The Elder Scrolls

[LovisXVI]

Pretty sure Morrowind was the first time I heard them openly say they expected modders to do all the clean-up work. Maybe that was just Carmack saying they weren't bothering making Quake III more than a skeleton of a game since modders would do all the work.

Well, to be fair, Id and Carmack at that point were more interested in making advances in engines, as that was their real business, and games were just ways to show it off.

 

[The Ugly One]

Well, to be fair, Id and Carmack at that point were more interested in making advances in engines, as that was their real business, and games were just ways to show it off.

They were also interested in charging $50 for an unfinished game. IIRC Quake III was the first PC game to cost that much, and it felt like half a game, especially compared to UT.

 

[BullfrogBill]

I'm late, but I posit that remake/remasters should never be a consideration in first place. A rerelease with QoL bug fixes like Skyrim LE > SE > AE should be enough.
I've had more than 1000 hours spent in original Oblivion and I can hardly make it past 2 hours in the Remaster. There's this voice in the back of my head screaming "It feels off, don't like it" and refunded the game.

For sure, imo a "remaster" or re-release or whatever the fuck they call them these days should be the original game in every way but with increased visual resolution, better compatibility with hardware, fix certain glitches or bugs, and add in the cut content that was intended to be in the original game but was removed due to limitations of some sort (they literally NEVER do this for some fucking reason, this to me would be the biggest reason to even get a "remaster" in the first place.)

Nothing else should be changed about the game, not the visuals, and honestly I'm against Quality of Life fixes too because this can vary for person to person. I've seen people say that Morrorwind needs Quality of Life changed made to the game and that's absolutely ridiculous to me as Morrorwind is quite literally nearly perfect as it is. Ultimately when people say "Quality of Life Changed" what they mean is "modernize the game" like they did with the Oblivion Remaster and I'm against that shit completely.

Most people can't help themselves though, they literally CAN'T play a game older than a few years "with exception to Fortnite and GTA 5 soon to be replaced by GTA 6). People NEED to play the newest games it doesn't matter if the game sucks or is full of propaganda that they hate. It doesn't matter, because it's NEW and the graphics look NEW and SHINY, and the game is 10000 GB "I MUST PLAY THIS!" is basically how my experience with most people about video games goes. The moment you mention a game older than a few years you lose most people. They either just go to sleep or they laugh at the idea of playing an outdated game as if it's a waste of time.

Since game developers are creatively bankrupt these days, they will continue to just smear older games with their bullshit to make a buck and gamers will continue to cream in their pants over it every time. At least for a week until the next NEW AND SHINY game comes out. The change in attitude towards the Oblivion remaster in this thread is a perfect example, the week the game came out this thread was FULL of people hardcore glazing Oblivion Remastered as if it was perfection and the greatest video game ever made let alone the greatest Elder Scrolls game ever made and if anyone disagreed and thought the game sucked balls (it did) they would flip the fuck out. It's very funny.

After about a week of this these people moved on and are nowhere to be found anymore, especially not in this thread. Something else NEW and SHINY came out and they HAD TO PLAY IT so they don't care about Oblivion Remastered anymore lmao. Everyone in this thread is now mostly in agreeance that Oblivion Remastered is gay as shit and anyone that defended it was a massive faggot.

 

[Spooky Dogwood]

The change in attitude towards the Oblivion remaster in this thread is a perfect example, the week the game came out this thread was FULL of people hardcore glazing Oblivion Remastered as if it was perfection and the greatest video game ever made let alone the greatest Elder Scrolls game ever made and if anyone disagreed and thought the game sucked balls (it did) they would flip the fuck out. It's very funny.

That's because the thread was featured for some reason.

 

[JON CENA]

Here's an idea I've been kicking around in my head for a few weeks now; TES6 isn't even dead on arrival just because the dev team can't deliver anymore, or because the design philosophy is "outdated" (or whatever faggot buzzword Youtubers throw around now), Bethesda's problem is that the consumer market has literally grown out of their product. The first five mainline entries to the series came out during a period of unbelievable exponential growth for the games industry. Todd went from watching Arena sell just over 120k units in the first three years after release to seeing Skyrim hit 7 million copies sold in the first week it came out (up to 60 million including rereleases as of 2023).

