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

[OndrejSc]

As long as you can get fucked by a bear in first person with raytracing, I'm in.

 

[Cryomancer]

> So it was intentionally looking backwards,

I really hate this mindset that "changes are always forward and good". Is better to look from the past, see their experiments, what worked and what didn't worked. People decided to have "rules heavy" RPGs by a reason. You can not like this reason, can prefer "rules light" but pretending that they where wrong only because their ideas are older than your ideas is just plain stupid.

That said if someone after FL76, FL4 and Starfield expects ANYTHING except a very boring dumbed down high fantasy version of Commiefornia, that person is delusional.

keep copy-pasting the same thing in every game.

They aren't merely copy pasting. They are copy pasting somethings and removing others.

 

[Rahdulan]

If you were worried for a moment that Bethesda might learn something from their blunders, then worry no more. TES VI is to be even more simplified and casualized than Skyrim, and BG3 was "looking backwards":

Back in the 90s, Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls was a deep, numbers-heavy RPG that borrowed heavily from the genre’s basis in Dungeons and Dragons. Today, The Elder Scrolls still has complex elements, but the series has moved away from random dice rolls, attributes and other systems to focus on providing a more casual experience.


On the other hand, the RPG genre recently saw a new shift in the form of Baldur’s Gate 3, an RPG that looked back on the complexities of past titles to provide the best transition of Dungeons and Dragons from tabletop to monitor. In an interview with VideoGamer, Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith explained that Larian’s success is an “exception” to the last decade of gaming trends, but one that shows a shift in desire from gamers.

The Elder Scrolls had to change​

With almost 40 years of development experience, Nesmith started making games around the time of Dungeons and Dragons’ debut. Back then, it was common to attempt to adapt the complex nature of D&D into even the most basic games, but as gaming became more accepted in the mid-2000s, developers opted to tone down mechanical complexity to create a more casual entry point for millions of gamers. Famously, Skyrim abandoned a lot of systems from past Elder Scrolls titles, making an RPG that focused more on systems reactivity than stat-based appeal.

“[Gamers] didn’t want to have outrageously complex character sheets [in 2011]“
SKYRIM LEAD DESIGNER BRUCE NESMITH

As Nesmith explains, that decision came very early on with even the earliest version of Skyrim axing the attributes system last seen in Oblivion. Removing attributes in Skyrim was a “day one” decision, opting to slim things down to focus on the reactivity of the world. As the veteran Bethesda developer explains, “every game is made within the culture at the moment you’re working on it” and the culture at that point was no longer looking to replicate D&D.

The character creator screens of Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind fell out of fashion, but Bethesda used this opportunity to create its own form of RPG.
“In the days of Daggerfall, everybody was trying to replicate the tabletop experience, which means that you were rules heavy,” he said. “Your character description was large and, I would argue unwieldy, and as time moved forward, that was less and less of interest to the audience. They didn’t want to have outrageously complex character sheets, and I was actually one who aggressively pushed for streamlining.”


Now, gamers want that complexity back. In the era of video essays and “best build” guides, there is a trend for some of that more extensive character creation and stat-based gameplay to return. For Nesmith, Skyrim was a chance for Bethesda to make a title where the game got “out of its own way”, but a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 is the complete opposite.


“When you look at something like Baldur’s Gate 3, I think that’s a very different animal. They had a very specific charge. They were taking Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition and putting it onto a computer game. So it was intentionally looking backwards, intentionally seeing the old tabletop presentation with the die rolls and all of that. It was, you know, reflecting back to the good old days from the point of view of the people who used to play those kinds of old playing games back then or did now to give them that joy buzzer. So I think Baldur’s Gate 3 is actually an exception to that.”

Baldur’s Gate 3 won’t change Bethesda​

While Nesmith departed Bethesda back in 2021, moving onto smaller games and novels like Mischief Maker and Glory Seeker, he doesn’t see the studio moving back to the complexities found in games like Baldur’s Gate. Just like the studio will likely not be moving to Unreal Engine, the current state of depth seems perfectly suited to the company’s aims.


“I don’t think [Baldur’s Gate 3’s success] necessarily presages a complete change over back to more numbers and more fiddly character sheets and things like that,” Nesmith told us. “Whether or not the rest of the industry will follow suit, I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to say that, But I think that through Skyrim, Bethesda has wanted to have the game get out of its own way.


“You see that everywhere in Skyrim. Todd [Howard] is a big proponent of the interface vanishing if you’re not doing something that needs it to be visible. So all you see is the world. That’s it. You just see the world.”

