Any gamers around here?

[Hydra009]

Bethesda is dead to me unless they put in some major work to shift back to the RP in RPGs. For years now, they've been making Gs. On a technical level, Fallout 4 is an excellent game. And Fallout 76 looks nice in screenshots, I suppose. However, they are not excellent RPGs. Choice and reputation had better come back in a big way in their next title or I'm gone.

[Blackleaf]

Bethesda is dead to me unless they put in some major work to shift back to the RP in RPGs. For years now, they've been making Gs. On a technical level, Fallout 4 is an excellent game. And Fallout 76 looks nice in screenshots, I suppose. However, they are not excellent RPGs. Choice and reputation had better come back in a big way in their next title or I'm gone.

I'm (cautiously) hopeful that the reason for TES VI's setting is as a signal that it will be an attempt to return to basics, returning to what made TES II: Daggerfall special. That game is practically the opposite of Skyrim in every way, although not always in a good way. Skyrim is fun in terms of its mechanics and graphics, but pretty weak in terms of roleplay. Daggerfall had a skill for everything. Quests had time limits. You could catch the plague and get softlocked in a dungeon. The overworld was realistically huge, to the point that no one was actually expected to manually move from A to B, but to use fast travel. You had to pay taxes, and gold had weight. So, if you didn't want to be weighed down by it constantly, you had to drop it off at a bank. In-game books were comparatively huge compared to later games. Like, where did they find the time to write all that? You could buy a boat and sail across the bay. It's extremely immersive, but maybe a tad too much.

Morrowind was an awesome middle ground between the two. The landmass wasn't realistically huge, but it was handcrafted and felt realistic. You could use fast travel, but you could realistically travel between A and B. There were no quest markers telling you exactly where to go, but characters would give you directions, and you'd have to follow them carefully to avoid getting lost. Choices had consequences, and you could even kill important quest NPCs. The game would warn you that you'd be essentially locking yourself out of content unless you reloaded, but you could do it. In-game books were shorter, but fun reads.

From that point on, roleplay and immersion kept getting stripped away to make the game more accessible. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I think they took it a bit too far in that direction. We lost several skills and spells. We lost spellcrafting, which fans have been BEGGING FOR since Skyrim first released. No attributes meant every character basically played the same. You could go from being a new recruit to the guild leader in every guild super quick, with no ranks in between. Choices rarely mattered, and it seems like every other NPC is marked as essential. You could switch from werewolf to vampire whenever you want. In-game books were rarely more than five "pages" long. Most NPCs would have one thing to say to you, and then they'll switch to their default, "Yes?"

Many people played Oblivion Remastered as their first experience of The Elder Scrolls outside of Skyrim, and the general sentiment was, "Wow! This is so much more fun." I really hope Bethesda took the hint. We need more creative quests. We want our choices to matter, including our builds. Spellcrafting needs to return. We need old skills back. If we can sail across the seas like in Daggerfall, that'd be cool. Especially if we could hire a crew to manage the sails, the canons, etc. Maybe we could become a pirate, and lead our crew into battle?

I don't want to get my hopes up, but Bethesda has to know how important it is for them to impress us. Especially after such a long wait. I'm hoping "transcribe the past and map the future" means they're taking notes from past successes to make the ultimate Elder Scrolls, but we'll have to wait and see.

[Hydra009]

I hope so, too. Though I'd push back on the "need" for realism. I don't want a completely realistic travel or inventory or durability system. I also don't want to teleport directly to the quest location and get the best sword in the game in under an hour. I think Oblivion and Morrowind mostly hit the sweet spot between frustrating and trivially easy.

One thing that Morrowind gets right is that you start off as a dirt poor nobody. And I mean dirt poor. Unless you're a sneak-thief in the Census Office, you are the mud that everyone walks on. You practically have to join a Guild just to survive. That just makes it all the sweeter as you steadily grow in power to the point where you've surpassed everyone.

And the quests sometimes threw curveballs to keep you on your toes - like that nice woman who asks you to retrieve her ring from a lake. Then, when your back is turned, she and her friend attack you. Or the witch and naked nord who both insist that they were wronged and ask you to pick sides. Morrowind had so many quests that actually require some thought (like "solving" the disappearance of the dwarves) or to pick sides between rival factions and not just fetch or kill quests, though it had plenty of those, too.

Bethesda should take that to heart. No matter how much players say they want horse armor and their own house and to be the guildmaster of every guild, what most people truly want are engaging quests, atmospheric environments, and the freedom to build characters with different strengths and weaknesses (i.e. good at playing a particular role).