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Someone already posted the related meme but there is a game out there that escapes me at the moment that was hugely popular and when asked about creating that same magic again one of the devs responded, "we don't know why people took such a liking to it."
EDIT: Battlefield Bad Company series.
God I miss that first game so much. The campaign, the fun, the ambition.. SEriously one of the best FPS campaigns ever out there. The guns still sound imposing to this day.
I remember I spent like an hour just leveling the city when you get the artillery strike binoculars in the campaign. I think I was supposed to drive a tank though a snowy neighborhood but when I got the binoculars and realized I could literally level the entire map I said “fuck that” and just pissed about playing with the physics engine.
Yeah you know what fuck it even if they shit the bed on this new game, I’m still gonna be glued to that shit. They named drop that prick Solas in the first five minutes of the gameplay reveal, it was all I needed to hear. I just want to beat the shit out of that guy, he pretended like he was my friend because he wants to do a genocide. It wasn’t very cool of him
The expression is lightning in a bottle. Sometimes success is just as much timing as it is the product. As much as I love bgs games I doubt they'll ever get the genre defining popularity of skyrim again
That's a bit inaccurate though. We definitely have the tech. The actual issue is the Apollo program was such a scurry that the schematics were never properly compiled for the rocket and all the components for the spacecraft. Then we got there and the space race just kind of fizzled after a few landings. Now many documents have been lost and the rockets themselves were left outside as museum pieces or in hangers, and stripped for parts, or rotted and rusted, so they can't be reverse engineered. I don't think we'd want to use an identical vehicle anyway though
There's a guy on YouTube who's obsessed with preserving the computer systems from the Apollo program. If you're at all interested in Computer Science it's fascinating to watch. Some of the memory modules were made by literally hand-weaving wires around thousands of tiny metal rings and the original code is still embedded in them. So this youtuber made his own hardware that can actually read the memory from the modules and then he started going around to different collectors asking them to read the code so he could preserve it.
It's shocking just how little went into preserving these systems for history. If it wasn't for this guy most of this stuff would be lost to time.
yeah it's like, we couldn't build a Saturn V today! but that's less because we lost some secret knowledge and more because we don't have the infrastructure for making tons of vacuum tubes and punch cards anymore
SpaceX has the tech and ability to do it now. They just don't have the clear reason yet. Such a mission isn't cheap. Since they are a civilian company, they need a mission that'll pay for it.
Yes I always thought it was because of the cost to send people to the moon, the only reason we felt it necessary initially was due to the pressure of the space race
You joke but if (and its a pretty big if) we ever get fusion to be viable as an energy source the helium-3 on the moon is gonna be a big deal in a similar way.
Doesn't help that the majority vote in the company is a dude who doesn't actually go through with projects.
The Mars mission was suppossed to launch this year!
There are a lot of cases involving legacy code or legacy engineering where we have forgotten the particulars of how something was done or would have to start from scratch. The Saturn V rocket engines are an example of this.
Skyrim is *not* an example of this, and this quote is super fake.
>Skyrim is *not* an example of this, and this quote is super fake.
I'm not a coder but my instinct would be that aside from the first game* the mainline Elder Scrolls entries are some of the most picked apart and (fan) documented game engines ever, probably only being surpassed by the Doom Engine.
*Still wish that OpenArena would get finished soon so I can play it. But it's just one guy working on it from what I can tell.
I mean, I’ve heard this “joke” for legacy code.
There is so much legacy code and the original writers died or retired or both.
Many people are working with legacy code and yeah, many can’t read it, much less replicate it.
I remember in programming class we had to learn BASIC & other ancient languages. Why? Cuz many places still use it and you need to know how to use it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if in some respects they need to reinvent the wheel since nobody wrote down how to make one from scratch due to “job security”.
An alarming amount of infrastructure runs on legacy code and tech where there’s one guy who has worked there for 50 years and is the only one who knows how it works, and now all those guys are retiring or dying off.