“You feel vindicated [in its popularity], you do. The thing that you loved, that you saw value in, that a lot of the rest of the world did not.”
BRUCE NESMITH

For Bethesda, this mantra caused many things that millions of gamers love, but some gamers hate. The Magic System was simplified, but was made more reactive with things like igniting oil spills; attributes were gutted in favour of a simplified skill tree; combat relied less on stats and more on player action. While Baldur’s Gate 3 also has some of these more reactive elements, as Nesmith explains, it aims for a completely different experience.


However, gaming is now in a space where there’s a massive audience for both types of RPG. While many will compare the upcoming Elder Scrolls 6 and Baldur’s Gate 3, Nesmith is correct: they are two completely different beasts.

RPG players are finally vindicated​

Making RPGs through the Satanic Panic, Nesmith recalls a time where players had to be “careful who you told” that you played the now incredibly popular board games. As religious groups blamed murders and crimes on fabricated cults allegedly inspired by the tabletop game, playing D&D was a secret you had to protect.


“I was friends with [some] who thought that the game was a bad influence on children, who had religious objections to it, and so I did not tell them what I did,” Nesmith explained. “Other people that didn’t have those prejudices, I did tell them, but you know I had to be careful. These days, interestingly, it works the other way around.”


Nowadays, Dungeons and Dragons is incredibly popular with content creators roleplaying entire campaigns becoming its own industry, a big-budget feature-length movie releasing in cinemas and video game adaptations like Baldur’s Gate 3 becoming one of the best-selling games of all-time.

The Satanic Panic of the 1980s led many gamers to hide their love of Dungeons and Dragons as thousands were deemed cultists and criminals for playing the game.
“You feel vindicated [in its popularity], you do,” Nesmith told us. “The thing that you loved, that you saw value in, that a lot of the rest of the world did not, now the rest of the world is seeing the value in it. I haven’t been there since the literal beginning, I wasn’t playing with Gary Gygax when he was first coming up with this stuff, but I’ve been there since pretty early on. I’ve watched the whole transformation of gaming of all sorts, from being a backwater entertainment for geeks and nerds to being something that is considered to be commonplace and accepted.”


While The Elder Scrolls 6 may not return to dense character sheets and dice-roll combat, it’s a game that doesn’t exist without the decades of Dungeons & Dragons before it. However, as with any genre, Bethesda has moved to create its own sub-genre, millions of players adore it, and everyone is waiting to see what comes next.

https://www.videogamer.com/features...-baldurs-gate-3-success-explains-skyrim-lead/

To be fair this is the Bethesda MO and not really surprising. They're doing their thing and they're, sadly, just getting worse at it.

 

[Drakortha]

Starfield with magic. Just thinking about it I already know I won't play it, making it the first Elder Scrolls game I have no interested in at release. Todd was already running low on good-will before he lied about Skyrim harkening back to Morrowind. But ultimately what he did with Fallout 76 killed any remaining hope I had for Bethesda Studio's to turn things around and make something competently again.

It actually wouldn't surprise me if we started seeing Disney appearing in TESIV due to Microsoft. Either through pre-order content or creation club content. I'm not even being purposely cynical, I really believe it's a possibility they'll go that low. But at the very least they'll lean heavily on mods and DLC again, which is so old and played out at this point. Nobody with a brain wants to mod your games, Todd. They want to mod good games.

 

[NecroLord]

If you were worried for a moment that Bethesda might learn something from their blunders, then worry no more. TES VI is to be even more simplified and casualized than Skyrim, and BG3 was "looking backwards":

Back in the 90s, Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls was a deep, numbers-heavy RPG that borrowed heavily from the genre’s basis in Dungeons and Dragons. Today, The Elder Scrolls still has complex elements, but the series has moved away from random dice rolls, attributes and other systems to focus on providing a more casual experience.


On the other hand, the RPG genre recently saw a new shift in the form of Baldur’s Gate 3, an RPG that looked back on the complexities of past titles to provide the best transition of Dungeons and Dragons from tabletop to monitor. In an interview with VideoGamer, Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith explained that Larian’s success is an “exception” to the last decade of gaming trends, but one that shows a shift in desire from gamers.

The Elder Scrolls had to change​

With almost 40 years of development experience, Nesmith started making games around the time of Dungeons and Dragons’ debut. Back then, it was common to attempt to adapt the complex nature of D&D into even the most basic games, but as gaming became more accepted in the mid-2000s, developers opted to tone down mechanical complexity to create a more casual entry point for millions of gamers. Famously, Skyrim abandoned a lot of systems from past Elder Scrolls titles, making an RPG that focused more on systems reactivity than stat-based appeal.

