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62 comments
Mannimarco was my fave Oblivion quest. They could have done so much with it instead like usual Bethesda did the least possible.
Brilliant interpretation, absolutely fantastic!
Still after all these years I have seen many very cool characters but none compare to the quality of your creations.
Personally I did not think when I started to be able to produce characters like these. But the question is: why Bethesda is not able to produce similar quality, that a worker who makes the tires in a factory can do with a little amateur editor? I have been to a convention on the comic and there was an entire stand where professional graphics produced images and 3d objects of great quality. But what do the graphics ofBethesda ??? If I had their leadership, a substantial proportion of Bethesda employees, would end to dig the earth.
My take on it is that I am deadly afraid of a new engine as it would be a total revolution. We start from zero, no modding tools, everything will need to be redone and you never know how the suits and those controlling the cashflow of the company feel about modding. I'm just waiting for the day when a new chief wants to "place their mark" by driving a dagger into the modding scene.
Reasons are many but they boil down to "it takes to long to make and support the tools required for modding and none of the competition does it so why should we...". It's one of those thing that I don't want to be right about... ever.
An engine is just code anyway, there is no such thing as a technical limit, there is only a time and talent limit. I always thought this was the reason why Bethesda bought iD Soft for in the first place, guess they didn't expect Carmac to leave right away.
What I feel would do wonders was if they had some hungry, young and talented programmers who would be tasked to go in and replace all the outdated parts of the engine, improve the scripting language to the point where you don't need a script extender to do simple, basic stuff (the more I hear about this from mod authors the more I shake my head...). Get some proper in/export tools for meshes and not the guesswork we have now. And give the CK a big overhaul cause that thing makes Skyrim look stable.... Who though throwing up 200 error messages by default when you start it up is good design.... no words...
Fabrizio, what you have to understand here is the politics behind all this. As amature modders and modmakers we get to decide where we spend our time and for how long. Bethesda employees have to meet other peoples deadlines that where probably way to optimistic to begin with. So the actual time the get to spend on something can be very very small before the have to work on something else.
It's one of the most vicious and soul-crushing cycles there is, when you know you can do so much better but since you don't have the time to do it right you have to make something as fast as you can and hope you get it right, right away. Because you are not going to get the time to fix anything later cause then you will be working on something else entirely...
One thing you learn is that these are amazing people stuck with insane "This is your new deadline, everything should have been done yesterday" schedules.
Not that I feel sorry for them, the do what they love and some even get payed well. But there is a very real reason why things are the way they are.
...oh ya, engine design and work schedules.
1) Engine design:
I gotta really wonder why they bother. I mean seriously, the Papyrus Scripting idea... *sigh*
I think it is a complete waste of time and resources to build a new engine for every game just to implement some geeks wet dreams instead of an infrastructure investment for the good of the tool set itself. Then they could turn the Creation Engine or its predecessors into a secondary revenue stream by licensing it out to other developers. I think I already read that they are already planning a new engine for their future titles. Though I also suspect that after two and a half decades, their practice of making dev tools that are "just barely enough" and then tossing them out to the community to see what happens has become something of a de facto "Excalibur Test" for Bethesda. The modder who came up with the original script extender for Morrowind, to be able to write the mod Morrowind Combat Enhanced, ended up getting hired by Bethesda to develop Oblivion's combat. This pattern has been repeated a few times since then.
2)Work Schedules:
The gaming industry is run like a ADHD monkey see, monkey do mentality. They are too busy eating hot pockets and playing ping pong until the final 6 weeks before the deadline release where they then pull all nighters drinking red bull to patch everything up. It really is a kindergarten mentality made up of google wannabes and microsoft rejects.
Partially correct on the second. Managing dev's would be a bit like herding cats (or cating Hurd's if they are Linux dev's). But a lot of it is just the crunch times that these things go through before release. Corners get cut so badly just to make a shipping date, you end up with things that are amateur level at best. Not because the person who did it didn't have the talent, but they didn't have the time.
Points to the Bethesda Hi Res DLC (missing purple textures lul) and the fact that the Skyrim masters are not even clean and full of errors, which cause all sort of issues when using mods, if you don't clean them in Tes 5 edit. Skyrim needs a new patch, Changenotes... we cleaned the masters... sorry that it took 5 years, kbai thnx, now go buy fallout plz, gek coming soon!
