metaphorset

You actually don't need to be able to to write better stories. It's a common misconception that you are only allowed to criticize things that you can do better. Normally it's enough to know that there is better storytelling in games out there - and not only in any games but in open world games, too (that's a big difference). About the coding - I doubt that you've seen all of it, since there is no source code available for us to review. Otherwise there would probably tons of people working on improving the old engines (also getting rid of some of the awful core mechanics) and we would all be playing BGS games instead of complaining. Another misconception is that people hate something because they criticise it. I do, in fact, love some aspects of their games. Bethesda Game Studios is still No. 1 when it comes to worlds that I want to explore. There is good lore in the games (though poorly fleshed out), the landscapes are beautiful, even if you don't slap a ton of mods on them but it all falls flat on the face once you start interacting with NPCs, dare to think about correlations or deeper meaining or do the fifth side quest with a boring story and three stages.

I almost never had any problem with Dogmeat and sneaking. I have no mods for him (or any other Companions because their annoyances can't be removed by any mod) and he does pretty fine in sneak mode. When my char is in walking or running mode, Dogmeat runs ahead. As soon as I enter sneak mode, he goes behind me. That's quite an improvement to Dogmeat 3, I'd say. The only thing that really bugs me is when you tell him to stay and he gets attacked. He won't fight back or flee. Just stays there, whimpering, until he goes down.

Better storytelling, better characters, better role playing elements. The biggest problems were the limited timeframe for development, the broken game engine and the fact that they had only a handful of people working for QA. To be fair, I must admit that it helps quite a lot, that the Obsidian People knew exactly what kind of game they actually wanted to create. And they sticked to the plan. Bethesda's idea on the other hand... "See that mountain over there?..." Fallout 3 is a bad shooter with some rpg elements. Fallout 4 is... um... a decent shooter with rpg elements? A settlement building simulation with micromanagement? A (bad) physics simulation where you could build barely functioning Rube-Goldberg machines? Who knows...

Decent, yes. But still not good. It really struck me in early 2012, when I still wasn't able to enter Whiterun due to a bug and even I as a experienced BGS Games Player couldn't bother with cheating my way through anymore. I should be so fair to mention that I didn't have any game breaking bugs with any of their previous games before. While waiting for the next patch I was looking for something to play and for whatever reason chose to buy "The Witcher - Enhanced Edition". It felt quite similar to my first Morrowind experience back in 2002. The combat system was atrocious to get into, but the story was good enough to keep me going. It even stopped me from checking for Skyrim Updates until I finished the game (weeks later, btw. since I had a job and a life going on). Since then I played all three Witcher games and that raised my bar quite a bit. Needless to say that BGS won't impress me with anything if their next TES and FO games aren't at least at a "Hearts of Stone" level regarding the story and the character depth. So, the story telling is not the only problem I had with Skyrim. Combat was still bad, there were so many bugs, so many problems with narrative design and once you realize that you actually don't play Skyrim but a combination of Frostfall, iNeed, Wet&Cold and maybe half a dozen other mods to keep you entertained you realize that there is a fundamental problem with that "game". Well, since they make 80% of the money due to console sales, it's no wonder they "optimize" the games for that kind of audience.

At some point, most possibly late at night or very early in the morning right after getting up, I found myself asking the same questions. But then I remembered all those other BGS games that came after Morrowind and everything started to make perfect sense again. You see, the most important rule for bad storytelling demands that you must have a rough framework and then you absolutely need to fill in the gaps with the least amount of effort possible. You have to ensure that in the end nothing fits together neatly, no matter what theory the audience comes up with. Kinda like that bird feeder some of us built in first grade with the help of our manually untalented dad, only with words. Bad story telling in games demands furthermore, that there are different groups working on different parts of the main and side quests, the narrative design and so on and they all should have little to no contact to each other. You should also give them the bare minimum of information they need to complete their task. For example, instead of "make a tree for a post-apocalyptic world" you tell them "make a burnt tree". That even works great with voice actors, although it might come out as actually quite good (Kellogg). Take all of this in account and it will answer all of the questions about things that don't make sense in every BGS game in the past (except Morrowind), present and future.

