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I'm done hiding it. I LOVE Bethesda games (BGS). Who's with me?
- Thread starter MajulaDream
- Start date
Honestly Skyrim is one of the most boring I've ever played. Terrible combat/controls, generic characters, and a whole bunch of copy+pasted fetch quests through the basically the same dungeon.
You can probably tell, I didn't get very far
I think games should be messy, like jazz. I will legit have more fun with a Unity asset flip than Red Dead II. But that's just me. Y'all do you.
Well it's Hammerfell so another human setting but it was my top choice followed by Summerset or Valenwood.
Sheesh. Y'all get weird when someone doesn't have the exact same taste as you.
You're blaming the thinkpieces for Fallout 76? I'm going to frame this.
It's cuz there aren't many positive traits you can put on their games anymore. "Glitchy, buggy, and ambitious" isn't really true. "Glitchy, buggy, and but solic mechanics" isn't really true. "Glitchy, buggy, but a great story" isn't really true.
BGS hasn't improved their world design since Skyrim. Fallout 4 was actually a step back.
Yeah same, I'll keep listening for any updates that may salvage it, but at this point just looking forward to whatever they do next.
As someone who logged 880+ hours into Oblivion back in my day... I can't say I do anymore. I fell out of love with them. Oblivion was my first. Morrowind was what I decided to come back to in the long, long death march between '06 and '11 for a new one. And, sure, Fallout 3 was grand, but I only logged about 211 hours total into that one. '10 brought New Vegas, and with it, a new standard for what quality looked like in that kind of game. Sure, it was buggy, sure, it was ugly, and there was no other way it could have been when you read about what that dev cycle was like. But ultimately? It had an even more compelling sense of verisimilitude than anything in regular Bethsoft games.
Look. Personal opinion? Morrowind was their best by far. It was a perfect storm. Pre-MW games had Julian LeFay as their lead designer-- and his mark and design sensibilities are strongly felt. He's the reason why Daggerfall has its own banking simulation system and a proc-gen landmass the size of England. His games were still a buggy mess, don't get me wrong--but his drive was towards fantasy sim, above all. After the Zenimax acquisition and subsequent shift in leadership, Todd Howard takes the reins. And his vision is different-- he was the project lead on Redguard previously, and we can see from his cinematic action take on the Elder Scrolls series that he as a designer prefers the tack of shaving off what he perceives to be cruft-- get rid of what you don't need. Now, what's fascinating about this is, because he's starting from Daggerfall, he has just so much fluff to try and get through that what he retains ends up being a compelling, and well-rounded set of options. On top of that, his propensity for flash does help in upgrading the game's visual style, and anybody who's ever seen the uncompressed textures for MW knows they had an eye towards visual fidelity at the time they, at a technical level, weren't able to meet in-engine. Add to that the frantic mysticism of Michael Kirkbride and you have a recipe for an unforgettable world.
The problem is, Todd's subtraction of gameplay features doesn't ever really stop. Do we really need spears when we already have a pokey weapon in the form of swords? Do we really need crossbows when we have bows? Do towns really need to be in the same cell as the outside world? That's not to say he didn't attempt some forms of technical innovation in Oblivion-- their commitment to a larger world size than that of Morrowind is one of those things which ended up hobbling them, as they tried using procedurally generated landscapes and dungeons to pad beyond what their labor could really deal with. The innovation we got for Oblivion was mostly unhelpful. The persuasion wheel was not an improvement to the world-- the procgen didn't produce a compelling landscape because it produced mostly eroded features. Ultimately, their curated content here is still what shines. Emil Pagliarulo's Dark Brotherhood questline remains among the gold standard for quests in Bethesda games, and Bruce Nesmith's sheer experience in the field of fantasy, both in Bethesda and back in TSR makes even the woefully generic retconned Cyrodiil something close to enjoyable. And that retconned Cyrodiil wouldn't be so painful if we hadn't had in-universe guides to the Imperial City that blow out of the water anything actually delivered to us. In general, as Kirkbride's influence diminished from its peak in Morrowind, I think the lore for Bethesda really suffered.
