• 0 Posts
  • 73 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle




  • Last time I’ll respond to you since it seems you’re a Bethesda fanboy - or at least a very ardent defender.

    I think you overestimate how many people actually install or care about mods. Many people just seems to like what Bethesda does.

    Then why did Beth go out of their way to include mod support for consoles for Skyrim and Fallout 4, as well as announce mod support for console versions of Starfield? Plus people were clamoring for mods on console versions of their games even going back as far as Morrowind - but their games back then were more complete, so you are correct in that more people were okay with not having mods because at least the games were decent enough.

    Oblivion was a smash hit on Xbox without mods. Since that the main sellers seems to be the console versions.

    During 2006? Yeah, you’re correct - but interesting you’re bringing up Oblivion instead of Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and even Starfield. Y’know, the games that have been pretty devoid of any worthwhile vanilla content.


  • Two things: 1) You’re making it sound like swapping engines is incredibly easy (it’s not, and you have to train staff on how to utilize it from the ground up and that can take a while), and 2) you’re probably right on why they keep using CE, and the sad reality is that Bethesda absolutely intentionally designs uncooked barebones games because they realized they can just have the fandom make actual interesting content, or QoL changes. They also know that Creation Gamebryo Engine does limit them a lot to what they can do, but rather than going through the cost and time of changing over engines, they just let the fandom create the script extenders that are available for literally every single game of theirs since Morrowind so modders can literally do things the base game can’t let them do.

    So this is more of a case where the craftsman has shoddy tools, but they don’t care because they’ll churn out a piece-of-crap and have their audience improve it for them for free. And then the craftsman will have the gall to try and get a cut of the audience’s work somehow.



  • Actually, you can argue that they are still limited by what the engine can do - which, in turn, means it affects game design due to the fact they might want to implement an idea, but either they would need a hacky way to do it (like trains in Fallout 3 being a fucking equippable hat with an NPC running underneath the map, which is probably why their Fallout games don’t have drivable vehicles) or simply cannot due to technical limitations of the engine.

    This is like saying a good wood carver can still be good if they have shoddy tools, when the reality is that a good craftsman is only limited by the quality of tools they have. If I can’t fully realize my wood carving because my knife is too blunt and do the best I could with what I have for an inferior design, is that my fault or the tool’s fault?


  • Bruh, TES games are button mashers if anything. Dark Souls and any other related games has got TES games beat by lightyears in that department.

    TES lore, on the other hand, is just as interesting as Dark Souls lore for different reasons - mainly how wacky and weird the stuff Kirkbride wrote for Morrowind and Oblivion, like the fact gameplay mechanics like saving and loading, console commands, and even mods are legitimately canon thanks to CHIM, or the factoid that Pelinal Whitestrake might have been a time-travelling gay cyborg depending on how you interpret his descriptions. And who can forget that Vivec, a living god, has a spear that is implied to be the penis of Molag Bal after Vivec gave him a blowjob and bit his dick off. Then you got shit with Lorkhan, the Dreamsleeve, and of course Talos being 3 different people at the same time.




  • You say that as if any of those games or series are truly original:

    Fortnite

    Fortnite just copied other survival games like Rust and Ark. Epic put their own spin on it by combining it with a battle royale - sorry, with a PUBG game mode.

    Zelda

    If you’re talking BoTW and ToTK, you can argue they just copied other open-world games like The Elder Scrolls and Far Cry and added a Zelda flair. Weapon degradation was even present in the older TES games.

    Pokemon

    Pokemon is just a kid-friendly version of the Shin Megami Tensei games without the fusion mechanic. Some of the Gen 1 Pokemon designs were also more or less lifted straight from Dragon Quest.

    Minecraft

    It was more or less virtual Legos when it first came out, and the survival mechanics gave it a unique spin.

    So if you really wanted to, you can reduce all of the games you mentioned into their influences and what they straight-up copied. Funny thing is, these are all very well-received games because their core gameplay mechanics and designs were very good, and they added their own spin on things. Copying others isn’t a bad thing so long as you’re either iterating on it to improve it or to do something different to it somehow.