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[Blarghagh]

 

 

 
 

 

 

Struck me as a bit weird too.

Not weird per se, tell reviewers to talk positively about your game unless they won't receive it and many will make that behavior into a story. Tell so-called "Influencers" "Oh hey, do you want exclusive Youtube/Twitch views on this cool new game? Well promise us you'll praise it in your content in this agreement here and you can have it!" Not saying Betheda's doing this, but it feels fishy that only some select people receive a copy.
 

 

Not that I would buy a Bethesda game on release or at full price anyway, though. Fo4, Fo3, Skyrim, Oblivion... that tells a story when it comes to their RPG games. Besides, the general information policy around Fo4 was already *really* bad (or hey, pretty good from a marketing point of view). Remember, they always only presented material that was showing the player either walking randomly through the game world or shooting up stuff. There was not a bit of dialogue seen... or quests. And what happened then? Game got released and people found out that at least dialogue- and quest-wise, it's nothing but a big turd. :D

There's games by Bethesda and then there's games published by Bethesda. Anything created by Bethesda is invariably buggy piece of crap on release. Anything published by Bethesda, on the other hand, is well polished, optimized and functions extremely well (perhaps with the exception of Evil Within, altho I think that was fine too?)You have your Dishonored, Wolfenstein: The New Order, The Old Blood, 2016 version of DOOM.

That makes their decision even more puzzling to me, it seems that their QA department actually does really good job for games they publish (and completely ignores those they develop for whatever reason.)

 
 

 

 
Dear Gearbox Software, welcome to my ignore list.

[redneckdevil]

TBH I'm waiting on Bethesdas next new big game (ES or FO) and reviewers pick up that a lot of people are experiencing bugs and whatever not picks, and they will roll with that and then I see Bethesda abandoning that practice.....maybe lol.

I can't say for certain seeing what their design goals have been lately..

[WDeranged]

Jim Trinca succinctly lays out exactly why Fallout 4 falls far short of being a classic. 

 

What Skyrim had that Fallout 4 lost

[Oner]

Wait, Skyrim is a classic now?

What about standards? Don't we have them anymore?

[Fenixp]

Yup, Fallout 4 was a terrible larping-aid, and since that's sort of what Bethesda excels at creating, well... There we have it. And sadly I have to eat my words - before F4 release, I kept saying that "Bethesda surely understands what makes their games tick and would never take away substantial features such as blank slate character."

[WDeranged]

Wait, Skyrim is a classic now?

What about standards? Don't we have them anymore?

 

I'm afraid so, many of us never stopped playing it.  And the modding scene is as vibrant as it was 5 years ago, definite classic despite it's obvious failings in other areas.

[Oner]

 

Wait, Skyrim is a classic now?

What about standards? Don't we have them anymore?

 

I'm afraid so, many of us never stopped playing it.  And the modding scene is as vibrant as it was 5 years ago, definite classic despite it's obvious failings in other areas.

 

I never subscribed to the notion that a game can be good because a few hundred modders made it so, let alone classic. But to each their own I suppose.

[Rosbjerg]

Wait, Skyrim is a classic now?

What about standards? Don't we have them anymore?

 

I wish bad games were on average as bad as Skyrim.. Better?

[Fenixp]

I never subscribed to the notion that a game can be good because a few hundred modders made it so, let alone classic. But to each their own I suppose.

Oh it's not only good thanks to modders, its popularity on consoles attests to that at least. But you can adjust it to your liking using mods, and to create a game which is modifiable to such an extent while also creating modding tools which allow easy access to creation of such adjustments, that's also an accomplishment developers had to work on you know. There's a reason why vast majority of games ever released don't come even close to the moddability of Bethesda's open world games. Edited October 27, 2016 by Fenixp

[WDeranged]

 

 

Wait, Skyrim is a classic now?

What about standards? Don't we have them anymore?

 

I'm afraid so, many of us never stopped playing it.  And the modding scene is as vibrant as it was 5 years ago, definite classic despite it's obvious failings in other areas.

 

I never subscribed to the notion that a game can be good because a few hundred modders made it so, let alone classic. But to each their own I suppose.

 

 

I get what you're saying but modders are just a symptom of Skyrim's popularity, they aren't the cause.  Seems to me that we have plenty of other modern classics coming out lately, it's just that Skyrim hit a great balance of freedom, gameplay and story.

[Ganrich]

Yup, Fallout 4 was a terrible larping-aid, and since that's sort of what Bethesda excels at creating, well... There we have it. And sadly I have to eat my words - before F4 release, I kept saying that "Bethesda surely understands what makes their games tick and would never take away substantial features such as blank slate character."

