Bioware vs. Bethesda! Place your votes!

[Mise]

Slimebeast said:

Instead many people perceive Bethesda as they would be somehow weaker at game craftmanship just because their games don't have as focused storytelling. But it's a misunderstanding of what they wanna do. Also, if you make open world games it's impossible to make them as 'tight' and bug-free as linear games (something that Bethesda gets so much unfair criticism for).

One of my bigger issues with Bethesda's games is a very common pitfall that most open-world games fall into - outside the primary quest and some of the bigger side quests, nothing you do either is (or feels like) worth doing.

For example, in Oblivion, you can be the champion of Cyrodiil, the Arch-mage of the mages guild, leader of the Dark Brotherhood and the master of the Fighter's guild - at the same time, no less - and outside of a certain statue and some random comments, nobody either notices or gives a damn. Hell, you can be the god of madness on top of those, and all you get is a summoning spell.

And while games like Shadows of Amn don't have an open world and are more restrictive in terms of exploration, I consider most of their (side)quests better simply because it feels like you're doing something that actually matters beyond loot and EXP - even though it might be the same thing you've done on five other playthrus.

Honestly, having hundreds of sidequests is irrelevant to me, if none of them are actually interesting and/or somehow significant outside magical phallic objects and grinding.

Quantity doesn't really have a quality of it's own in RPGs, methinks.