Far different games though. Completely different genres and I don’t find dwarf fortress as immersive as even nethack due to it being more of a god game. It really pulls me far out of the experience when you don’t control a single character. I still find it fun but more in a strategy system way rather than an RPG.
For me Dwarf fortress is like watching TV, nethack is like reading a book.
I feel like I’ll watching some bizarre sitcom with such great stories as “dwarven child sees an elephant trample a goblin and then gets possessed, keeps making bone carvings of the scene, and then gathers all the elephant meat in a forge and kills three grown men by slapping them with meat.” I’m not anyone in that story, but it’s fun to watch.
Nethack is like getting to know the quirks of your character as they narrowly escape death.
Have you only played the Steam version? The non-steam build has Adventure mode, where you control just a single character in a turn-based roguelike. IDK why it wasn’t included with the Steam release, but it’s always been my favorite part of the game.
I think it would be very funny if the game came out and was good. Like Bg3 level good. Just the irony of everybody going “not Todd doing his bullshit again” and it turns out to be a perfect game or something.
And for the record I’m not a huge Bethesda fan.
Edit: I’m astonished I even have to say this, but this is just a stupid joke comment. I’m not trying to make comparisons between baldurs gate 3 and a game that hasn’t even come out yet. Don’t dig that deep.
I’m not into fantasy at all, but it’s would be so funny seeing people cope about the game being good. But let’s be real, if it’s still on creation engine, it won’t be.
I agree the name means nothing. Which is why when people go gaga over Creation, I have to remind them it’s still GameBryo, but with more graphical features tacked on to it. The foundation of shit that is GameBryo is still at the heart of the tech driving their games. If Bethesda’s games were buildings, they all build them on a foundation of sand.
I also agree it’s not the reason why their games suck (their games in and of themselves tend to not suck), but it will be the reason why it performs like shit or has the same technical issues that have existed since they started using GameBryo. Unless even after all the time they’ve spent using the engine they still suck at using it, and that’s the reason they have so many problems.
The only other company and series of games I see having the same stuff holding back making better products because of the engine used is Bohemia with ARMA. They have just kept piling stuff on top of Virtual Battle System and all the problems stemming from VBS are present in the current iteration of the engine. Even the devs themselves hate it, but it would be way more work to make an entirely new engine.
They are on creation engine 2 with starfield and honestly, we’ll see how much of an improvement it is. I was saying back in fo4 that if they don’t upgrade the engine it would be a flop but it apparently was one of the best selling games at the time.
BG3 is a gem in this current age, but if you look at it as an open world game and specifically look at that only, then it’s not even good. (honestly even compared to BG1, the open world aspect is very limited)
The worst part is that it wouldn’t be that hard to “up” the level of Bethesda games. More focus on the writing, both story and characters would go a long way.
Dropping the whole “It’s one big world, no transitions.” goal. Make cities huge, with transitions and fill them with stuff and people. More “inhabited biomes” so to speak.
Choice & Consequence. Having different paths the players can go down. Locking players out of certain content and areas because of their choice, isn’t a bad thing. It just encourages multiple playthroughs. As well as adding multiple ways to dealing with a problem.
Not forcing motivation or character upon the player. The “chasing after a loved one” motivation in Fallout is terrible. And being a ‘shiny superman’ in both TES and Fallout is boring. We need more grey-area to move around in.
There’s clearly more that could be added to the list. But these four points alone would elevate their games to a more passable grade.
Almost certainly still stuck with their fork of gamebryo. On the bright side, the footage I’ve seen of Starfield suggests that they’ve actually gotten around to implementing a better animation system.
I’m not sure on the specifics of how animations work at the engine level (I know there’s stuff about animation rigs, but not much beyond that) but all their games up until now have had the same system of character animations and it consistently looked ancient. Straight from the late 90s levels.
Oh man, I remember in Oblivion how bad the third person view looked. Characters were stiff and stood perfectly upright while their limbs flailed around in nonsensical ways. I was amazed at how bad it was for a game of that gen.
Then Fallout 3 was a little better but still pretty shit. And Skyrim massively improved it, but it still wasnt up to par with games that actually put some effort into the animation systems (like GTA4).
Also ES has some of the best, deep, insane lore. The series is at its worst when it tries to be grounded.
Even Skyrim ends with you going to the afterlife to gather aid from the dead and fight the embodiment of the cyclical nature of time by imposing the concept of mortality on it. And somehow that was a bog standard dragon fight.
Even Skyrim wasn’t bad. I put like a thousand hours into it. It’s just not exactly what I’d call “ultimate”.
Oblivion was good. It’s dated at this point and like Morrowind combat is not comparable to say Elden Ring. Oblivion solves the whole open world (as in OpenCities) thing in mods, but Morrowind has it to start with. Which is why I think Morrowind is the closest the series has been to my ideal.
Rather than saying it’s better than say Oblivion, I’m saying it’s closest (among the ES games) to being what I’d want out of an “ultimate” ES game. Oblivion has mods that fix its bixest shortcoming (OpenCities and various magic mods) but I’m not inclined to give Bethesda credit for the work of modders.