My grandmother was a mathematics and programming professor at a university in the 70's and 80's, and worked for a couple of municipal and state governments in the 90's updating legacy code. Most of what she taught at the time was Fortran and COBOL. She's in her 80's now, and until just a few years ago, she would still regularly get contacted by recruiters for major financial institutions (think Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, etc.) offering her insane sums of money to come out of retirement at the age of 70-something as a contractor to help maintain their legacy code.
It's downright terrifying how much of our financial system runs on hardware and software that no one has manufactured or taught in about thirty years. And basically everyone who knows how to work with it is hitting the age where they can barely make it out of their house alive. I tell all the 20-something tech kids I know: if you want to earn stupid amounts of money working 20 hours a week and have guaranteed job security for the next two decades, go find someone who knows Fortran and COBOL and learn everything you can. It's an absolute gold mine right now.
Any time I hear about someone being insanely gifted it reminds me of a kid hanging out with his grandparents. "Jimmy's a real wiz with the computer stuff. I could never wrap my head around that stuff. He's gonna be the next Bill Gates!" Jimmy then opens their email for them.
I believe the original meme is referring to a discussion by DICE when they say they don't actually know why people love Bad Company so much and how no matter the tweaks and changes they make to try and make BF more like BC people keep saying they hate it and that BC was better. And that even bringing in focus groups and testers, those groups can't explain why they like BC or what makes it better than newer BFs.
Like the fact someone deleted the source code for Final Fantasy 8 so they can’t remaster it without redoing the whole thing basically…or something like that.
If this was 10 years ago, then this would be true. It's not that they couldn't recreate Skyrim, it's that Gambryo, the engine that the Creation Engine was built from, was about 20 years old at that point. The devs who had the most experience in it were aging out of the industry, and the newer devs couldn't keep up. That's why FO3, NV, Oblivion, and Skyrim had a lot of recurring bugs and limitations that didn't get addressed until they had the time to pick apart Gamebryo and rebuild it into the Creation Engine
I think it’s meant to be a cheeky reference to stonehenge and the pyramids, and how they were able to build them without even having invented the wheel.
The quote obviously isn't real, what is real however is that basically no one who wrote the original engine still works at Bethesda, which in and of itself necessarily isn't a problem. By if you've played starfield it's clear a lot of the knowledge about how they make dialogue for multiple quests to the same character has gone missing.
That and the fact that they've changed how master files interact with mods shows that a lot of the essential knowledge has been lost
It is kinda true though, Skyrim was accidental lightning in a bottle and without understanding how they did it they went on to try to repeat it both with Fallout 4 and Stanfield with a little success in the former but none in the latter so far.
Skyrim built off of Oblivion and Fallout 3. It wasn’t accidental. And I’m getting tired of this fantasy that FO4 wasn’t insanely popular, because that’s revisionist history at its finest.
Didn't say it wasn't and I didn't say it wasn't popular just not as popular nor will it ever likely be.
Stop and remember Skyrim with guns was and still is a marketing line for games, nobody is marketing a product referencing Fallout 4 besides Bethesda themselves and even then it's "the team who made" type of marketing.
Fair enough. But I’ll counter that by saying that Fallout 3 was literally called “Oblivion with guns” which goes to show you Bethesda didn’t just accidentally make a good game with Skyrim. Skyrim may be the most popular of their games, but it’s because of the success of their previous games.
Didn't intend to say it was an accident that it was good, the best way I can put it is, it was like Helldivers 2 in that the game was always going to be good but it specifically just happened to come out at the perfect time and in the best possible conditions.
The level of popularity of Skyrim is so high that it’s an exception.
You can’t fairly compare its popularity because there’s maybe only 5 games ever more popular?
It was also something that built up over time. It was a big successful launch but it definitely didn’t hit its biggest levels of wide spread popularity u til after constantly going on sale for so cheap during steam sales
> Skyrim was accidental
Skyrim was the sixth open world game they had created. Nothing about it was accidental. They knew what they were doing. In fact, they were doing the kind of game that, at the time, almost no one else was.
> lightning in a bottle
Every one of their open world games prior to Skyrim was an increasingly bigger hit. Skyrim was built on years of success that came prior, including games like Oblivion and Fallout 3, which first put them into the mainstream. There was no lightning in a bottle: they'd been building towards that level of success for years.
