Why ever would you say that? All they do is release massive bugfests with no story or interesting characters, how could they possibly stagnate?
Is Bethesda stagnating?
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Please, no. Just no. Yes, Fallout 1 is serious but has twists of dark humor, but Fallout 2? God no. This is the game that has an entire city dedicated to the pastiche of Prohibition Era Gangsters in a City of Sin and all of New Reno is essentially one long protracted joke about that. It is the game where you could be shotgun wed to a worthless NPC, star in a porno, get a training montage while training with a Chinese Kung Fu master, could find a cybernetic dog called K9 (canine, get it?), found a colony of talking death claws, could run into a Drill Sergeant Nasty [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkKkHmFOfKE] that served no specific purpose but to riff Full Metal Jacket and where a bunch of special encounters were nothing but pop culture references (bridge of death, crashed shuttle, crashed whale etc.).WolfThomas said:
I still love Fallout 1 and 2, but let's not pretend that they were things they were not. Fallout 1 was deadpan for most of its' playing time, Fallout 2 took the humor up to 11 and had a tendency to insert it at any time it possibly could.
Those CoD sales have been dropping recently though. Just because something is making bank now doesn't mean it'll continue to do so.Zhukov said:
Oh really?Metalix Knightmare said:
According to my incredibly meticulous and thorough research (otherwise known as a google search):
Ghosts: 20m
Advanced Warfare: 24m
Black Ops 3: 32m (highest ever for the series)
Yeah, I'm sure Activision are really worried about those dropping sales numbers.
You're right I understated Fallout 2. It is quite silly a lot of time.Gethsemani said:
It's still internally consistent a lot the time. New Reno functions because it's on the trade routes between NCR and Redding. Each of the crime bosses is filling a niche (Alcohol, Jet, Enclave tech, Working with NCR). Heck they spent so long explaining the origins of Jet (only to be able to find pre-war jet in Bethesda games).
For New Reno, you have places like Klamath, Redding, Modoc etc. Those really aren't much of a barrel of laughs. I do remember the quest where you drop the midget down the Broken Hill well, that was pretty funny.
Edit: I guess I'm just a curmudgeon. But I really loved New Vegas too.
So did I. I also loved how Fallout 2 was not afraid to be zany, self-referential or riffing on pop culture, while maintaining a rather dark main quest. Bethesda's problem seems to be that they want to be in-between Fallout and Fallout 2 in terms of mood and the end result is this wildly inconsistent mood. Fallout 2 had plenty of weird stuff sprinkled in all over, but Fallout 3/4 plays some areas dead straight, while making others wacky and it really doesn't tie together.WolfThomas said:
They've been regressing for a while, and pretty much personify what is wrong with the industry nowadays.
The Elder Scrolls has been getting simpler and simpler with every iteration since Morrowind, Skyrim being downright an action game IMO.
They "actionized" Fallout with 3, did not take any of the improvements Obsidian did with New Vegas, and pushed Fallout 4 even further into non-RPG territory.
And that's not to talk of their business model, from Horse Armour DLC, to monetized mods, to disappointing season passes that don't even cover the whole of the DLC, they're completely exhausting the goodwill people had left for them.
Giving out the Skyrim remaster to people who own the original on Steam is nice though, but it's becoming more and more common of devs to do this when they release a remaster. Larian did it with Divinity OS (and I love them for it) and some other dev did it out of nowhere last week. (Though I sadly don't recall which and for which game)
The Elder Scrolls has been getting simpler and simpler with every iteration since Morrowind, Skyrim being downright an action game IMO.
They "actionized" Fallout with 3, did not take any of the improvements Obsidian did with New Vegas, and pushed Fallout 4 even further into non-RPG territory.
And that's not to talk of their business model, from Horse Armour DLC, to monetized mods, to disappointing season passes that don't even cover the whole of the DLC, they're completely exhausting the goodwill people had left for them.
Giving out the Skyrim remaster to people who own the original on Steam is nice though, but it's becoming more and more common of devs to do this when they release a remaster. Larian did it with Divinity OS (and I love them for it) and some other dev did it out of nowhere last week. (Though I sadly don't recall which and for which game)
It's not just Bethesda. Quite a few of the triple-A companies have found a formula that was highly successful in one game, and because of that and the huge budgets they blow on each game they decided to play it safe and stick with the same formula for games that came after it.
