this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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I feel like the game is largely an unknown at this point. We saw some gameplay but I feel like I would want to wait for reviews. Bethesda has a strong track record though so I'm hoping it should be good.
“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.
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.