Yeah, I agree - in retrospect Moira was a million times better than Preston. Her integration into the game lore is quite good, compared to Preston's and I liked her for that. Back then many people didn't seem to like Moira because she essentially is a McGuffin NPC with the sole purpose of generating map markers. Still better than the Skyrim guards who would randomly drop remarks about places you shouldn't visit because of some random danger. Even worse, they start talking and you'd still get a map marker even if you don't stop and listen to their ramblings... Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that BGS seems to ramp up their favourite "game" with every new title. I honestly expect to see even more shallow NPCs and story telling in the next title. Oh, and maybe they make my worst nightmare come true and give us a forced companion that we have to drag with us throughout the whole game Bioshock Infinite style (only worse, because Bethesda) for even more handholding? I mean - according to the amount of companion mods on the nexus, people really seem to like them, right?

Reading all the Preston threads here always makes me wonder... BGS doesn't seem to be very good at getting hints. In Morrowind we had Fargoth, in Oblivion the adoring fan, in Fallout 3 Moira and Sticky, in Skyrim they gave us Heimskr, Nazeem, Jarl Ballin's brats and the arrow-to-the-knee guards and in Fallout 4 they gifted us Preston and the whole Brady bunch from the Museum. At some point all of them (minus Sturges) have become memes. Somebody needs to tell them that it's not necessarily a good thing if npcs become memes, because in 9 out of 10 cases they do so because they annoy the crap out of people.

Well... besides ADA he's still my favourite carry load expansion. I don't mind the whining or panting because I lived with dogs for 40 years and the playful ones used to make the same noises. However, he's not judgemental and he doesn't complain when I pick up junk.

Oh well... The main problem - not only with Fallout 4 but also Skyrim - is that the BGS people either have no clue what type of game they actually want to make or they are trying so desperately to please everybody and their Mum that they completely miss the goal. Personally I believe the latter and I also believe that the money people aka Zenimax have too much influence on the games. Fallout 4 is a physics sandbox settlement building simulator with micromanagement, microtransactions, FPS as well as 3rd person shooter and platformer elements, carefully seasoned with rpg-like story bits and a millenial-friendly dressup option that also satisfies crossdressing tendencies (regarding the rest of the mess I'm voting this as a good thing). Oh, you also can have carry load expansions (some people like to call them companions). Besides the post-nuclear theme, Fallout 4 is not only no "authentic" Fallout game, it actually cannot be compared to any other game out there, because it tries too hard to be all of them. It basically is the equivalent to one of the menus that are served in a cheap retirement home. They try so hard to match everybody's taste, so all that's left in the end is a bland mess.

This must be what you looking for http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/62688/ Thanks! That's exactly the mod I was looking for. I already feared that it's gone for some reason

Hey there, I am looking for a mod that added three highly unique characters to Skyrim. You could find them in the Drunken Huntsman. There was a strange guy with a grotesquely swollen belly, a granny in Daedric Armor and another guy with quite a unique look. You could hire them as followers. I browsed the npc and followers section but had to stop because all of these over-exaggerated FF-like characters made me gag. Does anyone remember the name of the mod I'm talking about? Thanks

I haven't played Fallout 4 since right before the CC update debacle so I'm still on version 1.9.4 (also have a backup of the complete folder laying around). Since Steam is nagging me all the time about pending updates whenever I want to download other games, I thought I'd ask around if it's really worth the hassle. - Is the update worth it for some reason? - Are there any new interesting things in f4se I would miss if I didn't update? - Any interesting and exciting mods that rely on the latest f4se? - Does Bethesda still think they have the right to dump unwanted crap on my ssd? Thanks in advance

Claims? Yes. Baseless? Not at all. I know, it's a modern thing to ignore every development and predict the possible outcome. Nevertheless - it worked in the past and it's going to work in any given future. Why? Because science proves it. Oh well, I know... it's also a modern thing to deny scientific methods because of... reasons. And of course we do not talk about "a 180", because right now there is only "a 90" left for them to do to be exactly there where I predict them to be. Anyway, time will tell.

