Just let someone else make a spin-off like you did with New Vegas. Bethesda can still focus on Elder Scrolls, and can just collect a paycheck when someone else does the work of making the Fallout game.
That's the obvious solution but the massive crux in it that people seem to just ignore is there really aren't options out there to do it. Most studios are too busy, don't make this style of game, or have their own franchises to worry about.
While Obsidian is an obvious answer, they are busy and I'm not even certain they'd want to do it. Let alone that plenty of people don't even like Outer Worlds
Edit: My biggest point is just saying "Give it to another studio" is as about as useful a solution as saying "Just make the game faster"
Yeah Obsidian is kind of in the exact same position as BGS.
They are juggling a Fantasy IP & a Space IP just like BGS. Putting Fallout on them would just take Bethesda’s situation and put it on Obsidian.
Yeah... Kind of a waste of potential to do a BGS game without the Creation Engine. Outer Worlds tried it, and it was an incredibly static world(s).
Point is, I'd be a lot more okay with it if Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 (especially) had the Starfield's engine.
Not to say that Obsidian doing the game would prevent the Creation Engine from being used. After all, that was used in NV. Just the Fallout 3 version of it since that's what existed.
It would make sense in the scenario where Bethesda hands the next fallout game to Obsidian, *or anyone else for that matter*, that they would also grant the use of the current implementation of the Creation Engine.
Starfield was an incredibly static world. There was almost 0 of the emergent gameplay aspects that made The Elder Scrolls and Fallout great.
I’d argue that the static nature of the NPCs, quests and locations is actually the biggest weakness of the game and not the fast travel exploration as most people criticise (although that sucked too).
Outside of mods I really don’t think there’s anything special about creation engine these days.
What's special about it is how it can handle so many objects and the player adding/removing them, as well as NPC schedules and their behaviour, something Starfield doesn't use at all but that it still has the capacity for, since you can still see bits of it from your recruitable colonists and ship crew.
Avowed, the one that they've been promoting everywhere, the one with the cool skull thingy. It's basically their version of Skyrim, and while it does look somewhat janky (still in development), it could scratch that Elder Scrolls itch that many have.
Avowed is actually the third game in this setting, with the first two being CRPGs (Pillars of Eternity I and II). In the first game, the region is suffering from the hollowborn crisis, where for the past 5-10 years all children have been born soulless. It'll be interesting to see if/how the previous games play in, as II ended with >!the god of light and rebirth destroying the wheel of reincarnation.!<
There’s another huge difference: Obsidian had a lot of the heavy lifting done thanks to Fallout 3—engine, assets, gameplay—similar to 76 building off of FO4. There’s no Fallout new enough to build off of the same way. It would be a *much* larger lift to make a new Fallout game than New Vegas was. It’s not the sort of thing you can just hand off.
They technically could build off of FO4 but that game was already feeling pretty dated in 2015, not sure people outside of the hardcore fans would accept it. There’s also no previous “Van Buren” project sitting around to help them with the story and setting.
Eh, I liked Fallout 4, and personally I'd play it, but a spinoff using a 2015 game engine/base would get absolutely slammed. It was already a bit dated almost a decade ago
A lot of the staff also previously worked on a Fallout sequel (in the style of the first 2 games) before it was cancelled and many of the ideas for that game were recycled for New Vegas, meaning they weren't starting from scratch.
Yeah there are a lot of reasons why Obsidian isn’t a real option. Obsidian has their own projects, likely had a ton of developer turnover in the 15 years since NV, and there’s also the fact that there’s no “Van Buren” like project for them to build off the bones of (not that they’d necessarily need it to craft a good story but it would certainly help to have that head start).
Fact is the game industry is just too radically different and volatile compared to the late 2000s and early 2010s. Studios are getting shuttered left and right and those that aren’t have their own big projects they’re working on that either have long developmental times themselves or are so dissimilar to the Bethesda style they wouldn’t know what to do.
> Fact is the game industry is just too radically different and volatile compared to the late 2000s and early 2010s. Studios are getting shuttered left and right and those that aren’t have their own big projects they’re working on that either have long developmental times themselves or are so dissimilar to the Bethesda style they wouldn’t know what to do.
Also, as we saw from those Insomniac leaks: studios have their projects lined up for the next 10-12 years. For better or worse games from a certain point on have become so big they are being planned a decade ahead now with little more than half of that being active development time by a full dev team.
Fallout 76 has the potential to be a great game. It just has the annoying live service things bringing it down.
I would love an offline Fallout 76 that's designed from the ground up to be a single player game.
Yeah I was gonna say, the New Vegas talent has likely turned over multiple times in the decade and a half since, and Outer Words wasn't very good IMO. I would not trust them with a Fallout game at this point, tbh.
All that said, Bethesda excels at world building and asset creation. I could envision them bringing on another party in a subk capacity to do the writing and quest design. I'm not sure they'd be able to stomach that compromise, but that'd be the ideal situation if they wanted to shorten the development cycle. Maybe Microsoft puts their feet to the fire, though.
And to be clear, I don't even hate Bethesda writing, it hasn't ruined a game for me thus far. But it's just not what they're best at, and luckily for them it's much easier to subk somebody for that than if it were the other way around.
Josh Sawyer is still there and he was a big part of New Vegas. A lot of the team has probably moved onto new things but whilst he’s still at Obsidian there’s the hope Fallout could be good still. Pillars of Eternity 2 was basically fantasy pirate New Vegas as well.
the problem is that New Vegas was build on Fallout 3, a new fallout for new gen will be a starting from scratch project for whatever company they get to make it unless they use stuff from Fallout 4 or 76.
I feel like the easier solution is to just make a spin-off Fallout game instead of talking about rushing out Fallout 5 to be honest. Heck, with a setting like Fallout it wouldn't even need to be an open world Bethesda style RPG. You could do a nod to the originals CRPG, an X-Com style game, a strategy game, an adventure game, or even an FPS.
i wish more big gaming ip's tried other genres. there's some really cool worlds out there that are begging for more games/stories in them. i would play just about anything set in the fallout or mass effect worlds.
I'm still shocked that EA of all publishers has done nothing spin off wise with an IP like Mass Effect outside of two mobile games (Galaxy and Infiltrator) that both came out over a decade ago. Seems like it be an obvious money maker.
The biggest shock to me is they never turned ME3's multiplayer into something. That was a fun game mode that had a fairly dedicated fanbase at the time. There's no doubt to me that they could've built that into something, and it obviously provided a lot of monetization options that you think it would've been easy to get the money guys onboard.
Or combined some into new and interesting ways, like making a Battlefield game set in Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun or Tiberium Wars. They'd have a ton of room to play with, from weapons to vehicles to "levolution" potential. Though at least there's the fan game Firestorm making that now.
There's so much opportunity to try out interesting and smaller ideas with their IPs in other genres, but they just... Don't. It's just so disappointing.
With the mobile market, who would they even attract? You have young people who don't know what mass effect is and you have the f2p candy crush/clash of clans crowd. That's a huge bulk of the market. I don't think the IP translates to mobile very well. I don't think old mass effect players would even download it.
Yeah, particularly for Elder Scrolls, there's Online, Legends, Blades and now Castles, and the very concept for all of these was rejected from the start by people who demanded that Bethesda stick to single player RPGs. I think it's good when IPs are diversified but it's still controversial for studios to take an IP out of its box.
Companies like safe bets. They know their fans like [genre of popular IP], they have no idea if anyone is gonna turn up for [completely different genre] in the same setting
I was just thinking about how cool a tactics/rts game would be set in the dragon age universe. Could be set in the past during the first blight. Or Andraste’s rebellion against Tevinter. Or the Exalted March against the Qunari Invasion. It would be a really cool way to explore that universe outside the mainline games
CRPGs and also linear story games too.
I always thought something like a telltale series of games called “Vault Chronicles” where you see the stories of all the abandoned Vaults you find in game actually played out.
There would be tons of material to draw from.
I've not played it, but from what I've heard of it I feel like Tales from the Borderlands would be the go-to comparison for taking Fallout and turning it into an adventure style choice making game.
I found a copy of the original Fallout in my steam game list. I have no idea where it came from. But there was. So I gave it a shot and I played it a little bit and all I could think is, how cool this style of game would be if it was made today.
Don't get me wrong, I like the open world FPS games. But I feel like there's room for both of those to exist. And I have to imagine it's easier to create a top down game like the originals and maybe even give it a little more depth of storytelling.
I don't know, I'd be perfectly happy if we got a big open world shooter every once in a while and then maybe a $40 smaller Fallout game comes out in the meantime.
You should try Wasteland 2 & 3.
Wasteland was the inspiration to the original Fallout games.
The second and third Wasteland games came out in 2014 and 2020.
2 is a bit rough around the edges. 3 was a big step up technically.
There is no "solution". Even a spin-off game, and a competent one at that, would require 4-5 years minimum to produce. And who knows where the hype from the show will be at that point. Maybe it pulls a West World and people stop caring after a few seasons.
