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.
"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
Yeah, it will be bad. I don't really understand how some people can be excited about it.
It will be passable, it will have a few moments, but in the end you'll be left wanting and it will set in just how disinterested the owner of the franchise is in any problem that doesn't preclude sales. It will sell well enough in preorders just because it's a Skyrim sequel.
Actually, if they have creativity left in them they'll have the option to make your own guild! Imagine building each part of your new guilds headquarters! And then imagine absolutely none of it doing anything!
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
Oof. I liked character stat screen in morrowind. I hate tjat newer bethesda games hide it.
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.
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.
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.
Stats are incredibly boring. People want to see upgrades that actually do something, stuff like perks. Those are far more interesting and tangible than leveling your CHR stat from 32 to 33.
Pfft, just give us stats that improve by doing the thing (eg. agility that improves by jumping around and visibly improves jump height every time it increases). I'd rather that nuance over a block of text with a witty name that gives a massive instant boon. Tangibility is right, but the numbers aren't the boring part.
This was by far the worst part of the RPG systems in their games. This sort of design always encourages really dumb and counter intuitive play.
The last time I felt that wad in Morowwind
Tell me about it. Skyrim for all its accolades kind of fails as an RPG in the sense that your character can do pretty much everything, but your run speed/jump height is static.
Increasing health/magic/stamina was a really lame way to handle levelling IMO.
It would be a shame if they streamlined the RPG systems even more for TESVI
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.
My biggest gripe still is the planet that has an absolute embargo on it, ships stopping anyone from entering, a planet obliterated by the monsters, frozen over. You land, do the mission, and then right outside there's multiple POI with settlers just casually living, pirate bases just generically there. Like they couldn't even stop the POI's from spawning on the one planet that should have been abandoned.
Water down the orange drink, Willie.
I've watered it down as much as it can go, it can't take no more!
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 😔
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 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.
I think I wanna fire up Morrowind!
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