-Ubisoft with their 'radio towers' and tons of side-activity icons on the map. (AC games, FC games)
-Bethesda with their awesome looking, but rather shallow world. Small settlements around the map (can't even call them towns or cities) where you can get quests, and samey dungeons to crawl through. (fallout and TES games)
-Bioware with their focus on a big and epic but clich? story. The same kind of 'dialoge wheel'. (mass effect and dragon age games)
-Blizzard with their taking of already existing idea's, putting their own twist on it, and making it more polished. (hearthstone, starcraft 2, heroes of the storm, overwatch, even going as far back as wow.)
And the list goes on. Truly new idea's are becoming more and more rare it feels like. At least from the triple-A industry. Unless an indie dev shows an idea is successful enough, then they tend to quickly try to adopt the 'new trend' because that idea is now seen as 'safe enough'.
-Ubisoft with their 'radio towers' and tons of side-activity icons on the map. (AC games, FC games)
-Bethesda with their awesome looking, but rather shallow world. Small settlements around the map (can't even call them towns or cities) where you can get quests, and samey dungeons to crawl through. (fallout and TES games)
-Bioware with their focus on a big and epic but clich? story. The same kind of 'dialoge wheel'. (mass effect and dragon age games)
-Blizzard with their taking of already existing idea's, putting their own twist on it, and making it more polished. (hearthstone, starcraft 2, heroes of the storm, overwatch, even going as far back as wow.)
And the list goes on. Truly new idea's are becoming more and more rare it feels like. At least from the triple-A industry. Unless an indie dev shows an idea is successful enough, then they tend to quickly try to adopt the 'new trend' because that idea is now seen as 'safe enough'.
I know this seems incredibly nitpicky but I think it's actually a huge issue - they need way better animation state blending in the Creation engine.
Every Bethesda game has issues where you can obviously and visually see the NPC's AI states. They visually dictate:
"I am now walking along this path"
"Now I am stopping"
"Now I am stopped"
"Now I am doing something else"
The animation technique and the rough state machine changes are brutal and make things feel super janky.
To further compound the issue is NPC's cant do more than one thing at a time. Want to talk to someone? They have to go to their talk state and stop everything they're doing, rotate in place to face the character, and then begin their talk sequence. I do think in Skyrim the blacksmiths would remain seated at their stations if you talked to them at least.
I just really wish they could sort this one particular issue out as I feel it's been present in their games for a very long time.
Every Bethesda game has issues where you can obviously and visually see the NPC's AI states. They visually dictate:
"I am now walking along this path"
"Now I am stopping"
"Now I am stopped"
"Now I am doing something else"
The animation technique and the rough state machine changes are brutal and make things feel super janky.
To further compound the issue is NPC's cant do more than one thing at a time. Want to talk to someone? They have to go to their talk state and stop everything they're doing, rotate in place to face the character, and then begin their talk sequence. I do think in Skyrim the blacksmiths would remain seated at their stations if you talked to them at least.
I just really wish they could sort this one particular issue out as I feel it's been present in their games for a very long time.
I very much disagree with this. When in the last 20 years have Blizzard done anything but "existing idea's, putting their own twist on it, and making it more polished". Yes, before even WoW. When did they not do that? Because that's kind of their thing and they are very well known for it. In fact, I remember one review that came out when WoW did and it pretty much started with "Blizzard have done it again - taken an existing idea polished it and put their own spin on it, as they so often do". I'm paraphrasing, not quoting, yet that is very close to what the review said.sanquin said:
I don't know how OP can say that. They're putting out more content than they have before. Fallout 4 hasn't disappointed me yet, and as for Skyrim remastered my understanding is that it's free on PC for people who already own Skyrim. Why argue with free? Consoles have to pay for it because they're on consoles, they get overcharged for everything and they can't get mods for Skyrim there anyway.
You want to talk about disappointing things from Bethesda -- what about that stupid MMO they have? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Elder Scrolls Online still generally considered to not even be an Elder Scrolls game? The fact that OP doesn't even mention it says a lot. They've been wasting time and resources on that abomination for years now.
