[Opinion piece] Starfield Killed My Hype For The Elder Scrolls 6
[Opinion piece] Starfield Killed My Hype For The Elder Scrolls 6
After Starfield, I'm not sure I care about The Elder Scrolls 6 anymore.
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Games have been steadily driving away from story-oriented to action-oriented since they began. I expect ES6 to be some type of Dark Souls clone.
I've got to say...both of those sentences are an absolutely wild perspective. The first on the history of the medium, and the second for thinking that Bethesda will make anything other than the type of game they've always made for the past 30 years.
I agree about the history thing. I'm old enough to remember a time when games were derided as mindless schlock and even stories considered laughable by modern standards were lauded as profoundly impressive. At most one could argue that emphasis on story in games has followed something of a bell curve over time, but I don't think even that is really true.
But I think your time frame of Bethesda lacking ambition and innovation is a bit too broad. 30 years would include things like first-person shooters with an official Terminator license and groundbreaking graphics and controls (3D enemies and mouselook, which people usually attribute to Quake, but that came later) or hyper-realistic racing games with extensive customization of the car's drivetrain and suspension. It wasn't until they hit it big with MW that Bethesda lost their balls and started just remaking the same game over and over with different coats of paint.
Which is funny, because computer games didn't have any kind of story at the beginning (look at pong, tetris, qbert, asteroids etc.)
Yeah, but those were meant to be quick, quarter-driven games. Think of Zork and those games (all text). Think of the old Sierra games (King's Quest 1 had text commands, KQ5(?) was point-and-click).
As computer speed and graphics have grown, story has often suffered.
This makes no sense. Zork and Asteroids are practically contemporaries. Last of Us and Dota 2, Persona 5 and PUBG, Street Fighter 6 and Baldur's Gate 3, each of these pairs released the same year. We can probably point to as many story-driven games as action-driven games, every single year, since 1977.
On the time scale you're talking about, there's almost no correlation between time and the quality of video game storytelling. If anything, it has been improving (insofar as bigger games with bigger budgets have more grandiose stories being written for them).
Shh, keep the facts out of this emotionally charged argument
You can practically see how people got less educated and the attention spans dropped through the lens of video game history. Those early point and click adventure games (and others) did NOT hold your hand, and expected you to think outside the box. Then, over the next 4 decades, things slowly got more and more handholdy, because people (ALL people, not just the youngins) just aren’t quite the same as they used to be.
I mean... there's not holding your hand and then there's the game not bothering to inform you that you're softlocked because you failed to notice and pick up a one-pixel item four hours ago in an area you can no longer return to. I remember those old point-and-click adventure games very well, and I have very little desire to go back to those days.
On the other hand, an alternate perspective is:
- The average action game today has more going on in its story department than point and clicks did 30 years ago, and that's not even accounting for games with a much larger emphasis on story like an RPG.
- Baldur's Gate 3 and the last two Legend of Zelda games are great examples of actually thinking outside the box, not thinking of explicit answers that were hard coded into old adventure games as valid answers. Those types of games back then got a reputation for "moon logic" for a reason, and I'm not sure we're better off with games that give you a soft fail state for missing an essential item in an early area like old Sierra games.
- What you might call "handholdy", others might call "better UX" in a lot of cases, though there are certainly plenty of games that are a reaction to more guided designs; not just the above examples of Zelda and Baldur's Gate but also the likes of Elden Ring, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, and Outer Wilds.
- People's attention spans didn't necessarily drop, and it's even harder to show that people are largely less educated than they used to be, but even if both of those things were true, neither would be demonstrated by the types of video games that came out over the past 40 years. People have built entire functioning computers inside of Minecraft, and Red Dead Redemption II certainly, without question, is doing more with its story than any adventure game from the 90s or earlier.
One of my favorite series, Phantasy Star, moved from a turn-based RPG in the 80s to an action RPG since 20 years ago (PSO, PSO2). What if I don't want to play an action game? I don't get what happened to the old style of RPG.
We just got Baldur's Gate 3 last year, and Persona 5 is a mega hit. Turn-based RPGs are very much still alive.
Is that how those work? I've been thinking about BG3. I suppose the first RPG I ever played was a Gold Box SSI game set in the Forgotten Realms so I'd probably like it.
I don't mean to sound rude, but it seems strange to pine for something lost that not only isn't lost but also you don't seem to have looked very hard for. There are some high profile turn based RPG hits all the time. Pokemon games are still turn based RPGs, and that's the most successful entertainment property of all time.
