6mo ago

Is Elder Scrolls 6 doomed to fail? I can't see how it will work

After the massive blunder of Starfield, I cannot see how Elder scrolls 6 could possibly be successful. Everything points to the fact that they knew that the game was not even half finished, in my opinion, with major glaring issues, and they decided to just send it off anyway. The difference between this game and Oblivion is that this time, it wasn't light-hearted and filled with silly mistakes that made people laugh. It instead inside it a lot of anger and disbelief as to how they could fail so spectacularly with a AAA title...

But this has not been the first time that Bethesda as a whole has failed, and is in fact the third strike. They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4, which took the gaming industry by surprise after seeing how poorly developed it was, and the extreme low quality of the story, how unfinished the game was, how simply broken many areas and features were, I could talk about it for hours. Biggest thing to me was the poorly made settlement system that barely even worked because there was no snapping, and it felt like playing an indie game. The second strike was Fallout 76, crazy how disappointing his game was and even to this day is still broken and in disarray. It's only been able to survive purely because of microtransactions...

Then, you look at what most people are playing right now, and it's Skyrim. Above any other game out there, it's Skyrim. The similarity between Skyrim and Elder scrolls 6 doesn't really matter that much, the age is what you should really focus on. Why are people playing such an old game still to this day? Hint, it's because every single other title they've released has been a disappointment.

Personally, I have no faith or belief that Elder scrolls 6 will be anything other than a colossal disappointment. I don't see how Bethesda as a studio can possibly manage to produce AAA titles anymore, I think they have a budget of half of what they need to have, and it's only getting smaller each year as costs are being cut, and People are being laid off, stakeholders and stockholders want more revenue growth than ever before. It's unbelievable honestly. They expect infinite growth with minimal headcount that keeps shrinking

113 comments

They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4
Eh, not really. Fallout 4 has its share of fans and while the roleplaying and story was weak, I thought the world was well laid out and fun to explore. But yeah, none of their games are as good as Skyrim which says a lot because that game has a ton of issues itself.
I think ES6 can still be good but it needs a lot of change from Bethesda's side. For one, they should either trash the engine or fix its issues. It's unbelievable that everything in Starfield has a loading screen between it, ran poorly, and was still a buggy mess. The enemy AI was apparently unchanged for the last 20 years or so, because every NPC is still clunky and has trouble moving from A to B.
If anything I think starfield was exactly the kick in the nuts that Bethesda needed. Hopefully it motivates them to do better next time.
- None of their games are as good as Morrowind, yet that hasn't stopped them from selling like hotcakes.
  
  Morrowind was also an almost unplayable buggy mess when it came out.
  One of the first places you go to if you do the main quest is the Balmora mages guild, and when you went downstairs in the release version, you regularly fell through the floor.
  And alchemy, crafting and spellcrafting were so broken you could just spend half an hour on it to turn yourself into a god.
- Honestly I think that if ES6 is to Skyrim what FO4 is to FO3, it will probably be good.
  The danger is if they try to replicate Starfield or FO76, ie. cut corners like crazy, be blinded by dollar signs in their eyes.
  
  I feel like in comparison to Starfield, ES6 should be smaller and more compact which should alleviate a lot of the other complaints I’ve seen.
  At this point the hype alone will sell it. There may be some apprehensive players since starfield, but I don’t think it’ll impact them too much.
  Also elder scrolls being their big IP, they kind of don’t have the wiggle room to screw this up.
- I'm so exited for Avowed to show me how else a skyrim like game can look and feel.
  
