The irony is that Beth pretty much set the standard for ambitious, weird and unexpected with Morrowind, and have been backing away ever since.
The arc from Arena -> Daggerfall -> Morrowind really made it feel like they were mastering the recipe. Daggerfall is great for weird and ambitious too but not as approachable as Morrowind, and more or less kicking off modern modding is a big deal for Morrowind. Oblivion was a bit of a slump but felt like they could recover. Then Skyrim 😞 it’s embarrassing
Imma gonna fight ya all. Skyrim is a good game, even vanilla. For it’s time. The rereleasing to infinity hurt it because people compared it to newer games.
It’s not as deep as Morrowind/Oblivion, but it is a good game. Just aimed more at casuals.
Skyrim you could at least argue nailed a sweet spot of customization and player freedom with simplicity for the normies.
Or maybe they just liked the race war subtext?
I think Quakeworld and Half-life probably deserve more of the credit for kicking off the modding community but Morrowind on PC definitely gave Xbox gamers something to be jealous of.
Im convinced someone at the top levels of the company us super far up their ass about the things Bethesda are doing while forgetting to ask if the thing they want players to do is fun. Too many Bethsoft games are running into the “this stretch isn’t fun” problem.
Yes, and his name is Todd Howard.
We’ve all seen Emil talk about his total lack of process and the general way he does things. Todd has said before he doesn’t play games but inserts himself into random parts of development. The studio is led by total buffoons.
Howard has reportedly been championing procedurally generated content for years or perhaps decades. We saw echoes of this in Starfield. The result is quite expected: boring and vanilla. Especially when contrasted with Bethesda’s previously great storytelling with intricate characters and hand-crafted experiences. We see once again with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 how important that is. Yes, it’s time consuming and expensive, but it’s clearly loved by customers and critics.
Compounding this was Starfield’s mediocre writing. It took a clear and obvious dive from previous games. It felt incredibly safe. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it was AI generated.
Avowed was pretty terrible too.
The problem with AAA games is they’re trying to make a game everyone likes, compromises on everything, and ends up with something no one likes.
BG3 and CK2 tho set out to make great RPGs and had faith people wanted great RPGs.
I agree. Games feel like they’re designed by committee now (very much likes movies, in fact). I recall SkillUp’s criticism of Veilguard’s writing as, “every interaction feels like HR is in the room.” This nails so many design choices today. Safe and vanilla is boring. There are of course people who believe that nothing should ever be remotely challenging or offensive to anyone ever, but I just don’t think they represent the majority of gamers. Attempting to please them at the expense of the much larger player-base is clearly not working.
What did avowed do wrong? I wanted more fist/barehand viability more ways to say stuff even if the result was the same
What did avowed do wrong?
That’s what I’m talking about…
It’s not that they do anything wrong, it’s that the don’t do anything well.
It was less an RPG and more just a fps shooter with the same bare minimum of RPG elements as every other fps shooter.
The biggest games are the blandest because they’re trying to appeal to everyone. But even people not into RPGs can like a good rpg. Which is why BG3 and
CK2KCD2 are so popular.Big studios aren’t underestimating their audience, they’re just counting on video game enthusiasts buying every major game.
I ran thru it on game pass, and it was alright, but I was kind of just going thru the motions. So I said “terrible” but I meant it was terrible at being a big budget triple A RPG.
It felt like a generic fps from 20 years ago, the only flavor was from existing IP pasted over it.
The way I would explain it is: they aren’t just battling the current gen titles but also all the games released before them. So meh just gets drowned out in the sea of already released games.
Ah maybe that’s why I had fun, I don’t really like role play part so much as having enough choices to do what I want as myself and they got very close
I’ll probably do another run with the arquebussy instead of just fists this time though
Damn, I was hoping avowed was going to be different.
There’s a great youtube video Laura Fryer made that talks about Avowed’s success. I belueve it is in the games community on .world or sh.itjust.works.
If you have gamepass it’s fine for a 20 some hour play thru.
But I wouldn’t recommend anyone spend money on it, it’s probably going to get huge discounts soon.
To be fair, it’s hard to say what Bethesda has to offer when they haven’t released anything since 2011. [checks wikipedia] Nope, nothing. Unless you count Fallout 4, which I wouldn’t.
Starfield was like a child’s half-inflated balloon: let go with high hopes only to immediately disappoint, then swiftly forgotten once it drifted out of sight. Bethesda wanted to reach the stars, yet only managed to drop trash in someone’s garden.
Bethesda also claims to have released a
gamenew instrumental album called Starfield.Shame about the price tag and download size though.
As much as I like FO4 it’s basically a total conversion mod of Skyrim.
FO76
Which, after all this time, is actually fun.
Or Obsidian
Always has been.