They have been doing it for 2 decades. Every iteration of TES has had systems removed or simplified. It seems their stock and trade. They just went too far with FO4, apparently, and brought the middling wrath of the console crowd. You know, the kind of "wrath" where you still shell out 60 bucks without hesitation but whine on the internet afterwards.

[WDeranged]

You know, the kind of "wrath" where you still shell out 60 bucks without hesitation but whine on the internet afterwards.

 

Ha, so true.  The hype train ensured that Bethesda made a mint on that game...though I've no doubt people will be more sceptical next time so there is a chance for them to learn a lesson, time will tell.

 

I really feel that Fallout 4 would have benefited by dropping the RPG pretense.  Without its bull**** 'choices' and hideously nonsensical plot contrivances they could have at least focused on making a half decent story to match the half decent gameplay.

Edited October 27, 2016 by WDeranged

[Hurlshort]

I definitely agree the lack of a blank slate character in Fallout 4 was a problem, as opposed to the standard unknown prisoner in every ES game.  Although that was hardly my only issue with it.  

[Lexx]

...though I've no doubt people will be more sceptical next time so there is a chance for them to learn a lesson, time will tell.

Hahahahahahaha. No.

 

TES6(5? I have no idea) and Fo5 = insta buy for most of em folks.

[Fenixp]

They have been doing it for 2 decades. Every iteration of TES has had systems removed or simplified.

I would argue that while this is certainly true for transition between Morrowind to Oblivion, it doesn't apply to Oblivion -> Skyrim, which is what made me hopeful for Fallout 4 in the first place. Pretty much the only thing that Skyrim simplified was removal of attributes, but those were made rather irrelevant in Oblivion already so no loss there.

 

On the other hand, it got rid of hard level scaling and made the are scaling mechanics a lot smarter, you have to commit while leveling a character due to perk system, the world was finally completely hand-made again as opposed to being filled with generated content, I could go on. Simply put, Skyrim is significantly more complex than Oblivion ever was - and while it can't live up to Morrowind in mechanical complexity, it removed a lot of Morrowind's jank. I wouldn't even go into transition from Morrowind to Daggerfall as TES III upwards are essentially entirely different games from TES I and II.

 

But then Fallout 4 was actually released and turned out to be a STALKER wannabe without the skill required on the side of developer to actually make that work.

[WDeranged]

 

...though I've no doubt people will be more sceptical next time so there is a chance for them to learn a lesson, time will tell.

Hahahahahahaha. No.

 

TES6(5? I have no idea) and Fo5 = insta buy for most of em folks.

 

 

You're almost certainly right.  Though I did say 'chance', and people are definitely more sceptical of Bethesda lately.

[Ganrich]

Oblivion still had birthsigns, major/minor skills, and NPCs still had the 0-100 disposition system. Skyrim didn't. They watered down char gen to race and looks, traded signs for those standing stones (where many people felt obligated to activate the ones to hasten leveling skills), and NPCs simply love or hate you. Skyrim did indeed remove a fair bit from Oblivion. My biggest pet peeve is that I have to equip spells to my hand(s). It makes archery/2 handed skills a chore to mix with magic. They removed half the spells to make room for dragon shouts. Magic is nearly useless without mods.

 

Sure, they spent more time building the province. The dungeons didn't feel so copy/paste.

 

I didn't mind perks, but lord are the majority of perks banal. +10% damage here, increased armor there, etc. Those were all things that you got by leveling the skills in previous titles. Now you spend perks to do what use to be done under the hood. Perks "could" be amazing if they did something fun with them, but incremental increases to the skill in question is just lazy. So, they added perks, but the majority don't do anything new really.

 

I agree that comparing Arena/Daggerfall to anything after Morrowind is fruitless, though. Still, in terms of the world, reactivity, depth of NPCs, etc, etc, etc the games get more shallow with every new release. Jank, or no, Morrowind was far deeper than the puddles that leak out of Bethesda these days.

[redneckdevil]

I didn't but fo4 first day and fo3, FONV, and skyrim were day 1 purchases. Skyrim and how Bethesda catered to Microsoft left a bad taste in my mouth so didn't buy until on sale and even then on the PS4 which after 2 weeks took back and got a refund.

I did get gifted it on steam from a long time friend I hadn't talked to in a bit though lol.

