Rumor: Bethesda has been in turmoil since the death of their CEO

[PorkyThePaladin]

Imagine caring about Bethesda in 2023. Actually, imagine caring about Bethesda at any point in time...

The company that has always had absolute crap gameplay, and whose only game with ANYTHING good in it was Morrowind with its lore and setting and part of the main quest, but which also had absolute crap gameplay, and the lore was somewhat offset by wiki-style dialogue.

I keep telling you people, if you don't want to play good/great open world games today (e.g. Witcher 3, BotW, KCD, ELEX), at least play Ubisoft's nu-Assasin Creed games (Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla, Mirage). They have out-Bethesda'd Bethesda, same kind of bland boring soulless shit but with better production quality, better combat, better graphics, more gameplay systems.

 

[dreughjiggers]

The salt mines of Codex. Always wrong, always mad.

Roguey I’m just going to have to disagree here, tes moved from a more niche success to global success with Morrowind. It was despised by many on this forum in the ancient days because of this reason.

Yeah, Morrowind was the game that saved them. Every one of their games has sold more copies than the last.

 

[Quillon]

I remember getting hyped up about Oblivion with no knowledge of Morrowind, I was playing games for a few years then and playing anything I can get my hands on, at the same time being clueless af so as per me being part of the mainstream circa 2006, Roguey is right

 

[Roguey]

Roguey I’m just going to have to disagree here, tes moved from a more niche success to global success with Morrowind. It was despised by many on this forum in the ancient days because of this reason.

https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=27

Many have lauded this game's accomplishments, and deservedly so. Its predecessor, Daggerfall, was a mixed bag. It offered a similar kind of freedom, but was plagued by bugs and a general feeling of pointlessness. Morrowind offers a huge, breathing game world with gorgeous graphics and a whole lot to do. On top of it all, the game is very, very mod-able which adds to the fun. Of course the game isn't perfect: interface flaws, steep system requirements and a less than perfect dialogue system all detract from the fun. The fact still remains, however, that Morrowind is without a doubt one of the most amazing accomplishments of the year.

Probably a more obvious choice than my first two, Morrowind is a game that, for me, both promised and delivered. It is by no means perfect, but it is definitely impressive. In sharp contrast to my other choices, Morrowind comes complete with stunning graphics, but past that is an immersive world, full of things to do. So full in fact, that I am still playing, as no doubt are many others. The combat could be better, the dialogue system could be greatly improved, and I could certainly use a more powerful PC to go with it, but I still often lose an afternoon or two wandering around this vast game.

If there was one word for which to describe Morrowind best, that word would have to be 'alive'. Morrowind is a game that comes close to fulfilling my vision of a simulation of a real political world, filled with real geopolitics, real rivalries and real outcomes to decisions made by the player. That very aspect of being 'alive' would also cover the atmosphere in the game's well designed environments, its inhabitants and the plethora of events that come to shape the game's evolving world. As with all things fair, I must say that Morrowind is by no means perfect, but it does an outstanding effort at making the attempt.

It's certainly true that a lot of people dislike Morrowind for various reasons, but those people are/were a minority. It was voted #10 in the top rpgs poll.

 

[Butter]

I had never heard of Morrowind or TES before Oblivion, but that's because I took the Nintendo->Sony pipeline and only dabbled in PC gaming up to that point for things like Diablo and Sim City. Of course, there were a fucking lot of people in the same boat.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Roguey, your dementia is showing, old man.

 

[Higher Animal]

Roguey, I was both alive, naive, and stupid enough to be on this forum a decade and a half ago, Morrowind hating was a gnostic mystical key to true grognard incline that was a widely voiced opinion. Page Vault Dweller

In fact I discovered this forum because it was a haven for oblivion bashers kicked off the old tes official forums, but I did it because Oblivion seemed to slide downward, while when I got here Morrowind was considered the slide downward.

 

[Tyranicon]

Everybody knows post-Morrowind TES games are just for sex mods.

Come on guys, get with the times. We all know who's most excited for Starfield.

coomer alert

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

Morrowind is shit, by the way.

 

[dreughjiggers]

I had never heard of Morrowind or TES before Oblivion, but that's because I took the Nintendo->Sony pipeline and only dabbled in PC gaming up to that point for things like Diablo and Sim City. Of course, there were a fucking lot of people in the same boat.

I too was a nintardo until I discovered Diablo, Lego Island, and MDK.

 

[NecroLord]

Morrowind is shit, by the way.

 

[mindx2]

Regardless of its fate (Bethesda died for me many years ago) I will always be thankful for Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire, Future Shock and Skynet.

