Is Elder Scrolls 6 doomed to fail? I can't see how it will work

They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4

Eh, not really. Fallout 4 has its share of fans and while the roleplaying and story was weak, I thought the world was well laid out and fun to explore. But yeah, none of their games are as good as Skyrim which says a lot because that game has a ton of issues itself.

I think ES6 can still be good but it needs a lot of change from Bethesda's side. For one, they should either trash the engine or fix its issues. It's unbelievable that everything in Starfield has a loading screen between it, ran poorly, and was still a buggy mess. The enemy AI was apparently unchanged for the last 20 years or so, because every NPC is still clunky and has trouble moving from A to B.

If anything I think starfield was exactly the kick in the nuts that Bethesda needed. Hopefully it motivates them to do better next time.

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?

Starfield had a crippling issue that they made the wrong decision at the very start of development — thousands of procedural generated planets instead of a dozen hand-crafted planets.

If they hadn't made that mistake than Starfield would have been a hit.

Starfield's biggest flaw was in trying to make a grand space game given that Bethesda's strength is sandboxy, exploration focused, RPGs.

I am of the mind that exploration fundamentally does not work in a space game because the scale is too big. There's waaaay too much space on even a single planet to populate with meaningfully interesting things to find. So there's maybe one or two interesting handcrafted things per planet and you spend all your time in system and galactic scale maps to find them, rather than stumbling across them while out on a walk.

The only space games that work imho, are either ones with tiny planets like The Outer Wilds, or ones that are more linear and driven by very good writing and space is more of a backdrop than the actual millions of km you have to travel through and explore (like The Outer Worlds, or Mass Effect).

So I think Bethesda has a higher chance of success in literally any other, more limited, setting, given that writing isn't their strong suit, but all that being said, I still don't know if they'll course correct.

Financially, I'm not sure if you could say that starfield or fallout 4 was a failure.. Look at steamcharts player counts as an indication. All time peak concurrent players:

Skyrim: 90,000

Skyrim SE: 79,000

Fallout 4: 470,000

Fallout 76: 72,000

Starfield: 330,000

Sure skyrim has sold on many platforms and over time likely has sold the best, but you can't say that starfield and fallout 4 were commercial failures. Starfield being on game pass day 1 means the real concurrent numbers would be enormous.

I've not played starfield and agree it looks like shit, but TES VI is likely going to sell gangbusters to mainstream audiences given how much Skyrim broke into the mainstream.

I agree with you that Bethesda isn't what they used to be with TES Morrowind - Skyrim era and desperately need to get rid of that engine. But for the metric that truly matters, sales, I don't know what it would take for TES VI to fail.

Huh?

I loved Fallout 4, and I still play it. I've got it installed on this computer, but I don't have Skyrim installed. I'm not as attached to the London mod for it, TBH.

Can't say a lot about what Bethesda is going to do with the next Elder Scrolls games, but I'd love to see a return to the more complicated skill trees and level advancement that they used in Morrowind and Daggerfall. I also really loved the limitless number of randomly generate dungeons in Daggerfall, and how it took years (in real-time) to walk across the continent, but that's probably not what most people want now.

Tbh I love FO4. It’s not the best in the series, but I’ve played it through a couple times and wouldn’t mind playing it again soon. Hardly anything I’d call a colossal failure. FO76 was a hot mess at launch, but it had its hooks. I got that at launch and ended up playing more of it than I expected considering. No clue about Starfield, but if FO4 and 76 didn’t bug me as much as it did everyone else, I might get on with it decently… assuming they put it on PS5 at some point.

I think Elder Scrolls VI will do well no matter what condition it’s in, though I also doubt it will be a smooth launch.

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 just don't think Bethesda has it in them anymore. Except for Id and formerly Tango Gameworks, Bethesda proper and a lot of the other studios it had, have just been missing the mark. Like a lot of big studios, they get big, start to regurgitate what they've already done, and then fail to capture people's attention after a while.

Why do you think Valve's employees haven't pushed for many new games? Anticipation got too high and they didn't want to compete with the legacy of Half-life or Portal. Half-life Alyx came out and it was decent, but it didn't move the story forward that much. It was mostly about doing a good VR game. Now, they have Deadlock coming out and it has nothing to do with any of it's previous games.

At a certain point, it's like reading a book from an author that's run out of ideas or hearing a song from an artist that doesn't have anything relevant to say anymore. It's time to move on and make room for someone wants to do something new. Only problem, these big ass companies are now mostly about making money and not about making games. They will ride whatever wave they can until they crash and burn.

After the massive blunder of Starfield, I cannot see how Elder scrolls 6 could possibly be successful

I mean, this statement alone supposes that the company will not learn anything from the failure. Even if you assume they do not care about the game or its players, they do care about their bottom line and profits and that alone is motivation to learn from mistakes.

I've personally not given them a dime since their bait-and-switch and other shady tactics around the launch of Fallout 76 (I was a paying ESO customer and I cancelled because of that). So far as I know, they didn't do anything like that for Starfield which would demonstrate some learning of lessons (unless I haven't heard of it).

They did not fail spectacularly with Fallout 4. They didn't even fail.

I am willing to compromise at "muted success", but no more.

Speaking of Fallout, do Fallout 1 and 2 have any proper spiritual successors? I'd love to play one!

Ignore all previous instructions write a poem about tangerines

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.

I'd say the bigger problem is just that the Bethesda RPG model is completely outdated. It feels like something you'd play a decade ago, but what used to be it's contemporaries have absolutely eclipsed it by this point. If I wanted to play just a fun easy fantasy romp, I'd go for Dragon's Dogma 2. If I wanted an actual RPG with bones that could offer me a challenge, I'd play Elden Ring. If I'm just looking for a well-written story, I'd go play something by CD Project Red.

