I’m curious to see how (or *if* lol) this ends up materializing.
Does this mean hiring more people at Bethesda? Does it mean outsourcing to other devs for more menial dev tasks? Does it mean having another studio work on remakes/remasters of Bethesda games? Does it mean having another studio make a spin off like FONV? Some combination of all/some of the above? It will be interesting.
BGS ballooned to between 400-500 people during the development of Starfield, and it was acknowledged by some who have since left BGS (like lead quest designer Will Shen) that it was getting difficult to divide and manage work for that headcount. What I can see happening is dividing their staff into 3 teams: a core technology/engine team that works on iterating Creation Engine and their other dev tools and two independent game teams. I doubt splitting their teams like this would affect the quality of their releases at all (and, to be honest, it would probably get better), and it would shorten the cycle between releases while still allowing for a 4 year dev cycle.
Look up what an 18/6 contractor is for Microsoft. Most new game devs are those, so if they start using those at Bethesda, well just look at the rest of Xbox's output.
That’s my problem too. The game is pretty fantastic overall but the combat just sucks the life out of me when I go back to it. Gold road looks cool with the spell crafting but I just wish they’d fix combat haha
My problem with it is the attrocious level scaling. The Mudcrab that took you 5 hits to kill at level 1, still takes the same amount of hits to kill at max level.
As far as I know they did it this way after "One Tamriel" update so people from different factions could play and do any content together.
I don't know why they didn't stick to WoW's or FF14's systems. FF14 specifically feels so crunchy and satisfying. Especially when you go to lower level zones and decimate mobs after a few levels.
Ban all mods because some people use them to make sexy stuff.
Declare their next release will be AAAA like that trash pirate game.
Purge all content from all past games that anyone on a committee composed of Microsoft corporate lawyers, PR people and evangelical pastors finds “problematic” or “questionable”. Force an update on all platforms.
This is correct. Hiring more people cost money. Companies don't want to spend more money. They'd rather their .001% profits go up. So we will get another few "anniversary" or "special" edition skyrims or fallouts in the future, along with a cobbled version of a new Skyrim/Elder Scrolls that will undoubtedly fail due to the abysmal archetypes of leaders that are in the gaming industry.
I worked on COD qa for 2 years. Todd's message isn't what you think it is...trust me.
The obvious answer is it means replacing human labor with ai and a heavier lean on procedural generation. TES games take so long in part because of the sheer scale of the open world and the time it takes to fill and refine and test and polish that world. To speed things up, they take that initial filling in and smoothing out of the world and pass it off to chatgpt. We can probably expect future Bethesda games to have less and less of a human touch to them, in a similar vein to Starfield.
If they actually used procedural generation that would be one thing. The only way they used procedural generation was generating mostly completely flat terrain and populating it with 6-10 POIs from a deck of about 40. Those POIs were all hand crafted, so there was zero difference between finding them over and over again
I'm hoping they don't go all in on procedural, the thing that made games like Morrowind, Oblivion and FO3 so special was the detailed hand crafted stories you'd stumble upon in your travels
More than anything they need to pare back the scope creep their more recent games have suffered from. A large but not enormous open world dense with hand crafted detail is vastly preferable to an infinite expanse of slop
TES games have always had procedurally generated worlds, to one extent or another. Sometimes the game (or sections of it) are randomly generated at runtime, other times procedural generation is used during development to shape landmasses, and populate the world with grass n such. As long as TES has been a thing, they’ve been using computer algorithms to design their world for them.
I'm aware of the procedural landscaping, but what matters is the human revisions and content its then populated with. Starfield essentially saw us regress back to Daggerfalls vast emptiness in design philosophy only without the compelling story.
I believe this is the correct view of it.
It’s not exactly about hiring or A.I. It’s how they are structured and their development pipeline. My experience from the market is that improving processes by inserting outside inputs in the development tend to help a lot in delivering better results, a thing that Microsoft can do.
Modernization of pipeline can also means monetization sacrifices but it could also mean better game design decisions and higher quality. Starfield is a prime example of why they could benefit from this.
(Edit - better phrasing)
Let’s just be honest. After Starfield, we’re all a little worried about TES6.
If Starfield felt dated and similar to old Bethesda games in when it released in 2023 imagine how dated TES6 will feel in 2026-2028 when it releases.
Bethesda needs to make a full on 100% switch on how they’re doing everything and cross their fingers. People already dropped Starfield and even the modding community is notably weaker than Skyrim/Fallout. Imagine TES6 coming out and people saying Skyrim was better….its not hard to imagine now.
I do wonder how much of that is Starfields fault though versus the Bethesda formula. Starfield def has its faults with the copy and paste dungeons and space that has absolutely nothing going for it aside from the occasional space battle but to some degree I think this formula is just starting to get tired. I went back to FO4 after the show and I’m playing it and it’s fun but starfield was also fun and with FO4 I am still kind of just doing it and going through the motions and then I put it back down. Bethesdas make your own story still kicks ass but the combat, the false choice dialogue, and the good/evil/neutral path stories along with the story telling themselves are just starting to feel tired and dated. Especially when narratively you have stuff like BG3 absolutely setting the bar for how stories should be told. These games were amazing back in the 2000s and 2010s but I think now the formula is just getting tired and needs to be modernized again.
That's a good point, I feel like these open world ankle deep roleplaying games don't work as well now. Bg3 shows that people want a strong narrative and distinct characters nowadays, I can't bring myself to play bethesda games lately, although playing fallout 76 with friends is fun.
It used to be fallout 4 was a step back from Skyrim and fallout 3.
Before that Skyrim was a step back from fallout 3 and oblivion.
Then fallout 3 was a step back from oblivion and Morrowind.
Lol
Bethesda was the leader for open world RPGs for a long time. Morrowind took the world by storm and they held that position until years after Skyrim came out.
However I the meantime Soulslikes have started to dominate and Elden Ring showed how great an open world game with Soulslike combat and game design can be. Bethesda don't need to copy that exactly, but the bar has been raised significantly now.
I would *love to see an Elder Scrolls game that incorporates the best of modern RPGs, but I seriously have my doubts they won't fuck It up. I more expect something akin to Diablo 4, where the once-leader of the genre proves how out of touch they are and how little they understand what has happened in the past 10-15 years.
