But in Fallout 3 you can go on and kill supermutants with first gun you find and every dungeon pretty much feels the same with little to do but to kill the same enemies you did 589 times before. Problem is not in lack of content but in quality and diversity of it. I really dont see how having 40 copy pasted metro stations is a good design.
This is a problem, I agree. But this is a limitation in pretty much any open world game. And I don't think even something like New Vegas should be held up as some sort of glorious improvement because Obsidian made it. Everyone knows that New Vegas reused art assets from Fallout 3 all over, and wouldn't have been nearly as big or ambitious as it was if they didn't have the existing code, engine, art, etc. to build on.
In Fallout 3 I avoided talking to people and just went on exploring the world because every time I got in conversation I wanted to smash my head due the awfulness of the writing and voice acting. Skyrim does a bit better job here but lack of choices in the quests often left me dumbfounded since for some reason I was often forced to be the bad guy. Again its nice to have lots of things to do in a game but if its poorly executed then its not really a joy to play it.
Because I apparently need to keep repeating myself: Bethesda's games have problems. A fuckton of them. In fact, I think that most of them are outright bad. But, that does not stop me from noticing they do certain things well. My comment about dialogue being a central game mechanic is really just to highlight the mechanical things dialogue does, as you implied bad writing = bad mechanics, which makes no sense.
There are RPGs that have no stealing, I would rather have a game without broken and useless mechanics and for developer spend more time polishing other areas then implementing something pointless.
Maybe. Again, I have to fall back on the "it's a massive game, getting everything right is impossible." What's important about Bethesda games are the tools they provide you, the options you have in playing the game, not the fine balance of each of them. If you'd prefer a smaller, focused experience, well, that's fine, but that's not really the kind of game they intend to make.
But they are still big problems, and as you say its a matter of execution and a talented developer team could have made those problems into a well crafted features.
Perhaps. But there are few developers making games the sheer size Bethesda tackles, and usually that means corners cut somewhere. With Bethesda, it's (lately) quality of writing and the finer points of game balance. If it were Piranha Bytes, it'd probably be polish, or stability, or glitches, etc. Talking in hypotheticals of what another developer *might* be able to do is pretty fruitless because every project and every developer is different, and often success is a result of factors entirely external to the development itself (like publisher intervention or bankruptcy of a parent company).
Lets take Morrowind for and example, there are huge amount of characters to be found in the world, they will provide you with quests and unique pieces of lore. Both Gothic and Morrowind reward you world exploration not only exploration of dungeon. In Morrowind there are large number of of places in the world without any enemies but are placed there to tell the story of the world. I can go now and play Morrowind again and Ill still finding something new and interesting, it wont be a super magic item but a simply skeleton and a small note talking about the last days of some non quests related man.
Morrowind is actually significantly smaller than Oblivion in terms of world size and number of locations, albeit it is more dense. However, most characters also used the same copy-pasted dialogue everywhere, the game was intended to be played on a PC by a dedicated audience of RPG fans vs. the more casual mass audiences newer Bethesda games are targeted towards, and voice acting was not a concern.
For the record, Oblivion had all that same stuff in many of its dungeons. I remember stuff like underground castles full of necromancers, or huge mass burial grounds, etc. that all had pieces of unique lore to contribute to the world. Yes, the game was lacking unique loot and enemies, and it did have more filler dungeons than Morrowind without anything of interest, but I think it's unfair to say Oblivion had no such details. Skyrim definitely gets very close to Morrowind's own standard as well.
Take in consideration only sandbox games there is not much of competition but I feel that first three Gothics and Morrowind are far superior in location design then later Bethesda games.
Oh, I fully agree. I'm just saying that competition isn't very stiff these days. And we all know that Gothic 3, which tried to bring those production values to the next level, was also kind of a fucking awful mess, and still sort of sucks after the community patches and mods.
Fun fact: every console generation jump results in a 25-50% average development cost increase, and usually take longer to make as well. Sooner or later you are going to have to cut corners to balance the books.
Well I agree, but as seen in Gothic and Morrowind you can make lot of locations and make then interesting witout combat. It seems to me that the new Bethesda works with this design idea that every dungeon need to have certain amount of levels and play time. In Gothics and Morrowind there are places you will explore in a minute or two, in Oblivion/F3/Skyrim every dungeon needs atleast 5 minutes to explore it. This is most noticeable in Skyrim where every dungeon has around of three levels. In first you will fight the easiest enemies and maybe one stronger, on second a mix of enemies including a few small groups or few stronger ones and in the last level one tough enemy and a compulsorily large loot chest. Why not make a dungeons without enemies and only traps, why not create a mine that collapses all around you, do you remember the Hell hound from Arx Fatalis which you could not kill but had to lure it on a mining machinery to kill it.
I agree with all of this, but again - creating unique gameplay scenarios, especially when special scripting etc. is involved, tends to eat up development time. That's not really an excuse for boring dungeons, but it's clear Bethesda wanted to have a formula of sorts to design Skyrim around - though outside of repetitive combat, there is a decent variety in dungeons, like caves full of gaints, old tombs, smuggler holds with lots of water to skim through, icy, claustrophobic tunnels, etc. I think the bigger problem is more that all the interesting dungeons are quest-related, rather than things you find during regular exploration (like that one where you have to hide in shadows to avoid taking fire damage).
Yes they do a good job of making shallow games but should we praise them for it
Not at all. But I am more than happy to point out the good things Bethesda do. I know it's cool to bash them constantly (and I used to do it a lot, trust me), but I think it's a more interesting discussion to be able to see both what a game does wrong and what it does right, rather than just focus on the negatives or what I personally want out of that game, even though it might be contradictory to the design goals.
This is just apologetics, the fact that Bethesduh games do
some things right, like forcefully making the repair skill in Fallout useful by making weapons break at idiotically high rate, does not impact their quality at all. They are hiking simulators with hiking made boring and pointless by their own design, which means being broken at the very core. Again, there is no point to overcomplicating very simple things by wall'o'text posts
No apologies here. I think Oblivion is fucking awful (outside of hiking around and mods, which at least sustain some novelty-type interest), Fallout 3 has crap writing, lore rape and balance but at least it has some decent exploration with some varied locations to find (downtown DC, old military bunkers etc. were well done), and Skyrim is overall a solid if repetitive sandbox dungeon crawler that recaptures a bit of Morrowind's magic in terms of having a more interesting game world, political struggles, etc. But as I've said, I don't think that thinking a game sucks overall should prevent me from being able to see things it does well.
.