No, they aren't really that much extraordinary. It's just that I am getting quite good at predicting things by observing past and present developments. Sometimes things like this come with age. You are more reluctant to believe pretty words just because they sound good and flatter your soul. Being over 50 should have at least some advantages, right? Anyway, it doesn't matter that much what Bethesda people say. Good Guy Todd might really believe in what he says about the modding community and how dedicated the fans are to the franchises and that they would be much smaller as a company if it were any different and that he's grateful and all that stuff... In the end it's Zenimax and the shareholders that run the show and if they tell him to jump, he doesn't even ask "how high", because he knows the answer already. About the experience thing... I wouldn't count too much on that. But then, every little bit might help and beggars can't be choosers, right? I am absolutely not a big fan of ddproductions83 and his antics (although I understand that passion sometimes comes with an attitude), but right now he is more of a game developer than he would be if things were different and he would have decided to join the "Club". Why? Because he has a finished game out there on Steam. It might not be the best game ever, but according to what experienced people ("Extra Credits" for example) say, it's the best first step one can take into the industry.

That one made me giggle quite a bit. :laugh: Again, if talented modders are treated like professional game developers (whatever that means... :dry: ) and get paid by them for whatever fits into the new scheme, I don't have any problem with it - as long as these modders are aware of that the ultimate outcome of their efforts (and a possibly resulting success for the microtransaction club) is going to change the whole idea of modding. There will be a time when there are no mods for new Bethesda titles on the nexus anymore, because the nexus would be in direct competition with the company's business model. This can (and is going to) be easily achieved by introducing a DRM system. And there are couple of other things that could be done to get a homogeneous mod variety for all platforms - aka no more console fanbois raging over PC elitist modding community. Step 1: No steam achievements for modded games. "Oh well, steam achievements - who cares!" Yeah, right. How about getting VAC-banned, then? It's the idea and all the possibilities behind it that counts. Step 2: Prevent dll injection. No dll injection -> no script extender -> no advanced modding. And also no post processing like ENB or SweetFX. Step 3: Abandon Steam. Why? Because of teh moneys. The sweet 30% Steam eats up for every copy that gets sold. Enter "Bethesda.net" including a nice little launcher that needs a login. Combine it with Step 1 and 2. Oh, and it also helps with keeping the bad reviews at bay -> mo' of teh moneys, YAY!

@nightscrawl - yes, of course there are many mods that take ingame assets, and some of them are even just vanilla assets. Furthermore, this was Bethesda's original intention, when they released the first construction set back in 2002. Regarding theft within the community, this goes way back before the Steam "paid mods" thing. It happened in the early days of the nexus and even before, when there was no nexusmods at all and mods where scattered all around the internet across many of the long defunct free hosting sites. People would repackage assets or even whole mods from others with their own readme files and some went even so far to warn "thieves" about the consequences. Compared to that, it's far more less of a problem today. Well, as long as it sounds logical to you... No, it's really not that complicated. Whoever runs the show there does not give a great deal about mods or the quality of mods, nor do they really care if the author has done all the work by themself. The two things they do care a great deal about are a) legal issues (aka not getting sued by competitors ) and b) making money. Just look at the recent history of bethesda.net and how they dealt with the early mod thefts by some real console peasants and their insults and mockery towards the original authors. The only official reaction was "Oh yeah, right. We do something against it as soon as you take legal action". The microtransaction club is going to stay, that's for sure. But you are not going to like its further development (as long as you like to have real mods instead of horse armor, that is). More control does not equal better mods. And never ever in history it stood for more freedom or more creativity. The new .esl format speaks volumes and it clearly shows what's going to happen in the future.

I don't have any objections here. But then it all leads back to criticism - or to what some people imagine it to be. It's not only THIS community or gamer communities that suffer from it. It's pretty much every community and especially every online community - FOSS communities included. That is exactly what I meant by "torch and pitchfork wielding outrage culture". It has become a socially accepted cultural movement to be outraged, whether there's a reason for it or not. It would be a lie to claim that it's hard to reason with outrage culture people. It's just downright impossible. You can't change them and you won't. Sure, you can try, but it takes away precious time and drains energy that could be put to better use. The good news is that such cultural phenomenons tend to die out once the majority realizes, how stupid they are. I don't know chesko's thoughts about the whole thing. But the fact that he's still around and still works on Last Seed tells me that he's over it to at least some degree. That's surely the case. But there are also people who value their contributions way above everyone else's contributions. This also makes it easier to take things for granted. It's pretty much the result of the fact that "the Internet" was originally never planned as a place of competition and commerce. It was intended to be a platform for sharing knowledge, so all people around the world could benefit from it and get smarter. Well, we surely missed that spot...