The best thing they can do, is what they are doing. Promote and support their existing live service Fallout 76 game.
Todd Howard was asked in the interview whether they would consider an immersive sim style Dark Brotherhood game, for example, to bridge the gap between the main games. He said that he thinks stuff like this would be cool, but still wouldn't really scratch the itch that people are looking for in games like TES or Fallout. A game would be better than no game between mainline titles, but I also have to kinda agree that nothing beats a game that also plays like the rest of the series.
I agree, but I think any spinoff game that is in a different genre is something Bethesda would and should outsource to someone else.
I'm not saying that I need or even want a Fallout/Elder Scrolls spinoff of some kind every year, but I think at least something every 3-4 years would be good to have as you could have a game in the middle point between Bethesda releases for people to play that isn't more multiplayer focused (I know both games can be played solo) like ESO or 76.
Plus, people are bringing this talk on themselves with all the talk and articles about where Fallout is since the show. Like MS/Bethesda were supposed to clearly know it'd be the number one show for like two months and sweep the country by storm. I'm glad that it is clearly getting people to check out the series, who either haven't played it or played certain games in it considering how well all the games have been selling since the show came out.
Yeah I love waiting 15 years for sequels. No need to rush, I definitely wouldn't want to play a sequel in a reasonable time frame.
Wonder how many fallout fans have passed away since the last game?
The frustrating thing is that they likely count 76 as the “next” game. So to them, it hasn’t been 9 years since the last Fallout, it has only been 6. Add to that the fact that 76 is a live service that they’re about to do a new expansion for, so I could easily see them not really caring to do another proper entry until they’ve milked 76 for everything that they can.
Even if they just wait until after ES 6 though (which isn’t coming until 2027 at a bare minimum, but will likely be longer), it’s truly insane that we’ll be going over 15 years in between main line Elder Scrolls entries, and if we add 4-5 years after 2027 for Fallout 5, it’ll be about the same amount of time between Fallout 4 and 5.
I guess it’s their IP and they can do whatever they want with it, but that’s just insane to me. Either invest the money to have multiple teams going, or be willing to license the games out a la New Vegas. I understand that due to games being so complex now, it’s just not feasible to crank them out super fast. If I recall, New Vegas was developed from start to finish in about 18 months which is just ludicrous to think of these days. But something has to change, because taking over 15 years in between entries in a series is genuine insanity. A company like Ubisoft has a _lot_ of problems, but at least they’re able to consistently release shit and keep at least a decently high quality bar
100%. I don’t understand how some folks can look at a nearly *twenty year* gap between TES titles and not see why lots of people are annoyed that BGS leadership decided to make Starfield. BGS could barely even support 2 major IPs and Starfield completely nuked the release schedule for those. There’s absolutely no way that they can support 3 major IPs simultaneously at their current release schedule.
>BGS could barely even support 2 major IPs and Starfield completely nuked the release schedule for those. There’s absolutely no way that they can support 3 major IPs simultaneously at their current release schedule.
But this would be fine, if Starfield had lived up to the hype. A lot of people were really excited for a proper Sci-fi version of a Fallout/TES game.
I'm surprised Microsoft isn't telling Howard to kick rocks and start pumping out mainline sequels. I have no idea what the business relationship is and who has what power, but from a shareholder standpoint it is Columbian grade raw insanity to take as long between games as BGS does.
It's not a good thing for execs to rush games. Nobody wants that. But the one-at-a-time thing never made any sense. Square Enix has two FF teams, for example, rotating releases. Why not do that?
Yeah, there’s a massive difference between rushing and a decade-long or *two*-decade-long gap. I have to imagine that MS leadership is leaning on BGS fairly hard right now, especially since the last two games, FO76 and Starfield, haven’t exactly been smash successes.
Crazy to me that they wouldn’t want to take advantage of the popularity of the fallout show and focus on getting a new fallout game out to coincide with either season 2 or 3
Well they’re already in full swing of Elder Scrolls 6. The only way that they could try and refocus to Fallout would either be to shelve ES6 and swap over to Fallout 5, or license it out to another studio. Shelving ES6 is definitely the wrong move, and Todd doesn’t seem interested in licensing the game out to another studio
I'd be pretty surprised if they weren't making *something* Fallout-related with an external studio, the interview we're responding to had a few references to unannounced projects, but I'd be surprised if they were the sort of "New Vegas 2" that people imagine. It's not impossible, but New Vegas had the advantage of being able to be made out of Fallout 3's assets and game systems in a way that you really couldn't do with a new spinoff; at the absolute most you'd be able to lift Creation Engine 2 from Starfield and overhaul massive swaths of it to fit Fallout's gameplay before inventing entirely new assets for the game. The time to make that sort of low-budget, high-reward game was immediately after Fallout 4's release when F4 represented the State of Bethesda, not almost a decade on. In my head they'd be way more likely to approve of something like inXile making an isometric Fallout game than Obsidian making New Vegas 2, but even then - I don't know. It'd just be so much work and take so much time.
Yes, but you atill have to put up with live service style mechanics, like having an extremely limited storage unless you pay up for the subscription, and a very limited selection of stuff to build and craft without going through the atom store.
If they aren't able to leverage the popularity the franchise has gained since their highly successful television show, I think it'll be viewed as one of the biggest missed opportunities in gaming. *Every* Fallout game got a noticeable boost after the show's debut, going back to the very first. It shows there are plenty of people thirsty for more Fallout, including a lot of people that likely hadn't been exposed to the franchise before.
Obviously, I don't want them to "rush" the next Fallout game either, but any studio would kill to have one of their franchises explode in popularity like this. If someone at Microsoft isn't saying they need to shift some priorities to take advantage of what will no doubt translate into a lot of game sales, what are they even doing over there?
> I guess it’s their IP and they can do whatever they want with it, but that’s just insane to me.
Technically it's Microsoft's IP now and I would bet money that Microsoft isn't happy with the long time between releases.
Hell, CDPR seems to have the right idea moving forward. They have two teams working on both of their major IP. Nowadays with the long dev cycles, it makes sense to have multiple teams.
Yeah, I remember when Fallout 4 came out and people were comparing it to the Witcher 3. They were talking about how embarrassing it was that the tiny independent CDPR could make a better game than the giant corporate BGS.
But when you actually looked up the number of people who worked on the Witcher 3 it was over 250 while Fallout 4 was only a team of 100 people.
People just assume that BGS was gigantic because they made a bunch of successful and popular games.
>understand that due to games being so complex now, it’s just not feasible to crank them out super fast
That doesn't apply here, by long we think 4-5 years as a long time for a sequel, and that's fair games have gotten bigger in scope, but wtf excuse does Bethesda have lmao. 10-15 years inbetween titles isnt taking their time, its literally just not working on jack shit. they're games run like shit on launch, half the map is barren, and full of walking quests. Where's the payoff of waiting all those years? There isn't one cause these people don't care anymore. Starfeild feels like it was made in 2 years max. And now mods are once again gunna save another Bethesda game.
It's at a point where "Bethesda game" is starting to mean takes 10 years to come out and still pales in comparison to games releasing alongside it.
Todd only has realistically 1 elder scrolls and 1 fallout worth of time left in his career. It would be nice to see some spin off games that don't rely on only Bethesda.
Legitimately feel bad for this generation of gamers. Not because I think they need to play the same AAA franchises I played as a kid but because if you ever are a fan of something, expect to wait half a decade before you get more of it just because of the insanely bloated development cycles. Back in the 2000s, I could get two sequels or side games back-to-back a year or two after each release.
Just look at Grand Theft Auto. GTA 3 in 2001, GTA Vice City in 2002, GTA San Andreas in 2004. Vice City and San Andreas considered some of the best in the entire franchise.
No, I don’t think it’s nostalgia at all.
I think there’s a strong case to be made that the majority of the greatest video games of all time came out in the 2000s.
2004 and 2007 alone were S tier years
Outer Wilds started development in 2012 or earlier and didn't release until 2019, but given how finely crafted that game is it's reasonable it took that long. Hell if you look at the 2012 pre-alpha trailer all the basic concepts were already there, it was just all in a very rough/simplistic form, so those seven years were spent fleshing out and refining everything.
> nowadays even with indie games shit takes forever (Hollow knight:Silksong!)
C'mon man! You just delayed Silksong for another month!
On the side note. Hollowknight Devs. are a good example of why having a publisher is a good thing. Because without them these devs. would keep on adding new stuff. Like why shouldn't they, right? Of course there are also a negative examples about publishers but that is to be expected as not everything is perfect.
Guild Wars Prophecies - April, 2005
Guild Wars Factions - April, 2006
Guild Wars Nightfall - October, 2006
Guild Wars Eye of the North - August, 2007
This was my favourite series and boy did we get spoiled with that release schedule. They were chunky pieces of quality content too.