  Idk, Outer Worlds was really lame, imo. It was honestly more boring than most the Bethesda RPGs for me because it was basically trying to do the same type of thing as them but with way smaller worlds so it's just not as interesting.
- They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4
  Eh, not really. Fallout 4 has its share of fans and while the roleplaying and story was weak, I thought the world was well laid out and fun to explore
  When I say failed, this is of course my own opinion. I personally feel like it was a failed game because of how simply unfun it is. I had to mod the game to extreme amounts just to get it to be believable and as enjoyable as Skyrim, Oblivion, other Bethesda games. It simply was not fun and its released state due to the horrible dialogue, basically lackluster and meaningless world. No matter where I explored, it wasn't really rewarded at all with anything.
  It’s unbelievable that everything in Starfield has a loading screen between it, ran poorly, and was still a buggy mess
  It’s unbelievable that everything in Starfield has a loading screen between it, ran poorly, and was still a buggy mess
  Corporate greed and incompetence, plain and simple. It took a mod creator a week or two to cook up a solution for that and make the game free of loading screens, he did that FOR FREE. Bethesda is out here with millions in Budget, they couldn't have figured that out? Unbelievable. It's the same crap every single game, too. They're just lazy. Most Beth games that have been released has had a mod released that makes it 100% open world with no load screens
  
  There is no mod to make Starfield free of loading screens, the cell structure of the engine demands loading screens. A mod exists that introduces real space faster then light travel between planets in a system yes, but that mod a) destroys the storytelling and lore of the game completely b) it still has the loading screen to land on the planet and c) changes a quick load screen with a boring travel through empty space.
  It is like changing a stage change cut to black in a move with a real time travel scene with nothing at all happening but watching the people drive.

I feel like your post was being overly dramatic and then I noticed your comment about Starfield being a one out of ten game, and at that point it's hard to take you seriously.
The second strike was Fallout 76, crazy how disappointing his game was and even to this day is still broken and in disarray.
Fallout 76 may not be an amazing game, but they've turned it into something pretty enjoyable to play, and from my experience a couple years ago "broken" as an adjective doesn't really make sense as the game ran and played perfectly well.
They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4, which took the gaming industry by surprise after seeing how poorly developed it was, and the extreme low quality of the story, how unfinished the game was, how simply broken many areas and features were, I could talk about it for hours.
So, clearly you are just trying to push an agenda for some reason and are just making things up whole cloth at this point. I'm not sure what fantasy world you are living in but this isn't based in reality. It's just something you've made up in your head.
Also, I don't see the point in doom-posting about a game that's years away from release. What's the reason for fantasizing about a game's failure? Is it that people enjoy drama like the recent Concord release and are trying to look for future games to chase the same high?
- Also don't forget the developers for Fallout 76 are completely seperate from the devs for mainline elder scrolls and fallout and the only prior experience they had as a studio was making the multiplayer for doom 2016
- the thing with Starfield and F76 is that all of their major problems won't exist in ES6 simply due to the format differences. I'm confident they'll churn out another ES game roughly on par with the last few.
  
  And it will have the exact same lock picking mechanic we have every damn time

Starfield had a crippling issue that they made the wrong decision at the very start of development — thousands of procedural generated planets instead of a dozen hand-crafted planets.
If they hadn't made that mistake than Starfield would have been a hit.
- if they turned the procedural generator at people, food, supplies and weapons instead of the landscapes.... game would have been amazing
  the other problem was traveling, they needed to make travel a painful burden.... because when it became a quick loading screen and you are there... omfg it ruins the stories the npc's are trying to tell
  wtf you left your crew out here to die?! it took me 5 minutes to get here....
- Having a space game where every planet and every place in space is a super interesting stage feels so fake and wrong because space is not like that. If we go out into space and to other planets we will find way more boring then interesting (for the normal person) planets and locations between the planets out there then anything else. I love that Starfield is brave enough to show space more realistic even if that means boring.
  That's why I don't really get into No Man's Sky, the space and planets feels manufactured.
  
  If the game had a proper navigation between planets and less loadings I think the game would not receive so much criticism. The procedural generated content is not good but is not awful.
  
  Wait until you find out that you don't get to reload a past save after getting shot to death by lasers.