When we get into Fallout, well... Bethesda's take on the franchise is, I'd suggest, woefully lacking. For one, I'd say the setting becomes troped up to the gills in ways the first two FO games weren't. The Fifties optimism gets the crank turned up to max, when it wasn't really that much of a thing outside of the openings of the first two games. In a way, Fallout 1 was more of an Eighties homage than a Fifties homage-- the Fifties stuff comes from the obsession the Eighties had with that time period and its glamorization and callbacks to an actually-pretty-dark period in the country's history meant to hearken to some moral core that never existed. Fallout points out that the Old World is a hellhole to live in. So Bethesda's obsession with Fifties kitsch is kind of weird-- especially since, when it comes to apocalyptic fiction, the original series went buck wild with bringing in a number of allusions. The choice to prioritize THE WONDERS OF THE ATOM style gunk over, say, the Mad Max insanity of drugs and leather that's every bit as present in the original FO1 is strange and only really understandable as a way to emphasize FO's uniqueness as a post-apoc setting. Not to say that there isn't still plenty of post-apocalyptic homage of different types even in FO3 or 4-- but the emphasis is on a different syllable, to put it some other way. FO1 and 2 had plenty of Eighties homage. There's a reason the G11 is a superweapon, and That Gun is That Gun From Blade Runner. To compound my issues with the series after Bethesda acquired it, the writing's all weird. Emil Pagliarulo got an upgrade from writing side quests to writing the main quest-- and with the knowledge that he was behind the "I've got to find my dad" plot of 3 AND the "I've got to find my son" plot of 4... I gotta... say... like... the guy's writing is pretty tropey. Oblivion's DB quest was great, but it works because its twist is a Psycho pastiche mixed in with a horror thriller. The tropes are out-of-genre and because of that, it manages to pack the surprise that it does. By comparison, EmilPags kinda sticks to post-apoc tropes in an almost paint-by-numbers fashion. You've got the radio deejay with a good heart fighting the good fight... although he's fighting it before the Enclave come on the scene, so it's not clear against who. You've got the weird post-apocalyptic cargo cults, and societies that evolved strange rules like Little Lamplight... and it's all just kind of artificial. The out-of-genre pulls in sidequests just don't land so well. Cosmic horror is kind of cool, I guess, but why's it in a game about the horrors of nuclear war? And why'd they double down on that with Pickman in 4? Lonesome Road got it right-- you want an ancient evil slumbering underground? You've got it. It's ICBMs. The tone is nailed. I played about 210 hours of Fallout 3 in total. I did about 25 hours of 4, didn't even finish the main quest.
Let's hop back to Skyrim. I logged 120 hours of that game by the end of 2011, having completed the main quest. I freebased that game. For a month and a half or so, I lived and breathed Skyrim. And then I hated it all at once and have not played it since. Jeremy Soule putting in the leitmotif of Morrowind to the big hub city can only do so much for so log. The gameplay design sensibilities of that game just kept shaving stuff down. Spell creation's pared down, birth signs are gone, skills are wacky compared to what they were... and complexity is only added back as DLC. It's just not a great situation. Dialog options are frequently binary, leaving little opportunity for roleplay. You can either be this Daedra's enthusiastic and willing servant, or you can be a zealot hating everything they stand for, with little nuance. That one still gets me from Hermaeus Mora quest. Once again I felt the absence of a big spark of creativity, the world still feeling more generic than anything else. And the quest writing just didn't get to be as good as even the highs of Oblivion! Ultimately there's just not a lot there.
The more and more Bethesda's gone on, the more alienated I've felt from their products. I don't resent their success at all-- if you couldn't tell, I'm such a huge fan I can actually put names to quests and faces to names. Their community director's a great guy. But I just don't feel like the games they make now have quite the same energy that they used to-- and I suspect that energy might have been a fluke in the first place.