The current Bethesda lives on the fruits of its past production, migration on consoles has made their games, poor. Fallout is not his creation, and published today Doom is seriously ridiculous. Behind the purchase of Id Software is certainly the need to acquire their graphics engine, and use it to keep up with the competition. This surely condemns the modding that will end under their control, though, what might save it, is the fact that virtual pornography has a certain market, but it is a type of content that Bethesda can not sell directly. Just note nexus, what is going through this type of material.
The fact remains that if the modding dies, Bethesda will fail soon, because it is a software house that has serious problems, but it does nothing to solve, or to evolve their mindset. If it was failed a software company like Origin, which has made the history of video games, I do not see why Bethesda must survive with this kind of attitude. Mediocrity has no justification at all.
If the Witcher had this, we wouldn't be having this discussion, Bethesda would have been the old dog, the has beens that fell to the wayside and it will be like this until someone can do those things but better.
Because it's one thing to make a very narrow and focused, single character game be great. It's another thing to do the same with something which has to fit every character type there is.
That's the crux of it really, we can make it our own, play by our rules, that is why we come back to it, even when there are other more technically superior games out there.
If they remove modding they remove that aspect and what you say in the end becomes reality. Then their one differentiating factor is removed and they are judged on other merits where they are inferior.
It unfortunately feels like it's a path they are headed in.
My only real hope lays in that Bethesda does change, they are not afraid to take risks even if half of them turn out to be bad.
Your closing lines ring true, the computer industry is littered with the remains of once great companies, now confined to a few lines on wiki about how they did this and that way back when.
I think Farvat is correct when she/he says, "The most amazing thing that the great events of the saga, take place outside of the game as pure narrative, between one game and another.
The current Bethesda lives on the fruits of its past production, migration on consoles has made their games, poor. Fallout is not his creation, and published today Doom is seriously ridiculous."
You would think Bethesda would be in trouble but in fact they are one of the most successful gaming companies. They make money and people are buying their games. Why? It does seem that their Open World concept keeps attracting younger gamers and the older gamers eventually come over to their new titles more out of curiosity. It is easy to go play F4 if you have already played their other open world titles. The concept is familiar. But they don't stay. They quickly go back to the earlier titles that are better. For example let's look at the Fallout community. Fallout New Vegas was clearly a better functioning game even though I preferred playing F3. FV looked better, played better but it lacked the large expansive world that F3 had. Still if you ask hardcore Fallout gamers which were their best titles they would overwhelmingly say the original games were the best with FV being next and F3 being LAST! And how about F4? Most of the FV modders and players don't even believe F4 is an RPG and were disappointed with the graphics. F4 was one of the most anticipated titles of 2015 and it didn't even make the top 10. In fact it was the most disappointing release of the year and Witcher 3 has become one of the all time great RPGs ever. Most of my FV friends who tried F4 have already stopped playing F4 and have come to Skyrim or back to FV. I myself have no plans to ever try F4. I'll wait to pick it up for 5-10 bucks in a few years when all the wrinkles have been ironed out. I did the same with Skyrim when I heard the initial rumbles in the Oblivion community regarding all the problems Skyrim was giving them. It certainly seems that Bethesda is on a downhill trajectory.
This is telling us all that there is something wrong. Bethesda has a symbiotic relationship with the modding community. Their old titles still sell and basically serve as a type of education system for modders to practice their craft. With the Pay-for-Mods fiasco and the poor results with F4 and DOOM I think the pathway is clear for another company to do something similar and be more successful at it. Like Raccoondance I would have hoped CD Projekt RED would release a full CS and adopt more of an open world-ness to their vision. However I also have high hopes for the future and that other organizations will see the opportunity that Bethesda failures are providing.
I think the best thing that Bethesda could implement in future open world rpg titles would be a, "Choice and Consequence" system in their games. If you join the East Empire Company then maybe you can also be a member of the thieves guild but you wouldn't be able to join the Imperial militia or become a priest. Maybe as a thieves guild member you could join the DB and maybe as a Mage guild member you could also be in the DB but you can't be in all the guilds. I always found that dumb. If you join a guild that should then become the focus of your game and moving up in the guild to a higher position within it should be difficult and time consuming. Becoming the head of the Mage's guild by level 6 without any magic skills is the bane of TES gaming as far as I am concerned. iykwim
For myself, I would love to join the fighter's guild and then be able to take over the guild and have the choice to either leaver the guild and go into politics, a new guild that you can only get there if you follow certain pre defined paths. Choice and consequence.