“[Gamers] didn’t want to have outrageously complex character sheets [in 2011]“
SKYRIM LEAD DESIGNER BRUCE NESMITH

As Nesmith explains, that decision came very early on with even the earliest version of Skyrim axing the attributes system last seen in Oblivion. Removing attributes in Skyrim was a “day one” decision, opting to slim things down to focus on the reactivity of the world. As the veteran Bethesda developer explains, “every game is made within the culture at the moment you’re working on it” and the culture at that point was no longer looking to replicate D&D.

The character creator screens of Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind fell out of fashion, but Bethesda used this opportunity to create its own form of RPG.
“In the days of Daggerfall, everybody was trying to replicate the tabletop experience, which means that you were rules heavy,” he said. “Your character description was large and, I would argue unwieldy, and as time moved forward, that was less and less of interest to the audience. They didn’t want to have outrageously complex character sheets, and I was actually one who aggressively pushed for streamlining.”


Now, gamers want that complexity back. In the era of video essays and “best build” guides, there is a trend for some of that more extensive character creation and stat-based gameplay to return. For Nesmith, Skyrim was a chance for Bethesda to make a title where the game got “out of its own way”, but a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 is the complete opposite.


“When you look at something like Baldur’s Gate 3, I think that’s a very different animal. They had a very specific charge. They were taking Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition and putting it onto a computer game. So it was intentionally looking backwards, intentionally seeing the old tabletop presentation with the die rolls and all of that. It was, you know, reflecting back to the good old days from the point of view of the people who used to play those kinds of old playing games back then or did now to give them that joy buzzer. So I think Baldur’s Gate 3 is actually an exception to that.”

Baldur’s Gate 3 won’t change Bethesda​

While Nesmith departed Bethesda back in 2021, moving onto smaller games and novels like Mischief Maker and Glory Seeker, he doesn’t see the studio moving back to the complexities found in games like Baldur’s Gate. Just like the studio will likely not be moving to Unreal Engine, the current state of depth seems perfectly suited to the company’s aims.


“I don’t think [Baldur’s Gate 3’s success] necessarily presages a complete change over back to more numbers and more fiddly character sheets and things like that,” Nesmith told us. “Whether or not the rest of the industry will follow suit, I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to say that, But I think that through Skyrim, Bethesda has wanted to have the game get out of its own way.


“You see that everywhere in Skyrim. Todd [Howard] is a big proponent of the interface vanishing if you’re not doing something that needs it to be visible. So all you see is the world. That’s it. You just see the world.”

“You feel vindicated [in its popularity], you do. The thing that you loved, that you saw value in, that a lot of the rest of the world did not.”
BRUCE NESMITH

For Bethesda, this mantra caused many things that millions of gamers love, but some gamers hate. The Magic System was simplified, but was made more reactive with things like igniting oil spills; attributes were gutted in favour of a simplified skill tree; combat relied less on stats and more on player action. While Baldur’s Gate 3 also has some of these more reactive elements, as Nesmith explains, it aims for a completely different experience.


However, gaming is now in a space where there’s a massive audience for both types of RPG. While many will compare the upcoming Elder Scrolls 6 and Baldur’s Gate 3, Nesmith is correct: they are two completely different beasts.

RPG players are finally vindicated​

Making RPGs through the Satanic Panic, Nesmith recalls a time where players had to be “careful who you told” that you played the now incredibly popular board games. As religious groups blamed murders and crimes on fabricated cults allegedly inspired by the tabletop game, playing D&D was a secret you had to protect.


“I was friends with [some] who thought that the game was a bad influence on children, who had religious objections to it, and so I did not tell them what I did,” Nesmith explained. “Other people that didn’t have those prejudices, I did tell them, but you know I had to be careful. These days, interestingly, it works the other way around.”


Nowadays, Dungeons and Dragons is incredibly popular with content creators roleplaying entire campaigns becoming its own industry, a big-budget feature-length movie releasing in cinemas and video game adaptations like Baldur’s Gate 3 becoming one of the best-selling games of all-time.

