Bethesda
I sure played a bit of Morrowind, in fact I even got to the end of it. The same goes for Oblivion and also for Skyrim. I also played a bit of Fallout 3 and a larger chunk of New Vegas and finished the Old World Blues add on. Did I like any of those games? Well honestly, no, not really. It may be a question of taste, but I’ll try to explain why none of those games and for what it’s worth the entire Bethesda game design philosophy has never given me any satisfaction.
I will start by saying that Bethesda is not that bad actually. They are unfortunately in that lukewarm place that makes something neither perfectly hate-able neither enjoyable. They’ve got the basics right, they know how to make numbers work, they know their RPG essentials, they know mechanics and a bit of storytelling but for some reason they never truly made a game out of those things.
It might just be a history thing. I don’t know how many of their initial employees are still working for the company but in the beginning Bethesda started out with a huge world RPG – Arena, repetitive, almost no story, and almost no goals type of game. At the time it was something novel and, of course it attracted players. This pseudo-sandbox design philosophy seems to have been following them ever since. They always had big ideas but never really got to the heart of the problem – player enjoyment and detailed experiences.
Take for instance Morrowind – the dialog screen – it was just a sort of parser, you talked to NPCs as if you were browsing a database. And that sort of design was in a game rooted in a fantasy setting. And it followed you for the entire duration of play. You didn’t have proper dialog options, just a bunch of highlights in a mass of text. You almost never knew if you were done “talking” or if there was anything else to know. It felt completely unnatural and out of place. And it extended to quest acquisition, encounters and other simple mechanics that simply were not fun to experience.
Take
I will start by saying that Bethesda is not that bad actually. They are unfortunately in that lukewarm place that makes something neither perfectly hate-able neither enjoyable. They’ve got the basics right, they know how to make numbers work, they know their RPG essentials, they know mechanics and a bit of storytelling but for some reason they never truly made a game out of those things.
It might just be a history thing. I don’t know how many of their initial employees are still working for the company but in the beginning Bethesda started out with a huge world RPG – Arena, repetitive, almost no story, and almost no goals type of game. At the time it was something novel and, of course it attracted players. This pseudo-sandbox design philosophy seems to have been following them ever since. They always had big ideas but never really got to the heart of the problem – player enjoyment and detailed experiences.
Take for instance Morrowind – the dialog screen – it was just a sort of parser, you talked to NPCs as if you were browsing a database. And that sort of design was in a game rooted in a fantasy setting. And it followed you for the entire duration of play. You didn’t have proper dialog options, just a bunch of highlights in a mass of text. You almost never knew if you were done “talking” or if there was anything else to know. It felt completely unnatural and out of place. And it extended to quest acquisition, encounters and other simple mechanics that simply were not fun to experience.
Take