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Zkuq on 25 October 2023
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JEMC said:

My take of the whole story is that Bethesda will run into problems sooner or later. The first one is that, as the article explains, that "Average Joe" point of view that only Todd Howard appears to have works in sales but limits innovation, and the second one is that Howard has already said that he may only stay for one more game, and Bethesda will have to change its design philosophy when that happens... and few studios manage to do that transition without problems, much less studios as big as Bethesda.

Absolutely. Game by game, Bethesda's formula is starting to show its age more and more. I'm surprised people are still putting up with some of the dated things in Bethesda's games.

Chazore said:
Zkuq said:

No wonder Starfield feels like such a relatively risk-free game, despite being a new IP. Anyway, I liked this part myself:

Kirkbride wanted to fill Morrowind with strange monsters, but knew anything too out-there would scare off his boss. So what he did was draw two versions of every monster: "the one that was weird… and then one that was fucking crazy," he'd show Howard the second one, get rejected, and then come back with the first, which would invariably be accepted into the game simply because it seemed so much more normal by comparison.

Also explains why the Magicka systems were slowly getting fucked over the iterations of ES, because Todd himself is an admitted fan of Barbarian class/style of combat, none of which involves magicka, so his input on that system was basically useless. 

I hated how we've gone from hand crafting and mixing spells and having tons of said spells to use in ES, to what we had in Skyrim, which was far, far less (also without one specific mod for Skyrim, Ai can still auto dodge spell projectiles, which is utter tripe for AI to do). 

My TES experience starts with Oblivion (I own Morrowind, but my backlog is keeping me away from it, just like countless other supposedly great games), but I can definitely see the trend, even with my somewhat limited experience with Bethesda's games (I've pretty much skipped Fallout). I'm not a fan of the trend, even though I do consider Skyrim a fun game to play too.