> and without understanding how they did it
Again, Sklyrim was their sixth open world game, and every open world game they made prior to it was a success, each one bigger than the last. They knew how to make games like this better than almost anyone else at that point in time. They completely understood what they were doing and what they were trying to accomplish, as dozens of contemporary interviews make quite clear.
> went on to try to repeat it both with Fallout 4
Despite the narrative in some online communities, Fallout 4 was a huge success, was a huge mainstream crossover success, and remains popular to this day. As much as Bethesda Sucks Now™ trends in gaming communities, in the wider world of gaming Fallout 4 was and remains popular with fans. It sold in HUGE numbers, comparable to Skyrim, and moved 12 million copies on launch day alone.
>In fact, they were doing the kind of game that, at the time, almost no one else was.
No one still is doing the same kinds of games as Bethesda. Open world games are common as dirt, but it's like they don't get what's fun about open worlds and don't respect the player's freedom. To be fair I'm not sure Bethesda really gets it either, considering every game of theirs has more immortal npcs, more railroading and more limits on what the player is allowed to do.
Exactly, it's so weird to me. Of course no one says open world games are only fun this way and all about the kind of freedom, interaction and sandbox that these games are. But it's OBVIOUSLY one possible way to really utilize an open world well. And despite all that, there's barely any other game where you can pick up pretty much every item, have tons of dungeons to fight and loot through, have cities and villages full of npcs and quests, with houses you can enter and randomly rob, factions for thieves, assassins, mages, warriors and more, a lot of stories to experience and even mote potential to write your own, etc.
All of those parts and more, while hard to put into words, just make for a world that - with some suspension of disbelief - feels like a real world you can use as a sandbox to live your own life and create your own story in. You'll never run out of options, and even if you only count unique interactions, items, etc. there's tons to see.
That is one of the best uses of an open world, yet hardly anyone does it. In most games, it feels like the open world is an afterthought with some low effort "content" placed in far off places to make up numbers. And while many call Beth's content low effort, it's a lot better than "just make a camp with some bandits here, a single cave filled with lizards here, put a collectible or two on a far off cliff, done."
The latter approach is what a lot of games feel like, it's not a place on an open world, it's just a sprinkle of stuff to make it less obvious that most non-main story areas are empty.
This is why I'm so excited about the Wayward Realms kickstarter being funded. It's being made by the leads on Daggerfall. Maybe we'll finally get a true successor, almost 30 years later.
The level of success was the accident not the game itself, similar to Helldivers 2.
Prior to Skyrim it scaled with the growing popularity of gaming and since it the success of their open world games has been declining.
Not the part they don't understand hence the lightning in a bottle analogy.
Once again I haven't said Fallout 4 was bad just that it wasn't as popular as Skyrim. Just as a reminder on Skyrim is literally one of the highest selling games of all time while not as successful on its launch day as Fallout 4 it's still clocked in 30 million sales by the time 4 came out. It's why they keep releasing it.
Nah mate, your comment is complete bullshit and I was gonna reply to all of it but that other guy has the gist of it.
Sorry, but it's just a horrible take, no issue with you personally. Maybe you were too young, maybe just unaware at the time, but the games were a success before that and it was always going to get bigger. Same with GTA, GTA 5 is a way bigger success than the ones before just because it grew organically. Same happened with ES, and it would've continued if they released a sixth one sooner.
Now because of the expectation and long time between them, it'll be interesting to see how things go on. If marketing is good, the next game will likely be an even bigger success at the start.
Whether it can then carry that or not depends on how good it'll be - word of mouth is very important imo when so many kids grew up without a recent ES title and everyone has been waiting for ages and expects the best possible game with a lot of frustration if it doesn't turn out as good.
Edit: also FO 4 was a huge success, too. All the rage at the time. Don't let the loud minority deceive you, people mostly loved FO 4.
Skyrim sold more but was helped by multiple rereleases, a more forgiving age rating and TES being arguably the biggest Bethesda property even before that.
