How Bethesda Quickly Fell From Grace In One Year

erek

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Fallout 76, one of the worst games i've ever played

"The past twelve months have been brutal for Bethesda on all fronts. Between monetization, botched launches, and betrayal of consumer trust, they threw away everything they gained throughout their decorated journey. It is a long road back on the proper path and hopefully 2020 is the start of that."

 
Fallout 76 was doomed from the get go, they should have known. They need to use it as a learning experience and move on. Anyways, I hope they don't shit the bed on TES6.
 
Sadly, it's what happens when enough bean-counters accumulate in an organization, like arterial cholesterol.

Don't spend the time / resources to design a good game. Don't spend the time to make it actually work. Don't include any art assets beyond the bare minimum - we can sell the rest!

It works for a while.
 
Don't spend the time / resources to design a good game. Don't spend the time to make it actually work. Don't include any art assets beyond the bare minimum - we can sell the rest!/QUOTE]

Fallout 76 didn't even have close to the bare minimum art assets[
 
I don't think Doom was worthy of all that praise in the first place. #changemymind
It was boring, and felt more like Quake than Doom.

Meh.

I thought Doom 2016 was better than I was expecting. I got a good nostalgia kick out of it.

There is no hiding the fact that the old school unrealistic run and gun / space marine / "deathmatch" type FPS games haven't aged well.

I have a lot of great memories of Quake and Doom from back in the 90's, but quite frankly, by the time Q3A came out this type of game bored me to tears. The only thing it has going for it today is a fun little nostalgia kick.
 
Meh.

I thought Doom 2016 was better than I was expecting. I got a good nostalgia kick out of it.

There is no hiding the fact that the old school unrealistic run and gun / space marine / "deathmatch" type FPS games haven't aged well.

I have a lot of great memories of Quake and Doom from back in the 90's, but quite frankly, by the time Q3A came out this type of game bored me to tears. The only thing it has going for it today is a fun little nostalgia kick.
 
They better make the new Skyrim absolutely amazing, that will make a big difference. Give the players lots of content not hidden behind DLC paywalls. Take a page from CDPR, look how that strategy worked for them.
 
Any bets on the new games being as moddable as the old ones? It's of course what made them sell a bazillion copies, but somewhere, there's someone saying "you're leaving money on the table!". That person should of course be destroyed, but they may be in charge.
 
I was.... was a massive fan of RTCW and Fallout. I stopped at FO4 and RTCW:NC. Until they fix their ways, it will remain that way.
 
what about Oblivion and Skyrim?

Oblivion was good, Skyrim sucked story wise, very cookie cutter and predictable. Having said this, I do have close to 1000 hours in the game, mostly because of modding it.
 
what about Oblivion and Skyrim?
ES games are even worse.

Oblivion was good, Skyrim sucked story wise, very cookie cutter and predictable. Having said this, I do have close to 1000 hours in the game, mostly because of modding it.
To me a game that requires user created mods to be playable is not a game worth playing.
 
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I was.... was a massive fan of RTCW and Fallout. I stopped at FO4 and RTCW:NC. Until they fix their ways, it will remain that way.

I know this is far from a universal opinion, but I had more fun with FO4 than I did with NV. In NV, about 50 hours in I was growing tired of being a desert errand boy and just rushed through the remaining story quest to get the slog over with. I put over 120 hours in FO4, and I was disappointed when the story quests ended, as I was still having fun.

My Wolfenstein history is a bit complex. I never played the early ones. My first introduction to the series was with Wolfenstein 3D. It was my first introduction to a FPS, and I remember thinking that FPS games were the future, but that this was a little clunky and not ready yet.

Then I lost track of the series completely (didn't even know any more titles came out) until 2001 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which I found to be a curious nostalgia trip in name only as I hadn't through about Wolfenstein since the early 90's. I have only hazy recollection of it, but I recall it being very well made, and almost a bit realistic for the time.

After that I lost track of the series, and didn't pick it back up again until last year, when I picked up "The New Order" on sale.

It was fun, in a kind of ridiculous and low brown overdone way, but it had an amusing story, so I kept with it. The Old Blood was less fun. Should have just been a cheap DLC expansion, not a full game of its own. The New Colossus was better, but not as good as The Old Blood. Still kind of over the top and cartoonishly ridiculous, but I guess that goes with the territory.

I was very recently playing Youngblood. They tried to call it an Open World title, but it was not well made. I have come full circle on it. When I first started it, my take was that it was better than the reviews suggested, but as time went on it just turned into a slog. It just came across as a linear shooter in which you play the same levels over and over, and has lame co-op game mechanics that are uninteresting. Why does everything have to have a multiplayer component these days? Made it to th efinal boss. Failed defeating him a few times, and then just didn't think it was worth the effort and retries just to get a final cutscene, so I called it a day and moved on.

I see that there is something else, called Cyberpilot, but from the description it sounds utterly uninteresting. I'm not even going to bother with it.
 
what about Oblivion and Skyrim?

I have never heard of Oblivion. I usually avoid the Fantasy genre like the plague, but I decided to try Skyrim for the same reason I decided to try the Witcher. People spoke positively of them, and they were on sale on Steam, so I figured I'd give them a try.

In both cases I probably should have done more reading before buying. I wound up requesting a refund for both. I have a very high resistance to anything in the fantasy genre, and I have absolutely zero tolerance for 3rd person gameplay.

First Person, or me no play.
 
It won't be too bad if es6 ends up being terrible, I'll have saved several hundred hours of my lifetime doing something productive.
 
I have never heard of Oblivion. I usually avoid the Fantasy genre like the plague, but I decided to try Skyrim for the same reason I decided to try the Witcher. People spoke positively of them, and they were on sale on Steam, so I figured I'd give them a try.

