I have great respect for anyone who puts this much thought into their post.
*puts his long-ass reply glasses on*
Spectrum_Prez said:
Oh wow. I've never played either a God of War game nor finished a Zelda game, but I would buy either of your mash-ups in a heartbeat.
Pfft. You know, I imagine a
lot of people would, if only out of curiosity, but my point was more that 90% of them would be extremely irked if they were sold as main entries into the franchises rather than spinoffs.
Spectrum_Prez said:
1) Quality Control aka Bug testing. ...but it has to be done if Bethesda wants to lure in more casual gamers.
You
think they have a ton of scripts running all the time, but consider how much of each game is just open wilderness with monsters walking around in it and re-think that. For the player, stumbling on every bug in the game is very hard to do because you don't know where everything is. Bethesda, though, as game developers, has every single location on the map meticulously catalogued and documented, and making a checklist and sending testers through each one isn't all
that hard for them to do. Maybe a bit expensive, but that's the only excuse they really have--unless they just never made a design document, which would make them unprofessional and lazy, and which I'm pretty certain they did. Fact is that almost no company responds well to the testers' criticisms and bug reports because at that point everybody's under a ton of stress and the final deadlines are mounting fast, so things end up feeling a little bit rushed at that point...
Spectrum_Prez said:
Animation's not as big an issue as you'd think. The fact is that animation is animation one way or another, all the characters in the game are animating
all the time--even in idle cycles--and good keyframe-based animation is just as process-intensive as
bad keyframe-based animation. While there
is something to be said for more complicated animation systems like in the Uncharted series, where it's always blending different things and referencing IKs to put peoples' feet on the right planes of elevation and all that, they don't need to go
that far to put together more attractive motions. Technical limitations aren't really the issue as I see it. The real problem is that they honestly don't give a crap what their games look like, as evidenced by the huge disconnect between Morrowind and Oblivion, wherein they jumped from a really surreal fantasy look with lots of organic structures and alien-looking lifeforms to about as vanilla and generic a medieval fantasy setting as you can possibly come up with.
The reason for this is that Bethesda has next to nothing to do with the artwork in their games. Virtually all of it is outsourced to a studio called Massive Black, and Bethesda itself is mainly responsible for programming and implementing the game--and their implementation is extremely clumsy, if you know what to look for. If you compare the combat of, say, Devil May Cry 3, God of War, or even Kingdom Hearts to the combat of the Elder Scrolls games and Fallout 3, the key difference is that GoW, DMC, and KH give you a choice between moving
or attacking--you don't do both at the same time except in the instance of very specific attacks that're meant to close gaps, and they're usually very explicitly animated for the purpose of encompassing very specific areas of effect. From a design standpoint this introduces a choice that challenges the player to put more thought into what they're doing. From an artistic standpoint the characters just perform more realistically; in real life, if you've taken
basic martial arts classes, you know that you never make a melee strike while trying to run or walk--you always need to plant both feet on the ground in order to get stable footing and put your weight into an attack. Even Phantasy Star Online got
that right. In Bethesda games, though, you run around and swing your weapon like a madman without any trouble or any sense that you're planting your feet. The actual implementation of this sort of thing isn't all that hard, it's just that most game developers, for first-person games in particular, tend to overlook this sort of thing a lot. For the Elder Scrolls games in particular I'm not sure how much they even think about the collision on their weapons; a lot of the actual gameplay comes down to simple mathematical interactions, like in Diablo, and the 3D world is more just a formality to put a presentable face on it. You'd think Massive Black, who has some of the industry's best artists, would do better with the animations than they do in these games, but they also have to work with the technical specs that Bethesda's programmers and designers give to them--which reflect their limited understanding of how most forms of movement and combat behave.
Spectrum_Prez said:
3) Storyline (for both flagship series) and art direction/world design (for TES especially).
Again, Bethesda had next to nothing to do with art direction. Mostly they come up with a list of modular pieces and throw them to Massive Black to put together instead of contracting their own artists. I think they use some of their own guys for a
couple of things, and certainly they had to get a bit more organic about it when they made Fallout and had a bajillion pieces of junk to make, but they're just not involved. Being mainly programmers who fancy themselves as game designers I don't think they're all that interested in writing, either, and in order to retain some of the quality of interactions from Morrowind they'd need to revamp their pipeline a bit. As it stands I imagine that they just assign different level designers to different landmarks on the map, so while each area is fleshed out in fair detail they hardly pay any attention to the interactions between them but in a few very specific instances. In their case they have a rare opportunity to assemble the world and then figure out all the major interactions of it
after the fact, having designers explore it and go, "you know what would be an interesting quest here?" and then going back to implement it. They could make the setting, then worry about telling the stories with it later. A hundred to one odds says they'll never think of that, though.
Spectrum_Prez said:
I'll agree that Oblivion stepped it up quite a bit, mainly for the fact that you can guard manually and they ditched the fatigue system. It felt a lot more real and in-your-face, but it still suffers from all the problems I talked about above. Combos and attacks aren't really thought-out, you just spam the attack button until things die. As for the aiming system in Fallout, well, I gotta agree with Yahtzee when he says that shooting and RPG elements don't mix too well. Nobody wants to start the game with bad, shakey aim and work their way to more responsive controls. I'll say that I actually enjoyed using VATS a lot, and they should've found a way to bring it to the forefront of things without slowing down the game so much.
Also: PLAY ZENO CLASH. It really has one of the best first-person combat systems around.
Spectrum_Prez said:
5) Voice acting and NPCs in general. Bethesda makes some really memorable NPCs but tends to mix them in with a lot of very boring generic NPCs. This is somewhat unavoidable in a game with thousands of people, but I'm sure there are some hungry unemployed English-major graduates out there on the job market that could churn out a few more tomes of day-to-day dialogue in a hurry, plus some waiters in Hollywood they could throw in to liven up the stale batch of voiceactors they have been using.
"What are you shooting at?"
"Anything I want, my dear! Anything I want!"
Yeah, I gotta agree with you on this one. For every really clever line of dialogue and every really inventive character there's a hundred boring ones that feel like they'd somehow be better served with 100% text instead of voiceovers. Not much else to say other than, yeah, they oughta' set aside a little more of the budget to pick up any of the hundreds of starving voice actors out there to do a little work as extras.
In general those are all just examples of how Bethesda pays little attention to a lot of things past the superficial surface elements of their games. Like too many RPG developers these days they really just go down a checklist of common elements that conform to their general style and mark things off as they go rather than putting thought into what to do in order to make them satisfying and engaging. They've grown complacent and don't ask themselves
why there's a melee combat system, what purpose it serves, they just know their game has to have one because all their past games have one--and that applies to virtually all the other elements of their games. It's the same problem I see with Bioware's games, which are also getting increasingly more shallow, but to their credit they at least have been polishing the hell out of their presentation and pushing forward on
that field, where Bethesda's kind of a one-trick pony.
