Why aren't there more Skyrim clones?

[SlamDunk]

Because no-one wants to clone shit.

 

[Humbaba]

Because Ubisoft already has Farcry and indies do not have the money.

 

[Robotigan]

A lot of people, including some veteran Codexers surprisingly, don't appreciate what aspects of game development are actually difficult to program. Programming a tree to handle the state of a branching quest or dialogue conversation isn't all that hard. A 2nd-year CompSci student can create an engine for that. Adding skills and skill checks is also easy, it's literally just adding a variable and then using it as a scalar in physics calculations or a simple if/else conditional. This is why some older games had a skill for everything under the sun. It takes all of 10 minutes to add a skill for nose-picking. But you could clearly tell their ambition outpaced their resources because that skill would only be used in like 3 places throughout the game. The hard part is implementing that skill in a way that feels satisfying and meaningful.

Also, in general player freedom is a huge effort because it vastly increases the possible interactions and outcomes one needs to design/test for. In many games, if a weapon has a broken interaction with a certain enemy, an easy way to remediate that is to make sure the player can't bring that weapon into the level with that enemy. But that's not very satisfying for the player. Bethesda's hallmark is player freedom and that means the player can have almost any quest in any state with any array of items/abilities/followers at any time. It also means there's a large breadth of interactions where exceptions can't easily be hidden (why unkillable NPCs are so jarring). Like in a game that does everything through optional menus you can just arbitrarily decide where you will or won't allow the player to attempt a pickpocket by presenting that option or not. In a Bethesda game everyone has an inventory that is exposed to the player at all times.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

The good parts of Twitcher 3 have nothing to do with the "open world" aspect though. Comparing it to the swill Bethesda makes isn't even appropriate but some people do it anyway.

Buit that's not the issue. I think the problem here is that modern devs tend to think in terms of "mechanics" only and can't see the bigger picture. They see people shoot at animals with arrows in a Bethesda game and they think they have to "copy" that mechanic without understanding why that shit is in there. They don't see that the appeal of Skyrim is the simulationist, LARPing aspect of it. Ubishit games are a primary example of what i'm talking about. Those games are nothing but an assortment of formulae and nothing else. I remember watching my nephew play Far Cry 5 and at no point it felt like he was immersed in the world. It's like he was doing things just to fill up a checkbox.

When you are that contrained by the mechanics you are essentially locked in a linear path whether the game is "open world" or not.

And my theory as to why nobody tried to tap into the same market of Skyrim is that modern gaming companies just don't get what Skyrim is, or where it comes from. Bethesda may be bad at what they do but they are the only ones doing it. That's just damn bizzare, isn't it?

It'd say Red Dead Redemption 2 does a lot of what people like about Bethesda games better than Bethesda games. It's funny because that game is like two totally different philosophies on games smashed together. There's the ultra narrow "do not deviate from the set path" story stuff in RDR2...which sucks. And than there's this ultra simulationist aspect where you can go out and hunt, you can actually track animals without going into tracking "Hunter Vision" mode, when you skin the animal you're going to get this big animal skinning animation with it, and then you've got to put the animal on the back of your horse an haul it to some town or city to get the most out of it; there's other stuff related to this too, like how your inventory works on your horse, needing to dress for the weather, and (kind of) needing to camp if you're staying out for long periods of time. I've got a friend who didn't play video games at all, and it was interesting watching him play that game because the aspect of the game he was interested in was stuff like hunting. Before that one of the few times I'd ever seen him play a video game was years before when I went to the college he was going to and him and his roommate were fucking around with Far Cry 2.

But then Rockstar games are even bigger Skyrim, so they have no reason to even think about going after what Betheada does unless someone their just really wishes to do something like a fantasy or sci-fi game.

Funnily I'd also say Bethesda doesn't even see the appeal of their own games. I mean, I think Fallout 76 kind of made that really clear. But even beyond that, they've never really designed one of their games around what people like about them. The appeal is much the same as GTA3, (and it's probably little surprised Elder Scrolls only really catches on post GTA3 with Morrowind) it's the sandbox, it's going anywhere and doing anything, and seeing how the world reacts to that. Unlike Rockstar games however nobody really gives a shit about the story in Bethesda games, it's why for almost 20 years now when people talk about Elder Scrolls they talk about the side quest being better than the main quest. So why even have a main quest? Why not just present a world for you to fuck around in, factions and systems for you to bounce off of, and that basically be it. Design Elder Scrolls in a way to where the side activities people like most, the main things people like, are actually the main driving force behind someone's playthrough. Like I bet the audience would be more into an Elder Scrolls where, once you're out of prison, if you wanted to do something like join a Gladiatorial circuit, you could just do that and travel around from city to city, rising in the ranks, making money, build a house, and start your own gladiatorial stable with your winnings if you wish...or just fight endless until you're dead. You could have a whole game related to nothing but fighting in arenas if you want, but it's not some little side mission, it could just be your whole game if that's what you wanted it to be and someone else that wanted to do something else could have a totally different experience. The smart way to design Elder Scrolls to me would be to make it so the shit people LARP doesn't have to be some weird fucking LARPing thing because the mechanics actually facilitate those people that want to play at being a merchant or whatever.

