I’d link an article or video or something, but seriously you guys know how to use Google, there’s several videos on my front page of Youtube about this.
Bethesda is apparently playing the victim or bullied kid going “OH YOU KNOW WHAT’S GONNA HAPPEN, PLAYERS ARE GONNA HATE ES6!”
And going on to start blaming the players before they even release the game, saying stuff like “it’s nearly impossible to please players” and “we can’t possibly release something as good as Skyrim again” while pointing out to how lukewarm Starfield is, and I’m just face-palming and thinking:
Bethesda.
Just shut up and listen for a second. Stop acting like a little kid talking himself into failure. Take a step back, look at Skyrim, and look at Starfield. Look at the biggest complaints against Starfield:
1). It runs like crap on most peoples’ computers.
2). The planets are full of nothing except for a few POIs.
3). The space mechanics are very under-developed.
An Elder Scrolls game wouldn’t even have to worry about #2 or #3 because it’s not a space game, and #1 … I know this is going to sound controversial, but here’s a secret:
You don’t have to push balls-to-the-wall and try to jack the graphics up to the utter maximums.
Tone it down a bit. Don’t max out everbody’s computers. Go to Steam Survey, and pick a PC Rig that is in the top 25%. Make sure that rig can run ES6 at 1440p 60FPS on High. That way, probably at least 75% of everybody who took the Steam Survey could run the game at playable FPS on lower settings and you wouldn’t be excluding half the playerbase because of ridiculously bloated graphics.
Next, onto the gameplay, just… well, do what you did with Skyrim. Do we really need to do a whole lot differently? It’s an Elder Scrolls game. You start out dumped into the game world after some form of imprisonment, you go through dungeons, you loot, you find weapons, you cast spells, and all of that adventuring business.
Maybe try to bleed some RPG elements back into the game (don’t go overboard) and keep things reasonable. Put more of the development time into more Game World Area, have more stuff in this game world, more quests, more items to find, more gear to use, more spells to cast, more voice acting, more towns, that kind of thing.
It’s Elder Scrolls. The game already has a good solid formula that works, and players are itching for more. This shouldn’t be hard. You guys are seriously over-thinking the whole thing, thinking you absolutely must change everything up in it. Don’t change what ain’t broke. Compare Oblivion to Skyrim and and see what worked in the transition and what didn’t work so well, what players liked and what they didn’t like so well and incorporate that into the transition into ES6.
Don’t make a greedy cash shop store, I know you guys love those but we don’t. We want the game straight up. Big Paid DLCs are fine, even Hearthfire (or whatever that homebuilding DLC for Skyrim was) was fine, but the skins and junk gets a little over-the-top.
Stop it with this paid mod nonsense, nobody wants to buy mods. We get our mods for free from other sources. Modmakers want paid mods, but players don’t want anything at all to do with that nonsense, so modmakers wanna put their stuff on CC and so there’s fewer mods to be had on free sites and it just creates a schism in the playerbase which doesn’t really help anybody.
So in closing… just do Skyrim with a few touchups, new game world, etc, don’t try to make it super duper grafix that needs a $3000 rig to run, and make it playable on launch and you basically have a print money button. Oh, and… make sure the thing is 100% clean of SBI. You don’t want to give players any ammo whatsoever, and SBI ruins everything they touch.