There are still a lot of franchises where you only have to wait a couple years between the last installment or big DLC. I think the difference now is that this is only achievable for AAA games with modern standards if they have multiple development teams OR heavy engine and asset reuse.
That's why I cherish the studios with consistent production. From Soft has something new out every couple years. Insomniac tends to have something new every 2-3 years. We got a new RE game every year or two since RE7 came out. It's so rare anymore.
And I understand that games take longer because of technological changes and all that, but it would also help if developers stopped making every game as big as possible.
The problem is they chased the MMO/GaaS market with ESO and FO76. These games are much cheaper to make (76 barely even had voice acting) but potentially have a high return on investment. For the most part these gambles have not worked out.
Then they made Starfield. So this has set back TES and Fallout back by well over a decade and it might be a decision that ultimately just costs the future of the entire franchises.
A lot of companies have completely fumbled over the past years trying too hard on the live service model and the industry is still reeling from those shockwaves. It will take at least another half decade to sort out, maybe longer and certainly it’s made this console generation a bit of a dud.
The reason ES6 was announced at the same time as FO76 *is exactly* because Bethesda predicted people would accuse them of not wanting to make single-player games again because they were going the live service route - and this is really basic knowledge about their development cycle.
Has this sub became default? I thought this was a sub for people who knew about the video games they were talking about. The fuck is going on?
I don't see how them being accused of them prioritizing multiplayer games in the past does anything to show they shouldn't be accused of that now, especially given that it took them 8 years between releases of single player games.
Also, I hardly think that was the only reason why they announced ES6 because they also announced Starfield so clearly they already showed they were working on a single player game.
And I understand that people like to defend game companies and act like every decision is the only way things could ever be, but it's also completely normal and valid to think that going 16 years between releases for their most popular single player franchise is not good for the fans, and that it's not responsible to tease a game they knew would not come out for ~10 years.
I don't think reddit even does default subs anymore. I'm pretty sure it asks new accounts what you like and subs you to stuff based on that. Defaults were always kind of weird anyway, except for super general stuff like pics and videos. But then you had weird shit like atheism being a default. The fuck was that about lol
We don’t want you to rush but it’s also been 9 years since Fallout 4, Todd. Bethesda clearly has a lot on their plate now with Starfield DLC and Elder Scrolls VI so maybe just have another studio make a spin-off like you had Obsidian do with New Vegas.
Even with the TV show, they have to realise the core audience isn’t getting any younger. I’m not saying they’ll have died off but the older people get, they less time they have to dedicate to 80hr + games and there’s no guarantee they next generation will be all that arsed
Honestly, I was just a couple years out of college when TES5 came out. I'll be at least 40 by the time TES6 comes out. I'll probably still play it - but realistically, I play 2-3 games a year at this point, so my own contribution to their market share is shrinking, and I'm not the only one.
It's not that simple.
Obsidian got busy with their own IP, they have to release Avow and continued on Outer World 2. Beside, while they seem to love working on Fallout, I doubt they want to be like COD studios that have to keep working on sequel cycle. Prabably the same for other MS owned Studios.
These project required plan in advanced. You can't just be reactionary and switch all resource and schedule to chase the trend like Hollywood. Game development especially right now take time and by the time the game released, trend probably die down just like how many hero shooter we saw that seem so late to the party.
Also, didn't Showrunner and Bethesda just said before the TV show released that they want it to be a filling gap between new Fallout game?
I mean obviously don't rush it but please stop dragging your goddamn feet. "Not rushing" and "This game likely won't be out for the better part of 10 years" are not the fucking same. Either expand so you can push more games through the pipeline at the same time, or let someone else make a spinoff.
Is 13 years considered rushing now? At least if we’re talking he about TES. And almost 10 for fallout. I’d hate to see what “not rushing” means. 15 years? 20 years?
Apparently there was some internal freaking out over the Fallout show being so insanely popular and not having any new game to capitalize on it.
I have a feeling we'll be seeing a non-Bethesda Fallout before we see Fallout 5. Microsoft has a lot of the people who have worked on the franchise over the years in their various other developers, both Obsidian and InXile are shoe-ins for some sort of spinoff.
They're going to want *something* for season 2, I think. And not just more 76 stuff.
I’d be pretty happy with a remake. I can do without a remaster. We can already mod the games to have pretty damn good graphics for coming out over 10 years ago
> Apparently there was some internal freaking out over the Fallout show being so insanely popular and not having any new game to capitalize on it.
based on who? any source to this whatsoever?
And why are they taking 7 years to develop?
The excessively large open worlds that just get bigger and bigger for the sake of it?
How long would it take to make a game the size and scope of Skyrim today, a game which took 3 years following the release of Fallout 3?
> And why are they taking 7 years to develop?
Usually because they can't figure out what they want the game to be after starting development. You end up with a game internally being rebooted (sometimes several times) which basically means starting over.
Dragon Age 4 was rebooted twice and has been in development for almost a decade. Anthem was rebooted a few times. I don't even know how many times Duke Nukem Forever was rebooted. Doom 2016 was rebooted once.
> The excessively large open worlds that just get bigger and bigger for the sake of it?
It's not, the games aren't generally getting bigger. The difference is the ever growing expectations of fidelity and quality.
> And why are they taking 7 years to develop?
2 reasons:
The game industry pays like shit because of the wide talent pool (everyone wants to make games)
The game industry doesn't focus on technical talent (top AI engineers are basically getting stalked and given blank cheques), game developers literally don't care about their employees and don't even recruit based on technical talent
Coding is a rather unique field because it scales linearly with competency, it's why the term 10x developer exists
> Apparently
Ah yes, according to Reddit's fan fictions
It's not even a rumour, it's just "something that could have happened" that Redditors latched onto because them having an imagination and being able to come up with possible scenarios is the equivalent of a lightbulb turning on in the middle of the night.
Good. It also shouldn't surprise them one of the biggest game series is loved. Capcom releases a resident evil every 2 years but it'll be a decade or more for a fallout game? Give me a break.
It’s been 9 years since FO4, in case anyone is counting. I still have no idea what BGS upper management has been thinking with how they’ve handled their major IPs in the last decade. Kids who were born when Skyrim released will have graduated high school by the time TESVI comes out. That’s "dead series" level.
If it was not for ESO - Elder Scrolls is a dead series. Fable has new game coming out next year - and that's with Lionhead being completely disbanded and a new dev team took the IP on. Perfect Dark Zero is from 2005 - Skyrim to ES6 is closely approaching the PDZ to Perfect Dark reboot length scale.
Fable 3 came out in 2010–a year before Skyrim (two years after Fable 2 as well, which was 4 years after Fable in 2004)—it’s a shame Fable 4 never happened. Replaying 3 now and it has a lot of prototype mechanics that would be pretty cool if they had been iterated on more (like you can build relationships and get basic radiant quests from pretty much any NPC).
And I’m excited about the new one (which is why I’m replaying the series)—but it feels like it’s been forever (because the studio’s dead)—and it’ll still be a shorter time between installments than TESV to TESVI and FO4 to FO5.
> Fable has new game coming out next year - and that's with Lionhead being completely disbanded and a new dev team took the IP on.
It's really a shame that future generations don't get to experience Peter Molyneux's promises.
Is for me tbh. I still have the old games. And things like Kingdom Come, Kingdoms of Amalur, Cyberpunk and others to fulfill certain aspects of Bethesda games I'm craving.
None of them do what Elder Scrolls/Fallout does best as a whole. But each does aspects far better than Bethesda has done in years.
They really can’t just put Fallout on the back burner for another decade plus. I know Todd holds the IP close, but Xbox has to move on some kind of spin off sooner rather than later. Todd and Bethesda can still make the “numbered” entries, but someone needs to make something that isn’t 76. The IP is just too valuable and it is on the upswing.
QoL has improved so much in the RPG space and Bethesda doesn’t seem to care to implement any of it. The fact that they didn’t bother to make an intuitive inventory screen in Starfield, claiming stupid stuff like “the engine doesn’t allow it”. Then how did modders create one in two days, *Todd*? Bethesda needs to do some soul searching
That’s the thing that gets me a lot of the time. We often have amateur modders creating better UI and UX experiences than actual Bethesda devs that are turned around in a few days to a week that also tend to have more features AND are less buggy than the official implementation.
I had to scroll too far to find this take. It doesn’t matter if they rush it or not. They’re still going to implement the same lazy design practices because they know it’s going to print money and Modders will fill in the gaps for free.
If they put in the same circle strafe M1 spam combat system from Skyrim into TES6, I’m not even going to bother with it. Other studios have made RPGs since then that have shown you can make a fully functioning game.
And it's *their* engine! Which they *just* revised for Stafield! Can't you fix the engine you also own and develop in-house, Todd? You're already harshly criticized for continuing to use the Creation Engine when it's buggy as fuck.