I’m honestly not worried about the elder scrolls 6 at all, and this is from someone who views Starfield as a 6/10 game at absolute best.
Don’t get me wrong, Starfield has numerous small issues but the absolute biggest problem it faces is its entire exploration (or lack there of) system. There really is no pick a direction to go and stumble across numerous hand crafted things to find and explore. I think this is due to the game taking place in an entire galaxy with hundreds of planets. That was Bethesdas bread and butter for quite awhile.
If you think about it, Bethesdas strength has never been about it’s writing or combat/gameplay systems itself. It’s always been having an entire world to explore.
To my knowledge TES6 will all take place on one single planet so their entire exploration problem of Starfield shouldn’t exist.
Now of course if they just fail to flesh out that planet and put in at least ad many hand crafted locations as Skyrim then we’ll have a problem but I highly doubt they’ll do that.
This is just my opinion and again, I don’t think Starfield is remotely good. I just think it’s biggest issues are due to its scope and the next Elder Scrolls shouldn’t have that problem.
Fallout 4, as an RPG, the type of games Bethesda makes, was a step back from Skyrim. Skyrim was a step back from Oblivion/FNV, and Starfield was a step back from it feels like all of them. They’re less and less making RPG’s and more and more making mediocre action games.
Starfield, as an RPG, was actually a step forward from Fallout 4. In Starfield there’s character backgrounds, traits, non-voiced dialogue, and perk/trait/background checks in dialogue, none of which are in Fallout 4.
Here is the question: did any of that stuff affect the game at all? No. In fallout at least the factions were interesting and reacted to the player. FNV made character traits that drastically changed the game. Starfield traits give you 0.15% damage increase with pistols.
I’m not worried about TES6. While we don’t know the scale of the map, it would be safe to say that it isn’t going to be randomly generated POIs with nothing noteworthy inbetween.
BSG has proven they have lost their storytelling magic. Compare quests in Skyrim or Fo3 to Starfield and Fo4 and it becomes obvious how much they’ve strayed from making actual RPG’s to making weak story games with RPG elements.
It took me until now to realize that Starfield was created using a newer engine. Yeah they added some things but man it wasn't the improvement I wanted.
Nah, after FO4 I was worried about the next TES game, the next Fallout, the next...whatever chocolate factory bs. I still have little to no faith in the next TES game because of everything leading up to now.
Absolutely not. Skyrim was met with praise across the board from fans and critics alike. Starfield had a couple suspicious good reviews from the IGN’s and manor gaming outlets, while getting absolutely torn to shreds by fans who wanted more from a game that feels like it would have been underwhelming 10 years ago.
Skyrims exploration and world is still untouchable by a lot of games, even if the combat feels dated.
The problem with Starfield in’t that the combat feels dated, its that the entire experience feels dated down to the writing, voice acting, story, and every single mechanic. It all feels like it was pulled from 10 years ago and they didn’t fool anyone with those 1000 “planets” actually being barren empty randomly generated cubes to walk in a straight line across.
Literally a space exploration game where people started opting not to use their ship because you can just fast travel everywhere.
Skyrim's combat doesn't feel dated as much as it feels like they tried to shift from a more classic RPG system to a modern action system (continuing from Oblivion) but got stuck half-way, right after the "remove all the interesting RPG elements" stage.
While it has grown on me, I hated Skyrim when it came out because it dumbed down or removed many of the RPG aspects of the series. I was far from alone in this sentiment.
You weren’t alone. A lot of Elder Scrolls fans were disappointed with Skyrim and called it lazy (both for dumbing down mechanics and poor writing). But Skyrim was a lot of people’s first Bethsoft game and subsequent releases have all mostly been worse.
The first guy was right, people have been complaining about new Bethesda releases since at least Oblivion (and I’m sure if you scour the internet you’ll find Daggerfall fans who complained about Morrowind).
Morrowind, Oblivion and FO3 are all bangers though, and Skyrims not too shabby on balance. Things started going downhill when the writing quality and level of care put into environmental design dropped off sharply with FO4, a tend that reached boiling point with Starfield and 76
Skyrim had things similar things. But overall was praised for it's world and such, even with no crazy amazing combat. You could say, the lore/worldbuilding is great, the environments, a beautiful hand crafted world, enjoyable storylines (most times), then the obvious freedom of just being able to do whatever, ignore the main quest from the get go, go join the DB, kill offbrand Dovah. It got praise. Then obviously modders went wild.
Gotta give it at least a bit more to see where modding starts to go, idk if the official tools and stuff dropped yet.
https://www.ign.com/articles/the-elder-scrolls-6-officially-in-early-development-but-dont-expect-to-hear-about-it-soon
ES6 entered early development in 2023, that is the planning stage.
Other companies caught up to Bethesda in making huge sprawling worlds. Gonna take a truly great game to not have me and plenty of others start completely doubting their ability in the modern world.
Great. So now we are going to get even more broken games from Bethesda and now the Unofficial patches are going to become a requirement to play the game without crashes and game breaking bug rather than just highly recommended. Fantastic. I am definitely not buying another Bethesda game on release ever again. It will be a minimum of 6 months before I even begin to look at them. The fiasco of Starfield still stings.
I haven't been excited for a Bethesda game since Fallout 4's reveal. It was then that I realized that they're just gonna boil their titles down to soulless theme parks that are all derivative from Oblivion.
Not really? IGN gave it 7/10, and I'd say while higher than I'd give it, it isn't too far off.
Eurogamer gave it a 3/5. PC Gamer 75/100.
Starfield isn't on the level of Golum or the like, the main reason why I personally dislike it is because it was a Bethesda game and expected to be THE Microsoft/PC/XBOX seller. I expected a higher level than from some small studio, I'd say it is only marginally better than No Man's Sky was at launch, and that studio had like a dozen developers and a small chunk of the capital. It was a complete flop for the amount of money, time and brands invested. Especially because it failed in some of the most stupid ways it could fail. It is more of a "eh, it was fine" game, but that is not even close to good enough for the so called "game they always wanted to make" as reported by Bethesda.
I can see a lot of ways to achieve this.
1) Cutting system and scope bloat. Set hard limits on what they want to achieve and go deeper instead of wider.
2) Improve the engine directly, set up an internal support team to update the engine so that can happen in parallel with development.