Here's my two cents (not as a mod author but instead as somebody who participates in free and open software development since 1995). Paid mods aren't a bad thing when done right. That would be pretty much everything that needs to be said about that topic, but the catch lies in the "when done right" part. It's simply not possible by Bethesda's rules, and they clearly state that nobody but them are allowed to sell mods. Setting up accounts at paypal or patreon would work, as long as it says "support the artist" and not "buy the mod". In the end it's still a voluntary act so if you really want to break it down by the formula, there is still no true money per point value. Bethesda's first attempt at generating money over steam was a half-hearted attempt that was clearly meant to test the community's reaction and it lead to an overwhelming bad result. And of course some people tried the easy route and vented their fury over the mod authors, because this is what peasants do in the modern age of torch and pitchfork wielding outrage culture ("They don't want to talk, they don't want to reason, they just want change!"). As stated above, I participate in and around the development of free and open software for over 20 years now. I could pretty much go through the whole latin alphabet and name at least one project to each letter in which I participated somehow. Writing documentations, finding bugs, fixing bugs, proposing useful functions, contributing new code, initiating new projects,... you name it - I did it. So, where's my gd m-effing money! And I clearly would not have done it, if I didn't want to do it or couldn't find any value in it for myself. Here's the thing: As soon as you put something or even just yourself out there (it really doesn't matter what or if you get paid for it) you are exposed to criticism. For everything you think it's right, there is at least one person who doesn't agree. You can either deal with it or you can't. If you want to do something, do it. (jeez, we are going to quote the little green guy here, aren't we...) But don't expect everybody to be happy about it. If chesko decides that he wants to participate in the microtransaction club, it's his decision and his alone. He's a great guy, a great modder and for me his mods helped changing Skyrim from a bland mess into a memorable experience. Personally I think he deserves all the money he makes and I hope he gets the chance to make a living out of what he enjoys. But it clearly does not mean that I have to like the microtransaction club or thank Bethesda/Zenimax for its existence. Because in the end, whether you, me or the rest of us like it or not: The Creation Club is going to change some things. It's already happening, since we all can pretty much agree on the topic that we really should quit comparing the value of a helmet or a weapon to what we got for the five bucks we paid for Hearthfire. To put it clear: Five Dollar DLCs are history and we're back at horse armor level.

There are quite a few possibilities for why it starts bugging you now. I don't know how old you are but normally people tend to raise their expectations and standards when they get older. And then of course there's also the possibility that you've played some games with better story telling between Oldrim and SSE. Personally I was never fond of Bethesda's story telling. Being 50 and having read quite a lot of good books in my live surely doesn't help to change that. In the past (pre Skyrim days) it was easier for me to dismiss, because there was always the possibility that technical limitations go hand in hand with shallow story telling and I really had high hopes for Skyrim. It's not only the Dawnguard opening quest, the bad story telling already starts with the opening scene of the main quest. Whether it's books, tv series, movies or games, all of them have the same problem to start with. You can't tell a story without some sort of McGuffin. The challenge is to disguise it in such a way that the reader/watcher/player becomes emotionally attached and involved in it as quickly as possible. For me, the real bummer was when I finally managed to enter Dragonsreach without CTD and someone told me that for whatever reason I was the guy to get some old stone plate from a Barrow. I followed the thread for a while, until I got bored after The Throat of the World and the fifth dragon attack on my way down (overusing "the epic moment" is a bad thing). Then I discovered Frostfall and spent about a week every day at least three hours (real life time) with surviving, camping, hunting, fishing, wandering the land, finding treasures, avoiding cities and annoying npcs as best as possible. After that the whole game changed for me from "Skyrim - the epic story of the Dragon Born" to "Survival in the north, fighting Dragons and occasionally doing annoying tasks for weird people".