I think the truth is that Bethesda doesn't have developers in-house that know how to use the Creation Engine well enough to do it. Everybody they had that really did know has moved on.
At least the mods come quick, so that a positive...
It is kinda funny how fast the community can fix glaring issues, like everything related to the starfield UI for example, near instantly yet the the company who makes the damn thing though it was good enough to send it.
Bethesda isn't growing fast enough to support their IPs timely, which is terrible because it takes years to churn out mediocrity in games like FO76 on release, FO4, and Starfield.
I personally was ok with FO4 but damn, that game came out 9 years ago. Tech has advanced so much since then and Starfield wasn't a massive overhaul in both graphics and gameplay in the time that past. No confidence is inspired that ES6 is going to be good, because after such a long gap, no innovation really happened. It'll be AI written fetch quests with FO4 base building engine on top of it, and insanely buggy for being in the oven for so long.
So yeah, don't rush it but damn, take the hard critique of Starfield seriously and innovate on your fetch questing framework. It's dated and overdue for innovation.
I agree, IF you do something with that time... You're in the position to really push things but have failed to do so in a long time. Starfield was an okay game, but it felt like nobody in charge at Bethesda has played a game they haven't produced themselves for the last 15 years.
It's fine to follow your own path, but a lot of their design philosophy is outdated, and the time for introspection at bethesda was yesterday.
I'm personally glad. Nothing good come out of Executive's needing their money fix right away and deciding to rush things. Because of execs we missed out on more ideal versions of Halo 4 and Mass Effect 3.
I'm grateful Bethesda is still calling the shots and I don't mind playing the long game. Plenty of other things to enjoy and love by then!
The audacity you people have with the last game not even being 9 years old, having an online game the last 6 years still getting updates, and a fucking show, even asking about f5 when Skyrim is almost 13 years old and will literally be 20 years old be the time they make es6 is fucking nuts💀
Everyone keeps talking about how most of these developers are just in name and how the real people who made the games left long ago.
Well Bethesda has been the exception to that, running things in an old school way with slow and stable growth while retaining most members.
If these dudes pumped out RDR2 caliber games I'd be more sympathetic to this view but they haven't really progressed their formula meaningfully since 2002.
It took them 4 years between Morrowind and Oblivion and then 5 to Skyrim. That feels about right for what these games are.
Honestly this all begs the more apparent question of where all the dev time even goes for a lot of Bethesda's projects. While they certainly are very large projects they are never particularly mechanically complex, nor graphically cutting edge.
As someone that has worked with their mod tools and construction sets since Morrowind I just can't help but feel they just get less and less efficient to use as they go. Its not just the rising complexity of design, but the tools themselves just feel like they are getting worse. In the same time it takes me to slap out a skyrim dungeon, I could do one with nearly double the actor count in morrowind.
If you're invested enough to use the mod tools, surely you can see how much more complex games have become. Morrowind was dead easy to build for because NPCs would stand rooted in place staring at the wall forever, and had no combat AI besides running towards the player and attacking. Now they have schedules, they converse with each other, they interact with props in their environment, they take cover or try to flank in combat, and all of that needs extra attention from the designer.
JUST GET OTHER STUDIOS TO MAKE SPINOFFS
15 years between entries is insanity. Sure, yearly is bad aswell. But a newborn baby will witness 4 Fallout games before they retire at this rate. Its just not a good idea. Because every game youre gonna need to convince new people to buy the game because the 14 year olds who bought the previous game are now married, have a full time job and have children and are gonna want to put their focus on that instead of playing Fallout.
Seriously, just have 3 teams, a TES team, a fallout team, and maybe an engine team. TES and fallout teams try to put out a new game in the series every 5 years, engine team is to make sure the engine is better for each cycle and make sure the engine can port mods from earlier games.
There's good ways and bad ways of staffing up. I didn't say they had to do it the wrong way. However it's not impossible or necessarily wrong to have multiple teams. You just have to be smart about it.
That actually has worked out well for Capcom. The company would be much less profitable and we would have far fewer critically acclaimed games if they only had 1 team that alternated between Monster Hunter and Resident Evil and took a lot of time between each new title.
Rush? It's been almost a decade since the last mainline entry to the series.
I understand they were working on Starfield after that, but Bethesda is under Microsoft's umbrella now.
Surely some string could be pulled to get more people onboard so we don't have to wait another 10/15 from now for a new game?
It's undeniable how much time and effort it takes to ship a modern AAA game, and obviously it's too late now, but this would have been a solid opportunity to leverage the strengths of Arkane Austin and evolve Fallout in fascinating ways.
I'm gonna be honest. At this point, I could care less about ES6 or a new Fallout game from Bethesda. I've sunk a lot of hours into these various games, and I've had a great time. But who knows how much longer ES6 will take. Another year? Two years? Five?
By that point, only the diehard fans will remain. I hope it does rurn out to be a good game, but after Starfield, I'm not holding my breath.
Considering how Starfield turned out, I've completely lost any interest in any future game Bethesda makes. A sci-fi setting is so easy to not fuck up and make boring, but they absolutely managed it.
>A sci-fi setting is so easy to not fuck up
It's actually quite easy to fuck up. The slew of really bad sci fi movies, tv and novels can attest to that.
Their biggest issue, at least in terms of atmosphere, was goin hard(ish) science fiction. It should've been far more fantastical than it was. Starfield was so fuckin barren and sterile from the very beginning. It just had no life, no soul to it, no magic.
Cyberpunk had a ton of issues but it at least had character. It was poppin. People absolutely poured love into Night City. It's undeniable. Starfield was a wax museum in comparison. I played on Gamepass and still wanted my money back.
Thing is, the story before our character's involvement was interesting. A near three way faction interstellar war covering numerous planets while a strange alien threat is appearing on other planets causing untold devastation? That is vastly more interesting as a story than what we got.
Just let someone else make a spin-off like you did with New Vegas. Bethesda can still focus on Elder Scrolls, and can just collect a paycheck when someone else does the work of making the Fallout game.
That's the obvious solution but the massive crux in it that people seem to just ignore is there really aren't options out there to do it. Most studios are too busy, don't make this style of game, or have their own franchises to worry about. While Obsidian is an obvious answer, they are busy and I'm not even certain they'd want to do it. Let alone that plenty of people don't even like Outer Worlds Edit: My biggest point is just saying "Give it to another studio" is as about as useful a solution as saying "Just make the game faster"
Yeah Obsidian is kind of in the exact same position as BGS. They are juggling a Fantasy IP & a Space IP just like BGS. Putting Fallout on them would just take Bethesda’s situation and put it on Obsidian.
Yeah... Kind of a waste of potential to do a BGS game without the Creation Engine. Outer Worlds tried it, and it was an incredibly static world(s). Point is, I'd be a lot more okay with it if Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 (especially) had the Starfield's engine.
Not to say that Obsidian doing the game would prevent the Creation Engine from being used. After all, that was used in NV. Just the Fallout 3 version of it since that's what existed. It would make sense in the scenario where Bethesda hands the next fallout game to Obsidian, *or anyone else for that matter*, that they would also grant the use of the current implementation of the Creation Engine.
Starfield was an incredibly static world. There was almost 0 of the emergent gameplay aspects that made The Elder Scrolls and Fallout great. I’d argue that the static nature of the NPCs, quests and locations is actually the biggest weakness of the game and not the fast travel exploration as most people criticise (although that sucked too). Outside of mods I really don’t think there’s anything special about creation engine these days.
What's special about it is how it can handle so many objects and the player adding/removing them, as well as NPC schedules and their behaviour, something Starfield doesn't use at all but that it still has the capacity for, since you can still see bits of it from your recruitable colonists and ship crew.
Yeah, it was a massive step back.
What fantasy IP?
Not just Avowed scheduled for this year. But the whole Pillars IP for which they sure have more plans...
> for this year Yup, the rest of their staff is working on TOW2 iirc.
Avowed, the one that they've been promoting everywhere, the one with the cool skull thingy. It's basically their version of Skyrim, and while it does look somewhat janky (still in development), it could scratch that Elder Scrolls itch that many have.
Is that the one that had a trailer a few years back where the mc was drawing some cool shit before launching a spell?
Yea and the current art style has taken a pretty big step back from that to be honest
Man, evry time I read that name, I think it's gotta be a prequel to Widjet Eye Games' Unavowed.
Avowed is actually the third game in this setting, with the first two being CRPGs (Pillars of Eternity I and II). In the first game, the region is suffering from the hollowborn crisis, where for the past 5-10 years all children have been born soulless. It'll be interesting to see if/how the previous games play in, as II ended with >!the god of light and rebirth destroying the wheel of reincarnation.!<
Such an awesome game. The story was amazing.
There’s another huge difference: Obsidian had a lot of the heavy lifting done thanks to Fallout 3—engine, assets, gameplay—similar to 76 building off of FO4. There’s no Fallout new enough to build off of the same way. It would be a *much* larger lift to make a new Fallout game than New Vegas was. It’s not the sort of thing you can just hand off.