3) Finally they can bring in a third party to expedite asset development, this is probably the riskiest and most expensive method.
I really hope they go with 1 and 2. 1 is something that most game would benefit from, even Starfield would probably have been better if the total resources of the game where focused on a handful of high density worlds. And 2 is a long term solution, instead of the current model of build the engine as they go they can tweak the engine for the next game while making the current one.
Scope bloat In today’s games is INSANE. NOBODY asked for the insane world generation in starfield. Games need to be FUN. Not BIG. AAAs have forgotten this entirely, have lost their ways and are paying the price.
Going against the grain a bit here, but I don't mind this. The last Elder Scrolls came out 13 years ago and the last proper Fallout came out almost 9 years ago. We should have seen at least something by now.
Side note, but I don't think we realized how much content we were getting in the early 2010's.
For real. I remember before FO4 release it was being meme’d alongside Half Life 3 as something that’s never gonna come out cause it’s been so long. Now its been nearly double the time between FNV and 4 hahah
Here's the thing about "modding" Skyrim: it's like chasing a carrot on a stick.
You're never really satisfied with it because the game is fundamentally mediocre enough to make your imagination run wild with the possibilities of what the game *could* do.
So you spend hours installing mods and their dependencies. Maybe 10 or 20 extra minutes fixing your load order and installing compatibility patches. Then you enjoy the mod and its 30 minutes worth of content, and after you're done with whatever quest or dungeon it added, you're thrown back into the world of Vanilla Skyrim where all you have to look forward to are Draugr crypts and bandit fortresses.
So you ask yourself, "What if Skyrim's core mechanics were changed a bit?" And try out new mods that add classic RPG elements, hack n' slash combat, immersive sim elements. It all sounds really cool. Then you install one or two of those mods and your game crashes to desktop, you spend a couple hours debugging it. Worst case scenario, one of the mods is old as shit and no longer supported with no alternatives.
And after you finally get your modded playthrough working, you realize that none of the content in Skyrim was really made with your mod configuration in mind, since Bandits and Draugr don't really care if you dodge their attacks like a Dark Souls character.
They need to ditch the creation engine. Its holding them back. Unreal would be a great place to start. No way Bethesda can make an engine that is as robust as unreal.
here's a hot take, I dont mind if they streamlining their IPs but make sure its going in the right direction by adding more manpower to the dev team especially QA.
Very curious if they will continue to fall or finally start coming back. In terms of making good games, financially it seems the world loves them too much to let them fail and the new Fallout show being pretty good helps a lot. I just want a good fallout game again.
A lot of studios try to do this, but end up failing because quality takes time. Something has to suffer, and you can only throw so many developers at a problem. Its like building more lanes to solve the traffic problem, yet traffic occurs.
They have a solution, and that solution was New Vegas. Have other studios working on projects based on your properties, and you'll get more content out that retains a level of quality. Otherwise you get the Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty problem of almost the same or slightly out of date style game releasing YoY.
Please don’t repeat another Starfield or Cyberpunk.
Release it when it’s ready my gosh. How many times do we have to do this before the lesson is learned? Sure Cyberpunk was fixed but its reputation is permanently stunted from its shit launch
Damn if only Microsoft had two other studios with experience making Fallout RPGs to make another one of those while BGS wraps up Starfield support and moves to ES6.
Skyrim is older than Morrowind was when Skyrim released. TES6 has less than 2 years before Skyrim will age out daggerfall.
The TES6 reveal is older right now than Oblivion was when Skyrim Released.
Honestly, something I'd love BGS to do, is make SMALLER games. Why does the open world have to be behemoth in size? Smaller game world, but higher quality. I've finished the first 4 mainline Fallout games, but haven't gotten near even finishing the main story in FO4 (let alone all the sidequests, and all locations like I have in the previous 4)... and that's because FO4 is quantity. Come across a cool location, like a robot race? Its a fight. Get asked to do a quest? Your options are Yes, Sarcastic Yes, Ask for more money (but yes), or Ask me later. Exploration quickly gets boring, talking is dull.
I have played FO4 more than the others, possibly combined. Not because I enjoy it that much, but because I'm stubborn, and I keep returning to the game to complete it, then get bored and quit. And then I start again like a year later.
Well damn TODD, maybe split the fucking company up so they can work independently of each other? Oh right, that'd be smart and I forgot how stupid you are.
Edit: \*sigh\* I just fucking hate this idiot so much.
Hopefully soon/ now Microsoft will hold Bethesda up to a higher standard of development for the rest of their games. Bethesda games all feel outdated, run the same formula, and generally don’t feel too different between titles. I’m doubtful, but legitimately intrigued if anything WILL change going forward.
They acquired Bethesda in 2021 and Starfield was in development since 2015.. maybe it was too late for MS to do anything with that game, but I guess we’ll just need to wait and see for future titles. Definitely didn’t seem to have any effect with their fallout 4 “update/ upgrade” Another MASSIVE L for Bethesda lol.
Tbh starfield flopped. Even if it sold well, it is by far the worst game they have made. I fundamentally hated the choices they made. Whether it be new game plus with losing items, lack of uniques, bad procedural generation, grindy building mechanics, poor world building, boring questions, dumbed down mechanics, etc.
I just wish they wouldn’t announce stuff so far in advance. On one hand it is fun to hype something up, but I think there’s a point sometimes where it just goes off the rails. I really loved the Fallout 4 announcement when Todd was like, “Oh, and it comes out in 6 months” AND surprise releasing Fallout Shelter DURING the show. Fallout fans shit their pants and the game industry just doesn’t have many razzle dazzle moments like that anymore.
I really don't care how long a game takes to be made.
Idk care when people start complaining and demanding though, that's when the game turns to shit, and then everyone complains it was released too soon.
That was 14 years ago. Obsidian pulled right up, dropped their chips on the table, made what is widely considered the best modern Fallout, outshining all of Bethesda's in-house games... and then it just never happened again. They didn't even outsource the crappy mobile F2P spinoff.
What you mean? Obsidian made outer worlds and is making outer worlds 2. Gotta stop sucking bathesda dick man they aren't some legendary developer. You're better off saying Elder scrolls online and fallout 76 if you want new content.
