Comment on Today, it has been 6 years since The Elder Scrolls 6 teaser

• mox@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’m not suggesting that a big budget alone is sufficient to make a good game.

  However, appropriate budgeting (in terms of both money and time) affects things like code quality and writing talent. It’s kind of important.

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I think it’s going to require the people making the most high-level decisions to come to the realization that their old way of doing things is outdated. I don’t have faith that they’ll come to those conclusions.

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    • mox@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I don’t have faith that they’ll come to those conclusions.

      Sadly, I don’t have much faith in them either. (Hence my low expectations.)

      I can still hope, though. Elder Scrolls has enough fans and lore that there’s certainly potential for a great new game.

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      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        lore

        Friendly reminder that the original “loremaster” of Elder Scrolls left Bethesda before they released Elder Scrolls Online, and they replaced him with someone who has apparently been making pretty questionable decisions with ESO lore.

        I mean, they always have the out of dragon breaks rewriting reality/making multiple conflicting timelines simultaneously canon (see the events of daggerfall as referenced in later games) to handwave away retcons, but overusing that just means that no lore actually matters.

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    • variants@possumpat.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      at the end of the day they are going to make the game they want, whether we like it or not, microsoft is now involved as well so who knows how that is going to affect them with their decisions

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      • explodicle@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Hopefully it’ll be like Minecraft; that game has gotten way better since Microsoft.

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• TachyonTele@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The real number is Morrowind had something like 10-20 writers that worked on it. Modern Bethesda games have 1.

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  • BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Michael Kirkbride counts as 15 writers-in-one with enough cocaine.

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    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It’s a good thing that he definitely didn’t leave the company years ago then!

      He released his Coda, he’s washed his hands of the setting.

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    • TachyonTele@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Lol he’s definitely worth it

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I think I counted 6 quest designers in Starfield, which was a spot in the credits I was specifically looking for given how many quests they had and how many of them would have been better off not even existing. You can’t talk about having 1000 planets and then make quests that aren’t interesting to populate them.

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    • TachyonTele@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      There’s a recent video that adds all of that up. Starfield had some crazy low number of quests, I think 50ish, and Morrowind had like 300+

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      • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        There are more than 50 quests unless you’re getting creative with how you count. There are over a dozen in each major faction, and those ones are mostly okay, but the ones I really take issue with are the nothing quests that aren’t part of any faction; the ones that basically just have you go to a location and then report back. Those are awful. There should be zero quests in there that the quest designers themselves aren’t excited about.

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      • fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Starfield has more quests than Skyrim (both somewhere around 200 or so quests). Morrowind definitely felt like it was twice as much as those.

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• olafurp@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It’s a tricky balancing act. They need to recover the investment as early as possible to pay less in capital costs but doing that will mean that later on when the product is sub-par it will cause problems and extra work.

  Since the engine, game logic, art, story, testing is so heavily coupled together changing the engine a little bit could cause a month of work down the line.

  I think personally the best way is to start by making an engine or taking one off the shelf and then write a mini version of the game with shit art that has a lot of bugs.

  At the same time making models with hitboxes that all have the same physical properties otherwise, dialog content and recordings and all other content that can be done separately.

  Once that is fun to play then you can start working creating a slightly bigger system with a single short storyline to have a cohesive experience and will have the genaral feel of the game.

  Once everything above is done setting up a closed beta is the way to go. Take some feedback, add features and redo the small story to be more fun.

  Then once everything is a fun experience but people just want more you do the whole everything.

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  • Chriszz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    While you’ve made some valid points, keep in mind this isn’t a startup, it’s a massive studio

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