At the time people could complain all they wanted about features getting removed/dumbed down, or the stupid lore retcons, but that doesn't mean shit when you have 50 people who've never even touched a fantasy game buying a copy of Skyrim for every person that even knew about the series before Oblivion. It's literally baby's first RPG. I'm actually pretty sure Oblivion was my first real open-world fantasy title that wasn't a Legend of Zelda game. That's Bethesda's main issue now; the market for video games in that genre doesn't have the room for growth anymore. You can't expand your market to a significant degree when your market already comprises the majority of males between the ages of 10 and 40 in the Western Hemisphere. They have to deliver a product that's going to appeal to the people that are already very familiar with the series. I'm actually not sure Bethesda is aware of this problem.

I'd argue that the Skyrim playerbase that would buy another TES can be boiled down to two types of people:
Type A: Role-playing focused player, the guy that wants good writing, interactive quests that reward player freedom, and a generally immersive world
Type B: Action fantasy focused player, the guy that wants fun, responsive hack & slash combat and to throw around fireballs in a fantasy dungeon looter setting (obviously the much larger part of the playerbase and where the money is going to be made)

The problem is since Skyrim came out, both of those segments have had 14 years to actually play other video games. Type A players went back and played earlier entries in the series like Morrowind, discovered earlier isometric RPGs, or got into stuff like Deus Ex. I think this accounts for the newer hardcore fans of the series, and these guys are going to want better writing and a less shallow role-playing experience than what was delivered in 2011. New Vegas becoming a long-term cult classic over Fallout 3 also really damaged Bethesda's credibility. Type Bs are where they're going to run into significantly more problems. Those guys have now seen stuff like the Witcher 3, Kingdom Come and the entire Soulslike genre come out since 2011, and all of those blow Skyrim's mediocre combat completely out of the fucking water.

I'm basically just shitting out a ton of words to say that Bethesda could release TES 6 to full Skyrim specs with Adamowicz back from the dead and Kuhlmann still on board, and people would still think it's garbage. I haven't even played Starfield and I wasn't even surprised that people thought it sucked when it came out. And from the little I saw it didn't look particularly worse than Fallout 4, but I could be wrong..

TL;DR Bethesda always blew rocks, it's just not obvious when you're 14 and haven't played that many video games.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

That's because the thread was featured for some reason.

That reason was for a mod which changed the body types to gender (like in the original) being banned on Nexusmods.

 

[Asian tech support]

That reason was for a mod which changed the body types to gender (like in the original) being banned on Nexusmods.

The thread was full of tourists even before the feature. It put up almost 50 pages on the 22nd alone.

 

[JON CENA]

Gamers are the biggest consoomers in the planet, It blows my mind seeing people still buying trash like Borderlands or Starfield in 2025. Every year developers push out broken, uninspired shit that barely runs, then they nickel-and-dime you with DLC and cosmetics, and slowly, maybe, hopefully they fix the game they already sold you at full price while openly showing contempt for their audience at every step of the cycle, yet people still line up and pay $70 day one like it’s normal.

What other group of people would willingly buy a product that doesn’t fucking work from people that hate you over and over again for FULL price, then shrug and say: “they will fix it later!!1"

Saw this when scrolling back through highlights and I gotta say I think consooming was way worse 10 years ago. I hope I’m not just accidentally insulating myself from retards but from what I’ve seen at least on the internet people are much more capable of criticizing video game studios than they used to be.

Keep in mind that Starfield got shit on in Steam reviews at launch and a lot of high-profile Youtubers called Bethesda out for releasing a shit game. It’s a pretty big paradigm shift from a time where if you criticized anything Bethesda did outside of a milquetoast Lying Todd meme you’d probably get dogpiled everywhere outside of /v/.

I think a decade of technological stagnation means people aren’t easily dazzled by open world shit and nice soundtracks like they were when Skyrim released, plus high-profile launch failures like Cyberpunk 2077 might’ve made people less tolerant of buggy games. I always though reddit faggots guntguarding Todd for glitches because “it’s part of the Bethesda experience” were fucking retards because the same experience that gave you le funny people clipping into walls could lose you hours of progress if you didn’t have a recent manual save and a quest borked. People don’t really seem to defend that shit any more though.