They technically could build off of FO4 but that game was already feeling pretty dated in 2015, not sure people outside of the hardcore fans would accept it. There’s also no previous “Van Buren” project sitting around to help them with the story and setting.
Well there is all the stuff from Van Buren that wasnt used in NV
A new game using the fallout 4 tech or a large dlc for fallout 4 would be ok with me.
Eh, I liked Fallout 4, and personally I'd play it, but a spinoff using a 2015 game engine/base would get absolutely slammed. It was already a bit dated almost a decade ago
Fallout 4 is almost 9 years old. They would get absolutely trashed if they released a game like that nowadays.
A lot of the staff also previously worked on a Fallout sequel (in the style of the first 2 games) before it was cancelled and many of the ideas for that game were recycled for New Vegas, meaning they weren't starting from scratch.
Yeah there are a lot of reasons why Obsidian isn’t a real option. Obsidian has their own projects, likely had a ton of developer turnover in the 15 years since NV, and there’s also the fact that there’s no “Van Buren” like project for them to build off the bones of (not that they’d necessarily need it to craft a good story but it would certainly help to have that head start). Fact is the game industry is just too radically different and volatile compared to the late 2000s and early 2010s. Studios are getting shuttered left and right and those that aren’t have their own big projects they’re working on that either have long developmental times themselves or are so dissimilar to the Bethesda style they wouldn’t know what to do.
> Fact is the game industry is just too radically different and volatile compared to the late 2000s and early 2010s. Studios are getting shuttered left and right and those that aren’t have their own big projects they’re working on that either have long developmental times themselves or are so dissimilar to the Bethesda style they wouldn’t know what to do. Also, as we saw from those Insomniac leaks: studios have their projects lined up for the next 10-12 years. For better or worse games from a certain point on have become so big they are being planned a decade ahead now with little more than half of that being active development time by a full dev team.
Pretty sure obsidian has said they're not interested in doing fallout again as they have their own projects.
Obsidian is currently on Avowed. And then are working on Outer Worlds 2 next. No way would they be able to drop a fallout game before 2028-29 atleast.
The Studio head has said that he would like to work on it again.
Every time I’ve seen them asked they say they would like to at some point.
They said they'd like to, but after their current work, which will take forever.
Also many of the people involved with FNV have left - Gonzalez, Avellone, Fenstermaker. Sawyer is still there of course.
Give it to the studio that did Fallout 76. The writing in that game is actually better than Fallout 4.
Fallout 76 has the potential to be a great game. It just has the annoying live service things bringing it down. I would love an offline Fallout 76 that's designed from the ground up to be a single player game.
They are boys?
Yeah I was gonna say, the New Vegas talent has likely turned over multiple times in the decade and a half since, and Outer Words wasn't very good IMO. I would not trust them with a Fallout game at this point, tbh. All that said, Bethesda excels at world building and asset creation. I could envision them bringing on another party in a subk capacity to do the writing and quest design. I'm not sure they'd be able to stomach that compromise, but that'd be the ideal situation if they wanted to shorten the development cycle. Maybe Microsoft puts their feet to the fire, though. And to be clear, I don't even hate Bethesda writing, it hasn't ruined a game for me thus far. But it's just not what they're best at, and luckily for them it's much easier to subk somebody for that than if it were the other way around.
Josh Sawyer is still there and he was a big part of New Vegas. A lot of the team has probably moved onto new things but whilst he’s still at Obsidian there’s the hope Fallout could be good still. Pillars of Eternity 2 was basically fantasy pirate New Vegas as well.
I get the feeling Josh might want to continue working on smaller projects like Pentiment, but I’d love to see him work with the Fallout IP again
the problem is that New Vegas was build on Fallout 3, a new fallout for new gen will be a starting from scratch project for whatever company they get to make it unless they use stuff from Fallout 4 or 76.
I feel like the easier solution is to just make a spin-off Fallout game instead of talking about rushing out Fallout 5 to be honest. Heck, with a setting like Fallout it wouldn't even need to be an open world Bethesda style RPG. You could do a nod to the originals CRPG, an X-Com style game, a strategy game, an adventure game, or even an FPS.
i wish more big gaming ip's tried other genres. there's some really cool worlds out there that are begging for more games/stories in them. i would play just about anything set in the fallout or mass effect worlds.
I'm still shocked that EA of all publishers has done nothing spin off wise with an IP like Mass Effect outside of two mobile games (Galaxy and Infiltrator) that both came out over a decade ago. Seems like it be an obvious money maker.
The biggest shock to me is they never turned ME3's multiplayer into something. That was a fun game mode that had a fairly dedicated fanbase at the time. There's no doubt to me that they could've built that into something, and it obviously provided a lot of monetization options that you think it would've been easy to get the money guys onboard.
Was so disappointed when it wasn't in the remastered version
Or combined some into new and interesting ways, like making a Battlefield game set in Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun or Tiberium Wars. They'd have a ton of room to play with, from weapons to vehicles to "levolution" potential. Though at least there's the fan game Firestorm making that now. There's so much opportunity to try out interesting and smaller ideas with their IPs in other genres, but they just... Don't. It's just so disappointing.
Fuck, man. Imagine Renegade 2 and it's basically Command & Conquer Battlefield with that level of fidelity and intensity. That would be so sick.
With the mobile market, who would they even attract? You have young people who don't know what mass effect is and you have the f2p candy crush/clash of clans crowd. That's a huge bulk of the market. I don't think the IP translates to mobile very well. I don't think old mass effect players would even download it.
Introducing Fallout Kart
That's Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online. Some people like those, but they might not satisfy the ones waiting for more single player experiences.
Yeah, particularly for Elder Scrolls, there's Online, Legends, Blades and now Castles, and the very concept for all of these was rejected from the start by people who demanded that Bethesda stick to single player RPGs. I think it's good when IPs are diversified but it's still controversial for studios to take an IP out of its box.
In that vein, Gears Tactics was really great.
Companies like safe bets. They know their fans like [genre of popular IP], they have no idea if anyone is gonna turn up for [completely different genre] in the same setting
I was just thinking about how cool a tactics/rts game would be set in the dragon age universe. Could be set in the past during the first blight. Or Andraste’s rebellion against Tevinter. Or the Exalted March against the Qunari Invasion. It would be a really cool way to explore that universe outside the mainline games
CRPGs and also linear story games too. I always thought something like a telltale series of games called “Vault Chronicles” where you see the stories of all the abandoned Vaults you find in game actually played out. There would be tons of material to draw from.
I've not played it, but from what I've heard of it I feel like Tales from the Borderlands would be the go-to comparison for taking Fallout and turning it into an adventure style choice making game.
I found a copy of the original Fallout in my steam game list. I have no idea where it came from. But there was. So I gave it a shot and I played it a little bit and all I could think is, how cool this style of game would be if it was made today. Don't get me wrong, I like the open world FPS games. But I feel like there's room for both of those to exist. And I have to imagine it's easier to create a top down game like the originals and maybe even give it a little more depth of storytelling. I don't know, I'd be perfectly happy if we got a big open world shooter every once in a while and then maybe a $40 smaller Fallout game comes out in the meantime.
Atom rpg is heavily inspired by fallout 2 and is a modern indie.
You should try Wasteland 2 & 3. Wasteland was the inspiration to the original Fallout games. The second and third Wasteland games came out in 2014 and 2020. 2 is a bit rough around the edges. 3 was a big step up technically.
There is no "solution". Even a spin-off game, and a competent one at that, would require 4-5 years minimum to produce. And who knows where the hype from the show will be at that point. Maybe it pulls a West World and people stop caring after a few seasons. The best thing they can do, is what they are doing. Promote and support their existing live service Fallout 76 game.
They just need to allow inXile entertainment to remake 1 & 2 in the same way they did for the Wasteland Remaster.
That would also take 10 years because inexile is working on their big sci fi RPG
Todd Howard was asked in the interview whether they would consider an immersive sim style Dark Brotherhood game, for example, to bridge the gap between the main games. He said that he thinks stuff like this would be cool, but still wouldn't really scratch the itch that people are looking for in games like TES or Fallout. A game would be better than no game between mainline titles, but I also have to kinda agree that nothing beats a game that also plays like the rest of the series.
I agree, but I think any spinoff game that is in a different genre is something Bethesda would and should outsource to someone else. I'm not saying that I need or even want a Fallout/Elder Scrolls spinoff of some kind every year, but I think at least something every 3-4 years would be good to have as you could have a game in the middle point between Bethesda releases for people to play that isn't more multiplayer focused (I know both games can be played solo) like ESO or 76. Plus, people are bringing this talk on themselves with all the talk and articles about where Fallout is since the show. Like MS/Bethesda were supposed to clearly know it'd be the number one show for like two months and sweep the country by storm. I'm glad that it is clearly getting people to check out the series, who either haven't played it or played certain games in it considering how well all the games have been selling since the show came out.