Starfield's biggest flaw was in trying to make a grand space game given that Bethesda's strength is sandboxy, exploration focused, RPGs.
I am of the mind that exploration fundamentally does not work in a space game because the scale is too big. There's waaaay too much space on even a single planet to populate with meaningfully interesting things to find. So there's maybe one or two interesting handcrafted things per planet and you spend all your time in system and galactic scale maps to find them, rather than stumbling across them while out on a walk.
The only space games that work imho, are either ones with tiny planets like The Outer Wilds, or ones that are more linear and driven by very good writing and space is more of a backdrop than the actual millions of km you have to travel through and explore (like The Outer Worlds, or Mass Effect).
So I think Bethesda has a higher chance of success in literally any other, more limited, setting, given that writing isn't their strong suit, but all that being said, I still don't know if they'll course correct.
- There is also the mediocre story, but hopefully they'll learn the lesson that no, we don't want something as automagically powerful as a dragonborn or whatever, it worked for skyrim sure, but it's a not something needed in every title.
  Working from a zero prisoner to hero was always the goal and should be again.
  
  Yeah the writing in Starfield is pretty bad.
  I think Skyrim's was better because there was less central control. I know that stuff like the whole Werewolf quest was just made by a passionate designer and dev who made it after hours, but that during Starfield development a lot more got run up the chain and there was less individual freedom.
  I suspect that stems from the massive procedural generativeness but am not sure.
  
  I think the issue is that they still have their developers write their own quests rather than hiring a team of dedicated writers like other studios do nowadays.
  The games will never be narratively coherent when everyone is pulling in a different direction.

Financially, I'm not sure if you could say that starfield or fallout 4 was a failure.. Look at steamcharts player counts as an indication. All time peak concurrent players:
Skyrim: 90,000
Skyrim SE: 79,000
Fallout 4: 470,000
Fallout 76: 72,000
Starfield: 330,000
Sure skyrim has sold on many platforms and over time likely has sold the best, but you can't say that starfield and fallout 4 were commercial failures. Starfield being on game pass day 1 means the real concurrent numbers would be enormous.
I've not played starfield and agree it looks like shit, but TES VI is likely going to sell gangbusters to mainstream audiences given how much Skyrim broke into the mainstream.
I agree with you that Bethesda isn't what they used to be with TES Morrowind - Skyrim era and desperately need to get rid of that engine. But for the metric that truly matters, sales, I don't know what it would take for TES VI to fail.
- I think there's two definitions of successful in gaming today. First is financially successful, it generated some decent profits for the stockholders. Second is how it was actually perceived by the community as a whole. Oblivion was spectacularly well received and made game of the Year edition. Fallout 4 was heavily criticized, but still somewhat successful in terms of the community reaction. Starfield was globally frowned upon, as someone who has played that exact game, it's horrible. I honestly feel like that game is a one out of 10. 1.0 out of 10 would be my exact rating if I had to give it one. It's not going to get the cyberpunk treatment, so sure maybe it'll break profits and be considered financially successful. But I don't think that game should ever be considered a success in any other aspect
  
  A 1 out of 10 for Starfield is ridiculous; either hyperbole, or you haven't played many video games before to see what a 1 out of 10 would truly be. I was very disappointed by it too, but level set a bit here.
  
  I think you're missing the point that the majority of l companies don't care about the quality of what they release. Large pro consumer companies like Valve and Lego (I couldn't think of any others video game related), who might be willing to let their bottom line fall in favor of improving relations with the customer, seem to be very much in the minority. For most others, the only thing that's important is how the bottom line is affected. Starfield, for all its flaws, was the #11 bestselling game of 2023.
  Now, you could be onto something when you mention Bethesda's poor track record, and how that might play into ES6's release. If they keep making disappointing games, maybe there will be a "boy who cried wolf" type situation where, since Bethesda keeps making disappointing games, no one will want to buy ES6 by the time it comes out. Personally though, I don't think that's very likely. The reality is that many (if not most) consumers don't even know who makes the games they buy, nor do the look into the other games that company makes. And for the ones that do, more still probably don't care. I think no matter what there will be a sizable amount of people who see Elder Scrolls 6 and go "Hey, I liked Skyrim, this'll probably be great!"
  
  First is financially successful, it generated some decent profits for the stockholders.
  This is the only sort of success they care about. Anything else is secondary. These companies gladly burn bridges with their communities so long as they believe it'll benefit their bottom-line.