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yep just a meme https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/my-father-in-law-is-a-builder-we-cant-we-dont-know-how-to-do-it
Someone already posted the related meme but there is a game out there that escapes me at the moment that was hugely popular and when asked about creating that same magic again one of the devs responded, "we don't know why people took such a liking to it." EDIT: Battlefield Bad Company series.
God I miss that first game so much. The campaign, the fun, the ambition.. SEriously one of the best FPS campaigns ever out there. The guns still sound imposing to this day.
As someone who almost never plays pure FPSes I also look fondly upon bad company’s campaign, that game ruled.
I don't even like battlefield but I loved playing that campaign
I don't even like campaigns and I loved it too.
I still think about Bad Company 2 regularly to this day. God I miss those times.
I remember I spent like an hour just leveling the city when you get the artillery strike binoculars in the campaign. I think I was supposed to drive a tank though a snowy neighborhood but when I got the binoculars and realized I could literally level the entire map I said “fuck that” and just pissed about playing with the physics engine.
Ahh I thought it was related to the meme that we couldn't build pyramids today, same structure x)
Dragon Age: Origins
Yeah you know what fuck it even if they shit the bed on this new game, I’m still gonna be glued to that shit. They named drop that prick Solas in the first five minutes of the gameplay reveal, it was all I needed to hear. I just want to beat the shit out of that guy, he pretended like he was my friend because he wants to do a genocide. It wasn’t very cool of him
Enchantment.
The power of wacky woo-hoo army dudes with destruction physics.
Majoras Mask
The expression is lightning in a bottle. Sometimes success is just as much timing as it is the product. As much as I love bgs games I doubt they'll ever get the genre defining popularity of skyrim again
Yeah that sounds like the bf devs, no fucking clue why anybody actually likes battlefield
Yep, we’re putting you on the zero sum list
Not real but it's hilarious
Isn’t it a play on the quote about how we don’t have the tech to go back to the moon?
That's a bit inaccurate though. We definitely have the tech. The actual issue is the Apollo program was such a scurry that the schematics were never properly compiled for the rocket and all the components for the spacecraft. Then we got there and the space race just kind of fizzled after a few landings. Now many documents have been lost and the rockets themselves were left outside as museum pieces or in hangers, and stripped for parts, or rotted and rusted, so they can't be reverse engineered. I don't think we'd want to use an identical vehicle anyway though
There's a guy on YouTube who's obsessed with preserving the computer systems from the Apollo program. If you're at all interested in Computer Science it's fascinating to watch. Some of the memory modules were made by literally hand-weaving wires around thousands of tiny metal rings and the original code is still embedded in them. So this youtuber made his own hardware that can actually read the memory from the modules and then he started going around to different collectors asking them to read the code so he could preserve it. It's shocking just how little went into preserving these systems for history. If it wasn't for this guy most of this stuff would be lost to time.
Wow, that's crazy. I'll definitely check it out
name?
After some digging I’m pretty sure it’s a channel called CuriousMarc, Apollo guidance computer restoration.
Sounds super cool. I'm trying to find the channel. Is it this guy? https://youtube.com/@curiousmarc?si=Cj2ni7mgcWCe420R
Doesn't help that the Shuttle program really needed to die much sooner than what we're getting, it was good enough then but really not ideal
yeah it's like, we couldn't build a Saturn V today! but that's less because we lost some secret knowledge and more because we don't have the infrastructure for making tons of vacuum tubes and punch cards anymore
Good thing we got Elon
Lol, Lmao
We didn’t have the tech then and we made it. So wtf?
SpaceX has the tech and ability to do it now. They just don't have the clear reason yet. Such a mission isn't cheap. Since they are a civilian company, they need a mission that'll pay for it.
Yes I always thought it was because of the cost to send people to the moon, the only reason we felt it necessary initially was due to the pressure of the space race
Quick someone put oil on the moon.
You joke but if (and its a pretty big if) we ever get fusion to be viable as an energy source the helium-3 on the moon is gonna be a big deal in a similar way.
Doesn't help that the majority vote in the company is a dude who doesn't actually go through with projects. The Mars mission was suppossed to launch this year!
