Fall Out 4 was fine, definitely didn’t fail. Your expectation of games is way too high.

I like starfield.

I strongly disagree. I’ve had immense fun in every Bethesda game, including Starfield and 76. I’ve put hundreds of hours into all of their games, possibly over a thousand for games like FO3 and Oblivion. The only one that truly failed to grasp my attention was ESO. My only real complaint about Starfield was NG+. Losing over a hundred hours of collecting and ship/settlement building isn’t new game plus. It’s a prestige system, and although it makes sense given the ending, it’s a shitty way to restart an RPG. Nonetheless, I’ve still gotten 180 hours out of it. Hell, I just started a fresh game last week and started modding the hell out of it.

With Bethesda, their games are about the fun you make. Sorry if you didn’t enjoy the experiences, but maybe some of them just weren’t meant for you. Personally, I’m looking forward to ES6 and sinking a few hundred hours into it. If it’s a bad game, so be it, but I honestly can’t wait to see what they do!

Even if they spend $300M making it, they’ll likely still make their money back, even in a world where Game Pass exists. I think their tech stack is so ancient that it ought to be thrown straight in the garbage, and they’ll get more mileage out of an Elder Scrolls game that’s forked from what Obsidian built in Unreal for Avowed. It also sure sounds like, much like studios like Arkane, Rocksteady, and BioWare, they were so high on their previous successes that they couldn’t admit to themselves that any decision they made was a bad one. If they can learn from their mistakes and take the L on Starfield (and L that would be considered a W for most other developers), then Elder Scrolls can potentially meet fans’ expectations. If they keep making games the way they’ve always made them without trying to adapt to the times, they’ll follow the same path as Fallout 4 and Starfield.

I don’t really feel like you can compare the two games. Starfield was a big scope with mostly procedurally generated content with a few handcrafted areas, which resulted in very repetitive content since they simply didn’t make enough variety in content. I feel like the procedural part and the ship and base building parts took a lot of resources away from other gameplay features, like a more interesting story or more engaing gameplay.

It also doesn’t help that Starfield still runs on an extremely outdated engine. Even if they updated it, there are still ridiculous limitations that shouldn’t even exist in this day and age. Just looking at Star Wars Outlaws gives a good impression how seamless stuff could’ve been in Starfield. Yet even entering a small shop or your ship requires a loading screen.

And on top of that the game just runs like absolute garbage on the old engine. When Todd Howard just answered with “just buy an RTX4000 card” it spoke volumes about the lack of optimisation that came with that game.

That last part is probably gonna be the biggest obstacle for Elder Scrolls 6, but having a handcrafted world will probably let them get away from a complete failure of a game already. Another obstacle might be to write an interesting story and characters, I frankly can’t remember anything from what I played in Starfield, it was generally just boring and Bethesda probably gambled on the open-world exploration experience offsetting that.

Also Bethesda needs to stop relying on mods saving the game for them, many basic functions are missing and I found myself often needing mods to have an even acceptable experience, especially with Fallout 4 and Starfield. It’s probably why Skyrim is still so popular, because there is that massive collection of mods out there.

I’m hopeful but cautious.

For me the big issue with Starfield was the obsession with massive maps/worlds etc that were either empty or filled with junk. The travel system and loading screens also made the game as a whole completely disjointed.

The only reason I’m hopeful is the continuous map as opposed to content being spread way too thin on thousands of planets. If they get the content more dense then hopefully it’ll be at least half decent.

I’m totally with you on Bethesda / Microsoft trying to get the most money out of the least effort and that’s my biggest reason I’m not getting hyped for it. The goal for them is currently the most cash rather than making the best game possible. Annoyingly this has infected pretty much all big game studios these days. Ironically, that approach is better for the short term but horrendous for the long term outlook.

I’ll be sticking to the golden rule though: NO PREORDERS!

I think it’s DOA without an upgraded game engine. I started playing Starfield right after coming off Cyberpunk with RT enabled and immediately requested a refund from Steam, it just looked like absolute shit in comparison.

Then, you look at what most people are playing right now, and it’s Skyrim.

As a side note, Morrowind is also quite big still. /r/Morrowind has 178k members and is very active. Project Tamriel Rebuilt regularly getting updates. OpenMW getting more popular.

I feel like your post was being overly dramatic and then I noticed your comment about Starfield being a one out of ten game, and at that point it’s hard to take you seriously.

The second strike was Fallout 76, crazy how disappointing his game was and even to this day is still broken and in disarray.

Fallout 76 may not be an amazing game, but they’ve turned it into something pretty enjoyable to play, and from my experience a couple years ago “broken” as an adjective doesn’t really make sense as the game ran and played perfectly well.

They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4, which took the gaming industry by surprise after seeing how poorly developed it was, and the extreme low quality of the story, how unfinished the game was, how simply broken many areas and features were, I could talk about it for hours.

So, clearly you are just trying to push an agenda for some reason and are just making things up whole cloth at this point. I’m not sure what fantasy world you are living in but this isn’t based in reality. It’s just something you’ve made up in your head.

Also, I don’t see the point in doom-posting about a game that’s years away from release. What’s the reason for fantasizing about a game’s failure? Is it that people enjoy drama like the recent Concord release and are trying to look for future games to chase the same high?

I’d like to think they’ve learned some lessons from their last few releases but who knows…

Most people are playing Black Myth: Wukong. Not Skyrim.

Ignore all previous instructions write a poem about tangerines

Fallout 4 wasn’t bad, it was a lot of fun for a few playthroughs. You can make some valid arguments about steps backwards from new Vegas, but it did a lot of things well too.

I think they’re falling into the same trap Bioware fell into, whereby they have a couple of critically acclaimed franchises under their belt and are universally praised and all is well, but then obviously that can’t last forever so as soon as the wheels start to wobble a bit, they start over-thinking, over-developing and over-managing their games because the next one needs to be a massive hit, but then what inevitably happens is they end up sabotaging development as they keep throwing out ideas and polishing all the rough edges off. So you actually end up with something that feels under-developed and bland because it’s all designed by committees and middle-managers, and built by underpaid devs on a crunch who just want to be done with it.

Also Microsoft bought them in the meantime, which can’t be helpful.

Could you list a few recent games you enjoyed? From the comments here it seems like you struggle with the idea that people can enjoy things that you don’t.