They’ve somewhat fallen into the same trap Valve did with Half Life 3, and nothing they put up will live up to the nostalgia of Skyrim for many players no matter what, as it’ll never recapture the magic many of the fanbase felt when they first played it (at least that’s my take). It’s been overhyped, and people will have some unrealistic expectations no matter what.

I think sidelining the next installment was a misstep on BGS’ part, and now they risk alienating the player base of one of their two largest IPs; don’t get me wrong, it’ll probably sell incredibly well, but I think there’s just no way it’ll be as well-received as they would want it to be.

On a more positive note though , I hope that whatever they deliver brings improvements rather than downgrades – I want to see a better magic system taking inspiration from competitors and previous installments, a return to NPC schedules (looking at you Starfield 😒), and hopefully prioritizing world-space content over a large open world map. Even if it’s more of the same, as long as the story is fun, the NPCs are well-written, and the systems aren’t a pain to engage with, it’ll live up to my expectations.

If they were worried about the expectations, they shouldn’t have taken 15 years to release the damn thing.

I can get wanting to not rush a project, and I know as a studio they don’t do multiple projects at the same time, but they’ve wedged themselves into a pickle.

Series that release at a relatively steady clip (not too often but frequently enough to stay in conversation) have the privilege of coasting on iterative design. You can try a few cool new things, see what works and what doesn’t, and then you can see how the tides shift for the next project.

When you take ages between games, the entire market shifts its tendencies to the point where you can no longer anticipate what people will be into and what they’ve already gotten over. That’s not to say that they need to make a radically different game, but you’re not going to win any points by just repeating styles that the audience has already moved away from.

Just as one example, Dark Souls 1 and Skyrim came out in the same year. Demon’s Souls aside, basically the entire Soulsborne genre developed and iterated within the time it’s taken Bethesda to get around to Elder Scrolls 6. And now that a game like Elden Ring has such a strong association to the modern state of open world fantasy RPGs, it’s hard to entirely ignore that when there will inevitably be a good deal of audience overlap.

Expectations should be low, not high. The current Elder Scrolls title (Online) and the current Fallout title (76) are both pay-to-win microtransaction-hell freemium games. Like the base game was given away to a lot of people and continues to be so, but to do anything fun, you really gotta buy the expansions (of which there are like a dozen) and/or subscribe. Even GamePass Ultimate ($30 a month!) doesn’t cover most of it. It gets you into the game and that’s about it.

Even if we overlook Online, the progression from Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim has been graphics go up and roleplaying goes down (in favour of one character who can do anything as opposed to in Morrowind where if you couldn’t do magic, you couldn’t advance in the Mages Guild, as opposed to in Skyrim where you do like one spell and find three books and solve a combat puzzle or three and you’re Arch-Mage. Even in Oblivion you had to choose between Thieves Guild and Mages Guild if you were in both — those who know avoid joining the mages guild until after that one quest. Or they’re arch-mage by that point.

Their focus should be way less on what the game looks like and way more on good story telling with a huge focus on excellent side quests. Maybe I’m the only one, but I could enjoy a game that looks and controls just like any of the existing Elder Scrolls if the writing is fabulous.

Bethesda, in recent games, has focused way too much on a main storyline and just let the side quests be pretty lame, and that’s just completely against what people have liked about Skyrim and Oblivion, where the main quest was decent and all, but you could completely ignore the main quest and totally have an excellent experience just exploring the rich side quests and the characters that feel alive and real.

Unfortunately, I’m betting that they relied heavily on AI to do their writing and it’s going to leave their game feeling completely soulless. I hope I’m wrong.

This idea is probably impossible to do, but here me out.

As we all know, most games today release before they’re really ready to release and they end up letting the players be the beta testers to let them know what’s wrong with the game. There have been some games that ended up improving so much after they launched with a fail that they’re now considered good games.

I’m wondering if a studio could lean into that and release the unfinished game with all kinds of side quests, and let the players decide what the best side quests are. And then develop those side quests in free updates. Just plan the work into their budget. Plan into the budget that the game isn’t done when it’s initially released. It’s done when the players have weighed in and developers add like a bunch of more content, free of charge based on the player’s assessment of the interest of the sidequests.

For example, I know, this is an example from fallout, but in fallout, 4, there were a lot of really cool side quests that just fell flat. That could have been worked on so much more and made so cool. One of them was the flotilla of boats contolled by Raiders where they set up these lines of boats, and you had to follow a path from boat to boat to boat. And some of them were almost sinking. They reminded me of the boats from Jaws, and it was really kind of scary to navigate and you worked your way all the way up to this kind of tower area. And then it was such a disappointment. It fell flat. There was really no story. Players could have expressed that they liked that, and then they could have developed something super cool like maybe a shark attacked you randomly as you were trying to make your way through the flotilla of boats. Or once you got to the end tower, that was just the start of an extended quest. Let players decide what side quests should be filled out and expanded.

You could make the game what the players want by leaning in to releasing it before it’s completely ready and letting players know that their input is going to determine what’s developed.

Wouldn’t this take some of their pressure off and allow them to release this game?

It’s Bethesda and after FO4 nothing is still to high of an expectation

All I know is that the longer Todd is at the helm the worse their games get.