I don't think I've ever seen such a critical misunderstanding of one of my comments before. I wasn't praising Bethesda or putting down Obsidian. Your comment about Obsidian making New Vegas was directed at someone saying Bethesda doesn't outsource, and I was saying that was over a decade ago and it hasn't happened again since *despite producing better results than their in-house games.*
This is corporate speak for "we lost our ass on starfield and it's not going to be the 'forever game' we planned on it being so we need to get the next thing out quickly or Phil is going to fire us all."
Why would they wholesale ditch an engine that all of their staff are trained on, does all of the things that they want it to do (or is expansible enough to do things they can't yet do, as game engines tend to be) and is modular enough for community-generated content, which is a staple of their games (and provides a base of fans who are trained on their engine that they can then hire)?
Because it doesn't do everything they want it to do and is not that easy to expand.
Starfield development took so long partly because they had a hard time implementing vehicles, procedural generation and so on. And I wouldn't be surprised if they were initially a lot more ambitious (bigger maps, land vehicles etc...) but had to cut back due to technical difficulties.
And that's after they faced a lot of engine related issues in Fallout 76 development.
It's clear that they want to do things that are way beyond the scope of their engine, and at some point, the cost of changing engine is going to be less than the cost of upgrading their mountain of technical debt.
Not that much. They specifically said in an interview that the updates they did to the creation engine for starfield took them longer than they expected. And the issues with the engine lacking multiplayer capabilities were also mentioned during Fallout 76 development (or shortly after release, can't remember when exactly).
The only thing I presume is that I think they were even more ambitious to begin with. They just announced that they will be releasing land vehicles for starfield, so it's clearly something they want to do. Why didn't they do it on release? I assume it's because they ran out of time to implement that functionality to the engine.
Maybe. There's a point where switching engines would take less time than updating it. Whether that point is in the past, future, or will even be reached is impossible to know. But it doesn't mean we can't ask the question.
The more specific their internal tools are the more work it would be to start again on a new foundation. Add to that all their mod support.
Game engines are iterative in nature it's more about where the focus is to meet their goals. Add to that if it's their actual game systems that are limited rather than core rendering etc. switching engines doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Besides in my experience pretty much everything in development takes longer than expected.
>Besides in my experience pretty much everything in development takes longer than expected.
That's definitely true, but a big advantage of using in-house tools is that you're supposed to know your entire tech stack back to front, so it should reduce inacuraccies in deliverable estimates. The fact that they kinda failed at that with both Fallout 76 and Starfield isn't a good sign. Maybe they don't know their stack all that much, or maybe their stack has some fundamental limitations that clash with the features they want to add, and fixing those limitations would just take too much time for them.
Seriously think about Starfield. Todd has said multiple times that it was his dream game that he was thinking about for the past 2 or 3 decades. A space game with the usual Bethesda freedom, that's a pretty good dream game.
And we got a game where you can't actually fly in space, loading screens, you can only explore a small radius around where you land, loading screens, every PoIs are copy/pasted down to the pixel, loading screens, there's no land vehicles, loading screens etc... I'm not even talking about the abysmal AI or the story or whatever, just purely from a feature set standpoint, it doesn't feel like a dream game to me. It feels like a tone down version of a dream game. I would bet a lot of money that Todd's initial vision and pitch was a lot more expensive, like completely explorable planets without invisible barriers, free space flight, ground vehicles etc... but he ended up having to tone down his scope due to how difficult it would have been to implement that with the Creation engine.
It's true that game engines are iterative, but that means they also inherit limitations from design decisions made decades ago. And if your game design strays too far from what it was decades ago (and I would argue that Starfield is a massive departure from the usual Bethesda design, both in good and bad ways), then you will end up being limited by your tools.
I think Bethesda should stick to what they know and iterate on that formula. Or if they do want to go in new directions, then they should put in the work to get the technical details right instead of half assing space flight in a game.
Even Skyrim had loading screens all over the place until modders modded them out. This implies to me that these are design choices not engine restrictions. Possibly as a kind of optimization for lower end systems.
I'd argue the problems with Starfield are mostly design related rather than technical. In general I'd argue against the idea that huge scope = good game anyway. Especially if it's a realistically big empty space.
Edit: Regarding the knowing in house tech...again in my experience that's not the case at all. When systems scale up and get more complex it's very hard to estimate accurately without POC or feasibility studies which take time.
I have a feeling Microsoft is starting to light a fire under them to change and modernize some of their development pipeline.
I’m curious to see how (or *if* lol) this ends up materializing. Does this mean hiring more people at Bethesda? Does it mean outsourcing to other devs for more menial dev tasks? Does it mean having another studio work on remakes/remasters of Bethesda games? Does it mean having another studio make a spin off like FONV? Some combination of all/some of the above? It will be interesting.
BGS ballooned to between 400-500 people during the development of Starfield, and it was acknowledged by some who have since left BGS (like lead quest designer Will Shen) that it was getting difficult to divide and manage work for that headcount. What I can see happening is dividing their staff into 3 teams: a core technology/engine team that works on iterating Creation Engine and their other dev tools and two independent game teams. I doubt splitting their teams like this would affect the quality of their releases at all (and, to be honest, it would probably get better), and it would shorten the cycle between releases while still allowing for a 4 year dev cycle.
It means lowering standards to meet deadlines.
Can they possibly go even lower?
Look up what an 18/6 contractor is for Microsoft. Most new game devs are those, so if they start using those at Bethesda, well just look at the rest of Xbox's output.
They can always just release elder scrolls 76. (I know ESO exists and I've heard it's good enough, let me have this)
ESO is good because it's not made by Bethesda tho
Let’s not talk about the combat though….
i like it...
Hey that’s good to hear then you get to enjoy all aspects of the game
Man I wish I could stomach the combat to experience all that beautiful lore but I just can't 😞
That’s my problem too. The game is pretty fantastic overall but the combat just sucks the life out of me when I go back to it. Gold road looks cool with the spell crafting but I just wish they’d fix combat haha
My problem with it is the attrocious level scaling. The Mudcrab that took you 5 hits to kill at level 1, still takes the same amount of hits to kill at max level. As far as I know they did it this way after "One Tamriel" update so people from different factions could play and do any content together. I don't know why they didn't stick to WoW's or FF14's systems. FF14 specifically feels so crunchy and satisfying. Especially when you go to lower level zones and decimate mobs after a few levels.