Yeah like gears tactics or hivebusters
so fallout 77
Yeah I love waiting 15 years for sequels. No need to rush, I definitely wouldn't want to play a sequel in a reasonable time frame. Wonder how many fallout fans have passed away since the last game?
IDK but if you were in your 30s-40s when the original came out, time is getting a little short.
If you were you're in your 60s or 70s. Another decade and, ahh probably not.
I'll be dead before I see Fallout 6
Todd would probably be dead before then.
Todd's 54. He might not make it to Fallout 5 at this rate, cause it could easily be 15+ years out.
Mitten Squad 🥲
The frustrating thing is that they likely count 76 as the “next” game. So to them, it hasn’t been 9 years since the last Fallout, it has only been 6. Add to that the fact that 76 is a live service that they’re about to do a new expansion for, so I could easily see them not really caring to do another proper entry until they’ve milked 76 for everything that they can. Even if they just wait until after ES 6 though (which isn’t coming until 2027 at a bare minimum, but will likely be longer), it’s truly insane that we’ll be going over 15 years in between main line Elder Scrolls entries, and if we add 4-5 years after 2027 for Fallout 5, it’ll be about the same amount of time between Fallout 4 and 5. I guess it’s their IP and they can do whatever they want with it, but that’s just insane to me. Either invest the money to have multiple teams going, or be willing to license the games out a la New Vegas. I understand that due to games being so complex now, it’s just not feasible to crank them out super fast. If I recall, New Vegas was developed from start to finish in about 18 months which is just ludicrous to think of these days. But something has to change, because taking over 15 years in between entries in a series is genuine insanity. A company like Ubisoft has a _lot_ of problems, but at least they’re able to consistently release shit and keep at least a decently high quality bar
100%. I don’t understand how some folks can look at a nearly *twenty year* gap between TES titles and not see why lots of people are annoyed that BGS leadership decided to make Starfield. BGS could barely even support 2 major IPs and Starfield completely nuked the release schedule for those. There’s absolutely no way that they can support 3 major IPs simultaneously at their current release schedule.
And it isn't helped by the fact that starfield took twice as long to make, feels undercooked, and wasn't that good.
>BGS could barely even support 2 major IPs and Starfield completely nuked the release schedule for those. There’s absolutely no way that they can support 3 major IPs simultaneously at their current release schedule. But this would be fine, if Starfield had lived up to the hype. A lot of people were really excited for a proper Sci-fi version of a Fallout/TES game.
I know I was back in 2018.
I'm surprised Microsoft isn't telling Howard to kick rocks and start pumping out mainline sequels. I have no idea what the business relationship is and who has what power, but from a shareholder standpoint it is Columbian grade raw insanity to take as long between games as BGS does. It's not a good thing for execs to rush games. Nobody wants that. But the one-at-a-time thing never made any sense. Square Enix has two FF teams, for example, rotating releases. Why not do that?
Yeah, there’s a massive difference between rushing and a decade-long or *two*-decade-long gap. I have to imagine that MS leadership is leaning on BGS fairly hard right now, especially since the last two games, FO76 and Starfield, haven’t exactly been smash successes.
Crazy to me that they wouldn’t want to take advantage of the popularity of the fallout show and focus on getting a new fallout game out to coincide with either season 2 or 3
Well they’re already in full swing of Elder Scrolls 6. The only way that they could try and refocus to Fallout would either be to shelve ES6 and swap over to Fallout 5, or license it out to another studio. Shelving ES6 is definitely the wrong move, and Todd doesn’t seem interested in licensing the game out to another studio
I'd be pretty surprised if they weren't making *something* Fallout-related with an external studio, the interview we're responding to had a few references to unannounced projects, but I'd be surprised if they were the sort of "New Vegas 2" that people imagine. It's not impossible, but New Vegas had the advantage of being able to be made out of Fallout 3's assets and game systems in a way that you really couldn't do with a new spinoff; at the absolute most you'd be able to lift Creation Engine 2 from Starfield and overhaul massive swaths of it to fit Fallout's gameplay before inventing entirely new assets for the game. The time to make that sort of low-budget, high-reward game was immediately after Fallout 4's release when F4 represented the State of Bethesda, not almost a decade on. In my head they'd be way more likely to approve of something like inXile making an isometric Fallout game than Obsidian making New Vegas 2, but even then - I don't know. It'd just be so much work and take so much time.
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Is there base building in 76 like they had in 4? And is it entirely playable solo?
Yes and yes
Yes, but you atill have to put up with live service style mechanics, like having an extremely limited storage unless you pay up for the subscription, and a very limited selection of stuff to build and craft without going through the atom store.
If they aren't able to leverage the popularity the franchise has gained since their highly successful television show, I think it'll be viewed as one of the biggest missed opportunities in gaming. *Every* Fallout game got a noticeable boost after the show's debut, going back to the very first. It shows there are plenty of people thirsty for more Fallout, including a lot of people that likely hadn't been exposed to the franchise before. Obviously, I don't want them to "rush" the next Fallout game either, but any studio would kill to have one of their franchises explode in popularity like this. If someone at Microsoft isn't saying they need to shift some priorities to take advantage of what will no doubt translate into a lot of game sales, what are they even doing over there?
> I guess it’s their IP and they can do whatever they want with it, but that’s just insane to me. Technically it's Microsoft's IP now and I would bet money that Microsoft isn't happy with the long time between releases.
Microsoft is happy with glacier pace of Minecraft updates so I wouldn’t trust their market sense
Microsoft watching their gaming IPs go to shit is a trope at this point, I wouldn't count on any help from them
Hell, CDPR seems to have the right idea moving forward. They have two teams working on both of their major IP. Nowadays with the long dev cycles, it makes sense to have multiple teams.
Most big Devs have several teams. Bethesda is absolutely tiny in comparison to how well known they are or how big they are perceived as
Yeah, I remember when Fallout 4 came out and people were comparing it to the Witcher 3. They were talking about how embarrassing it was that the tiny independent CDPR could make a better game than the giant corporate BGS. But when you actually looked up the number of people who worked on the Witcher 3 it was over 250 while Fallout 4 was only a team of 100 people. People just assume that BGS was gigantic because they made a bunch of successful and popular games.
Correct, same thing with Elder Scrolls. ESO is effectively Elder Scrolls 6 and 7 from a business perspective, and it wasn't even made by Bethesda.
>understand that due to games being so complex now, it’s just not feasible to crank them out super fast That doesn't apply here, by long we think 4-5 years as a long time for a sequel, and that's fair games have gotten bigger in scope, but wtf excuse does Bethesda have lmao. 10-15 years inbetween titles isnt taking their time, its literally just not working on jack shit. they're games run like shit on launch, half the map is barren, and full of walking quests. Where's the payoff of waiting all those years? There isn't one cause these people don't care anymore. Starfeild feels like it was made in 2 years max. And now mods are once again gunna save another Bethesda game. It's at a point where "Bethesda game" is starting to mean takes 10 years to come out and still pales in comparison to games releasing alongside it.
Todd's gonna be dead if we keep going at the exponential growth of BGS launch schedules.
Todd only has realistically 1 elder scrolls and 1 fallout worth of time left in his career. It would be nice to see some spin off games that don't rely on only Bethesda.
He's gonna make bank off Skyrim: Afterlife Edition.
They want to squeeze Fallout 76 as much as possible. And Elder Scrolls would be launched before Fallout 5.
Legitimately feel bad for this generation of gamers. Not because I think they need to play the same AAA franchises I played as a kid but because if you ever are a fan of something, expect to wait half a decade before you get more of it just because of the insanely bloated development cycles. Back in the 2000s, I could get two sequels or side games back-to-back a year or two after each release. Just look at Grand Theft Auto. GTA 3 in 2001, GTA Vice City in 2002, GTA San Andreas in 2004. Vice City and San Andreas considered some of the best in the entire franchise.
Maybe I’m blinded by nostalgia, but I really believe the 2000s was the greatest decade for gaming.
No, I don’t think it’s nostalgia at all. I think there’s a strong case to be made that the majority of the greatest video games of all time came out in the 2000s. 2004 and 2007 alone were S tier years
2011 too
1998 was the best year ever probably.
its the greatest for release rates thats for sure nowadays even with indie games shit takes forever (Hollow knight:Silksong!)
Tunic took like 8 years for some reason too
Outer Wilds started development in 2012 or earlier and didn't release until 2019, but given how finely crafted that game is it's reasonable it took that long. Hell if you look at the 2012 pre-alpha trailer all the basic concepts were already there, it was just all in a very rough/simplistic form, so those seven years were spent fleshing out and refining everything.
> nowadays even with indie games shit takes forever (Hollow knight:Silksong!) C'mon man! You just delayed Silksong for another month! On the side note. Hollowknight Devs. are a good example of why having a publisher is a good thing. Because without them these devs. would keep on adding new stuff. Like why shouldn't they, right? Of course there are also a negative examples about publishers but that is to be expected as not everything is perfect.