Look. Personal opinion? Morrowind was their best by far. It was a perfect storm. Pre-MW games had Julian LeFay as their lead designer-- and his mark and design sensibilities are strongly felt. He's the reason why Daggerfall has its own banking simulation system and a proc-gen landmass the size of England. His games were still a buggy mess, don't get me wrong--but his drive was towards fantasy sim, above all. After the Zenimax acquisition and subsequent shift in leadership, Todd Howard takes the reins. And his vision is different-- he was the project lead on Redguard previously, and we can see from his cinematic action take on the Elder Scrolls series that he as a designer prefers the tack of shaving off what he perceives to be cruft-- get rid of what you don't need. Now, what's fascinating about this is, because he's starting from Daggerfall, he has just so much fluff to try and get through that what he retains ends up being a compelling, and well-rounded set of options. On top of that, his propensity for flash does help in upgrading the game's visual style, and anybody who's ever seen the uncompressed textures for MW knows they had an eye towards visual fidelity at the time they, at a technical level, weren't able to meet in-engine. Add to that the frantic mysticism of Michael Kirkbride and you have a recipe for an unforgettable world.
The problem is, Todd's subtraction of gameplay features doesn't ever really stop. Do we really need spears when we already have a pokey weapon in the form of swords? Do we really need crossbows when we have bows? Do towns really need to be in the same cell as the outside world? That's not to say he didn't attempt some forms of technical innovation in Oblivion-- their commitment to a larger world size than that of Morrowind is one of those things which ended up hobbling them, as they tried using procedurally generated landscapes and dungeons to pad beyond what their labor could really deal with. The innovation we got for Oblivion was mostly unhelpful. The persuasion wheel was not an improvement to the world-- the procgen didn't produce a compelling landscape because it produced mostly eroded features. Ultimately, their curated content here is still what shines. Emil Pagliarulo's Dark Brotherhood questline remains among the gold standard for quests in Bethesda games, and Bruce Nesmith's sheer experience in the field of fantasy, both in Bethesda and back in TSR makes even the woefully generic retconned Cyrodiil something close to enjoyable. And that retconned Cyrodiil wouldn't be so painful if we hadn't had in-universe guides to the Imperial City that blow out of the water anything actually delivered to us. In general, as Kirkbride's influence diminished from its peak in Morrowind, I think the lore for Bethesda really suffered.
When we get into Fallout, well... Bethesda's take on the franchise is, I'd suggest, woefully lacking. For one, I'd say the setting becomes troped up to the gills in ways the first two FO games weren't. The Fifties optimism gets the crank turned up to max, when it wasn't really that much of a thing outside of the openings of the first two games. In a way, Fallout 1 was more of an Eighties homage than a Fifties homage-- the Fifties stuff comes from the obsession the Eighties had with that time period and its glamorization and callbacks to an actually-pretty-dark period in the country's history meant to hearken to some moral core that never existed. Fallout points out that the Old World is a hellhole to live in. So Bethesda's obsession with Fifties kitsch is kind of weird-- especially since, when it comes to apocalyptic fiction, the original series went buck wild with bringing in a number of allusions. The choice to prioritize THE WONDERS OF THE ATOM style gunk over, say, the Mad Max insanity of drugs and leather that's every bit as present in the original FO1 is strange and only really understandable as a way to emphasize FO's uniqueness as a post-apoc setting. Not to say that there isn't still plenty of post-apocalyptic homage of different types even in FO3 or 4-- but the emphasis is on a different syllable, to put it some other way. FO1 and 2 had plenty of Eighties homage. There's a reason the G11 is a superweapon, and That Gun is That Gun From Blade Runner. To compound my issues with the series after Bethesda acquired it, the writing's all weird. Emil Pagliarulo got an upgrade from writing side quests to writing the main quest-- and with the knowledge that he was behind the "I've got to find my dad" plot of 3 AND the "I've got to find my son" plot of 4... I gotta... say... like... the guy's writing is pretty tropey. Oblivion's DB quest was great, but it works because its twist is a Psycho pastiche mixed in with a horror thriller. The tropes are out-of-genre and because of that, it manages to pack the surprise that it does. By comparison, EmilPags kinda sticks to post-apoc tropes in an almost paint-by-numbers fashion. You've got the radio deejay with a good heart fighting the good fight... although he's fighting it before the Enclave come on the scene, so it's not clear against who. You've got the weird post-apocalyptic cargo cults, and societies that evolved strange rules like Little Lamplight... and it's all just kind of artificial. The out-of-genre pulls in sidequests just don't land so well. Cosmic horror is kind of cool, I guess, but why's it in a game about the horrors of nuclear war? And why'd they double down on that with Pickman in 4? Lonesome Road got it right-- you want an ancient evil slumbering underground? You've got it. It's ICBMs. The tone is nailed. I played about 210 hours of Fallout 3 in total. I did about 25 hours of 4, didn't even finish the main quest.