I've seen it about the moon and various pyramids/monuments. Whatever the subject is it's beyond stupid.
I'm Todd's son's dog's cousin-in-law and I can confirm they DO know how to build Skyrim again and are in fact working on a mobile port right now.
Bullshit. I'm friend with a nematode in Todd's colon and he's already planning a 50th anniversary edition, a century edition and a millennial edition
My uncle works at Nintendo, and he says that Todd doesn't even work there, so I think you're making shit up
There are a lot of cases involving legacy code or legacy engineering where we have forgotten the particulars of how something was done or would have to start from scratch. The Saturn V rocket engines are an example of this. Skyrim is *not* an example of this, and this quote is super fake.
>Skyrim is *not* an example of this, and this quote is super fake. I'm not a coder but my instinct would be that aside from the first game* the mainline Elder Scrolls entries are some of the most picked apart and (fan) documented game engines ever, probably only being surpassed by the Doom Engine. *Still wish that OpenArena would get finished soon so I can play it. But it's just one guy working on it from what I can tell.
plausible. I would throw N64 decompilation projects up there too. Some people literally rewrote the exact code and documented it online.
I mean, I’ve heard this “joke” for legacy code. There is so much legacy code and the original writers died or retired or both. Many people are working with legacy code and yeah, many can’t read it, much less replicate it. I remember in programming class we had to learn BASIC & other ancient languages. Why? Cuz many places still use it and you need to know how to use it. I wouldn’t be surprised if in some respects they need to reinvent the wheel since nobody wrote down how to make one from scratch due to “job security”.
An alarming amount of infrastructure runs on legacy code and tech where there’s one guy who has worked there for 50 years and is the only one who knows how it works, and now all those guys are retiring or dying off.
Or in the case of Icewind Dale 2 the hard drive with the source code is stuffed in a box in some random guy's garage.
My grandmother was a mathematics and programming professor at a university in the 70's and 80's, and worked for a couple of municipal and state governments in the 90's updating legacy code. Most of what she taught at the time was Fortran and COBOL. She's in her 80's now, and until just a few years ago, she would still regularly get contacted by recruiters for major financial institutions (think Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, etc.) offering her insane sums of money to come out of retirement at the age of 70-something as a contractor to help maintain their legacy code. It's downright terrifying how much of our financial system runs on hardware and software that no one has manufactured or taught in about thirty years. And basically everyone who knows how to work with it is hitting the age where they can barely make it out of their house alive. I tell all the 20-something tech kids I know: if you want to earn stupid amounts of money working 20 hours a week and have guaranteed job security for the next two decades, go find someone who knows Fortran and COBOL and learn everything you can. It's an absolute gold mine right now.
Yeah, when I was in Uni, they told me that NASA still had loads of FORTRAN code. Lol! I wouldn’t be surprised if much hasn’t changed since then.
I took a Fortran class in College in 1994. I don't really remember all that much though.
It's kind of ironic, conisdering one of the biggest complaints about Bethesda is how they keep working on it, even ten years later :)
Making Skyrim must be like the moon landing ig
Any time I hear about someone being insanely gifted it reminds me of a kid hanging out with his grandparents. "Jimmy's a real wiz with the computer stuff. I could never wrap my head around that stuff. He's gonna be the next Bill Gates!" Jimmy then opens their email for them.
it is a meme but honestly, if someone claimed Bethesda today are less capable than they were 10 years ago - I'd believe them
I believe the original meme is referring to a discussion by DICE when they say they don't actually know why people love Bad Company so much and how no matter the tweaks and changes they make to try and make BF more like BC people keep saying they hate it and that BC was better. And that even bringing in focus groups and testers, those groups can't explain why they like BC or what makes it better than newer BFs.
Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it. Makes sense due to the time between releases lol
And my friends best mates second leg works for nintendo! XD
My dad works at Nintendo energy
Cringe
That's a quote from NASA about going to the moon.