Morrowind was the first of the ES series where they drastically reduced the area but invested more in the content in that area. It had a unique art style and location. It kept most of the complexity of the prior games in the series, while subsequent games heavily simplified things to cater to console gamers. There are a lot of babies that were thrown out with the bathwater after Morrowind. Of course the later games also added a lot of improvements, but I think for its time, Morrowind was a very good game. It depends on preferences, but I would consider it the best game of the ES series relative to when it was launched.
Fair enough. I loved it. Had never played a game like that. I was definitely under the impression that these were mostly PC games. I had a lot of fun with Morrowind and played oblivion a bit too. I didn’t see a ton of difference in them. Then Skyrim for me was absolutely incredible. Besides the bugs (which I barely ever saw myself) I didn’t see a single reason people talked so much smack about that game.
They the. Said nothing for half a decade. Now starfield is coming out and is shipped from their perspective so he’s on to his next sale. Simple as that. See you in another 5+ years
This article is almost entirely non-news. ES6 is a long ways off, was likely announced prematurely, and they have nothing new to say.
The only nugget in the article that seemed relevant to me was that in the engine work for Starfield, Bethesda was mindful of including future engine requirements from ES6.
The rest was just what you’d expect the ES6 project lead to say: “We want it to be amazing, of course!”
It was only announced because people were foaming at the mouth for any info at all, so they said “Yes, it is coming.” and people got bent out of shape that it isn’t already out even though they never hinted that it was soon.
i genuinely cannot imagine that it’ll be anything other than a continuation of the bethesda model: simplify and just add more environments to keep the players inside the basic gameplay loop of “go here, do thing, return, reward, go here, do thing”
76 has actually made me pretty hopeful for the direction of bethesdas games- it includes a return to older style dialogue, introduced more skill checks and the like, featured a more cohesive world and generally seemed like it went back on the simplification a fair bit
starfield similarly seems to be more of a return to form for them, focusing more on character builds, an expansive trait system etc
it is also being worked on heavily by the lead quest designer for far harbor iirc, which is absolutely a good sign and is setting my hopes high for a deeper, more complex and more forked main questline than Bethesda usually goes for
Skyrim but no skill tree, too complicated. Player can buy every weapon and spells and skills level are just damage boost. Bethesda adds a 3rd person view during conversation and a weird standard male voice so that any chance of roleplay is dead. All cool spells are removed and players can only use destructions spells. No more illusion or alteration funny spells. Only fireballs and bolts exist now. All guilds quests have been removed in favour of radiant quests. Everything is randomly generated and sold as replayability and “every playthrough is unique”. Main quest is 3 quests long because people didn’t finish skyrim main quest. Everything is level scaled. They learned from skyrim and oblivion mistake so now every enemy is scaled but 10lvl below you so you never struggle against anything (no more oblivion sponges!). Every location can be fast traveled to from the beginning of the game because the world is too big. Spears have been added to the game but it’s an official creation club mod only. The stamina bar has been removed for “faster paced” combats.
Bethesda, everything doesn’t need to have the biggest map ever, it just needs to have good writing and replayability.
Like New Vegas has a map 3 times smaller than fallout 4 & 76 and I’m still enjoying it almost 15 years later. (I’m not knocking those other games, I’m just saying map and game hugeness isn’t what matters.)
You don’t need the biggest map ever to make a good game. You do, however, need the biggest map ever to make a good Elder Scrolls game. People referring to BG3 don’t really understand the essence of the Elder Scrolls, a vision the series has pursued all the way back to Arena.
…well when you put it that way you are right. Elder scrolls games are known for having enormous expansive maps, criticizing that is like criticizing mario for having too many coins or something haha
You don’t need the biggest map ever to make a good game. You do, however, need the biggest map ever to make a good Elder Scrolls game.
No you don’t. The evolution of the Elder Scrolls series proves that, as the map size has been massively reduced. The Skyrim map is extremely tiny compared to Daggerfall.
I think if we are strict on the definition, BG3 is definitely the better roleplaying game. The Bethesda games are better at the go here and do anything,but their world connections has always been far more gamey that what Larian is doing. I think if Bethesda really wants to make ES6 the undisputed best again, I think they need the NPCs improved to at least Oblivion standards, better town to town(power Dynamics), better so that remembers what you have done contextually, and then probably 2 or 3 very well fleshed out companions, and a really good story which I think they have set up already. Their gameplay is undisputed imo, but their reason to care about the world can sometimes be a mile wide but an inch deep.
Only in the context of the specific set-pieces provided within the game though. You have no way to work outside of the very specific rails that BG3 provides for interacting within the game.
If Skyrim is a mile-wide but an inch deep, then BG3 is an inch wide but a mile deep.
I think that’s part why BG3 has taken off so much, honestly. We’ve had so many open world games with ridiculously large maps that a lot of people are disillusioned with the lack of depth.
BG3 with its narrower scope makes for a much deeper experience. I would love a game that can do both depth and breadth, but these games already are a massive undertaking.
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