrowind especially is barely playable without mods these days.

I still hated Starfield, though. Gave it the old college try and left so underwhelmed I couldn't tell you a damn thing about the story.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

The story was the most interesting thing about Starfield, since like me, the writers of Starfield also really loved the movie Interstellar. Unfortunately, nearly every plot line sort of wrapped up in an unfulfilling way for one reason or another.

I think the gist of Bethesda games is that what they did was truly impressive 20 years ago, but each individual piece of them is kind of bad. The combat is bad, the story is bad, the RPG systems are way worse than their pen and paper roots, the NPC schedules tend to do little more than make quest givers just appear in slightly different locations, and what should be dynamic uses of physics and NPC line of sight never manifests in anything more interesting than putting a bucket on a shop keeper's head to steal things.

There's nothing quite like a Bethesda game, because I think when another developer sits down to make a new game, they try to make one or more of those pieces way better than a Bethesda game rather than implementing everything that Bethesda implements, because plenty of it is bad and will be bad without being able to focus on it.