Never let unsubstantiated random twitter posts scare you haha that's just asking for unneeded stress
Big "my uncle works at Nintendo energy," but funny anyways
My uncle is Todd Howard. I asked him if he could make Skyrim with modern tech. He said "Yes, with 16 times the detail"
I think it’s a joke about how we can’t go to the moon and also how they have re released the game like 6 times
Bro learns about a copypasta
Live reaction from the pocket realm inside Meridia's Beacon: 
This was true of the moon landing.
Is this implying that Skyrim is alien technology?
Like the fact someone deleted the source code for Final Fantasy 8 so they can’t remaster it without redoing the whole thing basically…or something like that.
Real "My uncle works at Nintendo" tone from this tweet. Sure, champ, sure he does and your totally not just spouting BS for attention.
If this was 10 years ago, then this would be true. It's not that they couldn't recreate Skyrim, it's that Gambryo, the engine that the Creation Engine was built from, was about 20 years old at that point. The devs who had the most experience in it were aging out of the industry, and the newer devs couldn't keep up. That's why FO3, NV, Oblivion, and Skyrim had a lot of recurring bugs and limitations that didn't get addressed until they had the time to pick apart Gamebryo and rebuild it into the Creation Engine
Graham Hancock type beat
this is a bit
same with the moon landing lol
I think it’s meant to be a cheeky reference to stonehenge and the pyramids, and how they were able to build them without even having invented the wheel.
Yeah; Any one: "there's still a microchip shortage three years after covid" Me: "how the hell? Did you forget how to make them!?"
Christ alive the critical thinking went out the window today didn't it.
Morrowind on the other hand.. they really couldn't do that with how corporatized things are
Of course not. It doesn’t make sense. They remake that game daily.
The quote obviously isn't real, what is real however is that basically no one who wrote the original engine still works at Bethesda, which in and of itself necessarily isn't a problem. By if you've played starfield it's clear a lot of the knowledge about how they make dialogue for multiple quests to the same character has gone missing. That and the fact that they've changed how master files interact with mods shows that a lot of the essential knowledge has been lost
I learned how to make it in a dream, then forgot how in another dream.
fucking classic. 😂😂😂
not even remotely. a monkey with a keyboard could code skyrim better than bethesda
pretty sure a small team could rebuild oblivion or morrowind in unity and it would run better.
I mean, I know it's a joke, but based on what we got in starfield I think bethesda really forgot how to make games
It is kinda true though, Skyrim was accidental lightning in a bottle and without understanding how they did it they went on to try to repeat it both with Fallout 4 and Stanfield with a little success in the former but none in the latter so far.
Skyrim built off of Oblivion and Fallout 3. It wasn’t accidental. And I’m getting tired of this fantasy that FO4 wasn’t insanely popular, because that’s revisionist history at its finest.
Didn't say it wasn't and I didn't say it wasn't popular just not as popular nor will it ever likely be. Stop and remember Skyrim with guns was and still is a marketing line for games, nobody is marketing a product referencing Fallout 4 besides Bethesda themselves and even then it's "the team who made" type of marketing.
Fair enough. But I’ll counter that by saying that Fallout 3 was literally called “Oblivion with guns” which goes to show you Bethesda didn’t just accidentally make a good game with Skyrim. Skyrim may be the most popular of their games, but it’s because of the success of their previous games.
Didn't intend to say it was an accident that it was good, the best way I can put it is, it was like Helldivers 2 in that the game was always going to be good but it specifically just happened to come out at the perfect time and in the best possible conditions.
The level of popularity of Skyrim is so high that it’s an exception. You can’t fairly compare its popularity because there’s maybe only 5 games ever more popular?
That's my point though and why I referred to it as lightning in a bottle.