Mainly I was pining for turn-based Phantasy Star. I'd accept DnD. I was out of the gaming world from 2005-2020. I could have looked harder, it's true, and that's why I'm asking questions.
Your best bet is to just go on Steam and start filtering by tags. You can click on a search and search for both "JRPG" and "Turn-based combat" tags, and that will give you a good list of games in the ballpark of Phantasy Star.
Lol, even the Yakuza series, which used to be brawlers turned to JRPGs in Like A Dragon.
AAA games started getting too expensive and therefore risky to make since the PS3 (if not the PS2 era), and so the big companies started playing it safe by chasing trends rather than try something new and avante-garde (aside from Nintendo of course). Action-RPGs drew a wider audience, and therefore more money, so it would be silly for them to choose the option that makes less money. Capitalism ruins everything.
"Appealing to a wider audience."
TES ain't got shit on Dark Souls in terms of story... Or lore, at least.
Dark Souls lore seems deeper than it is because it's less coherently presented than in TES.
And also because lore youtubers gotta eat, but there's only so much lore in each game, so they grasp at straws to come up with far-fetched theories that were definitely not intended by the writers.
Dark Souls lore has actual themes deeper than "we need an excuse for the player's power fantasy".
Most of what people call DS's lore is made up of complete guess work from the fans, and pretty much everyone you ask will have a different idea of the lore. Even the YouTube DS lore masters will contradict each other on a lot of things, or have a different version of the events.
It's perfectly fine for people to enjoy that, but it's definitely not as deep as people make it seem.
As for ES, the lore is actually quite deep and has been developed for a lot longer than DS lore. As a couple of examples, you have Pelinal Whitestrake and the Dwemer, the latter of which is also the subject of a lot of speculation and fan theories. Just between those two, and not counting fan theory and speculation, you probably have more lore than in all of Dark Souls.
So if lore is not explicitly stated, it is bad, becapse of guess work, unless it's in TES, because then it sparks "fan theories".
Look: Lore is really a "quality over quantity" kind of deal. I know that there are entire books in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. But just because there's a lot of it doesn't make it great. And just because some author in Morrowind took some ketamine back in 2000, doesn't absolve the later TES games, where the whole world boils down to "the player is the most important being in the world".
TES games are basically a solipsism simulator, whereas DS drips with atmosphere and themes of decay, hope and even teaches you a bit of zen.
The fact that it's so vague but still makes people be so invested in the world speaks to the strength of the writing.
Yes, you will have nuggets of genius in TES games. But that's because
A) Morrowind's writing was really weird and actually good and they still reference that a lot B) they throw everything at the wall and then you're bound to have something good if you have some talent employed.
You still have to wade through so much trite, boilerplate fantasy shit, though.
So if lore is not explicitly stated, it is bad, becapse of guess work, unless it’s in TES, because then it sparks “fan theories”
I never said DS lore was "bad", I just said it wasn't really that deep, because most of it was based on guess work from fans and YouTubers who need a reason to keep making videos. I like DS, and I've played the whole trilogy, including DLCs, but a lot of the "lore" is actually fan fiction. Then I said that in comparison, TES is much deeper - or more "expansive"/"developed", if you prefer those terms - while also offering room for fans theories. That's all.
Basically, learning DS lore is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle that is missing most of the pieces, whereas learning ES is like reading history books, which can never give you all the answers.
Some people will like one or the other more, for different reasons; but I'd say TES lore is definitely deeper, since it has a lot more to dig into.
But what there is of it is hand-crafted to perfection.
There are also fundamental differences in plot mechanics between Western and Eastern RPGs.
In a Japanese game the plot lines don't wait indefinitely for the player to pick them up — you get brief windows of opportunity and then they move on.
It makes things a lot more realistic because you don't have any of those silly circumstances where you've already done tremendous things in one plot line only to be treated like a newb in another.
I've never played, but the videos I've seen look like a button-mashing nightmare. And I think you underestimate the Elder Scrolls lore.
It's a real time game, but if you try just mashing buttons, you will die quite quickly.
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.
It is the opposite of a button mashing nightmare
Wildly ignorant take.Why even mention DS.
Lol "button mashing" will kill you instantly in Dark Souls
Of course, the DS games are filled to the absolute brim with meaningful, world-building lore. ES6 could really take from that example.
Just say it: Elden Ring is the ES6 we deserved.