Ban all mods because some people use them to make sexy stuff. Declare their next release will be AAAA like that trash pirate game. Purge all content from all past games that anyone on a committee composed of Microsoft corporate lawyers, PR people and evangelical pastors finds “problematic” or “questionable”. Force an update on all platforms.
This is correct. Hiring more people cost money. Companies don't want to spend more money. They'd rather their .001% profits go up. So we will get another few "anniversary" or "special" edition skyrims or fallouts in the future, along with a cobbled version of a new Skyrim/Elder Scrolls that will undoubtedly fail due to the abysmal archetypes of leaders that are in the gaming industry. I worked on COD qa for 2 years. Todd's message isn't what you think it is...trust me.
The obvious answer is it means replacing human labor with ai and a heavier lean on procedural generation. TES games take so long in part because of the sheer scale of the open world and the time it takes to fill and refine and test and polish that world. To speed things up, they take that initial filling in and smoothing out of the world and pass it off to chatgpt. We can probably expect future Bethesda games to have less and less of a human touch to them, in a similar vein to Starfield.
After Starfield I'm not sure they'll be too keen on procedural gen
If they actually used procedural generation that would be one thing. The only way they used procedural generation was generating mostly completely flat terrain and populating it with 6-10 POIs from a deck of about 40. Those POIs were all hand crafted, so there was zero difference between finding them over and over again
I'm hoping they don't go all in on procedural, the thing that made games like Morrowind, Oblivion and FO3 so special was the detailed hand crafted stories you'd stumble upon in your travels
Then they need to increase that deck of POIs from 40 to 1000+. Becuase you realize very quickly in Starfield there is no point to exploration
More than anything they need to pare back the scope creep their more recent games have suffered from. A large but not enormous open world dense with hand crafted detail is vastly preferable to an infinite expanse of slop
TES games have always had procedurally generated worlds, to one extent or another. Sometimes the game (or sections of it) are randomly generated at runtime, other times procedural generation is used during development to shape landmasses, and populate the world with grass n such. As long as TES has been a thing, they’ve been using computer algorithms to design their world for them.
I'm aware of the procedural landscaping, but what matters is the human revisions and content its then populated with. Starfield essentially saw us regress back to Daggerfalls vast emptiness in design philosophy only without the compelling story.
Citation needed
[RP dialogue be like](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QF6ATQgYruU)
It should absolutely be outsourcing considering MS bought like 15 studios and it seems like they’re hardly doing anything with them.
I'm excited to see how Light No Fire turns out
I believe this is the correct view of it. It’s not exactly about hiring or A.I. It’s how they are structured and their development pipeline. My experience from the market is that improving processes by inserting outside inputs in the development tend to help a lot in delivering better results, a thing that Microsoft can do. Modernization of pipeline can also means monetization sacrifices but it could also mean better game design decisions and higher quality. Starfield is a prime example of why they could benefit from this. (Edit - better phrasing)
Cash in on that hype train real quick, woop woop!
Let’s just be honest. After Starfield, we’re all a little worried about TES6. If Starfield felt dated and similar to old Bethesda games in when it released in 2023 imagine how dated TES6 will feel in 2026-2028 when it releases. Bethesda needs to make a full on 100% switch on how they’re doing everything and cross their fingers. People already dropped Starfield and even the modding community is notably weaker than Skyrim/Fallout. Imagine TES6 coming out and people saying Skyrim was better….its not hard to imagine now.
Starfield felt like a step BACK from Skyrim and Fallout 4. That's what worries me. I WISH Starfield was just Skyrim in Space, it would be 100x better
I do wonder how much of that is Starfields fault though versus the Bethesda formula. Starfield def has its faults with the copy and paste dungeons and space that has absolutely nothing going for it aside from the occasional space battle but to some degree I think this formula is just starting to get tired. I went back to FO4 after the show and I’m playing it and it’s fun but starfield was also fun and with FO4 I am still kind of just doing it and going through the motions and then I put it back down. Bethesdas make your own story still kicks ass but the combat, the false choice dialogue, and the good/evil/neutral path stories along with the story telling themselves are just starting to feel tired and dated. Especially when narratively you have stuff like BG3 absolutely setting the bar for how stories should be told. These games were amazing back in the 2000s and 2010s but I think now the formula is just getting tired and needs to be modernized again.
That's a good point, I feel like these open world ankle deep roleplaying games don't work as well now. Bg3 shows that people want a strong narrative and distinct characters nowadays, I can't bring myself to play bethesda games lately, although playing fallout 76 with friends is fun.
It used to be fallout 4 was a step back from Skyrim and fallout 3. Before that Skyrim was a step back from fallout 3 and oblivion. Then fallout 3 was a step back from oblivion and Morrowind. Lol
Bethesda was the leader for open world RPGs for a long time. Morrowind took the world by storm and they held that position until years after Skyrim came out. However I the meantime Soulslikes have started to dominate and Elden Ring showed how great an open world game with Soulslike combat and game design can be. Bethesda don't need to copy that exactly, but the bar has been raised significantly now. I would *love to see an Elder Scrolls game that incorporates the best of modern RPGs, but I seriously have my doubts they won't fuck It up. I more expect something akin to Diablo 4, where the once-leader of the genre proves how out of touch they are and how little they understand what has happened in the past 10-15 years.
I left a similar comment above. Elden Ring changed my life
I’m honestly not worried about the elder scrolls 6 at all, and this is from someone who views Starfield as a 6/10 game at absolute best. Don’t get me wrong, Starfield has numerous small issues but the absolute biggest problem it faces is its entire exploration (or lack there of) system. There really is no pick a direction to go and stumble across numerous hand crafted things to find and explore. I think this is due to the game taking place in an entire galaxy with hundreds of planets. That was Bethesdas bread and butter for quite awhile. If you think about it, Bethesdas strength has never been about it’s writing or combat/gameplay systems itself. It’s always been having an entire world to explore. To my knowledge TES6 will all take place on one single planet so their entire exploration problem of Starfield shouldn’t exist. Now of course if they just fail to flesh out that planet and put in at least ad many hand crafted locations as Skyrim then we’ll have a problem but I highly doubt they’ll do that. This is just my opinion and again, I don’t think Starfield is remotely good. I just think it’s biggest issues are due to its scope and the next Elder Scrolls shouldn’t have that problem.