Well, Gopher has a slowly but steadily growing fanbase. For every game he plays you find some comments in the comment section where new people post that they like his playstyle. Many of them have watched other youtubers' channels before and commented about how they would rush through a game. In any case, it's good that he has "only" 445 000 subs, because these people like quality over quantity. The whole Microsoft Openworld prediction is hilarious, because it proves once again, that they are quite oblivious about what people want - not only with their console customers. But that's another story... Take a random industry and you will find two kinds of people. There are the ones who create stuff and then there are the others who want to make as much money as possible out of it. That's why we rarely see a movie in the cinemas that hasn't been "reworked" by some money people (hey, they can sell the Director's cut later, anyway) and we rarely see AAA Games that don't have cut content or some other "creative" way to produce more money than they deserve. As for Skyrim, it's quite easy to see how rushed the game has been in some cases, while in other cases there were redesigns that feel quite forced. It's not only the cut content that got reactivated by the Cutting Room Floor, there are tons of Indications that it wasn't the game Bethesda wanted to create. Backdoors to the College of Winterhold and also to Riften jail (which at one point might have been even connected to the Ratways) to indicate that they originally didn't intend to involve the Mages and the Thieves into the main quest. These two don't feel like they were made by anyone who has any idea about what the RP in RPG stands for. It almost seems like some of the money people felt that there is too less of content for the main quest for the people who want to "plough through three other games this month", so they incorporated all the main guilds in some far-fetched way to "show all the cool places we created" they otherwise might not see (there's an interview with Good Guy Todd somewhere containing the "cool places" part). As for "cheaper development": There is no way AAA gaming development especially in the RPG segment will get cheaper ever again by just using technical measures. Even if they would use the most advanced tools and start involving some of the highly talented 3D artists China has to offer, Companies are stuck with the errors of the past. Evolving graphics towards realism without evolving the gameplay possibilities first is one of them. Anyway, going back to the beginning and the original question: I believe that TES and Fallout games are about to change fundamentally and not only in a good way. The modding possibilities might get limited to what's possible on consoles, they might even introduce some sort of DRM to prevent mods from other sources than the microtransaction club. This means on the other side, that they wouldn't be able to rely on the community to fix the bugs anymore. The voiced protagonist will stay, as well as the bad pseudo industry standard for choosing dialogue options. We definitely won't see any improvement in the UI sector and the skill tree in the next TES game might not even be tied to the birth signs anymore. Microtransactions will be amped up, because they are "industry standard" as well as the "games cost 60 Dollars" thing. DLCs might become more expensive, because paying 8 Dollars for some armor and maybe an additional weapon clearly says so, if you compare it to the the original 5 Dollars of Hearthfire and its value. Bethesda games might even vanish from Steam because, you know, money. This might also help to keep the raging fans and their bad reviews at bay, if they decide to introduce even more BS. Besides... Fallout 4 already requires some obscure client software that needs to be launched and logged into for being able to play the game. Sounds a little bit like Origin to me...

@Mudran - I never said that console gamers don't like open world RPG games, only that the majority has a different approach on them. As I said, go watch any of the Top 10 Console gamer youtubers and compare them and their play styles to someone like Gopher. They don't give any attention to Books, terminal entries or any other details in the games. If it doesn't produce a new entry in the quest log it's not worth to spend a second on it. Yet they won't stop ranting about how much "deep lore" Dark Souls has. In the end it's all about how modern entertainment works. "Books" like Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey become bestsellers - hey, great! Let's make some movie adaptations! The same goes for games. Look at what "Gaming Journalists" tend to write these days. "Wow, the Final Crapfest 15 world map is ten times bigger than Skyrim! Must be a heck of a great game then!" and "Oh noes, the Fallout 4 map is smaller in size and the game has less quests than Skyrim, so it might be not as good!". Quality is measured by sizes and the most important size is sales, the better it sells, the better it must be, right? Therefore - don't try something new and take out what casual gamers complain about or tend to ignore anyway. Boom! 85% on Metacritic - YAY! So yes, in the end game development will get cheaper - or at least not more expensive - if you cut out "unnecessary" content or even good content and sell it later as dlc. It might also get faster if you hire more employees who demand less money, because working in the game industry is such a great joy.