 

[30+GameOvers]

TL;DR Bethesda always blew rocks, it's just not obvious when you're 14 and haven't played that many video games.

Modding is the name of the game, and with the latest two games they dropped the ball hard. Make that three actually, Fallout 4 is unusable after the "next gen update"(infamously released right before launch of Fallout London, which directly led to it's delay), Fallout 76 has absolutely no modding aside from some very light stuff, and Starfield completely shit the bed, with many losing faith in Bethesda at that point. Skyrim's main selling point is the absolutely retarded amount of mods it has, made even today, you can basically turn your experience into anything you want. That's what people are looking for, Skyrim 2.0 and it's becoming apparent that this is not going to be the case with TES6, we will get Starfield without the space and Fallout 76 without the guns, with even poorer modding support than in Starfield. People would kill for another modest Skyrim-esque experience, but they're not going to get it from Bethesda, they will get it from other developers or from fan mods and so this is why there isn't that big of a hype for TES6 anymore. It's the Assassin's Creed Shadows scenario where the studio is down-bad and breaks glass in an emergency and releases something fans have been waiting on for years now, except it's way too late and nothing like what fans envisioned since it's made by a completely different, less competent and much more gay studio.

It’s a pretty big paradigm shift from a time where if you criticized anything Bethesda did outside of a milquetoast Lying Todd meme you’d probably get dogpiled everywhere outside of /v/.

Speak for yourself, I have been shitting on Bethesda for nearly 20 years now and I am not the only one. Niggercattle consoomerbase and their thoughts do not matter and never will, but boy have I been eating good over the last decade or so since Fallout 76 has shat the bed.

 

[Sheep King]

Type Bs are where they're going to run into significantly more problems. Those guys have now seen stuff like the Witcher 3, Kingdom Come and the entire Soulslike genre come out since 2011, and all of those blow Skyrim's mediocre combat completely out of the fucking water.

While I mostly agree with you that releasing ES6 with the same mechanics as base-game Skyrim in Current Year +10 wouldn't be a win for Bethesda I disagree that combat mechanics are the only reason non-roleplaying fans enjoyed Skyrim. The success of a game like Tainted Grail shows there's the third type other than the two you mentioned who are broadly the most underserved: people who like first-person dungeon crawling.
You might say that there's no reason to buy a modern game for this when OpenMW and Tamriel Rebuilt offer better content for free but that still leaves a huge market of niggercattle who can't run a mod manager but want a game 'like Skyrim' where they can go in a cave and loot every urn without needing to go through crunchy RPG mechanics or Soulslike difficulty.

Oblivion Remastered is not a good product but I saw people who had no nostalgia for the original play and enjoy it for the world; first person RPGs trade the more complex combat for an overall more seamless experience (being able to look around for interactable objects without needing them highlighted for you, more intuitive stealth, playing with physics objects, general immersion) which is why people like me are still looking forward to Skyblivion. Avowed too was also shooting for this market and while I haven't played it the fact it still has a camp of defenders despite looking like wokeshit and (apparently) running like ass. That's how starved that particular market is for Skyrim 2.

 

[God of Nothing]

my fucking god, there are so many trash mobs polluting the game my destruction skill was leveled more from destroying them than training

Also, why the emphasis so many people place on Morrowind requiring you to actually know a faction related skill when you only really need one?

Sure, I'd have to level the other skills somewhat if I didn't have them in major and went with the mage's guild, but I expected more than just having them at fucking 35 of all levels. That's not even adept. I suppose it gets credit because it's the only one of the popular games that actually requires you to be skilled in the things your faction is dedicated to.

Funny enough, I think the College of Winterhold is the only one you have to actually use spells in order to progress the story so ha! And I don't even like that questline.

 

[Trusty Terrorist]

The vigilant mod is fun. It started off kind of wack but grew to be an interesting horror mod. My main question is what's with the bullet spongey enemies. I guess it's a horror mod, and horror is about wrongness, but yeah, it's fun seeing another game philosophy being transplanted into skyrims. This feels less of a dungeon crawl and figuring out a maze.