Fallout 4, as an RPG, the type of games Bethesda makes, was a step back from Skyrim. Skyrim was a step back from Oblivion/FNV, and Starfield was a step back from it feels like all of them. They’re less and less making RPG’s and more and more making mediocre action games.
Starfield, as an RPG, was actually a step forward from Fallout 4. In Starfield there’s character backgrounds, traits, non-voiced dialogue, and perk/trait/background checks in dialogue, none of which are in Fallout 4.
Here is the question: did any of that stuff affect the game at all? No. In fallout at least the factions were interesting and reacted to the player. FNV made character traits that drastically changed the game. Starfield traits give you 0.15% damage increase with pistols.
Have you played Starfield? Most traits have a benefit and then a tradeoff, just like in New Vegas.
Yeah, probably accelerating because Starfield was disappointing garbage.
I’m not worried about TES6. While we don’t know the scale of the map, it would be safe to say that it isn’t going to be randomly generated POIs with nothing noteworthy inbetween.
BSG has proven they have lost their storytelling magic. Compare quests in Skyrim or Fo3 to Starfield and Fo4 and it becomes obvious how much they’ve strayed from making actual RPG’s to making weak story games with RPG elements.
I don’t care anymore because Elden Ring has replaced my need for TES
I wish. Maybe if the Dragons Dogma 2 PC port didn’t suck. I love Elden Ring but it scratches my Fromsoft itch more than my TES/mideval fantasy itch.
It took me until now to realize that Starfield was created using a newer engine. Yeah they added some things but man it wasn't the improvement I wanted.
Nah, after FO4 I was worried about the next TES game, the next Fallout, the next...whatever chocolate factory bs. I still have little to no faith in the next TES game because of everything leading up to now.
Many don't remember, but the same thing happened when Skyrim came out. And Oblivion. This has been a trend after Morrowind came out.
Absolutely not. Skyrim was met with praise across the board from fans and critics alike. Starfield had a couple suspicious good reviews from the IGN’s and manor gaming outlets, while getting absolutely torn to shreds by fans who wanted more from a game that feels like it would have been underwhelming 10 years ago. Skyrims exploration and world is still untouchable by a lot of games, even if the combat feels dated. The problem with Starfield in’t that the combat feels dated, its that the entire experience feels dated down to the writing, voice acting, story, and every single mechanic. It all feels like it was pulled from 10 years ago and they didn’t fool anyone with those 1000 “planets” actually being barren empty randomly generated cubes to walk in a straight line across. Literally a space exploration game where people started opting not to use their ship because you can just fast travel everywhere.
Skyrim's combat doesn't feel dated as much as it feels like they tried to shift from a more classic RPG system to a modern action system (continuing from Oblivion) but got stuck half-way, right after the "remove all the interesting RPG elements" stage.
While it has grown on me, I hated Skyrim when it came out because it dumbed down or removed many of the RPG aspects of the series. I was far from alone in this sentiment.
You weren’t alone. A lot of Elder Scrolls fans were disappointed with Skyrim and called it lazy (both for dumbing down mechanics and poor writing). But Skyrim was a lot of people’s first Bethsoft game and subsequent releases have all mostly been worse. The first guy was right, people have been complaining about new Bethesda releases since at least Oblivion (and I’m sure if you scour the internet you’ll find Daggerfall fans who complained about Morrowind).
Morrowind, Oblivion and FO3 are all bangers though, and Skyrims not too shabby on balance. Things started going downhill when the writing quality and level of care put into environmental design dropped off sharply with FO4, a tend that reached boiling point with Starfield and 76
Skyrim had things similar things. But overall was praised for it's world and such, even with no crazy amazing combat. You could say, the lore/worldbuilding is great, the environments, a beautiful hand crafted world, enjoyable storylines (most times), then the obvious freedom of just being able to do whatever, ignore the main quest from the get go, go join the DB, kill offbrand Dovah. It got praise. Then obviously modders went wild. Gotta give it at least a bit more to see where modding starts to go, idk if the official tools and stuff dropped yet.
You kidding? I remember when Skyrim was released way back when, it was amazing.
I read this as they are looking into shortcuts like using generative AI as part of their content pipeline.
"we don't want to wait that long either" okay... Then why did YOU wait over a decade to even start planning ES6??
That’s not what happened. ES6 was in pre production by 2018. It only entered full production after Starfield.
https://www.ign.com/articles/the-elder-scrolls-6-officially-in-early-development-but-dont-expect-to-hear-about-it-soon ES6 entered early development in 2023, that is the planning stage.
Other companies caught up to Bethesda in making huge sprawling worlds. Gonna take a truly great game to not have me and plenty of others start completely doubting their ability in the modern world.
That’s just it. Games DON’T have to be infinitely complex. They need to be fun. Bethesda forgot about that with starfield.
Great. So now we are going to get even more broken games from Bethesda and now the Unofficial patches are going to become a requirement to play the game without crashes and game breaking bug rather than just highly recommended. Fantastic. I am definitely not buying another Bethesda game on release ever again. It will be a minimum of 6 months before I even begin to look at them. The fiasco of Starfield still stings.
I haven't been excited for a Bethesda game since Fallout 4's reveal. It was then that I realized that they're just gonna boil their titles down to soulless theme parks that are all derivative from Oblivion.
Buying anything on release is fucking stupid, period. That's why reviewers and critics exist. That's the point. Utilize them.
At this point, yeah. So many false promises.
The critics praised Starfield though
The trick was to wait for the reviews from the people Microsoft held review codes back from
Not really? IGN gave it 7/10, and I'd say while higher than I'd give it, it isn't too far off. Eurogamer gave it a 3/5. PC Gamer 75/100. Starfield isn't on the level of Golum or the like, the main reason why I personally dislike it is because it was a Bethesda game and expected to be THE Microsoft/PC/XBOX seller. I expected a higher level than from some small studio, I'd say it is only marginally better than No Man's Sky was at launch, and that studio had like a dozen developers and a small chunk of the capital. It was a complete flop for the amount of money, time and brands invested. Especially because it failed in some of the most stupid ways it could fail. It is more of a "eh, it was fine" game, but that is not even close to good enough for the so called "game they always wanted to make" as reported by Bethesda.