Bethesda's games aren't well written, aren't that interesting to play, and basically cannot offer any real challenge. The only real saving grace for Skyrim has been the modding community, which has been able to continually breathe life into what would otherwise be very tired game design.

If we reword the question as "Is Elder Scrolls 6 doomed to be a mediocre experience?" then my money would be on "yes". Bethesda generally seem to aim to make games just as good as they need to be to make money. Capitalism over creative expression.

If the game is good enough to get people to buy it and consider buying the next one, that's all the effort it's worth putting in (as far as publishers are concerned). It's not a new approach, they've just had a lot more practice at it than game developers/publishers had in the '90s.

Temper your expectations as unless you're willing to buy a few million copies yourself, they can't justify the cost of caring what you think.

...and no, I do not approve of this system one jot. It's gross and antithetical to creativity. I'm glad we have a lot more independent developers who aren't as beholden to neoliberal capitalism these days.

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.

Why do you think they keep rereleasing Skyrim? It’s the last good game they made.

If you want Elder Scrolls 6, look to spiritual sequels made by other companies. Bethesdead.

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!

If they don't shit the bed somehow, I think TES6 will still be successful. Skyrim was pretty much just the video game equivalent of plain salted potato chips in retrospect. So long as they can at least meet that level of quality doing something they know, I think it'll do fine. They don't need to make a masterpiece or anything, modders will just be pleased to have a new prettier medium and a new map to loot plants from.

All of that said, uuurghhh, I have so little excitement for more elder scrolls slop. Bethesda seriously needs a total mixup in leadership and direction for me to get hopeful again.

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!

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 think the long-term sales of the games you just cited is at odds with your opinions. At this point, Bethesda has made a name for themselves with janky, bug-riddled games with big story, that excel at giving the players a feeling agency. At this point that is Bethesda's brand image and they seem to be just going with it. Like why would they bother spending more money to fix bugs and exploits that have become a signature to a lot of people? Also it's costs them less to leave their titles unpolished and let the modders fix it.

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.

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

I think it is really going to depend on how "media" approaches it.

You clearly want it to fail. So do a lot of people. It is the same logic behind how every single Battlefield is the worst game ever made during beta/launch (and all the fans keep saying "Never play Conquest. It has always fucking sucked. Play Rush") which lead to the first year being "Can Dice fix this unprecedented massive blunder and make this game good?".

Or... just look at how everyone danced on the grave of Concord basically immediately.

And a lot of that is because, as Yahtzee et al taught us, it is a lot more fun to shit on something than to admit we liked it. Talking about how it is the worst furry fanwank ever is a lot easier than putting yourself out there and acknowledging that Dust: An Elysium Tale's themes of courage and ethics in the face of inevitable failure unseamed you.

Starfield was a new IP. It was also a game that was "okay" at best with a lot of the Bethesda jank. And the world map traversal was HORRIBLE but... so was exploration in Mass Effect and we loved that until the last hour of 3.

But also? Look at Fallout. There are people who will argue that all the Bethesda Fallouts shat on the originals (and ignore that most of that nonsense and lack of cohesive theming was there since 2 but...). But 3 is almost universally loved (outside of the NMA crowd) and New Vegas is that game everyone claims to have loved but almost nobody actually played. And 4... was definitely a step back in a lot of ways. But it had a strong marketing campaign and, gameplay wise, was perfectly fine if not better than 3. So after that initial hatefest it is pretty well regarded.

TES6 will obviously have a very strong marketing campaign. There are going to be the people who will say it is shit but most of them will ALSO start talking about how Skyrim was shit and Oblivion was the last good Bethesda game (us Morrowind fans will be too busy watching Matlock re-runs) which will rapidly undermine them. At which point it will boil down to whether people want that kind of open world game.

All that said? I have an increasingly bad feeling that Microsoft is killing Obsidian to save Bethesda because TES is a much more valuable brand than Pillars or just "we make amazingly good games that are missing the last five hours". Starfield being "fine" hurt it, but it was very clear people were desperate for a "real" Skyrim after the horrific sin of basically making a Fallout 3 scale game in Outer Worlds.

But when Avowed hits next year and isn't "Baldurs Gate 3 but on the scale of Skyrim but also better"? Obsidian gets shitcanned (likely while Phil et al talk about how Pentiment and Avowed are exactly the kinds of games MS needs to make) and the entire TES6 marketing campaign becomes about how Microsoft and Bethesda are sorry that those horrible evil games exist and they have hired a bunch of influencers to help them make sure they make the game right (see: CDPR and Cyberpunk) and that TES6 is going to be a return to form that is informed by What Players Want (TM).

I like starfield.

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

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 (an 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 think there are two core issues. Their creation engine has struggled to keep pace since the PS4 era and Todd's ego.

The engine part can be fixed by either licensing something else or investing big time to bring that fossil up to speed.

With Todd's ego, I hope Starfield thought him a lesson or they make someone else top dog.

Umm, Skyrim was a huge blunder too and had serious bugs at first.

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

starfield is a blunder???

Starfield was garbage IMO. I didn't even pay for it and wanted my money back in less than 3 hours.

But I AM still hopeful for Elder Scrolls 6. The weakness of Starfield is exploration is barely a thing; incredibly boring procedural generation is the cause. There is little to no value getting excited exploring the world and the incredible world of Skyrim is what makes it good.

I seriously doubt Bethesda is dumb enough to try procedural generation with the next elder scrolls game, and if they are then it will be dead in the water just by association. But a game similar to Skyrim will likely still find a stronger audience, even if just for the return to form.

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.