Elder Scrolls The Elder Scrolls VI - officially announced but you'll have to wait

And see ESO with new expectations. Possibly turning them off.

 

Bethesda sold 30 million copies of Skyrim. And Zenimax sold 8,5 million copies of ESO thanks to Skyrim. I wonder what the strategy will be.

 

I don't know how one would even go about making a coherent TES6, ESO has been lore raping Elder Scrolls really bad

 

In-game purchases means a steady income from a sizeable fraction of those 8.5 million.

 

Examples?

 

Once people buy Skyrim, that's it. That's all the money to be made (unless they buy some new edition of Skyrim or whatever). With MMOs, you can milk them over and over and over. With a good monetization tactic, you can make a lucrative STABLE revenue (something you just cannot get with single player games). It's a lot more money than most people think, and it lasts far longer too, microtransactions in such games are just too tempting for many people to resist and they spend up several times more money than had they bought a copy of a full priced single player game.

Entire mobile games market stands on this, by the way. Every game is freemium aimed at keeping you playing as long as possible so as to tempt you with microtransactions as long as possible. That why they're so grindy and shitty – to get into your wallet. It works very well, too, which is why all the big publishers are trying to get some of that pie too.

 

it'd have to come from someone that cares, because I'm not tuned in enough to provide a plethora - last thing I saw was dragons

 

Todd Howard implied in an interview that doing Starfield before Elder Scrolls 6 was his and Bethesda Maryland's choice, not Zenimax's. I got the impression that its his "dream game" and that a lot of employees at Maryland wanted to do something different for a couple of years instead of just doing ES 4, Fallout 3. ES 5, Fallout 4, ES 6, Fallout 5, ES 7, Fallout 6 for the rest of their lives. Considering how well Skyrim sold I would imagine that Zenimax would be the ones pushing to release a sequel quickly. The ES 6 and Starfield trailers were released on YouTube simultaneously. Both of them show basically nothing. Yet ES 6's trailer has 11 million views, while Starfield's trailer only has 2.4 million views. ES 6 is a guaranteed best seller even if its shit. I'm pretty confident that the existence of ESO is the only reason that Zenimax agreed to delay ES 6 for so long.

Starfield is a much more risky product than ES 6. If its good it could sell like crazy. The market for a massive hard space RPG is enormous, as evidenced by the absurd amount of money that Star Citizen has kickstarted. However if its shit Bethsda could be in trouble. Fallout 76 completely and utterly destroyed Bethesda's reputation in the mainstream, which had already been somewhat damaged by Fallout 4. Back when Fallout 3 and Skyrim released criticizing Bethesda games for being shallow was something that grognards like Codexers did. Fallout 76 made Bethesda-bashing mainstream. Thus with Starfield a lot more people will be cautiously waiting for reviews before making a purchasing decision compared to earlier Bethesda games.

Actually... come to think of it... I think I have a theory for why Fallout 76 exists. Bethesda said they wanted to do both Starfield and ES 6 before Fallout 5. Maybe Zenimax said no. Maybe Zenimax said that Fallout 4 sold really well and that they loose too much money by letting the franchise stay dormant for 12-15 years. Maybe Zenimax demanded that the only way they would agree to it was if a Fallout MMO was made to make money off off Fallout fans in the interim between Fallout 4 and Fallout 5, like they did with ESO. Maybe Bethesda Maryland said fine, but were not enthusiastic about the project in the slightest. Thus the project was handed off to a C-team and was rushed and underfunded... and the rest is history.

 

A niche market populated by people with more money than sense doesn't mean there's mass appeal for that type of game.

 

I wish there was an opportunity for me to throw money at a project I wanted made.

I'd spend $500+ on a worthy successor to Morrowind.

 

Fair enough, but I do think there definitely is a type of game there that has a very high sales potential if its good. Maybe not as high as ES 6, but still. Noone has yet to do that type of game properly in my opinion. The Mass Effect games are old and not that great, except Andromeda which is just shit. No Man's Sky had a lot of hype, but was very low-budget, was content-barren and had an ugly artstyle. Star Citizen is more of a crazy cult than an actual game. Elite Dangerous has no guns or NPCs or proper story. You can't even leave your spaceship in that game. If someone came along and made a AAA single-player space RPG with a decent story and an emphasis on exploration that is actually good I'm pretty confident that it has very high sales potential. We don't really know for certain since noone has really made a game like that yet, but I'm fairly confident that it has.