Let's hop back to Skyrim. I logged 120 hours of that game by the end of 2011, having completed the main quest. I freebased that game. For a month and a half or so, I lived and breathed Skyrim. And then I hated it all at once and have not played it since. Jeremy Soule putting in the leitmotif of Morrowind to the big hub city can only do so much for so log. The gameplay design sensibilities of that game just kept shaving stuff down. Spell creation's pared down, birth signs are gone, skills are wacky compared to what they were... and complexity is only added back as DLC. It's just not a great situation. Dialog options are frequently binary, leaving little opportunity for roleplay. You can either be this Daedra's enthusiastic and willing servant, or you can be a zealot hating everything they stand for, with little nuance. That one still gets me from Hermaeus Mora quest. Once again I felt the absence of a big spark of creativity, the world still feeling more generic than anything else. And the quest writing just didn't get to be as good as even the highs of Oblivion! Ultimately there's just not a lot there.
The more and more Bethesda's gone on, the more alienated I've felt from their products. I don't resent their success at all-- if you couldn't tell, I'm such a huge fan I can actually put names to quests and faces to names. Their community director's a great guy. But I just don't feel like the games they make now have quite the same energy that they used to-- and I suspect that energy might have been a fluke in the first place.
The only game Maryland have made since is Fallout 4. It's not what everyone expected but I'd hold off on making a statement like that until Starfield is out at least.
Besides, their world design doesn't need to be "improved" when it's already top-tier.
Yeah, through the jank that I can't deny, I've loved everything since Morrowind except Fallout 76, and I've started off each of Bethesda-proper's title on consoles (arguably the worst version of their releases). It took me a while to get into both Skyrim and Fallout 4, though -- both rubbed me the wrong way at first until I returned to them with a different mindset months later, usually one that didn't have a feverish hype bloating my expectations. In those late-return cases, I ended up playing each of those games for hundreds of hours.
I love the publishing work that Bethesda does nowadays, too. id's Doom 2016 is one of my ongoing generational favorites, and I love the new Wolfenstein series, Dishonored series, and Pretty 2017 as well.
I am disappointed that 76 is a drag and I still wish there was a world with a great coop multiplayer Fallout game, but I didn't end up buying it and kind of had a sense that Bethesda was out of their depth from watching the noclip Making Of, so while it is still disappointing, it's not a breaking point for me. As a publisher, I am looking forward to the new Wolf game in 2019 and Rage 2, and I can wait a long, long time for Elder Scrolls VI and their new sci-fi game.
I love the publishing work that Bethesda does nowadays, too. id's Doom 2016 is one of my ongoing generational favorites, and I love the new Wolfenstein series, Dishonored series, and Pretty 2017 as well.
I am disappointed that 76 is a drag and I still wish there was a world with a great coop multiplayer Fallout game, but I didn't end up buying it and kind of had a sense that Bethesda was out of their depth from watching the noclip Making Of, so while it is still disappointing, it's not a breaking point for me. As a publisher, I am looking forward to the new Wolf game in 2019 and Rage 2, and I can wait a long, long time for Elder Scrolls VI and their new sci-fi game.