[Fenixp]

Oblivion still had birthsigns, major/minor skills, and NPCs still had the 0-100 disposition system. Skyrim didn't. They watered down char gen to race and looks, traded signs for those standing stones (where many people felt obligated to activate the ones to hasten leveling skills), and NPCs simply love or hate you. Skyrim did indeed remove a fair bit from Oblivion. My biggest pet peeve is that I have to equip spells to my hand(s). It makes archery/2 handed skills a chore to mix with magic. They removed half the spells to make room for dragon shouts. Magic is nearly useless without mods

Skyrim actually still has an NPC disposition system, it just works differently and isn't visible. IIRC it's changed by your character's actions in the world and by completing quests for NPCs, and with it increasing, NPC reactions change, prices are changed and if they like you enough, you can start taking things from NPC houses - I think this is worked out based on their value or such. Honestly, this system feels a lot more organic than an arbitrary number displayed next to their heads, it's true that the abstraction of persuasion was removed.

 

Considering attributes got removed, removal of minor/major skills doesn't actually do anything and since attributes were more or less an afterthought in Oblivion already, well... Nothing of value was lost, really. What Skyrim gained by this change however is a much more organic leveling process - your character is defined by your actions a lot more than by answers you give at the start of the game, and due to the perk system, your character also ends up much more tightly profiled than in older Elder Scrolls games. I agree that perks themselves were mostly not that interesting, but it doesn't change the fact that investing gained perks makes your character a lot less likely to master ALL THE SKILLS like he could in the previous games.

 

As for standing stones, the change is mostly cosmetic, really - if you have a character build that you want to pursue, you'll stick to a single sign anyway. Dunno about magic, I quite liked how the system worked since some interesting spell effects were finally introduced and as a pure mage/battlemage I never really felt underpowerd, but to each his own I suppose. Wouldn't exactly call that "removal", just a "change".

[Ganrich]

I didn't but fo4 first day and fo3, FONV, and skyrim were day 1 purchases. Skyrim and how Bethesda catered to Microsoft left a bad taste in my mouth so didn't buy until on sale and even then on the PS4 which after 2 weeks took back and got a refund.

I did get gifted it on steam from a long time friend I hadn't talked to in a bit though lol.

Yeah, I still haven't played FO4 because of the voiced PC. I just knew how much that would limit the options, and knew it wasn't for me. I probably never will play it, tbh.

 

I give Bethesda **** because I grew up on TES, and want more from them (I know they are capable). It just looked like (with FO4) they were taking Bioware's dialogue wheel, making it more shooter focused by lowering the influence of skills, and retaining the open world. I don't want FO meets Borderlands (without the jokes, because if FO3's humor was off) with Bioware's dialogue boot strapped to it.

 

So, now Bethesda is a wait and see deal with me. This recent issue of review embargos until the day before just compounds that sentiment.

[Tale]

I know my excitement for Final Fantasy XV should be more restrained, but it's simply not happening.

 

 

Also it went gold.

[Ganrich]

The problem with Skyrim's disposition everyone inevitably likes you 2 hours into the game. It may as well be binary.

 

Yeah, they removed attributes. That's what I meant. I think a lot of value was lost with attributes, but we will likely run circles here. I like building the character. The "organic" leveling is marketing jargon to me. Skyrim went too far with the lack of scaling levels from Oblivion. Those two things combined to make it feel like you were a god at level 1 through 50. Well, if you avoid Giants, early on. In Morrowind you had to think to succeed at times.

 

I have no problem with any player maxing everything after 300 hours logged in the game. Who cares? It's not like the games make you pick factions at the cost of other factions becoming hostile anymore. So every play through is identical in terms of content. May as well let players max everything and not start over to try different things. If your game isn't being designed with replaying in mind then let the player max everything. I won't do it, but it doesn't hurt the game to allow it.

 

It's a bandaid fix to a nonexistent problem. They could have kept attributes, not allowed players to increase three of them by +5 every level, and limited the number of skill increases like Ultima did in UO. Same outcome. No character with all attributes and skills maxed.

 

Magicka almost instantly refills, and potions are in such abundance that they might as well move to a cool down system with the next installment. Limited potions and limited magicka regen in MW made you debate casting spells, but the byproduct was spells were actually useful and fun. Now they are boring, and almost useless. Destruction was never great, but man is it tedious in Skyrim.

 

No, standing stones "would" be mostly cosmetic, but they put 4 in that replace the major/minor system from previous games. Thief, Mage, Warrior, and Lover (IIRC) increased leveling speed. So, you have to choose between something interesting(which there weren't many even still) or increasing skills not being a chore. It's like they simplify things without wondering what the ramifications might be.

 

I just don't know how you can say more was removed in the transition between MW to Oblivion than Oblivion to Skyrim. I like Skyrim, in many ways more than Oblivion, but that doesn't change that Oblivion still had a lot of MW still in there. It's nearly all gone in Skyrim.

