this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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“Bethesda has a strong track record though” i mean… do they?
their games sell a lot of units but i can’t remember any time since morrowind that they launched a game that received widespread praise for anything other than its technical merits, and i say this as someone who still dips back into heavily modded TES games a few times a year :/
Morrowind: 89 on Metacritic
Oblivion: 94
Fallout 3: 91
Skyrim: 94
Fallout 4: 84
PC scores, for consistency. There are plenty of better games out there, but most AAA studios would kill for that kind of consistently good-but-not-quite-legendary track record.
oh yeah the metacritic scores are good but i was referring to audience reception about characters, narrative, etc
fallout 3 in particular is a fun one because once people started beating it there was a general upswell of “what the fuck was that?” that was loud enough that we got a changed ending in DLC :)
Morrowind scoring lower than Oblivion and Skyrim is a travesty.
After a certain point, scores are as much based on hype as quality.
That's not even a malicious choice, either. Hype influences our experiences and perceptions of whatever is being hyped. It's intuitively obvious that people will enjoy a good thing that they are hyped about more than a good thing that they are not hyped about. Hype is strongest just before release... which is exactly when reviewers play and assign a score to a game.
A sequel to a well received game is going to have more hype than the predecessor in most circumstances. Morrowind sold something like 5-10x the copies as Daggerfall and came about at a time when there was a lot of upheaval in the industry from a target-audience standpoint: a lot of potential Morrowind players (and reviewers) would have not played Daggerfall.
In essence, Oblivion was reviewed more positively because of the positive reception of Morrowind. The positive reception of Oblivion in turn boosted Skyrim.
This is not to say people would hate the games without the prior game before it or hype, just that there is a "hype boost" for games.
It's been a while since they've actually released one of their mainline games. I don't really count TES:O and FO:76 as IIRC neither had the normal dev teams working on them.
Im cautiously optimistic about it all, but am obviously going to wait for reviews.
the thing for me about starfield is that most of the game looks like a reskin of games i’ve already played (no man’s sky, elite dangerous) and the parts that don’t look like mainline bethesda fare but In Space, so my general vibe about starfield is pretty dismal
would be absolutely stoked for it to turn out well though. more games in space = good
Don't threaten me with a good time!
lol
What exactly do you think merits a strong track record then? If a series of games consistently over the course of 20 years being highly regarded, still being played, still growing with active communities, and selling extremely well for nearly every single title you made isn't a "strong track record," then who can claim that right?
It's not even like other game franchises which "just sell a lot of units" like sports games which tend to not do anything with their formula and release the same game but worse yearly.
well the context was about the quality of the game and not how many units they sell, so :/