Skyrim during it's time a top tier, FO4 isn't. But yeah I hope they're taking criticism to heart and wow us with Starfield
Well look at the first page. It's not Sonic thread level bad but there's something about liking certain games that instantly sets off dozens of gamers to go "You LIKE thing?? NO. NO THAT IS UNACCEPTABLE!! YOU MUST KNOW HOW MUCH I DON'T LIKE THING SO YOU CAN BE CORRECTED!"
On topic the only Bethesda game I've really played all that much of is Skyrim, but as a relatively new player that hopped on with the Switch I've really been into it for like, an obscene amount of time. Honestly don't see what's got people so peeved about it, but then people seem offended to death by Breath of the Wild existing and I enjoyed the heck out of that too. Like, is there some video game out there with such epic storytelling that a dearth of a main storyline in any video game is suddenly an offense? Because if there's some magic video game title I'd like to hear what it is and exactly how it pulled it off so I can follow the general storytelling pattern and get a legion of fanboys to butter up my low self esteem . . .I mean *cough*
Sorry, not with you. No problem with you liking them though, I get the appeal. My best friend's GOAT game is Skyrim while I find it mindlessly boring.
Yet I keep buying their games. Bought FO3, didn't like it. Bought Skyrim, didn't like it. Bought FO4, hated it. Didn't buy F76 so maybe I've learned my lesson...
Yet I keep buying their games. Bought FO3, didn't like it. Bought Skyrim, didn't like it. Bought FO4, hated it. Didn't buy F76 so maybe I've learned my lesson...
Hahahahaha
I'm in the complete opposite camp. Even when Oblivion came out, while I somewhat enjoyed it, I always thought it was such a janky, buggy game.
Their future games proved to be just as bad in that regard. I find their games absolutely awful and haven't really bothered since Oblivion.
The world/map design in Fallout 4 is faaaar from top tier. I'd even call it bad.
Hold up. Have you seen the insane amount of bugs and glitches in RDR2?
This seems a good a place as any to ask this question:
As someone that loved FO3 and NV, Oblivion and Skyrim but only has time for one game, would it be better to get FO4 or Witcher 3? I haven't played the first two Witchers. I've been out of the loop for awhile. I'm asking because I just got a PS4 for Christmas.
I'm just to grab whichever one you suggest and hope for the best
As someone that loved FO3 and NV, Oblivion and Skyrim but only has time for one game, would it be better to get FO4 or Witcher 3? I haven't played the first two Witchers. I've been out of the loop for awhile. I'm asking because I just got a PS4 for Christmas.
I'm just to grab whichever one you suggest and hope for the best
OK, I'll bite. What's the moral stand you're taking here by making one sentence snark about anyone possibly liking a particular video game?
I also love Bethesda games, but 76 was just hot trash. I'm definitely interested to see how Starfield turns out.
Morrowind was great. Everything after was middling to outright embarassing for a developer of their stature.
I played Oblivion, liked it at first, then got bored. I skipped Fallout 3, didn't want to have anything to do with Skyrim because of their PS3 version being almost close to just stealing people's money due to how broken it was, but I absolutely loved New Vegas. It was still broken at launch because Bethesda thought it would be cool to just cut development short and fuck over Obsidian, who made the best Fallout game under Bethesda yet.
I had high hopes for Fallout 4 and could not believe I fell for their shit again, delivering a servicable game that worked as intended 60% of the time.
Fallout 76 wasn't even on my radar and I got more entertainment out of that game without buying it than I ever got since playing through Morrowind. With that they even told people it would be broken as fuck and they would still buy it!
Everything else like Starfield and ES VI is so far away and will likely still be the same shit again, maybe with a renaming of their tools and engine.
I have no faith whatsoever that Bethesda as a development studio can ever get my interest again aside from being disgusted at them or laughing at them, ever.
So Tl;Dr : No, I'm definitely not with you.
I played Oblivion, liked it at first, then got bored. I skipped Fallout 3, didn't want to have anything to do with Skyrim because of their PS3 version being almost close to just stealing people's money due to how broken it was, but I absolutely loved New Vegas. It was still broken at launch because Bethesda thought it would be cool to just cut development short and fuck over Obsidian, who made the best Fallout game under Bethesda yet.