@Mudran - as I wrote in another thread already: The old fans aren't important. They will either stay or leave and the quality of a game is only one reason for that. I am 50 years old and can afford the luxury of being passionate about gaming. Not because I'm rich and more due to some unfortunate health reasons. The passionate 50 yr old gamers don't show up in any statistics of any game company out there, because there are very few of us. Compared to other Studios/Distributors with big franchises, Bethesda/Zenimax has time on their side. Imagine what happens if Ubisoft would introduce major changes to the next installment of Assassins Creed that would make the game less appealing to "old" fans. They release a new title at least every two years or so thus they might loose a big chunk of their entire fanbase. TES on the other hand... It took five years from Oblivion to Skyrim. That's a long time for a complete new fanbase to grow. The average 6 year old console gamer on sugar rush surely won't remember, right? (Insert Skyrim 2 meme here...) @CosmicArrow - about the gaming industry treading dangerous ground because of price tags... well, I don't think so. At least not entirely. Compare a game like Fallout 4 to a new Tomb Raider title, take the average play time an average player spends in it, then take the average price for a cinema ticket and you know that there are still enough people out there who are more than willing to spend maybe even 150 Dollar/Euro/Whatever for an AAA title + all dlcs. And quite a few of them are even happy to spend even money on such ridiculous things like "rare" CSGO skins. About 80% of the profit from Skyrim and Fallout 4 was due to console sales. If you have the guts, go watch some of the longplays on youtube that were uploaded by the biggest Console gamers there and you know exactly where the priority for future gaming titles lies. Less reading, less exploring, more map markers, more micro transactions - with the occasional so-called "hard" game for which gaming journalists introduced the term "souls like". Recently I visited some gaming forum and stumbled over a thread where someone asked about how much time he would have to spend for Fallout New Vegas + DLCs. The reason he gave for the question was that he was somewhat in a hurry and needed "to plough through some other games this month". This might not be the "average gamer" but allow me one question: How does a person like him even exist?

@Mudran, creating a graphic overlay for creation kit would fix exactly nothing, as long as the underlying tech isn't fixed. Even if the underlying tech would be fixed, creating "easy modes" is everything else but trivial. I also totally disagree with "easy modes" for advanced technology in general. They tend to result in mediocre outcomes at best more often than not. In the end nobody would be truly happy. I've had this whole discussion for example within the Blender community many many times. As for the story-driven game thing... Bethesda games were far away from that. Not anymore, they are. Skyrim as well as Fallout 4 pretty much would work without the open-world scenario, because nearly everything is somehow tied to the main quest. If it was not for the side quests (which are quite forgettable in many cases, anyway) and the crafting grind you could pretty much build them using linear level design. About the Witcher 3 combat system... it surely looks pretty, but I really wouldn't mind the more "realistic" approach of Skyrim's dirty and clunky system. That is if the game would be built around it and if the AI would play along from the start. The whole fighting mechanics are tied to the animation system, which I also covered in my rant. If Bethesda would adopt the Witcher-like Bolschoi ballet fighting style, they most possibly will drop the first person mode. And I surely am not the only one who would miss that. Ultimately Skyrim's combat system suffered from the same problems that were already present in Morrowind. Hack, slash and shoot, no weapon art required. Every weapon type feels the same. Bows, crossbows, long swords, short swords, all kinds of axes and warhammers ... they are all a bland mass of clunky tools without any variation. You can use all of them right level one, they look the same, no matter how much you improve them and on top of that their damage doesn't vary much because of levelled enemies.