The Satanic Panic of the 1980s led many gamers to hide their love of Dungeons and Dragons as thousands were deemed cultists and criminals for playing the game.
“You feel vindicated [in its popularity], you do,” Nesmith told us. “The thing that you loved, that you saw value in, that a lot of the rest of the world did not, now the rest of the world is seeing the value in it. I haven’t been there since the literal beginning, I wasn’t playing with Gary Gygax when he was first coming up with this stuff, but I’ve been there since pretty early on. I’ve watched the whole transformation of gaming of all sorts, from being a backwater entertainment for geeks and nerds to being something that is considered to be commonplace and accepted.”


While The Elder Scrolls 6 may not return to dense character sheets and dice-roll combat, it’s a game that doesn’t exist without the decades of Dungeons & Dragons before it. However, as with any genre, Bethesda has moved to create its own sub-genre, millions of players adore it, and everyone is waiting to see what comes next.

https://www.videogamer.com/features...-baldurs-gate-3-success-explains-skyrim-lead/

"Today, the Elder Scrolls still has complex elements".
Wat?

 

[Konjad]

"Today, the Elder Scrolls still has complex elements".
Wat?

There are still some stats and variables. Too complex. Need to remove. Me click, me win.

 

[NecroLord]

"Today, the Elder Scrolls still has complex elements".
Wat?

There are still some stats and variables. Too complex. Need to remove. Me click, me win.

Also that "reactivity" part was hilarious.
Reactivity to what?
Npcs barely acknowledge the fact you've just saved Tamriel from being devoured by Alduin. Barely anything changes in the game world...

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

Is it possible to beat the stunning experience that was Starfield? Perhaps. I bet that we'll have a blast with TES6

 

[thesecret1]

"Today, the Elder Scrolls still has complex elements".
Wat?

There are still some stats and variables. Too complex. Need to remove. Me click, me win.

Also that "reactivity" part was hilarious.
Reactivity to what?
Npcs barely acknowledge the fact you've just saved Tamriel from being devoured by Alduin. Barely anything changes in the game world...

The article later mentions oil spills catching on fire if you cast a fire spell on them... Goddamn.

 

[Drakortha]

The article later mentions oil spills catching on fire if you cast a fire spell on them... Goddamn.

If you got the worlds best scientists together to study the genealogy of Skyrim they would discover that Skyrim was in fact the genesis of flammable oil spills in gaming, exposing Larian Studios for the hackfrauds they are.

 

[destinae vomitus]

The article later mentions oil spills catching on fire if you cast a fire spell on them... Goddamn.

Which is something that they just wholesale lifted from Bioshock, that game's plasmids were the main inspiration behind Skyrim's magic system. That is to say Bethesda looked at a 7th gen whack-a-mole FPS for inspiration for the spellcasting in their "high fantasy epic" because even 15+ years ago that's the sort of game they were into and wanted to be making. Nobody over there after Ken Rolston's departure had any experience/interest in designing actual RPGs, let alone complex mechanics of any sort.

“[Gamers] didn’t want to have outrageously complex character sheets [in 2011]“
SKYRIM LEAD DESIGNER BRUCE NESMITH

By "[Gamers]" I presume he means moronic mongoloids whose first "RPG" was Oblivion on their shiny new Xbox 360.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Can you blame them? Builds haven't mattered in TES games since, like, Daggerfall, or something. They barely mattered in Arena too. And as we all know progression is hilariously broken in Morrowind. From Oblivion forwards, they just focus on silly physics stuff (the only thing they kept from the Ultima influence)

 

[Lemming42]

Not much of what Nesmith says seems disagreeable to me, they're in a tough spot with TES VI because a lot of people will just expect/want Skyrim, but Skyrim also looks from today's perspective like a relic of an era where things had gotten too over-simplistic - it was the right game at the right time in 2011 but if you released it today people would probably find it pretty dull. For the first time in a long time we're in a position where tastes have shifted to the point where something akin to Daggerfall could be a big mainstream commercial success if done right, but they'd also piss off fans who want something closer to MW/Oblivion/Skyrim, especially the latter which is what most people probably expect when they play something with "The Elder Scrolls" written on it. On top of that is that first person action combat governed skills always sucks - it sucked in Arena, it sucked in Daggerfall, it sucked in Battlespire, and it somehow got worse by the time of Morrowind, and the best Oblivion could think to do was fuck everything up beyond belief, so the opportunities for TES to seize on the success of BG3 are pretty limited.

I think something Starfield doesn't get credit for is making skills more varied and more important than in a lot of recent Bethesda games. They even gate basic core mechanics behind skills, which is pretty ballsy. You can see the outline of how TES VI's character building might work there. The only huge misstep is the stupid "challenges" you have to complete before you're allowed to advance a skill.