In both cases I probably should have done more reading before buying. I wound up requesting a refund for both. I have a very high resistance to anything in the fantasy genre, and I have absolutely zero tolerance for 3rd person gameplay.

First Person, or me no play.
What? I might not have played Oblivion or Skyrim for years, but my memory isn't that bad! They were first person games last I checked.
 
Honestly I never though highly of any of their games. One of the most over rated developers ever.

Agreed. For me, the news item here is that Bethesda was respected in the first place. I don't recall that ever being the case. What I remember is that they published a couple of games that people thought were fun, but all along the players thought of Bethesda as a shit company.

When will we see the same article posted about EA's "fall from grace?"
 
One thing that really bothers me is how Elder Scrolls gets watered down with each new release. They completely destroyed any sense of a significant/solid spell system with Skyrim. I still enjoyed the game, though, but it did have issues and I could feel them for sure when playing. Also really disliked the lack of enemy variety. Skyrim is Draugr-killer-simulator, really, lol. There's something special IMHO that Morrowind and Oblivion captured that they haven't been able to reproduce since then- these games were the single thing gave me a good impression from Bethesda. Skyrim barely feels like an "RPG", all of the gravity has been sucked out of the series.

I feel like they water things down to try to appeal to more people. At the end of the day that means we all get a pretty medicore product, though.

Liked FO3 quite a bit, FO4 was ... tolerable. NV was the best FO, IMO- and not even developed by Bethesda (of course lol)... and I'm still kicking myself for having purchased 76.
 
Agreed. For me, the news item here is that Bethesda was respected in the first place. I don't recall that ever being the case. What I remember is that they published a couple of games that people thought were fun, but all along the players thought of Bethesda as a shit company.

When will we see the same article posted about EA's "fall from grace?"
Bethesda is just known for producing a highly moddable game with a good baseline to start for all of those creators. I agree that they have never been an outstanding developer, but there are plenty of people out there who praise them and believe they can do no wrong. People just need to go back and actually play the base games and realize how barebones and buggy the games the put out were and are.
 
I was.... was a massive fan of RTCW and Fallout. I stopped at FO4 and RTCW:NC. Until they fix their ways, it will remain that way.

This is utterly confusing. What does RTCW have to do with Fallout or Bethesda? And what the fuck is RTCW:NC?
 
Bethesda is just known for producing a highly moddable game with a good baseline to start for all of those creators. I agree that they have never been an outstanding developer, but there are plenty of people out there who praise them and believe they can do no wrong. People just need to go back and actually play the base games and realize how barebones and buggy the games the put out were and are.

Pretty much. There's a definite veneer of quality that they don't deserve, due to how easy it is to mod their games. FO76 showed what a Beth game is really like, and it's not a pretty picture.
 
Bethesda was pretty much always a crappy developer, putting out b-grade bug-ridden games with terrible production quality and possibly the worst writing and quest design in the whole industry, while leading the industry in nickle-and-diming practices (from Horse Armor to paid mods) and conducting various greedy and lawsuit-happy escapades that were screwing over other developers in the background. It's just that the mainstream audience is finally tuning in to what Bethesda has been since at least around 2006.

Opening the Scrolls: Unpacking the Shady and Scandal-Plagued History of Bethesda / ZeniMax

The first Xbox console generation and the console generation after that brought in megaloads of millions of new video gamers who had never played anything before and so games like Oblivion and Fallout 3, which were actually terrible by existing standards at the time, seemed all new and amazing to those new and casual audiences. And because those games were open-world, the experience of just walking in a free environment, which was also kind of new (but not really) drew people in. But Oblivion and Fallout 3 were crap even when they released, being far less in all ways than Morrowind or Gothic 1 and 2, and other actual RPGs. Oblivion and Fallout 3 are Action-Adventure games, and not very good ones at that.

Beyond Morrowind, Bethesda never deserved the praise and fanboyism they received. They gained those things through ignorance and naivety of new and ultra-casual gamers and by a feckless sycophantic games media that only sought to inflate the hype to produce more article and video clicks for themselves.

Bethesda has long-been a disreputable company and developer and the corrections to perceptions of Besthesda that we've seen so far are not the full correction that's due.


Also, Bethesda has had one of the most obscenely favourable investment-to-return ratios in the games industry, and possibly the highest such ratio, from their Elder Scrolls and Fallout games. More than perhaps any other company in the industry, Bethesda has the means to polish their games more and to make them bug-free before launching them. They're that cheap and greedy that they don't - they rely on their customers to fix and improve their games, and then even try to have people pay for their customers' mods that fix their games.
 
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This is utterly confusing. What does RTCW have to do with Fallout or Bethesda? And what the fuck is RTCW:NC?
I guess this supports my use of the qualifier "most" in my earlier post. I think he's confusing the new Wolfenstein series with Return to Castle Wolfenstein as I assume "RTCW:NC" is referring to Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. But RTCW was developed by Grey Matter Interactive and published by Activision while the new series is developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda.
 
I guess this supports my use of the qualifier "most" in my earlier post. I think he's confusing the new Wolfenstein series with Return to Castle Wolfenstein as I assume "RTCW:NC" is referring to Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. But RTCW was developed by Grey Matter Interactive and published by Activision while the new series is developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda.

Well, you never addressed it in your reply. Someone had to step in.

I had to google RTCW:NC but it turned up nothing. I guess New Colossus must be it.
 
Fallout 76 was doomed from the get go, they should have known. They need to use it as a learning experience and move on. Anyways, I hope they don't shit the bed on TES6.

If you go back to the original announcements and pay attention to the Noclip documentary they say as much themselves
 
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