 

[Ryzer]

Regardless of it's fate (Bethesda died for me many years ago) I will always be thankful for Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire, Future Shock and Skynet.

Strangely, the Christopher Weaver era before Altman settled in, yeah that fits.

 

[dreughjiggers]

The era they went bankrupt because nobody wanted Battlespire or Redguard?

 

[Nifft Batuff]

They don't do games like Skyrim anymore.

 

[Raghar]

If I became king of Microsoft tomorrow, I'd have Bethesda ditch the high fantasy altogether and buy them Funcom as a Christmas present. Then Todd A. Howard could finish what Robert E. Howard started.

You mean racism?

While making a game where each species act as different species and species don't intermix would be nice. They would have to prove theirs skills by making a totally xenophobic TES VI. Otherwise they would create a mild boring stuff similar to most games that were inspired by Howard that were released last few years.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

3) Pete Hines was made Head of Global Publishing but nobody knows what that means exactly

This seems like good old bethesda to me.

 

[dreughjiggers]

The setting's clearly an afterthought with only barest attention paid to lorewank. Its undiluted powerfantasy. They're after people who have never read a book or played rpgs before. Moddability's a top concern, too.

 

[Harthwain]

Every gaming magazine gave it top scores. I definitely knew about it before I played it.

Yes, core gamers knew about it. People with a casual interest in games did not. Bethesda sells tens of millions per game because casuals like them.

You could've said the exact same thing about most games back then, because the search engine wasn't as good then as it is nowadays so gaming magazines were the main source of information on games and game-related events.

Edit:

And they did that because Morrowind was already popular on the xbox, so they knew that investing in the sequel and dumbing it down a bit would give them a massive hit.

Thing is, they didn't plan on dumbing down Oblivion. If anything, they were even more ambitious with it, but at some point realized they overpromised and bit more than they could chew, so they started scaling down whatever they could in order to just deliver the game (how pathetic the main quest is the most visible result of this, but it's not the only visible sign). This became a trend, because it's easier to operate that way.

If Morrowind was already some mega-popular thing, Oblivion wouldn't have made the radical changes it did to get an even bigger audience. Skyrim's success came from being a refinement of Oblivion, not a near-total overhaul.

Oblivion didn't make radical changes "to get an even bigger audience". They wanted to make a better game, but really caught up with them. Oblivion is the result of that and Skyrim is the lesson learned from Oblivion, but less so because they aimed for it and more because they simply don't know how to do better anymore and Todd Howard wants to avoid the situation Bethesda was in when they were making Morrowind - so they go for a safe course now, rather than trying to revolutionize their games. This is doubly true after the Oblivion fiasco (I mean fiasco in terms of what it aimed for, not in terms of how popular it became).

 

[Wunderbar]

their IPs be given to another company with better writers.

like what, Obsidian?

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

I think Bethesda became too big right at the moment in time when they were getting a hand on how to make the sort of game they wanted to create.
Lefay's designs were becoming too ambitious for a DOS game, however the jump towards a full 3d game was promising. The company, though, felt that the iterations that his philosophies went through weren't fruitful enough, both creatively and financially. If they had been, TES would be more of a simulation type game instead of an FP action rpg. And while Bethesda under Todd champions murderhoboism as a core value, ironically, I think Lefay would've introduced player housing and settlement management much earlier. He was the guy who wanted you to talk to trash mobs instead of attack them blindly, for instance. And the sort of guy who'd care about creating a simulation of a world with fluctuating prices and functional economies. But that was also the sort of thing that belonged in a game world where games came with book-sized manuals, and even in the early 00s you'd start getting pdfs instead. Besides, there's the issue of intended audiences and playtesters. You can't have them play through 80 hours of a game to let them discover all the slow burning variables of a complicated game world.

Smacking enemies with an axe (which levels your blunt ability) is easier to code and to show.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Very cool. But then you launch the game, and its all the very dull brown&rust that every game was doing at the time.

That's not fair, the Ashlands are shades of grey rather than brown.

Many parts of Morrowind are more colorful than the Ashlands or places like Balmora, as demonstrated in these screenshots (with MGSO but faithful to the original):

 

[Wunderbar]

Many parts of Morrowind are more colorful than the Ashlands or places like Balmora, as demonstrated in these screenshots (with MGSO

faithful to the original

no.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

That's modded. Original Morrowind is predominantly brown. I think it probably suits the rural tone they wanted to give to the game. You are never in a proper city (which is something they definitely wanted to try with Oblivion).

 

[Frank Capicoli]

with MGSO

Did we just time skip back to 2012?