Do you think Beth is getting lazy because of modders?

[Psychotogen]

Do you think they just say "OK guys do a mediocre job because the modding community will fix our mistakes" ?. Because ever since Morrowind it seems like they been putting less and less work and thought into their games.

[bben46]

Actually no, because they are making the games primarily for consoles now - where mods have no effect on the game. Morrowind was the last game they actually made for PC - since then all of their games have been made for consoles - then ported to PC with as few changes as they can get away with. As it was a management decision to make the PC version as exactly the same as the console version as possible - with the mistaken belief that the experience of playing the game would be exactly the same no matter which platform you had. :sad:

[Riprock]

I never thought that "go get my laundry, it's over that hill" type quests in Morrowind were examples of deep thinking. What people do is get nostalgic for the first time the played TES, and for most it was Morrowind. There were a lot of "run here and do that" quests. Get my gloves. Give them to that guy. Tell him this. Go get approval from this leader. He sends you to get an item. You give it to him. That's not deep or detailed, it's busy.

 

The only things I really miss from Morrowind are number one the mystery and vague menace, because you know you could be in over your head. They really hit a home run with atmosphere but Morrowind is hardly a game without flaw or a game that revolves around complexity for anything but complexity's sake. Number two I liked the journal.

[Rennn]

No.

However, Bethesda is rapidly losing control of the open world market with so many other open and pseudo-open games releasing on multiple platforms. Bethesda uses one of the worst engines of the last 5 years, and if they carry it forward into the next generation, prepare for disappointment. It already took Bethesda 2 years too long to release a game that was buggier, harder to run, and more copy-pasted than the competition.

 

Bethesda's dedication to their ancient engine means that it's harder to squash bugs, harder to optimize, they're working with a lossy texture format, they're tied to DX9, and they're working with a buggy and heavily modified toolset. All of this burns time and money that could be better spent on literally anything else.

Edited August 25, 2013 by Rennn

[psycros]

Between bben46 and Rennn there's nothing left to add!

[rhowington]

Except Witcher 3 might tie their tail in a knot and goose them to rethink in the future.

[ArtMurder]

Except Witcher 3 might tie their tail in a knot and goose them to rethink in the future.

I personally don't think one game could have any effect on a game series that's been around for around 20 years. I personally don't even like the witcher series very much, unless the third is a lot more interesting then the others I don't see why it specifically would change that. To be honest, the Dragon Age games are the only other RPGs that really challenge TES, and I still don't really play them much compared to TES games

 

 

 

ON TOPIC;; I don't agree, Bethesda works very hard on their games. Skyrim is an AWESOME game out of the box, modders tend to forget that for some silly reason. I mean seriously, I played skyrim on console for over a year before I got my gaming PC, and I loved the hell out of it. Sure it has problems, but all games have problems.

 

Skyrim modded is not comparable to any game, because of COARSE you think it's a million times better that way, because you have thousands of options to make the game exactly how YOU like it! No one knows what makes a game better in YOUR opinion then YOU! ^_^

[kleinstaff]

i think this has more todo about having to create a game that orks for both console and pc

developers have to take into account the limits of consoles even the next generation still have serious limirs compared with pc

and to be honest compared with the modded version of what i have now on pc the console /vanilla version is dull and one sided and in my opinion not really a good game

by making the creation kit available not only did they prolong the sales and shelftime , they also create a huge fanbase that will assure there next game will be a hit aswell

 

pretty smart from them and you can be sure they are watching us

 

ps wouldn't even be suprised that some of those modders actually work in the gaming industry

Edited August 26, 2013 by kleinstaff

[Rennn]

Except Witcher 3 might tie their tail in a knot and goose them to rethink in the future.

 

True. When TW3 releases with full mod support, I can't imagine what redeeming features people will find in Skyrim.

[Rennn]

 

ON TOPIC;; I don't agree, Bethesda works very hard on their games. Skyrim is an AWESOME game out of the box, modders tend to forget that for some silly reason. I mean seriously, I played skyrim on console for over a year before I got my gaming PC, and I loved the hell out of it. Sure it has problems, but all games have problems.

 

Skyrim modded is not comparable to any game, because of COARSE you think it's a million times better that way, because you have thousands of options to make the game exactly how YOU like it! No one knows what makes a game better in YOUR opinion then YOU! ^_^

 

 

Bethesda does work very hard on their games, but their engine is holding them back severely. Their texture artists are great, even though their engine forces them to deal with DX9, 3.2GB of RAM, and massive texture compression even with 1K diffuse maps. Their meshers are adept at optimization, even though their engine limits them to about 4k polygons on a single mesh (and they usually use even fewer polygons to ensure that the game doesn't crash). Their concept artists and whoever designs the landscape is world-class, even though their engine forces Bethesda to use a terrible LoD system ripped from 2006.

 

Many developers now includes dynamic wet effects, footprints in snow, hair and cloth physics, and dynamic meshes that react to player interaction. A few of things have been added in sub-par forms in mods, but even more things, modders have been unable to add. I tried to fix Bethesda's awful LoD and got 700 endorsements for my trouble, but even that isn't enough to fix Bethesda's Creation engine.

 

Long story made short, Bethesda needs to ditch the Creation Engine ASAP. It's slowing them down, consuming more time, money, and resources than it needs to, and ultimately is responsible for most of the dirty scripts and bugs in Skyrim.