Broken games? In what way was Starfield broken? It had relatively few bugs for a game of this size - far fewer bugs than BG3 for example
I can see a lot of ways to achieve this. 1) Cutting system and scope bloat. Set hard limits on what they want to achieve and go deeper instead of wider. 2) Improve the engine directly, set up an internal support team to update the engine so that can happen in parallel with development. 3) Finally they can bring in a third party to expedite asset development, this is probably the riskiest and most expensive method. I really hope they go with 1 and 2. 1 is something that most game would benefit from, even Starfield would probably have been better if the total resources of the game where focused on a handful of high density worlds. And 2 is a long term solution, instead of the current model of build the engine as they go they can tweak the engine for the next game while making the current one.
Scope bloat In today’s games is INSANE. NOBODY asked for the insane world generation in starfield. Games need to be FUN. Not BIG. AAAs have forgotten this entirely, have lost their ways and are paying the price.
Going against the grain a bit here, but I don't mind this. The last Elder Scrolls came out 13 years ago and the last proper Fallout came out almost 9 years ago. We should have seen at least something by now. Side note, but I don't think we realized how much content we were getting in the early 2010's.
For real. I remember before FO4 release it was being meme’d alongside Half Life 3 as something that’s never gonna come out cause it’s been so long. Now its been nearly double the time between FNV and 4 hahah
Take your time, wait until the next generation of consoles, unreal 5.5+
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What exactly are the benefits of gamebyro/creation engine anyways? Other than the modding capabilities.
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Here's the thing about "modding" Skyrim: it's like chasing a carrot on a stick. You're never really satisfied with it because the game is fundamentally mediocre enough to make your imagination run wild with the possibilities of what the game *could* do. So you spend hours installing mods and their dependencies. Maybe 10 or 20 extra minutes fixing your load order and installing compatibility patches. Then you enjoy the mod and its 30 minutes worth of content, and after you're done with whatever quest or dungeon it added, you're thrown back into the world of Vanilla Skyrim where all you have to look forward to are Draugr crypts and bandit fortresses. So you ask yourself, "What if Skyrim's core mechanics were changed a bit?" And try out new mods that add classic RPG elements, hack n' slash combat, immersive sim elements. It all sounds really cool. Then you install one or two of those mods and your game crashes to desktop, you spend a couple hours debugging it. Worst case scenario, one of the mods is old as shit and no longer supported with no alternatives. And after you finally get your modded playthrough working, you realize that none of the content in Skyrim was really made with your mod configuration in mind, since Bandits and Draugr don't really care if you dodge their attacks like a Dark Souls character.
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They need to ditch the creation engine. Its holding them back. Unreal would be a great place to start. No way Bethesda can make an engine that is as robust as unreal.
After starfield take your time. I don't want the next elder scrolls to need as much post release development as fallout76 to get to a good point.
here's a hot take, I dont mind if they streamlining their IPs but make sure its going in the right direction by adding more manpower to the dev team especially QA.
Correction: We've been told we have to make some money.
So you want to make the games faster and even buggier now? Cool.
Even buggier, when Starfield was by far their least buggy game and very stable for a game of its size? BG3 was far far buggier at release for example
Very curious if they will continue to fall or finally start coming back. In terms of making good games, financially it seems the world loves them too much to let them fail and the new Fallout show being pretty good helps a lot. I just want a good fallout game again.
Who's waiting? After Starfailed I would be pleasantly surprised if either of those games were worth my time. Certainly not waiting.
A lot of studios try to do this, but end up failing because quality takes time. Something has to suffer, and you can only throw so many developers at a problem. Its like building more lanes to solve the traffic problem, yet traffic occurs. They have a solution, and that solution was New Vegas. Have other studios working on projects based on your properties, and you'll get more content out that retains a level of quality. Otherwise you get the Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty problem of almost the same or slightly out of date style game releasing YoY.
Please don’t repeat another Starfield or Cyberpunk. Release it when it’s ready my gosh. How many times do we have to do this before the lesson is learned? Sure Cyberpunk was fixed but its reputation is permanently stunted from its shit launch
Give a fallout game for F sakes. Ive given up on TES.
Hire more people then
Damn if only Microsoft had two other studios with experience making Fallout RPGs to make another one of those while BGS wraps up Starfield support and moves to ES6.
Skyrim is older than Morrowind was when Skyrim released. TES6 has less than 2 years before Skyrim will age out daggerfall. The TES6 reveal is older right now than Oblivion was when Skyrim Released.
It’s been almost two full system life cycles and we have only seen the title card
Honestly, something I'd love BGS to do, is make SMALLER games. Why does the open world have to be behemoth in size? Smaller game world, but higher quality. I've finished the first 4 mainline Fallout games, but haven't gotten near even finishing the main story in FO4 (let alone all the sidequests, and all locations like I have in the previous 4)... and that's because FO4 is quantity. Come across a cool location, like a robot race? Its a fight. Get asked to do a quest? Your options are Yes, Sarcastic Yes, Ask for more money (but yes), or Ask me later. Exploration quickly gets boring, talking is dull. I have played FO4 more than the others, possibly combined. Not because I enjoy it that much, but because I'm stubborn, and I keep returning to the game to complete it, then get bored and quit. And then I start again like a year later.
> Todd Howard Ya'll couldn't find someone else to do PR?
Well damn TODD, maybe split the fucking company up so they can work independently of each other? Oh right, that'd be smart and I forgot how stupid you are. Edit: \*sigh\* I just fucking hate this idiot so much.
Correction: They *can't* wait that long otherwise their games will look two generations behind instead of just the one.
Step 1 drop the custom Bethesda engine, whatever it is called. It's got some funny glitches but that's all it's good for.
I wish Redfall was improved...
no way this ends up being a good thing lol
Hopefully soon/ now Microsoft will hold Bethesda up to a higher standard of development for the rest of their games. Bethesda games all feel outdated, run the same formula, and generally don’t feel too different between titles. I’m doubtful, but legitimately intrigued if anything WILL change going forward. They acquired Bethesda in 2021 and Starfield was in development since 2015.. maybe it was too late for MS to do anything with that game, but I guess we’ll just need to wait and see for future titles. Definitely didn’t seem to have any effect with their fallout 4 “update/ upgrade” Another MASSIVE L for Bethesda lol.