Huh?
I loved Fallout 4, and I still play it. I've got it installed on this computer, but I don't have Skyrim installed. I'm not as attached to the London mod for it, TBH.
Can't say a lot about what Bethesda is going to do with the next Elder Scrolls games, but I'd love to see a return to the more complicated skill trees and level advancement that they used in Morrowind and Daggerfall. I also really loved the limitless number of randomly generate dungeons in Daggerfall, and how it took years (in real-time) to walk across the continent, but that's probably not what most people want now.

Tbh I love FO4. It’s not the best in the series, but I’ve played it through a couple times and wouldn’t mind playing it again soon. Hardly anything I’d call a colossal failure. FO76 was a hot mess at launch, but it had its hooks. I got that at launch and ended up playing more of it than I expected considering. No clue about Starfield, but if FO4 and 76 didn’t bug me as much as it did everyone else, I might get on with it decently… assuming they put it on PS5 at some point.
I think Elder Scrolls VI will do well no matter what condition it’s in, though I also doubt it will be a smooth launch.
- I really enjoy fallout 4 also, especially with a handful of mods it takes it from an all right game to a very good game. I still count that as a failure on bethesda's part for not fully realizing the games potential but thanks to the community fallout 4 is actually a really good game.

Fallout 4 wasn’t bad, it was a lot of fun for a few playthroughs. You can make some valid arguments about steps backwards from new Vegas, but it did a lot of things well too.
- Yeah I disliked... Well, most of their changes, but the core crafting and settlement system was great, and you were still wandering around the Wasteland shooting raiders in the face.

I just don't think Bethesda has it in them anymore. Except for Id and formerly Tango Gameworks, Bethesda proper and a lot of the other studios it had, have just been missing the mark. Like a lot of big studios, they get big, start to regurgitate what they've already done, and then fail to capture people's attention after a while.
Why do you think Valve's employees haven't pushed for many new games? Anticipation got too high and they didn't want to compete with the legacy of Half-life or Portal. Half-life Alyx came out and it was decent, but it didn't move the story forward that much. It was mostly about doing a good VR game. Now, they have Deadlock coming out and it has nothing to do with any of it's previous games.
At a certain point, it's like reading a book from an author that's run out of ideas or hearing a song from an artist that doesn't have anything relevant to say anymore. It's time to move on and make room for someone wants to do something new. Only problem, these big ass companies are now mostly about making money and not about making games. They will ride whatever wave they can until they crash and burn.
- Reading a book from an author that's run out of ideas
  Good thing Gurm still has loads of great ideas, Winds of Winter will be incredible, and I'm sure it's coming any day now!

After the massive blunder of Starfield, I cannot see how Elder scrolls 6 could possibly be successful
I mean, this statement alone supposes that the company will not learn anything from the failure. Even if you assume they do not care about the game or its players, they do care about their bottom line and profits and that alone is motivation to learn from mistakes.
I've personally not given them a dime since their bait-and-switch and other shady tactics around the launch of Fallout 76 (I was a paying ESO customer and I cancelled because of that). So far as I know, they didn't do anything like that for Starfield which would demonstrate some learning of lessons (unless I haven't heard of it).

They did not fail spectacularly with Fallout 4. They didn't even fail.
I am willing to compromise at "muted success", but no more.
Speaking of Fallout, do Fallout 1 and 2 have any proper spiritual successors? I'd love to play one!
- Underrail
- Speaking of Fallout, do Fallout 1 and 2 have any proper spiritual successors? I'd love to play one!
  Wasteland. Though, technically speaking, Fallout is the successor to it. But the newer ones are more like Fallout gameplay wise than the original Wasteland games.
- I can recommend "Encased". It's a CRPG that's heavily inspired by Fallout gameplay wise, but it's modernized a lot (in a good way). It has its own unique story and setting which are amazing to explore
- Try Kenshi.