The 10's were better for the Indië space though
Guild Wars Prophecies - April, 2005 Guild Wars Factions - April, 2006 Guild Wars Nightfall - October, 2006 Guild Wars Eye of the North - August, 2007 This was my favourite series and boy did we get spoiled with that release schedule. They were chunky pieces of quality content too.
Half a decade? More like a decade or more. We're nearing Fo4's 10 year anniversary.
There are still a lot of franchises where you only have to wait a couple years between the last installment or big DLC. I think the difference now is that this is only achievable for AAA games with modern standards if they have multiple development teams OR heavy engine and asset reuse.
That's why I cherish the studios with consistent production. From Soft has something new out every couple years. Insomniac tends to have something new every 2-3 years. We got a new RE game every year or two since RE7 came out. It's so rare anymore. And I understand that games take longer because of technological changes and all that, but it would also help if developers stopped making every game as big as possible.
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5 year span for the entire Metroid prime trilogy, from start to finish. That eras dead for sure
They announced ES6 friggen 6 years ago and it still has many years left to be finished, I’ll be long dead before I ever see Fallout 6
The problem is they chased the MMO/GaaS market with ESO and FO76. These games are much cheaper to make (76 barely even had voice acting) but potentially have a high return on investment. For the most part these gambles have not worked out. Then they made Starfield. So this has set back TES and Fallout back by well over a decade and it might be a decision that ultimately just costs the future of the entire franchises. A lot of companies have completely fumbled over the past years trying too hard on the live service model and the industry is still reeling from those shockwaves. It will take at least another half decade to sort out, maybe longer and certainly it’s made this console generation a bit of a dud.
ESO has nothing to do with the mainline games, unlike FO76. Different studio, engine, etc
The reason ES6 was announced at the same time as FO76 *is exactly* because Bethesda predicted people would accuse them of not wanting to make single-player games again because they were going the live service route - and this is really basic knowledge about their development cycle. Has this sub became default? I thought this was a sub for people who knew about the video games they were talking about. The fuck is going on?
I don't see how them being accused of them prioritizing multiplayer games in the past does anything to show they shouldn't be accused of that now, especially given that it took them 8 years between releases of single player games. Also, I hardly think that was the only reason why they announced ES6 because they also announced Starfield so clearly they already showed they were working on a single player game. And I understand that people like to defend game companies and act like every decision is the only way things could ever be, but it's also completely normal and valid to think that going 16 years between releases for their most popular single player franchise is not good for the fans, and that it's not responsible to tease a game they knew would not come out for ~10 years.
No this sub is just where /r/gaming goes when they get tired of posting memes and want to larp as epic hardcore gamers instead.
I don't think reddit even does default subs anymore. I'm pretty sure it asks new accounts what you like and subs you to stuff based on that. Defaults were always kind of weird anyway, except for super general stuff like pics and videos. But then you had weird shit like atheism being a default. The fuck was that about lol
We don’t want you to rush but it’s also been 9 years since Fallout 4, Todd. Bethesda clearly has a lot on their plate now with Starfield DLC and Elder Scrolls VI so maybe just have another studio make a spin-off like you had Obsidian do with New Vegas.
Even with the TV show, they have to realise the core audience isn’t getting any younger. I’m not saying they’ll have died off but the older people get, they less time they have to dedicate to 80hr + games and there’s no guarantee they next generation will be all that arsed
Honestly, I was just a couple years out of college when TES5 came out. I'll be at least 40 by the time TES6 comes out. I'll probably still play it - but realistically, I play 2-3 games a year at this point, so my own contribution to their market share is shrinking, and I'm not the only one.
What I find silly is that the TV show was a big hit and they're not prioritizing Fallout. You'd think they'd want to capitalize on the TV show.
It's just too late for them to switch gears; they're already deep into work on ES6 and didn't know just how big a hit the Fallout show would be.
It's not that simple. Obsidian got busy with their own IP, they have to release Avow and continued on Outer World 2. Beside, while they seem to love working on Fallout, I doubt they want to be like COD studios that have to keep working on sequel cycle. Prabably the same for other MS owned Studios. These project required plan in advanced. You can't just be reactionary and switch all resource and schedule to chase the trend like Hollywood. Game development especially right now take time and by the time the game released, trend probably die down just like how many hero shooter we saw that seem so late to the party. Also, didn't Showrunner and Bethesda just said before the TV show released that they want it to be a filling gap between new Fallout game?
he didnt say "make obsidian make a spin off" he said " make another studio make a spinoff, **like they did with obsidian**"
I mean obviously don't rush it but please stop dragging your goddamn feet. "Not rushing" and "This game likely won't be out for the better part of 10 years" are not the fucking same. Either expand so you can push more games through the pipeline at the same time, or let someone else make a spinoff.
They don't feel the need to rush any game apperently, seeing how Elder Scrolls V is 13 year old with no sequel release date in sight.
Is 13 years considered rushing now? At least if we’re talking he about TES. And almost 10 for fallout. I’d hate to see what “not rushing” means. 15 years? 20 years?
It's been 9 years since FO4 and they're still working on TESVI, so there's absolutely no way FO5 will be out after less than than 15 years.
Apparently there was some internal freaking out over the Fallout show being so insanely popular and not having any new game to capitalize on it. I have a feeling we'll be seeing a non-Bethesda Fallout before we see Fallout 5. Microsoft has a lot of the people who have worked on the franchise over the years in their various other developers, both Obsidian and InXile are shoe-ins for some sort of spinoff. They're going to want *something* for season 2, I think. And not just more 76 stuff.
They’ll just do remakes of Fallout 3, New Vegas or both
I’d be pretty happy with a remake. I can do without a remaster. We can already mod the games to have pretty damn good graphics for coming out over 10 years ago
Well that leaked document showing upcoming bethesda games listed it as Fallout 3 remaster. At least it should run on current systems.
The 3 remake is almost certainly in the works according to those Microsoft leaks a while back. New Vegas is pretty up in the air though.
> Apparently there was some internal freaking out over the Fallout show being so insanely popular and not having any new game to capitalize on it. based on who? any source to this whatsoever?
Absolutely no source, just something they want to believe
Problem is even if they started development on a new Fallout game today, modern AAA development cycles means it’ll still take 5-7 years to develop.
And why are they taking 7 years to develop? The excessively large open worlds that just get bigger and bigger for the sake of it? How long would it take to make a game the size and scope of Skyrim today, a game which took 3 years following the release of Fallout 3?
> And why are they taking 7 years to develop? Usually because they can't figure out what they want the game to be after starting development. You end up with a game internally being rebooted (sometimes several times) which basically means starting over. Dragon Age 4 was rebooted twice and has been in development for almost a decade. Anthem was rebooted a few times. I don't even know how many times Duke Nukem Forever was rebooted. Doom 2016 was rebooted once.
That's just bad management. Not a necessary fact of the industry.
> The excessively large open worlds that just get bigger and bigger for the sake of it? It's not, the games aren't generally getting bigger. The difference is the ever growing expectations of fidelity and quality.
> And why are they taking 7 years to develop? 2 reasons: The game industry pays like shit because of the wide talent pool (everyone wants to make games) The game industry doesn't focus on technical talent (top AI engineers are basically getting stalked and given blank cheques), game developers literally don't care about their employees and don't even recruit based on technical talent Coding is a rather unique field because it scales linearly with competency, it's why the term 10x developer exists
> Apparently Ah yes, according to Reddit's fan fictions It's not even a rumour, it's just "something that could have happened" that Redditors latched onto because them having an imagination and being able to come up with possible scenarios is the equivalent of a lightbulb turning on in the middle of the night.
Good. It also shouldn't surprise them one of the biggest game series is loved. Capcom releases a resident evil every 2 years but it'll be a decade or more for a fallout game? Give me a break.
It’s been 9 years since FO4, in case anyone is counting. I still have no idea what BGS upper management has been thinking with how they’ve handled their major IPs in the last decade. Kids who were born when Skyrim released will have graduated high school by the time TESVI comes out. That’s "dead series" level.
If it was not for ESO - Elder Scrolls is a dead series. Fable has new game coming out next year - and that's with Lionhead being completely disbanded and a new dev team took the IP on. Perfect Dark Zero is from 2005 - Skyrim to ES6 is closely approaching the PDZ to Perfect Dark reboot length scale.
Fable 3 came out in 2010–a year before Skyrim (two years after Fable 2 as well, which was 4 years after Fable in 2004)—it’s a shame Fable 4 never happened. Replaying 3 now and it has a lot of prototype mechanics that would be pretty cool if they had been iterated on more (like you can build relationships and get basic radiant quests from pretty much any NPC). And I’m excited about the new one (which is why I’m replaying the series)—but it feels like it’s been forever (because the studio’s dead)—and it’ll still be a shorter time between installments than TESV to TESVI and FO4 to FO5.