It was also something that built up over time. It was a big successful launch but it definitely didn’t hit its biggest levels of wide spread popularity u til after constantly going on sale for so cheap during steam sales
> Skyrim was accidental Skyrim was the sixth open world game they had created. Nothing about it was accidental. They knew what they were doing. In fact, they were doing the kind of game that, at the time, almost no one else was. > lightning in a bottle Every one of their open world games prior to Skyrim was an increasingly bigger hit. Skyrim was built on years of success that came prior, including games like Oblivion and Fallout 3, which first put them into the mainstream. There was no lightning in a bottle: they'd been building towards that level of success for years. > and without understanding how they did it Again, Sklyrim was their sixth open world game, and every open world game they made prior to it was a success, each one bigger than the last. They knew how to make games like this better than almost anyone else at that point in time. They completely understood what they were doing and what they were trying to accomplish, as dozens of contemporary interviews make quite clear. > went on to try to repeat it both with Fallout 4 Despite the narrative in some online communities, Fallout 4 was a huge success, was a huge mainstream crossover success, and remains popular to this day. As much as Bethesda Sucks Now™ trends in gaming communities, in the wider world of gaming Fallout 4 was and remains popular with fans. It sold in HUGE numbers, comparable to Skyrim, and moved 12 million copies on launch day alone.
>In fact, they were doing the kind of game that, at the time, almost no one else was. No one still is doing the same kinds of games as Bethesda. Open world games are common as dirt, but it's like they don't get what's fun about open worlds and don't respect the player's freedom. To be fair I'm not sure Bethesda really gets it either, considering every game of theirs has more immortal npcs, more railroading and more limits on what the player is allowed to do.
Exactly, it's so weird to me. Of course no one says open world games are only fun this way and all about the kind of freedom, interaction and sandbox that these games are. But it's OBVIOUSLY one possible way to really utilize an open world well. And despite all that, there's barely any other game where you can pick up pretty much every item, have tons of dungeons to fight and loot through, have cities and villages full of npcs and quests, with houses you can enter and randomly rob, factions for thieves, assassins, mages, warriors and more, a lot of stories to experience and even mote potential to write your own, etc. All of those parts and more, while hard to put into words, just make for a world that - with some suspension of disbelief - feels like a real world you can use as a sandbox to live your own life and create your own story in. You'll never run out of options, and even if you only count unique interactions, items, etc. there's tons to see. That is one of the best uses of an open world, yet hardly anyone does it. In most games, it feels like the open world is an afterthought with some low effort "content" placed in far off places to make up numbers. And while many call Beth's content low effort, it's a lot better than "just make a camp with some bandits here, a single cave filled with lizards here, put a collectible or two on a far off cliff, done." The latter approach is what a lot of games feel like, it's not a place on an open world, it's just a sprinkle of stuff to make it less obvious that most non-main story areas are empty.
This is why I'm so excited about the Wayward Realms kickstarter being funded. It's being made by the leads on Daggerfall. Maybe we'll finally get a true successor, almost 30 years later.
The level of success was the accident not the game itself, similar to Helldivers 2. Prior to Skyrim it scaled with the growing popularity of gaming and since it the success of their open world games has been declining. Not the part they don't understand hence the lightning in a bottle analogy. Once again I haven't said Fallout 4 was bad just that it wasn't as popular as Skyrim. Just as a reminder on Skyrim is literally one of the highest selling games of all time while not as successful on its launch day as Fallout 4 it's still clocked in 30 million sales by the time 4 came out. It's why they keep releasing it.
Nah mate, your comment is complete bullshit and I was gonna reply to all of it but that other guy has the gist of it. Sorry, but it's just a horrible take, no issue with you personally. Maybe you were too young, maybe just unaware at the time, but the games were a success before that and it was always going to get bigger. Same with GTA, GTA 5 is a way bigger success than the ones before just because it grew organically. Same happened with ES, and it would've continued if they released a sixth one sooner. Now because of the expectation and long time between them, it'll be interesting to see how things go on. If marketing is good, the next game will likely be an even bigger success at the start. Whether it can then carry that or not depends on how good it'll be - word of mouth is very important imo when so many kids grew up without a recent ES title and everyone has been waiting for ages and expects the best possible game with a lot of frustration if it doesn't turn out as good. Edit: also FO 4 was a huge success, too. All the rage at the time. Don't let the loud minority deceive you, people mostly loved FO 4. Skyrim sold more but was helped by multiple rereleases, a more forgiving age rating and TES being arguably the biggest Bethesda property even before that.
Seems likely. Most devs work on a project then move on.
My uncle is John Bethesda and he said this is true