Let's talk about the "new engine" thing from a view of a programmer, shall we? Until Oblivion Bethesda licensed GameBryo, which means they could add things to it by using its API. Somewhere before Fallout 3 they bought the code for it (which at that time was possible for many other game engines as well, btw.) This allows them to modify and expand the code in a way that goes way beyond what's possible if you just use the API.In modern times (aka at least since the early 2ks) there is no such thing as "the game engine". What people call "the Skyrim engine" is more or less a couple of "engines" put together, where every part could be replaced by something else (like it should be in any half-decent piece of software). For example you have a graphics rendering engine that itself is divided into several parts, like a rendering pipeline a post processing pipeline and so on. Some other parts would be "the sound engine" or "the AI engine" (if we want to stay with the simple engine terminology) and most possibly a dozen more. Furthermore you can integrate middleware like SpeedTree, Havok - you get the picture."The Engine" is just one problem they'll have to face sooner or later. Another problem is the editing tools, which - putting it kindly - are a freaking mess. Everyone who ever tried to create a mod knows that. Even the simplest of things need way too much steps in and outside the CS to accomplish, every step could produce bugs and that's a freaking nightmare for a solid production pipeline.Now, let's take a look at the real problem. As pretty much every other company Bethesda hopefully takes a close look at what the competitors do. You know, things like voiced protagonists, the "games cost 60 Dollars" thing or - hey! - microtransactions. In form of a club. Until Skyrim their Games more or less were the poster child of modern open world RPGs. Pretty much everything they did since the early 2ks lead to a change in the gaming industry. Fast forward 15 years and along comes an obscure Polish Company that had moderate success with two games and pushed them from the throne with their third installment. Not only that, they continued to deliver with two massive expansions from which the first one has one of the best story lines (not only) I have ever played in any RPG. So here's what I think is the real reason we won't see a new TES game before 2020: I believe they already had plans for TES VI but ultimately scrapped them because they felt that the concept wasn't good enough. Even if they tell the truth and there is no such thing as TES IV in production, it's not an easy thing to recreate the success of Skyrim, because there will be competition. The whole microtransaction thing will not go away, as well as the voiced protagonist we got with Fallout 4 (what a nightmare if you think about the spanking they will receive if they deliver only two voices for the two genders across all the races). What I think they should do, if they want to compete: They definitely should change the whole "community will fix it" attitude. After Skyrim Fallout 4 was the first Bethesda Game I haven't bought on Day 1. I even went so far as to wait one year and grab it on the Steam Sale. Why? Simply because I wanted to play the game instead of waiting for the CS to fix it or have s.o. else to fix it for me (at this point you might already have figured out that my first Skyrim experience was everything else but great. Thinking back, it wasn't even ok or acceptable) .They should hire some good writers. Not only for the main quest but also for the side quests. People are tired of flat fetch quests. Take a close look at the Witcher games.Quit overusing "the epic moment". Having a Gate to Oblivion or a Dragon every 10 or 20 Days keeps the moment epic instead rendering it into a boring grind for EP.Spend more time in QM. Broken Quests are very annoying. They really are.If they want to give the players the freedom to choose between First Person and 3rd Person view, they should keep both consistent and make both at least decent - or, if they don't want to put the effort into it scrap one and concentrate all the work on the other (which I personally would consider as a mistake, because it's not really that much more effort if done right). (Oh, and also climbing ladders without loading screens is a thing one should expect from a next generation game. It has been done already in 1996.)They should stop copying stuff from other games, especially if it doesn't make any sense, because the games are completely different. Nobody asked for a Fallout Souls no-safe feature in Fallout 4's survival mode. Regarding common safe game corruptions, CTDs and connect those to the Settlement Build Mode this was the most stupid idea in a game I've come across for a very long time.They should stop binding every faction into the main quest. It's not good for replayability. I don't want to join the Mages and the Thieves and possibly half a dozen factions just because they want me to see every "awesome place or quest" they created. At least not in a single playthrough.

@wfandrews, thanks for the advice. I just found out that the community uncapper won't work with SSE, which is one of the things on my must-have list (slower levelling, lesser dragon attacks, etc.) Maybe I'll give SSE a chance when SKSE64 is out, but all in all I was quite happy with what I had in Oldrim. Around 100 mods and no stability problems since I promised my firstborn to Sheson. Most of the other things on my wish list can't and won't be resolved by mods, anyway. Rain Occlusion would be nice, though...