 

One could argue that the differences are so vast that it's like comparing the first two games to anything after. You can compare Arena and DF, or Oblivion and MW, or Skyrim and maybe TES VI. However, the changes are so vast you can't compare Skyrim and MW, or even Skyrim and Oblivion. We might have an easier time discussing the similarities of Skyrim to the previous 2 TES games vs the differences. I'll start. How are they similar? They aren't.

[Fenixp]

Skyrim went too far with the lack of scaling levels from Oblivion.

Huh? Oblivion scaled 100%. You could finish the main quest line on like lvl 2 and that's only because lvl 2 was a hard-scripted requirement for a daedric quest you've had to complete in order to progress in main storyline. As opposed to Skyrim, which... Let's just say I dare you to finish a dwemer ruin on lvl 1 :-P Level scaling in Skyrim was still a bit too much to my liking, but there actually were dangerous areas and enemies which outpowered you, something not at all present in Oblivion.

 

I just don't know how you can say more was removed in the transition between MW to Oblivion than Oblivion to Skyrim. I like Skyrim, in many ways more than Oblivion, but that doesn't change that Oblivion still had a lot of MW still in there. It's nearly all gone in Skyrim.

It's true that Oblivion had a lot more of Morrowind in it than Skyrim does, definitely. And I also really enjoy character creation and progression, which happens to precisely be why do I enjoy Skyrim a lot more than I did Oblivion. Thing is, I feel like transition from Morrowind to Oblivion dropped everything of substance about Morrowind's mechanics - Bethesda was cutting systems from Morrowind left and right without much thought as to how it'll affect the bigger picture until we were left with skeleton of RPG mechanics that were Oblivion. For Skyrim, somebody actually seems to have sat down and put serious amount of thought into how to make these changes work, which naturally leads to a massively different game, but IMO also massively superior.

 

Of course, this doesn't necessarily have to mean that you'll like the changes - I still however stand by my initial statement that Skyrim quite simply contains a lot more meaningful mechanical complexity which hardly existed in Oblivion (and Morrowind beats both, hands down). It's poorly balanced of course - but balance is not exactly what TES games ever did right, so meh.

 

Anyway, you definitely hit the nail on the head by saying that they're quite simply very different in their mechanics. If you quite simply prefer more traditionally structured RPGs, you'll obviously like Oblivion more than Skyrim.

[redneckdevil]

My main beef with skyrim BESIDES crafting was the attributes. And the only reason why is because I have a horribad case of restartistis with TES games and they all feel the same when u start and takes a few levels before u start feeling different (aka ur character). Minor beef with people, but was very obvious with me.

Also the damn crafting. Sigh when u can make a steel sword better than daedric weapons or hell any special weapon from quests or npcs...

Story wise, they took a huge **** on their lore with Alduin, unless they come out and say that it was only his avatar.

 

Mods, mods made it playable for me though. I'm gonna grab the enhanced edition and not play with mods and see how it goes though.

[Ganrich]

What I meant is Skyrim felt like you were mostly safe because of the lack of level scaling. Don't get me wrong. I know there were areas where trolls, liches, etc were and would wreck you at level one, but it felt that the game's difficulty was always too far behind you. I cranked it to a harder difficulty (it's been too long to remember what difficulty, but I usually play with it pretty high), and I still burned through enemies fairly easily.

 

Oblivion's scaling was silly. No matter what level you were the enemies were around the same. Nothing worse than a bandit in Daedric armor demanding 50 gold. It also was problematic if you built a less combat focused character, or spammed jump too much with acrobatics as a skill. You ended up with enemies too tough to tackle.

 

No, I actually am more hard on Oblivion than Skyrim. It is a completely different can of worms, though. Skyrim isn't bad, but it could be much better. Oblivion did some things better, but not many. I feel like Skyrim is like a skeleton that needs some flesh. If the perks were made more interesting, the standing stones made more interesting, the enemies were less copy/pasted (like MW), the quest lines not so mediocre(something Oblivion got right with its faction quests. They were probably the best part of the game), the world more reactive, more factions that don't get along so you can't join all of them, etc... I'd love it. I also miss the MW dialogue system. Bring that level of depth, and I'm sold. However, it felt like an open world dungeon crawler, with mediocre quests, and easy and simple combat.

 

Yeah, I also don't care about balance being great, but all combat styles need to be fun and capable. Skyrim fails that for me because of how crappy the magic is. Dragon shouts really did become iconic, but man did it harm magicka as a whole. I will definitely wait for news of TES VI, but I won't be jumping in this time without heavy scrutiny.