Skyrim lead designer says it will be 'almost impossible' for Elder Scrolls 6 to meet fan expectations: 'Marketing departments just put their heads in their hands and weep'

Really? After the absolute clownshow that was Starfield, my expectations for TES6 are extremely low.

I mean maybe if you hadn't been milking Skyrim for 13 fucking years, expectations wouldn't be so unreasonably high, would they?

Maybe they shouldn't use marketers. From what I see, marketers are the reason for unreal hype. Look at cyberpunk, marketers told poeple that it was going to be basically a real life simulator and then people were upset that it was only a really fun RPG. (Aside from the launch issues this was also a big thing at launch).

All modern games hype is directly because of marketers.

Here's a novel thing. Just show us what the game is like. No stupid marketing lingo, no flashy graphics, just what the game is like. Give us the opening mission. There, pay me a marketing fee. No stupid high expectations, no lying about features that don't actually exist, just telling the consumer honestly what they're buying.

I honestly don't even think vanilla Skyrim was that good of a game. It had nice world building, but the combat sucked, the main story was kinda whatever, it was glitchy and a lot of systems were poorly thought out. It's only ever been the promise of a good game which was mostly found in mods.

Use 👏 a 👏 better 👏 engine! 👏

I expect it to be a buggy mess that has lots of potential and doesn't deliver on half of what it seems like it should do. Then after a year or two it will finally be patched into being mostly stable and mods will have reached a point where it can mostly be turned into the game I actually want. However there will be a few creative decisions that I absolutely hate but which are so unnecessarily locked in that even mods can't fix them, so I'll have to just accept them as an irritant that I will do my best to ignore.

Permanently Deleted

What a cop-out.

Bethesda didn't have trouble making games when they cared about making games. Now, they care about making money. Yes, devs should get paid for their work. But design decisions based on anything other than making a good game poison the well.

This is why small devs are absolutely killing it with indie games on PC at the moment. AAA titles fail over and over again, because they're designed for C-suite pockets first and gamers second.

Anything that makes marketers sad is a win for the world, honestly

Thank God they lowered the expectations after Starfield.

Step 1, this time don't have an unskippable intro that lasts 30 minutes before you can start actually playing.

It’s too late for me to care. I grew up with TES. I played daggerfall when I was 15 on my pentium. Then every few years a new amazing game came out. Then after sky rim it stopped. I’m in my 40s now and don’t have the time. This game should have come out in 2016 at the latest.

Modern Bethesda and making good games, what a joke.

Really? Just make the exact same game as Skyrim with better graphics and a new plot, while making it less likely to have bugs and glitches and maybe fix the largest complaints about Skyrim.

It's not like they don't know how to make a good game. They don't have to reinvent the wheel. Take Skyrim, make a new land with new characters and new quests, make it 4 times as pretty, fix the biggest bugs. Maybe make the quests a smidge more complex. Boom.

I think at this point I am more excited for, and have higher expectations of, Skywind.

How many people who worked on Morrowind, Oblivion, and/or Skyrim are still working there? This is a question I feel does not get asked enough when it comes to beloved franchises. People talk about their favourite game developers and how they “sold out” or whatever. I don’t think I see enough recognition that sometimes the best people at a company just leave.

Yeah I know, I played Morrowind, Oblivion, and unfortunately Skyrim. I expect it to be pretty and large, but not have much unique, good stuff, the side quests will be "go steal this same vase 6x from different people oh look you run the Thieves Guild now," and the main quests might be neat.

I'm not sure I'll be picking it up tbh.

Honestly if they had just put a little more thought into the loot progression and made a couple systems more interesting it would have been a much better game.

The randomized empty open world planets wasn't great but they also did that in Daggerfall so I don't think it was totally unprecedented and still had some value if there was a better incentive to explore (in my opinion better and more interesting loot would have kept me exploring).

What pissed me off the most was the fact that when you built the armillary it literally showed up on the OUTSIDE of your spaceship and you couldn't build it indoors in your settlements. What the fuck? You literally killed people for some of those artifacts. Why would you keep them outside for fucks sake?

It's been a long time since 11-11-11.

Do what was done with Skyrim but make the dungeon puzzles less terrible, remove the horrific bugs, and make the setting a desert or lush forest. Boom, billion dollar game. Send me money, Todd.

It's cool. We'll make it for you (and far more impeccably gorgeous than you would). Just give us the engine.

• The Modding Community

Oh it can be done. The only question is: is Bethesda the one to do it?

I've been saying this even before Bethesda went down the gutter. Everyone is pointing to their recent collosal failures like they wouldn't still be disappointed even if ES6 was "perfect."

I don't think anybody can point out what, exactly, made Skyrim so fucking legendary. It was a buggy, unpolished mess of a game. Its lore was inconsistent. It had a villain and story that should have been deeply intriguing and interesting and yet it does Alduin a disservice and was, quite frankly, boring.

But somehow the game was fun. So fun that people spent an average 80 hours a week playing it, me included! And the only possible exploration is that Bethesda had passion, and then Skyrim inflated their egos. So I can see why people see their recent spree of lackluster-to-terrible games as a very valid reason for agreeing with Tod Howard, for once.

Set that aside, however. Let's assume they "get it right." Let's assume it's made with passion and recent history has humbled them. People will still be disappointed. Why? Because "it's not Skyrim." Just in the same way that hardcore ES fans hated Skyrim because "it's not Morrowind." Skyrim set the bar so astronomically high that it would take an absolute fucking miracle for them to, at bare minimum, meet expectation! And it would honestly be better that they didn't, because then people would expect them to hit that milestone every, single time when the "secret ingredient" to Skyrim's legendary success is so fucking aetherial nobody can say exactly what it is.

After Starfield my expectations are so low that the only way I'd be disappointed is if it's worse than Skyrim. And Skyrim wasn't even that amazing in hindsight.

The adoring fan and characters like claptrap are proof that I would never make it as lead designer for game sequels. I would never include a character like those and think to myself "This needs to be more than an annoying minor side character, I need to bring them closer to begin to the identity of the games."

I expect nothing and I know that they will still dissapoont me. Marketing isn't weeping because they don't know how to sell the expectation, they weep because they don't know how they can convince anyone to even look at that game.

I don't blame the MD tbh, if I had to try and make Starfield worth buying I'd fucking quit

Fire Emil and you'll be on a good start to un-fucking yourselves, Bethesda

Literally dummy easy. Hire the mod developers. Work WITH them not commanding them. Have better graphics than starfield. Hire a decent writer for the main quest.

I was a pretty hardcore Bethesda fan for years, long before Skyrim. But they have burned me too many times now for me to have any faith in ESVI.

TES6 isn't out yet? neat. wouldn't know, cuz fuck Bethesda

Awesome, I hate marketers.

I seriously doubt they do actual surveys. The only one’s raising the bar are AAA developers.

I think it will meet my Creation Store fan expectation, and that's not something I am looking forward to.

They can try.

The Elder Scrolls 6: Skyrim 2

I know at least Gopher (and probably several others on YouTube or elsewhere) literally spelled out the equation for success for TESVI, or at least the beginnings of it.

The real Bethesda fans will know the game is going to be wonky as hell when it comes out. Mods and fan fixes/tweaks are the real bread and butter. Bethesda just creates the world. The fans make it awesome.