All of the "like Oblivion, but" games, Fallout 3, NV, 4 and Oblivion/Skyrim I find all to be very fun and interesting, even if they do run a bit bland at times and have noticeable seams. But I can't complain about a lack of content, because to-date I haven't finished a single one of these games. I've played all of them for hundreds of hours each and I haven't finished any of their main campaigns + DLCs. I just find the open world, various options, and roleplaying to be that engrossing. In fact, I'm going to be playing more Skyrim within the hour. To say I feel stagnation when playing these games isn't really true.
You want to talk about disappointing things from Bethesda -- what about that stupid MMO they have? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Elder Scrolls Online still generally considered to not even be an Elder Scrolls game? The fact that OP doesn't even mention it says a lot. They've been wasting time and resources on that abomination for years now.
All of the "like Oblivion, but" games, Fallout 3, NV, 4 and Oblivion/Skyrim I find all to be very fun and interesting, even if they do run a bit bland at times and have noticeable seams. But I can't complain about a lack of content, because to-date I haven't finished a single one of these games. I've played all of them for hundreds of hours each and I haven't finished any of their main campaigns + DLCs. I just find the open world, various options, and roleplaying to be that engrossing. In fact, I'm going to be playing more Skyrim within the hour. To say I feel stagnation when playing these games isn't really true.
Fallout 4 was the first Bethesda game I didn't play multiple characters and reach 100+ hours of play time.
It was a shallow, repetative mess of a game with zero roleplaying, a terrible story, dull quests and no incentives to actually DO anything. Unless you REALLY like the idea of pipe weapons or base building.
The most frustrating thing about all this is that the game has SO MUCH potential but it's all built around a shitty core that is leaking out and making all any good parts shitty as well.
It's fairly obvious that Bethesda doesn't actually CARE about Fallout though. TES has much more love put into it and it shows. But TES is their baby and I hope they actually pay attention to the critisims of Fallout 4 and avoid making the same mistakes with TES6.
On Skyrim: Remastered, don't care. Would have prefered Oblivion: Remastered.
It was a shallow, repetative mess of a game with zero roleplaying, a terrible story, dull quests and no incentives to actually DO anything. Unless you REALLY like the idea of pipe weapons or base building.
The most frustrating thing about all this is that the game has SO MUCH potential but it's all built around a shitty core that is leaking out and making all any good parts shitty as well.
It's fairly obvious that Bethesda doesn't actually CARE about Fallout though. TES has much more love put into it and it shows. But TES is their baby and I hope they actually pay attention to the critisims of Fallout 4 and avoid making the same mistakes with TES6.
On Skyrim: Remastered, don't care. Would have prefered Oblivion: Remastered.
So if someone shits on a plate and gives to to you for free you wouldn't complain?MHR said:
and the Creation Engine is based on the Gamebyro Engine and whatever way you slice it it really is starting to show it's age. Oblivion and Fallout 3 got played to death, modded and played through several times. Fallout Vegas got at least two play throughs Skyrim was lucky enough to get a single play through and a second attempt with mods but didn't hold my interest enough to get me to play the DLC even though I bought it cheap in a Steam Sale and Fallout 4 didn't even hold my interest long enough to get me to complete the first playthrough.
The games have been getting steadily less engaging, if you push the game you can see the cracks, both in terms of the gameplay and the strains the game puts on the game engine but part of it seems to be a lack of frankly tedious quests. Oblivion still stands out for having some awesome quests, the entire Theives Guild quest line is fantastic as is the Shivering Isles but Skyrim opted for one dimensional quests with boring rewards and tried to make a big thing about the procedural quests that meant you could never run out of quests to do, only problem being that they were go to location, find something bring it back, no story no reason to do it and that's a feature that continued in to Fallout 4, only instead of you getting them once you completed the storyline quests you were getting them from several NPCs from the second you met those NPCs.
The thing is both Oblivion and Fallout 3 if you looked hard enough you could see the cracks in the game engine and gameplay but fun environments, silly or interesting NPCs and pretty good storyline quests as well as some good side and interesting side line quests all helped to pull you in and paper over those cracks Skyrim and Fallout 4 were just boring, uninvolved story line quests, pretty boring locals, uninteresting NPCs and no real stand out side quests, all the interesting and fun stuff thrown out to make way for tedious repetitive procedural quests in Skyrim and Fallout 4 and boring crappy, utterly uninvolving and piss poor in it's own right settlement building in Fallout 4, seriously the game has like one major developer built city and maybe 2 or three smaller town settlements, everything else is expected to be built by the player and fuck me if that isn't a load of tedious bullshit.