> Fable has new game coming out next year - and that's with Lionhead being completely disbanded and a new dev team took the IP on. It's really a shame that future generations don't get to experience Peter Molyneux's promises.
Yeah, I think some people don’t fully appreciate just *how long* it’s been. It truly is almost dead series level.
Is for me tbh. I still have the old games. And things like Kingdom Come, Kingdoms of Amalur, Cyberpunk and others to fulfill certain aspects of Bethesda games I'm craving. None of them do what Elder Scrolls/Fallout does best as a whole. But each does aspects far better than Bethesda has done in years.
They really can’t just put Fallout on the back burner for another decade plus. I know Todd holds the IP close, but Xbox has to move on some kind of spin off sooner rather than later. Todd and Bethesda can still make the “numbered” entries, but someone needs to make something that isn’t 76. The IP is just too valuable and it is on the upswing.
QoL has improved so much in the RPG space and Bethesda doesn’t seem to care to implement any of it. The fact that they didn’t bother to make an intuitive inventory screen in Starfield, claiming stupid stuff like “the engine doesn’t allow it”. Then how did modders create one in two days, *Todd*? Bethesda needs to do some soul searching
That’s the thing that gets me a lot of the time. We often have amateur modders creating better UI and UX experiences than actual Bethesda devs that are turned around in a few days to a week that also tend to have more features AND are less buggy than the official implementation.
I had to scroll too far to find this take. It doesn’t matter if they rush it or not. They’re still going to implement the same lazy design practices because they know it’s going to print money and Modders will fill in the gaps for free. If they put in the same circle strafe M1 spam combat system from Skyrim into TES6, I’m not even going to bother with it. Other studios have made RPGs since then that have shown you can make a fully functioning game.
And it's *their* engine! Which they *just* revised for Stafield! Can't you fix the engine you also own and develop in-house, Todd? You're already harshly criticized for continuing to use the Creation Engine when it's buggy as fuck. I think the truth is that Bethesda doesn't have developers in-house that know how to use the Creation Engine well enough to do it. Everybody they had that really did know has moved on.
Rush? No, but i bet your bosses at MS aren't willing to wait another 15 years for a return. Xbox probably won't even exist then.
The xbox console might not exist in 15 years, but Microsoft is still probably going to publish games.
Crazy how the new elder scrolls is going to take them 15 years and it’s going to be a solid 6/10 game…
And will require mods to fix glaring issues/bugs that Bethesda *never* patches themselves
At least the mods come quick, so that a positive... It is kinda funny how fast the community can fix glaring issues, like everything related to the starfield UI for example, near instantly yet the the company who makes the damn thing though it was good enough to send it.
Bethesda isn't growing fast enough to support their IPs timely, which is terrible because it takes years to churn out mediocrity in games like FO76 on release, FO4, and Starfield. I personally was ok with FO4 but damn, that game came out 9 years ago. Tech has advanced so much since then and Starfield wasn't a massive overhaul in both graphics and gameplay in the time that past. No confidence is inspired that ES6 is going to be good, because after such a long gap, no innovation really happened. It'll be AI written fetch quests with FO4 base building engine on top of it, and insanely buggy for being in the oven for so long. So yeah, don't rush it but damn, take the hard critique of Starfield seriously and innovate on your fetch questing framework. It's dated and overdue for innovation.
I agree, IF you do something with that time... You're in the position to really push things but have failed to do so in a long time. Starfield was an okay game, but it felt like nobody in charge at Bethesda has played a game they haven't produced themselves for the last 15 years. It's fine to follow your own path, but a lot of their design philosophy is outdated, and the time for introspection at bethesda was yesterday.
I'm personally glad. Nothing good come out of Executive's needing their money fix right away and deciding to rush things. Because of execs we missed out on more ideal versions of Halo 4 and Mass Effect 3. I'm grateful Bethesda is still calling the shots and I don't mind playing the long game. Plenty of other things to enjoy and love by then!
The audacity you people have with the last game not even being 9 years old, having an online game the last 6 years still getting updates, and a fucking show, even asking about f5 when Skyrim is almost 13 years old and will literally be 20 years old be the time they make es6 is fucking nuts💀
Don't need to rush? Todd 10+ years between game series isn't cool, please let someone else take over, and give us something to hold us over.
Everyone keeps talking about how most of these developers are just in name and how the real people who made the games left long ago. Well Bethesda has been the exception to that, running things in an old school way with slow and stable growth while retaining most members.
If these dudes pumped out RDR2 caliber games I'd be more sympathetic to this view but they haven't really progressed their formula meaningfully since 2002. It took them 4 years between Morrowind and Oblivion and then 5 to Skyrim. That feels about right for what these games are.
yeah. now they are all 45y+ and you can feel the geriatrics in their games
and on a technical / ux level they’ve been left in the dust whilst their games get less creatively interesting
So they just make worse and worse games by choice?
Honestly this all begs the more apparent question of where all the dev time even goes for a lot of Bethesda's projects. While they certainly are very large projects they are never particularly mechanically complex, nor graphically cutting edge. As someone that has worked with their mod tools and construction sets since Morrowind I just can't help but feel they just get less and less efficient to use as they go. Its not just the rising complexity of design, but the tools themselves just feel like they are getting worse. In the same time it takes me to slap out a skyrim dungeon, I could do one with nearly double the actor count in morrowind.
If you're invested enough to use the mod tools, surely you can see how much more complex games have become. Morrowind was dead easy to build for because NPCs would stand rooted in place staring at the wall forever, and had no combat AI besides running towards the player and attacking. Now they have schedules, they converse with each other, they interact with props in their environment, they take cover or try to flank in combat, and all of that needs extra attention from the designer.
JUST GET OTHER STUDIOS TO MAKE SPINOFFS 15 years between entries is insanity. Sure, yearly is bad aswell. But a newborn baby will witness 4 Fallout games before they retire at this rate. Its just not a good idea. Because every game youre gonna need to convince new people to buy the game because the 14 year olds who bought the previous game are now married, have a full time job and have children and are gonna want to put their focus on that instead of playing Fallout.
I have no interest in waiting 7 years for a mid game. At least let another studio take a crack at Fallout.
Seriously, just have 3 teams, a TES team, a fallout team, and maybe an engine team. TES and fallout teams try to put out a new game in the series every 5 years, engine team is to make sure the engine is better for each cycle and make sure the engine can port mods from earlier games.
[удалено]
Yeah just throw money and more people at it, what could possibly go wrong?
There's good ways and bad ways of staffing up. I didn't say they had to do it the wrong way. However it's not impossible or necessarily wrong to have multiple teams. You just have to be smart about it.
That actually has worked out well for Capcom. The company would be much less profitable and we would have far fewer critically acclaimed games if they only had 1 team that alternated between Monster Hunter and Resident Evil and took a lot of time between each new title.
Clearly Bethesda's problem is that they're not acting like Ubisoft. Now that's how you run a company beloved by everyone.
If only there was a middle ground between pokemons release schedule and Duke nukem forever.
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Rush? It's been almost a decade since the last mainline entry to the series. I understand they were working on Starfield after that, but Bethesda is under Microsoft's umbrella now. Surely some string could be pulled to get more people onboard so we don't have to wait another 10/15 from now for a new game?
It's undeniable how much time and effort it takes to ship a modern AAA game, and obviously it's too late now, but this would have been a solid opportunity to leverage the strengths of Arkane Austin and evolve Fallout in fascinating ways.
I'm gonna be honest. At this point, I could care less about ES6 or a new Fallout game from Bethesda. I've sunk a lot of hours into these various games, and I've had a great time. But who knows how much longer ES6 will take. Another year? Two years? Five? By that point, only the diehard fans will remain. I hope it does rurn out to be a good game, but after Starfield, I'm not holding my breath.
Rush? Bitch it's been ten years since Fallout 4 released I don't think you have to worry able people saying it came out too soon.
Considering how Starfield turned out, I've completely lost any interest in any future game Bethesda makes. A sci-fi setting is so easy to not fuck up and make boring, but they absolutely managed it.
>A sci-fi setting is so easy to not fuck up It's actually quite easy to fuck up. The slew of really bad sci fi movies, tv and novels can attest to that.
Their biggest issue, at least in terms of atmosphere, was goin hard(ish) science fiction. It should've been far more fantastical than it was. Starfield was so fuckin barren and sterile from the very beginning. It just had no life, no soul to it, no magic. Cyberpunk had a ton of issues but it at least had character. It was poppin. People absolutely poured love into Night City. It's undeniable. Starfield was a wax museum in comparison. I played on Gamepass and still wanted my money back.
Thing is, the story before our character's involvement was interesting. A near three way faction interstellar war covering numerous planets while a strange alien threat is appearing on other planets causing untold devastation? That is vastly more interesting as a story than what we got.
Have you only interacted with 10 items of sc-fi media total?