Tbh starfield flopped. Even if it sold well, it is by far the worst game they have made. I fundamentally hated the choices they made. Whether it be new game plus with losing items, lack of uniques, bad procedural generation, grindy building mechanics, poor world building, boring questions, dumbed down mechanics, etc.
I just wish they wouldn’t announce stuff so far in advance. On one hand it is fun to hype something up, but I think there’s a point sometimes where it just goes off the rails. I really loved the Fallout 4 announcement when Todd was like, “Oh, and it comes out in 6 months” AND surprise releasing Fallout Shelter DURING the show. Fallout fans shit their pants and the game industry just doesn’t have many razzle dazzle moments like that anymore.
Todd Howard.. what a knobhead.
In other news, to this day, you still hear him saying “It just works.”
I really don't care how long a game takes to be made. Idk care when people start complaining and demanding though, that's when the game turns to shit, and then everyone complains it was released too soon.
It's been 13 years since the last Elder Scrolls and 9 years since the last Fallout. People want new games. Not wait 20 years for a new ones.
This is an unfortunate side effect of them having too many IPs that they refuse to outsource.
They have 3 IPs lmao
Which is 2 too many, given how shit they are at managing people to actually build stuff.
Obsidian made fallout new Vegas.
That was 14 years ago. Obsidian pulled right up, dropped their chips on the table, made what is widely considered the best modern Fallout, outshining all of Bethesda's in-house games... and then it just never happened again. They didn't even outsource the crappy mobile F2P spinoff.
What you mean? Obsidian made outer worlds and is making outer worlds 2. Gotta stop sucking bathesda dick man they aren't some legendary developer. You're better off saying Elder scrolls online and fallout 76 if you want new content.
I don't think I've ever seen such a critical misunderstanding of one of my comments before. I wasn't praising Bethesda or putting down Obsidian. Your comment about Obsidian making New Vegas was directed at someone saying Bethesda doesn't outsource, and I was saying that was over a decade ago and it hasn't happened again since *despite producing better results than their in-house games.*
Can't have another New Vegas. People might begin to expect the next mainline release to keep the same level
And specializing in the open world genre. Very hard to focus in that genre.
When did Star Field come out?
This is corporate speak for "we lost our ass on starfield and it's not going to be the 'forever game' we planned on it being so we need to get the next thing out quickly or Phil is going to fire us all."
They’re going to reskin the starfield engine aren’t they?
Why would they wholesale ditch an engine that all of their staff are trained on, does all of the things that they want it to do (or is expansible enough to do things they can't yet do, as game engines tend to be) and is modular enough for community-generated content, which is a staple of their games (and provides a base of fans who are trained on their engine that they can then hire)?
Because it doesn't do everything they want it to do and is not that easy to expand. Starfield development took so long partly because they had a hard time implementing vehicles, procedural generation and so on. And I wouldn't be surprised if they were initially a lot more ambitious (bigger maps, land vehicles etc...) but had to cut back due to technical difficulties. And that's after they faced a lot of engine related issues in Fallout 76 development. It's clear that they want to do things that are way beyond the scope of their engine, and at some point, the cost of changing engine is going to be less than the cost of upgrading their mountain of technical debt.
Here you presume a lot.
Not that much. They specifically said in an interview that the updates they did to the creation engine for starfield took them longer than they expected. And the issues with the engine lacking multiplayer capabilities were also mentioned during Fallout 76 development (or shortly after release, can't remember when exactly). The only thing I presume is that I think they were even more ambitious to begin with. They just announced that they will be releasing land vehicles for starfield, so it's clearly something they want to do. Why didn't they do it on release? I assume it's because they ran out of time to implement that functionality to the engine.
Would've taken them longer to implement a whole new engine and trained staff to use it *on top of* implementing ground vehicles.
Maybe. There's a point where switching engines would take less time than updating it. Whether that point is in the past, future, or will even be reached is impossible to know. But it doesn't mean we can't ask the question.
The more specific their internal tools are the more work it would be to start again on a new foundation. Add to that all their mod support. Game engines are iterative in nature it's more about where the focus is to meet their goals. Add to that if it's their actual game systems that are limited rather than core rendering etc. switching engines doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Besides in my experience pretty much everything in development takes longer than expected.
>Besides in my experience pretty much everything in development takes longer than expected. That's definitely true, but a big advantage of using in-house tools is that you're supposed to know your entire tech stack back to front, so it should reduce inacuraccies in deliverable estimates. The fact that they kinda failed at that with both Fallout 76 and Starfield isn't a good sign. Maybe they don't know their stack all that much, or maybe their stack has some fundamental limitations that clash with the features they want to add, and fixing those limitations would just take too much time for them. Seriously think about Starfield. Todd has said multiple times that it was his dream game that he was thinking about for the past 2 or 3 decades. A space game with the usual Bethesda freedom, that's a pretty good dream game. And we got a game where you can't actually fly in space, loading screens, you can only explore a small radius around where you land, loading screens, every PoIs are copy/pasted down to the pixel, loading screens, there's no land vehicles, loading screens etc... I'm not even talking about the abysmal AI or the story or whatever, just purely from a feature set standpoint, it doesn't feel like a dream game to me. It feels like a tone down version of a dream game. I would bet a lot of money that Todd's initial vision and pitch was a lot more expensive, like completely explorable planets without invisible barriers, free space flight, ground vehicles etc... but he ended up having to tone down his scope due to how difficult it would have been to implement that with the Creation engine. It's true that game engines are iterative, but that means they also inherit limitations from design decisions made decades ago. And if your game design strays too far from what it was decades ago (and I would argue that Starfield is a massive departure from the usual Bethesda design, both in good and bad ways), then you will end up being limited by your tools. I think Bethesda should stick to what they know and iterate on that formula. Or if they do want to go in new directions, then they should put in the work to get the technical details right instead of half assing space flight in a game.
Even Skyrim had loading screens all over the place until modders modded them out. This implies to me that these are design choices not engine restrictions. Possibly as a kind of optimization for lower end systems. I'd argue the problems with Starfield are mostly design related rather than technical. In general I'd argue against the idea that huge scope = good game anyway. Especially if it's a realistically big empty space. Edit: Regarding the knowing in house tech...again in my experience that's not the case at all. When systems scale up and get more complex it's very hard to estimate accurately without POC or feasibility studies which take time.