I remember many many years ago someone from Rockstar said in an interview (don't remember where, sorry) that they were a bit nervous about making a AAA cowboy game because noone had ever done it before. I remember thinking to myself something like "Dude, western movies are extremely popular. A game where you ride around a big open-world and do cowboystuff is going to sell like crazy if its done right. The fact that noone has really done it before just means that its going to sell even more."

 

lol Bethesda has been raping the lore for a good while longer than ESO has even been around but good try anyway. They've been changing the canon on whims before why would they suddenly stop now.

 

An "indie" Morrowind has to come eventually. Same with Deus Ex. There's already tools that make massive content generation much easier for a small team, and those games have massive fanbases. Just a matter of time.

 

There is no reason ES6 couldn't get endless expansions/dlc so it lasts a long time like ESO. There is a reason why they don't do that. The main issue is that ESO is mechanically far deeper, more interesting and more polished, so they can't release ES6 with the same dumbass design they have used for decades, because millions of people will be commenting online about how it is worse than ESO. And that effects sales. OMG how can a brand new game be worse than ESO from 2014?!

They want nothing but hype and positivity, they spend a lot of money on paid reviews and full screen ads all over the place to make sure that every gamer is excited about zomg the new Elder Scrolls! EVERYONE IS PLAYING IT! I MUST HAVE IT! In other words, ESO being better (it still isn't great), has forced them to spend longer on ES6 because they raised their own shitty bar and now they need to live up to it.

 

In fact, we already have an indie game heavily inspired by Morrowind in Kenshi, although the gameplay differs substantially in crucial aspects (e.g. large parties replacing a single character, change in perspective, automated combat, base-building and technological research).

 

No, it hasn't. It has been the best thing for Elder Scrolls lore since Morrowind. It was bad at first then after the shit they got they hired a bunch of people specifically to oversee the lore put into the game. They even hired some former TSR D&D campaign writer as the loremaster(actual job title)
Remember, roleplayers are lore nerds and roleplayers are the people who spend the big bux on ingame cosmetics.

 

if they're still years away from release for ESVI, they probably had to recycle game design & production and remake their game again. competition got stiffer and they just couln't release skyrim v2 with 3-building cities, even less gameplay and character skills.

 

What competition?
There are no games that even remotely try to accomplish what Bethesda does, which is why their mediocre, bug-ridden messes sell so well.

 

normies don't see the difference between subtypes of RPGs. Average gamer lumps together Skyrum, Witcher 3 and even Kingdom of Amalur.

 

They lump together Witcher 3 and Assassin's Creed, but Bethesda have a different vibe that very few even attempt to copy. First-person, go anywhere anytime, physics derpness, random visual storytelling and events to find everywhere to reward exploration more, towns where almost every person has a story, schedule and quest role... as much as people here hate it, they do certain things well that gets more people to buy their games than the average. Outer Worlds is the only Bethesda-a-like I can think of in recent history, and it was nowhere near the same in scope.

 

KCD was much closer to a bethesda-like. Outer Worlds felt like they attempted to do it at a very superficial level but it all falls apart the moment you actually get past that.

Though I will give Outer Worlds a plus for the reactivity, probably ranks at the top for it tbh.

edit:
can't believe I completely forgot, but Enderal(and presumably the games that came before) are basically gothic mashed together with bethesda game stuff.

 

I haven't played it yet, but I thought it was a more realistic sim feeling type game. Bethesda's derpy goofball "fun" is a big factor in their success. Outer Worlds tried to copy that.

You're probably right in other areas though.

 

KCD is closer on things like NPC schedules and a living world, most particularly in it actually being an open world game though.

 

KCD still isn't like bethesda games because of a pre-made character and focus on story (time limits, immediate failure if you don't do something in intended way during early segments).

TOW isn't like Bethesda games at all, it's just a crudely made first person KOTOR. And yet a lot of players call it bethesda-like, which proves my point that average gamers don't know shit and will lump together different games because they look similar on surface level.

 

Monarch is very "Bethesda on a budget." The others being smaller and more simple... also budget. Splitting up the world is a factor of the setting. Lack of a physics system would probably be the biggest difference after scale/exploration depth, IMO.