I'm not really keen on the idea of a mainly underground open-world setting for a TES game. Which sounds like a contradiction to my mind. I like broad vistas with the occasional confinements of a claustrophobic environment. It's this mixture in the TES games which I find attractive. My favourite places are full of colourful shrubs, trees and grass. I find such landscapes more interesting to explore.

I have played some good dungeon crawls but they aren't my preference.

The already existing elder scrolls 6 thread didnt catch your fancy?

Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 21, 2018 2:13 pm

The already existing elder scrolls 6 thread didnt catch your fancy?

Nope.

Ah, lemme merge this real quick.

So we are looking at late 2024 / early 2025 release for Elder Scrolls 6 now.

Mostly speculation of course, but an educated speculation.

This is insane.

Granted, I don't want to see fast tracked, quick released garbage every 2-3 years like some game studios do, but 13 years between the most popular open world RPG series release is down right crazy.

and no... I don't count Elder Scrolls Online.

It's also crazy to think that Elder Scrolls 6 will be the last one I ever play, by the time ES7 is released dead or so old I won't be able to play.

Again, insane.

I just played Morrowind again, Sera. It's still the best

Zanteogo wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 01, 2021 1:24 pm

So we are looking at late 2024 / early 2025 release for Elder Scrolls 6 now.

So it's looking like 2026 now.

Crazy.

Zanteogo wrote: ↑

Tue Jul 18, 2023 6:53 pm

Zanteogo wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 01, 2021 1:24 pm

So we are looking at late 2024 / early 2025 release for Elder Scrolls 6 now.

So it's looking like 2026 now.

Crazy.

What's strange to me about the ever-increasing time required for Bethesda games is that, while they certainly have a lot of game-spanning interacting systems, as open-world games they tend to emphasize breadth -- they are vast fields of content.

If that's so, then it seems like time-to-create could be reduced somewhat by simply throwing more creative bodies at content creation. That doesn't work for complex, "tight" products (see Fred Brooks's "Mythical Man-Month"); adding more people to a team doesn't reduce the time needed to complete projects of that kind.

But for a big open-world game, where 10,000 small pieces of content can be added without affecting each other, why not bring in qualified contractors to build those things, freeing up the Bethesda creatives to build the medium, large, and main-game content?

Of course there are obvious costs to this: you have to pay contractors; their work needs to be good quality and not lore-breaking; their work needs to be supervised; and they all need to respect the NDAs they presumably have to sign. But none of those seem insuperable. In fact, I'll bet at this point Bethesda has a very good idea exactly how much "content" needs to be built given the breadth and depth of one of these games -- so why not bring in enough outside creators to pull the ship date to the left?

I guess when every game you build rakes in billions of dollars, you're not so worried that every game takes longer to make. Maybe Microsoft will feel differently about that than Zenimax did, maybe not.

But as one of the creatives building these games over a decade, wouldn't it be more satisfying to be able to work on more than 2-3 games in your entire career?

Flatfingers wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 11, 2023 1:39 pm

I guess when every game you build rakes in billions of dollars, you're not so worried that every game takes longer to make. Maybe Microsoft will feel differently about that than Zenimax did, maybe not.

But as one of the creatives building these games over a decade, wouldn't it be more satisfying to be able to work on more than 2-3 games in your entire career?

It shouldn't take this long. I assume it's due to poor management, or working on old outdated engines that slow things to a crawl.

Starfield is a taste of what is to come unless they change. It took forever to make, and released with out dated graphics, and way more loading screens than a modern game should have.

Zanteogo wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 24, 2023 6:56 pm

Starfield is a taste of what is to come unless they change. It took forever to make, and released with out dated graphics, and way more loading screens than a modern game should have.

Starfield gives me the _very_ distinct impression of being a re-skin of Fallout 4 with some additional procgen effort for planetary surfaces. There doesn't seem to be as much innovation in Starfield's underlying engine as there was in Morrowind (PC) and Oblivion (consoles) allowing the player to see great distances and then stream in the details as the player's character gets within a certain distance.

(It certainly doesn't help that the video just released for Squadron 42 showing our old friend, seamless space-to-planet transitions, really hammers home the lack of progress in Bethesda's engine.)

If that's a fair/accurate representation, then what the heck have Bethesda been working on over all these years for Starfield? Character animations? Cloth simulation? Story? Arguing about whether character appearances should match voice actor deliveries or character backstories (or not)?

It certainly wasn't proofreading. I've never seen a Bethesda game whose dialogue text has this many grammatical errors in it.

I should probably admit that Steam says I've played Starfield for 389.2 hours. So it's probably fair to say I've been enjoying it a lot more than hating on it. (I'm about to finish; I really need to get back to adding more poorly-written code to Limit Theory Redux.)

But also fair to say Starfield makes me wonder what TES VI is going to look like technically....

Flatfingers wrote: ↑

Fri Oct 27, 2023 12:30 am

If that's a fair/accurate representation, then what the heck have Bethesda been working on over all these years for Starfield? Character animations? Cloth simulation? Story? Arguing about whether character appearances should match voice actor deliveries or character backstories (or not)?

From watching interviews with employees and the general "vibe" of modern Bethesda, I imagine they had more meetings and discussions rather than actual work.

The inventory management was improved ten fold by a free user mod, released in the same week as the game. This tells you a ton about the company now.

I originally felt that Starfield suffered from being too much like the previous Bethesda games, now that the honeymoon period has well worn off, I think the problem is they took on all the negative traits of their previous games, and left all the positive ones behind.

Loading screens for single room buildings and events and quests not having an impact on each other is a prime example.

I can only imagine what kind of mess Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be. It will be the same outdated engine with all the flaws like needing a loading screen to enter a tent.

Thankfully due to the increase dev time for each game, most of us will have died before ever having to see the disappointing monstrosity.