 

[Trusty Terrorist]

I actually thought that was Morrowind at first. It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference...

View attachment 8008800

With oblivion and morrowind there's very clearly something about the characters animation, the way the joints are attached which makes them look distinctly dated. Once that gets fixed, they can pass as modern games.

 

[God of Nothing]

Blighted Cities
Deceived by Ancient War
Praise Not the False Three
I Am the Fourth.

I have yet to actually kill Dagoth. I just stopped by to retrieve an artifact for the temple.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

https://kiwifarms.st/profile-posts/651483/

 

[God of Nothing]

Got bored of my supreme potion seller and decided to go for a less broken and cheesy build taking advantage of my new game knowledge.

I am having fun with actually needing to try, but good lord do I miss the sheer convenience magic and alchemy provided.

 

[Divine Schizo]

The vigilant mod is fun. It started off kind of wack but grew to be an interesting horror mod. My main question is what's with the bullet spongey enemies. I guess it's a horror mod, and horror is about wrongness, but yeah, it's fun seeing another game philosophy being transplanted into skyrims. This feels less of a dungeon crawl and figuring out a maze.

I remember playing VIGILANT 5 years ago, ever since it's been living rent free in my head. I found the atmosphere to be unmatched, specifically in the Windhelm underground, the Mansion, and Coldharbor areas, there was a real sense that these areas have been completely forsaken.
As for the spongey enemies, I assume it's due to the mod trying to be like Dark Souls, and since Skyrim has a fairly limited combat system, the only way to make it challenging is to ramp up the enemy health.

 

[God of Nothing]

i want to kill whoever made the directions in Morrowind

northeast of x? do you have any fucking idea how little that narrows it down? i've run into fifteen fucking tombs and mines, beset by nix dogs and cliff racers over and over again

and why do some places get marked on your map and not others? nearly every dwemer ruin and daedric ruin are the same

Aside from that, I'm still having fun

 

[Chieftain Coke Peanut]

Rate my optimistic since I already know it's not happening but Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 lit a fire under Bethesda's ass and they better innovate their game.

Disregard the wokeness of part of it for a second, and just look at how the game functions.

The combat is pretty decent, locking on to enemies still makes battles against other enemies more difficult than it has to be but there is depth, skill, and variety to how you play. Swords feel different from maces which feel different from pole arms. An underrated aspect of this is how much you feel the progression as you play. You start out barely able to finish a combo and having to back up to regent stamina, but you finish being able to pull of crazy combos and do tricks like goading someone into triggering amaster strike that
you can then redirect into a combo. In Elder Scrolls the gameplay is the same from start to finish. Light attack, heavy attack, block. That is all you get.

Stealth is surprisingly intricate and useful. Clothes affect stealth through both appearance and noise. You can wear muffled shoes of +5 thievery but if you wear chain mail at the same time you will never be stealthy. Noise is generated by other things as well. You can hide in a bush and be nigh invisible, but you make also racket climbing into the bush. There is the groundbreaking ability to distract enemies by whistling or throwing rocks, carrying bodies, and stealth take downs. Meanwhile stealth in Bethesda games is hit control and you become essentially invisible. No takedowns, no distractions, no enemies raising alarm, nothing.

Non combat skills are just as useful as combat ones. Alchemy and smithing both had full minigames associated with them and let you craft some of the most powerful items in the game if you invested the time and effort into them. One of my favorite features was that lockpicking wasn't needlessly hampered for gameplay reasons. If you were good enough at picking locks, there wasn't anything stopping you from running to the armor and swordsmith shops, cracking open their chests, and stealing end game loot. In addition, robbing every day houses was quite fun. There is a surprising amount of loot sitting out in the open just waiting to be pilfered.

It makes me sad because it showed me what a modern Elder Scrolls could be like. We need a Morrowind style re-imagining of what an Elder Scrolls game is for TES6 but what we will most likely be getting is a Skyrim style downgrade.

 

[30+GameOvers]

Rate my optimistic since I already know it's not happening but Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 lit a fire under Bethesda's ass and they better innovate their game.

If the poor reception of Fallout 76 and Starfield didn't do anything, then nothing will. KCD2 was a wet fart, nobody remembers it anymore.