I had high hopes for Fallout 4 and could not believe I fell for their shit again, delivering a servicable game that worked as intended 60% of the time.
Fallout 76 wasn't even on my radar and I got more entertainment out of that game without buying it than I ever got since playing through Morrowind. With that they even told people it would be broken as fuck and they would still buy it!
Everything else like Starfield and ES VI is so far away and will likely still be the same shit again, maybe with a renaming of their tools and engine.
I have no faith whatsoever that Bethesda as a development studio can ever get my interest again aside from being disgusted at them or laughing at them, ever.
So Tl;Dr : No, I'm definitely not with you.
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OK, I'll bite. What's the moral stand you're taking here by making one sentence snark about anyone possibly liking a particular video game?
What are you biting here?
The Witcher 3 is fine for newcomers, that was my first one as well. It's also vastly superior in almost every way to Fallout 4, which only has the classic Bethesda open-world exploration going for it.
Seriously, there's a reason why many people here have TW3 at the top of their GOTG list. Treat yourself.
Not really a fan of BGS proper, but New Vegas was solid and it's basically a better Fallout 3. I liked Bethesda-published games though :P
That's not a difference in taste. That's someone selling you a car with two tires missing.
Selling people broken messes is not "interesting". It's a scam. And with their PR they even turned that shit into a positive somehow for these people. Sometimes I really think I am from a different planet.
"I have to make drivebys in threads about games I don't like because it's my moral obligation to."
It's pretty obvious that's the thought process of hundreds of people over dozens of threads for tens of franchises, but I think that's the first time I've seen something that kinda reads as an actual admission of it so I was just kind of curious on the long form explanation on that.
Long post, and I agree with the entire thing. For me there is definitely this feeling of loss, even as the games improve technologically.
Arena : Eh
Daggerfall: Eh
Redguard: NOPE
Terminator FS: Eh
Morrowind : I like this
Oblivion : Hit and miss
Fallout 3 : Loved it at first, disliked over time
SkyRim : Same a FO3
FO4 : It ain't New Vegas
Kind of a love hate relationship. They're the Russian Roulette of game devs
Daggerfall: Eh
Redguard: NOPE
Terminator FS: Eh
Morrowind : I like this
Oblivion : Hit and miss
Fallout 3 : Loved it at first, disliked over time
SkyRim : Same a FO3
FO4 : It ain't New Vegas
Kind of a love hate relationship. They're the Russian Roulette of game devs
If you buy a broken game, get a refund. I don't know what to tell you. But it's not a scam if software has bugs. All software has bugs. Not everything is a scam on the consumer. Jesus.
i just wanted to say that this was a great read. A few weeks ago i was reminiscing about Daggerfalls manual and how Bethesda at the time were to me this visionary company setting forth to make bold moves in gaming. They were daring but now? i really dont want to get into it more here because this thread is a celebratory thread and doing so feels too much like shitting on people talking about things they love.
Yup, I really love those Bethesda style games, including Fallout 4 and 76. They have a lot of problems but I'm more than willing to endure them to get to the parts I like. It's OK if you don't feel the same.
I love Skyrim. I have bought it three times. I think they're a developer that does a few things really well and they make awesome stuff when they lean into those strengths.
Even games of theirs I have found disappointing, such as Oblivion and Fallout 4, have fool had a ton of fun stuff in them.
I am disappointed that they keep releasing Skyrim with the game breaking Dawnguard quest bug though. They really should have fixed that for the new releases.
Fallout 76 is a total pass from me, I hope their next projects turn out well.
Even games of theirs I have found disappointing, such as Oblivion and Fallout 4, have fool had a ton of fun stuff in them.
I am disappointed that they keep releasing Skyrim with the game breaking Dawnguard quest bug though. They really should have fixed that for the new releases.
Fallout 76 is a total pass from me, I hope their next projects turn out well.