 

[Robotigan]

Funnily I'd also say Bethesda doesn't even see the appeal of their own games. I mean, I think Fallout 76 kind of made that really clear.

I mean, 76 has to trim down a lot of the simulationist stuff because it's an MMO so every problem is compounded across many players. E.g. you can't have systems as dynamic because one player could fuck up the game state for everyone else. I think 76 was made because of two things: Zenimax needed more dependable revenue stream and fans had been asking for a Bethesda game they could play with their friends for a long time.

I think Bethesda understands why their games are enjoyed better than most Codexians, honestly. Of course people plays Bethesda games for the sandbox, that's why they added the settlement system. But reading the official Codex Fallout 4 review you definitely don't get that impression. It continually dismisses the sandbox elements and storyfags the whole way through.

 

[Bad Sector]

My point was picking up every cup is a novelty nobody gives a shit about anymore. The novelty is no longer novel, so it's not something anyone thinking about making some take on Elder Scrolls would need to worry about because you don't even need it in the game.

Well, if you mean it not in that "picking up every cup doesn't matter for a Skyrim clone" but in that "people do not think picking up every cup matters, which includes developers so they do not bother to implement all that is necessary to pick up every cut, thus ending up with systems that cannot clone Skyrim even if they wanted", then yeah sure, i'd agree with that :-P

I've never worked on games, but I am a programmer. I've heard Bethesda's record system is somewhat unique because many games have object data grouped into flat files or some immutable list. I can imagine hash-checking for an object id in a list is just a wee bit faster than checking an object property. But the problem this presents is that when someone wants to add a new weapon, they must modify the weapons list and that creates conflicts when several modded weapons are all trying to write themselves to the weapons list without knowing about the others. However Bethesda's record system is engineered makes it super stable even under heavy modification.

Bethesda's record system isn't anything unique, you can open their editor and play around with it a bit. Everything it does can be done with files in a directory, their mod support is basically "plugins" simply add or override records in the base game or previously loaded plugins, which is essentially the same as (in a very simplified yet workable approach):

FILE* open_resource(const char* path)
{
    int i;
    FILE* f;
    for (i=mod_count - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
        chdir(mod_path[i]);
        f = fopen(path, "rb");
        if (f) return f;
    }
    return NULL;
}

That's it, during startup fill "mod_path" and "mod_count" with the full paths to directories that contain the base data at index 0 and the mod data in the rest and you have pretty much the same flexibility as Bethesda's database system in handling mods. Of course you also need to make sure you only store information about a single thing (weapon, spell, map, whatever) into each resource file, but this would be the same as not storing info for more than one thing in a database record. The issue other games have is doing exactly that latter.

 

[tritosine2k]

I think people massively underestimate how much work would go into a first-person RPG, even with modern technology and allowing for a moderate level of jank.

I mean, yeah I can probably load up a kit on Unity and make one in a few months, but it'll be hot garbage.

It's hopelessly stuck as a genre & kind of gave way to MP obsession. The more I think about it the less suprising F76 came out the way it did. Yet they only admitted they can't fix companions:

"The following part, right now, they're basically going to be in your camp. Or in towns. We have technical limitations there, frankly… Obviously, if I kill [an NPC] in the game, other people need to be able to interact with that NPC, so they will be in closed areas, frankly, and other areas where we can control the environment better than an exterior."

 

[tritosine2k]

So I thought about this for a long while and found some "acceleration structure" that should handle NPC-s better than 2D (bad) navmesh or recast (voxels, screams COARSE)
https://recastnav.com/

The walkable areas described by the voxel grid are then divided into sets of 2D polygonal regions.

(yeah right...)
It's kinda critical to compress such acceleration structure. That's necessarily slow. So it has to be either asynchronous / offline or server side. Bonus point if it can be reused for graphics or weather. I think it's doable but server side is infinitely preferable. Will see if I get ahead with my other project this year I spent a lot of time on lately that'd provide some heavy lifting for this.

 

[tritosine2k]

Mebrilia the Viera Queen
Now this is an innovative mod unlike soulslike barrel rolls:



I'm thinking of fixing the RPG sandbox. I think FO4 gets quite a few things quite right. Interiors are AWESOME:

FO4 interior quality is all over the place. When it's right loading screen is totally worth it. When it's bad you'd wish it was just semi interior.

I think this walking sim stuff is preferable to path of exile if NPC's would handle themselves (way) better.