I was so psyched when it was announced that somebody had picked up the fallout series. Then I got FO3 and 4, and then I swore never to buy another Bethesda release. And I then bought a backup disc of the originals, because I’ll be damned if my kids will grow up and think that their father wasted his late teens playing Bethesda’s FPS versions.
Me: no idea what Bethesda is
A city in Maryland
Now is your time, share some niche indie gems people likely don’t know about
This year it’s Colony Ship and Last Train Home. Kinda a dry year but still pretty good.
I’m not going to go into other years as most people already know about Stardew, the Owlcat Pathfinder games, the likes of Children of Morta/Hyperlight.
I’m also a huge fan of Dorfromantik, but that just dumb Civ style shit.
Seems like Bethesda and Ubisoft have kinda the same problem.
Once upon a time they innovated and released games that set a new level for the industry. Then they kinda boiled that down to a formula and just focused on making it bigger, missing the point of what made the games popular and what people liked them for.
They also managed to lose the fine details and parts that people liked in their quest to just make the games as big as possible.
People didn’t like Skyrim and the early AC games because they were perfect, they liked them because they were the best we had at the time and there was also a lot of care put into them.
FromSoft could’ve fallen down that rabbit hole as well, but they keep changing things up in their soulslike games.
Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, each of those games are “soulslike” but also have fundamental changes that make them a unique experience.
Ngl, I didn’t even like Skyrim, I feel exactly the way you described but, playing from III and IV, was disappointed by V and saw it as the end. It already seemed like the care and the good quests were gone in favor of “make big and pretty,” but tbh Cyrodiil is so much prettier with The Gold Coast and Bravil’s swamps even with the “worse” graphics (Skyrim’s graphics really weren’t even that big of an improvement to justify shitting up the game imo.) They all but nuked the brotherhood and thieves guild, never forgive.
Before they even started rerealeasing it I was already thinking “maybe I won’t get VI,” and now 15yr and 500 rereleases later I’ll probably stick with that.
AC OTOH I only played 1 and 2, then my 360 RROD and by the time I got an Xbox one I just never got back into it, but Skyrim I gave a really fair shot, coming off Oblivion I wanted to love it.
Once upon a time they innovated and released games that set a new level for the industry.
For real: Prince of Persia, Beyond Good & Evil, Far Cry, Rayman, XIII, the Tom Clancy games, Assassin’s Creed (before it became a yearly by the numbers franchise)… There was a time when they were putting out some “riskier” titles that never seemed to just follow trends.
Splinter Cell was absolutely mind-blowing when it first came out. I HAD TO have that game.
Particularly I loved watching the making-of videos because they put so much love into their craft! There was a cheesy “interview with Sam Fisher” (voiced by legendary Michael Ironside) where they described their decision to cast an older, more experienced character for believability rather than some young cool kid. Or using keyframed animation for everything because it allowed more artistic freedom than just mocapping it all.
Assassin’s Creed’s devs talked about how they designed the controls to feel intuitive, where they tried to map the face buttons implicitly to parts of the body.
People CARED about this stuff!!
I used to think Ubisoft was a mark of quality and one of my favorite games companies. But now…people would call me INSANE if I still held that opinion! How far they’ve fallen.
(I’m glad people seem to enjoy Rainbow Six Siege but I’m forever mad that it means we’ll likely never see another real R6 title again, and that its Fortnite-esque nature has all but pushed out collective knowledge of the previous titles.)
FromSoft could’ve fallen down that rabbit hole as well, but they keep changing things up in their soulslike games.
And then on top of that they were like “Hey you guys still like Armored Core, right?” and continued blowing everyone’s minds. :p Soulslikes might not always be my cup of tea but I’ve got a lot of respect for Fromsoft.
After the first few times that’s on you bud, I’m sorry… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
stop trying to use their faces as memes. it’s not going to happen
But they’re so fetch
More like fascist.
😂😂😂
They make pretty good memes honestly.
blocking to avoid innocuous trump spam
Don’t block, we need your downvotes
Shit post.
Oh yeah Bethesda’s actual valuable talents just straight up don’t exist anymore.
Basically it’s a lot cheaper to bring in underpaid, non-unionized contract workers with short contracts. So as far as I’m aware, Bethesda got rid of all their skilled programmers who were highly familiar with the coding and engines of Bethesda games, and brought in people who didn’t have any talent or familiarity, resulting in terrible outputs just because the actual people that make Bethesda’s games good were all fired for being good at making games (and thus being on ‘permanent hire’ wages instead of ‘shitty short contract’ wages).
But it gets worse. A lot worse.
See, Bethesda is pretty notorious in the industry for the low quality of their code documentation. Even in their prime they were notoriously bad at this. Code documentation is essential to allowing people to read and understand code, which is notoriously one of the hardest things in the job to do- code is a lot harder to read than to write. Bethesda keeps little to no documentation, which is why most of their games have so many glitches. But not having documentation is a particularly dastardly combo with frequently cycling your workers to keep their wages low. Because their unfamiliar, underpaid workers now don’t have any way to quickly learn how the code operates. And adding your own code to existing code in this way makes the problem a LOT worse, since now even if someone understands one part
Frequently cycling workers also makes it a lot harder for workers to communicate with each other. This is primarily useful to companies who want to prevent the formation of unions so they can underpay people, but it’s also something that REALLY shows when making games because people need to talk to each other and work together in order to make assets that all go well together. If people aren’t talking to each other… well, think of all the ways that tasks and goals can be interpreted. Two people assigned to different sections of the same task can produce fundamentally incompatible work.
I’m sure you can see how this could be all be an obstacle to making classic games with rich environments that are prized for their immersion, storytelling and fun gameplay decades later.
Do you have a source for any of these claims?
Bethesdud