I really hate this mindset that "changes are always forward and good".

I'm not sure Nesmith is saying that; he's just observing that there was a move away from simulating a tabletop experience over the last two decades because it was perceived to be unappealing to the mainstream, and that BG3 stands out for discarding that trend and achieving huge success, which suggests that the trend may be reversing.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

It's not just a trend when Civ 6 won back a lot of people by having it work more like a tabletop game than a strategy game. You could also add in the effect of card based games in the mix. Normies who game often love tabletop stuff. Jocks who only play Fifa, Cod or Madden are a dying breed.

 

[Lemming42]

Yeah, I think the reversal of the casualisation/simplification trend is here to stay; the late 2000s/early 2010s are gonna look like a weird abberation to people in the future.

 

[Child of Malkav]

Also that "reactivity" part was hilarious.
Reactivity to what?
Npcs barely acknowledge the fact you've just saved Tamriel from being devoured by Alduin. Barely anything changes in the game world...

So much this.
In Skyrim the PC should be considered the 10th divine by what you're accomplishing in game. Leader of every faction, dragon born that can freeze time and other dragon stuff, has all the spells and magic items and artifacts of deities, all the money in the world, can do the alchemy enchanting restoration loop to become basically immune to damage and cast magic for free, has all theoney and riches in the world etc.
You should become the god emperor of....everything. Command armies, the game becomes basically RTS at that point.

 

[thesecret1]

The casualization era was there because enormous masses of people got into gaming for the first time back then. Over the course of a decade, gaming went from a hobby for nerds into a mainstream phenomenon that virtually everyone engages in on some level. These masses had no prior gaming knowledge and thus nothing to carry over between games - you don't need to explain the concept of attributes and skills to someone who's played dozens of RPGs over the years, but to someone whose only gaming experience so far was Snake on the old Nokia, that seems autistically complex. We're talking people who go WOW when you tell them that they can walk around in 3D, and if they left click, they swing a sword.

Now that everyone's had over a decade to immerse himself in gaming, the number of such clueless retards is low, and the average normalfag desires more than just the absolute basics. Hence garbage like Starfield flopping. Had they released it in 2011 and made the core loop at least slightly less repetitive, we'd be looking at a megahit.

 

[Bulo]

Hoping the pendulum swings back the other way before the next FromSoft game releases

 

[NecroLord]

Hoping the pendulum swings back the other way before the next FromSoft game releases

Yet more SoulSlop?

 

[Bulo]

Hoping the pendulum swings back the other way before the next FromSoft game releases

Yet more SoulSlop?

I'm not as interested in another Souls game, though I do want another one like Sekiro

 

[Cryomancer]

Is it possible to beat the stunning experience that was Starfield? Perhaps. I bet that we'll have a blast with TES6

Just fire more competent people and hire more diversity hires. I'm sure that the next Bugthesda game will come with a much higher quality.

 

[thesecret1]

Is it possible to beat the stunning experience that was Starfield? Perhaps. I bet that we'll have a blast with TES6

In TES6, they will cater to the average Skyrim fan by changing the combat system. It will be 100% skill-based: the faster you mash LMB, the more damage you will deal.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Considering combat overhaul is always one of the most popular shit in TES modding I honestly don't know where this "we must make combat even more simpler" comes from. RPG Elements like last in Oblivion might not be that popular but combat in Oblivion and Skyrim both are so shit that people mod them.

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

Real gamers play on consoles with no mods though. PirateComputer plebs be stealin.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

To be fair this is the Bethesda MO and not really surprising. They're doing their thing and they're, sadly, just getting worse at it.

If Bethesda had continued doing the same thing as Morrowind, Starfield would have been a far better game. Instead, the hand-crafted Open World world was dropped in favor of procedurally-generated biomes, which might have as many as three varieties of alien fauna, and no real content unless you stumble upon a procedurally-generated quest to travel to a copy/pasted installation and fight the same spacesuit-wearing human enemies you encounter throughout the game. Meanwhile, RPG elements were gutted even further in favor of "looter-shooter" gameplay. Since fast travel is used to automatically move from world to world or system to system, the only actual content in space is the spaceship combat, which is worse than that accomplished in Spaceborne (2020), a game created by a single person.

Granted, even allowing for these shifts to eliminate the Open World and replace RPG mechanics with "looter-shooter" mechanics, while not making use of space itself, the quality of output from Bethesda Softworks has deteriorated, mirroring the personnel employed there.