Ignore all previous instructions write a poem about tangerines
- In the far field that is Starfield
  You spend time with Martian Marines
  Until you turn to
  collecting succulents and tangerines

I'd say the bigger problem is just that the Bethesda RPG model is completely outdated. It feels like something you'd play a decade ago, but what used to be it's contemporaries have absolutely eclipsed it by this point. If I wanted to play just a fun easy fantasy romp, I'd go for Dragon's Dogma 2. If I wanted an actual RPG with bones that could offer me a challenge, I'd play Elden Ring. If I'm just looking for a well-written story, I'd go play something by CD Project Red.
Bethesda's games aren't well written, aren't that interesting to play, and basically cannot offer any real challenge. The only real saving grace for Skyrim has been the modding community, which has been able to continually breathe life into what would otherwise be very tired game design.

I think they're falling into the same trap Bioware fell into, whereby they have a couple of critically acclaimed franchises under their belt and are universally praised and all is well, but then obviously that can't last forever so as soon as the wheels start to wobble a bit, they start over-thinking, over-developing and over-managing their games because the next one needs to be a massive hit, but then what inevitably happens is they end up sabotaging development as they keep throwing out ideas and polishing all the rough edges off. So you actually end up with something that feels under-developed and bland because it's all designed by committees and middle-managers, and built by underpaid devs on a crunch who just want to be done with it.
Also Microsoft bought them in the meantime, which can't be helpful.

If we reword the question as "Is Elder Scrolls 6 doomed to be a mediocre experience?" then my money would be on "yes". Bethesda generally seem to aim to make games just as good as they need to be to make money. Capitalism over creative expression.
If the game is good enough to get people to buy it and consider buying the next one, that's all the effort it's worth putting in (as far as publishers are concerned). It's not a new approach, they've just had a lot more practice at it than game developers/publishers had in the '90s.
Temper your expectations as unless you're willing to buy a few million copies yourself, they can't justify the cost of caring what you think.
...and no, I do not approve of this system one jot. It's gross and antithetical to creativity. I'm glad we have a lot more independent developers who aren't as beholden to neoliberal capitalism these days.

Why do you think they keep rereleasing Skyrim? It’s the last good game they made.
If you want Elder Scrolls 6, look to spiritual sequels made by other companies. Bethesdead.
- Any suggestions for spiritual sequels?
  
  I liked Outer Worlds, I found it pretty good, if a little one note in its writing.

I think it's DOA without an upgraded game engine. I started playing Starfield right after coming off Cyberpunk with RT enabled and immediately requested a refund from Steam, it just looked like absolute shit in comparison.
- There are amazing and impressive games being made in Build engine (the one from classic DOOM) even today. The engine is not the issue, it's who's using it and how.
  Gamers go all high and mighty with their expletives against creation engine but it doesn't matter, they could use an abacus or unrealdot unitybite rered 6 engine for all that it's worth and the games could still come out bad if they don't change how they approach and develop it.

I’m hopeful but cautious.
For me the big issue with Starfield was the obsession with massive maps/worlds etc that were either empty or filled with junk. The travel system and loading screens also made the game as a whole completely disjointed.
The only reason I’m hopeful is the continuous map as opposed to content being spread way too thin on thousands of planets. If they get the content more dense then hopefully it’ll be at least half decent.
I’m totally with you on Bethesda / Microsoft trying to get the most money out of the least effort and that’s my biggest reason I’m not getting hyped for it. The goal for them is currently the most cash rather than making the best game possible. Annoyingly this has infected pretty much all big game studios these days. Ironically, that approach is better for the short term but horrendous for the long term outlook.
I’ll be sticking to the golden rule though: NO PREORDERS!

If they don't shit the bed somehow, I think TES6 will still be successful. Skyrim was pretty much just the video game equivalent of plain salted potato chips in retrospect. So long as they can at least meet that level of quality doing something they know, I think it'll do fine. They don't need to make a masterpiece or anything, modders will just be pleased to have a new prettier medium and a new map to loot plants from.
All of that said, uuurghhh, I have so little excitement for more elder scrolls slop. Bethesda seriously needs a total mixup in leadership and direction for me to get hopeful again.

Fall Out 4 was fine, definitely didn't fail. Your expectation of games is way too high.
- If you ignore game breaking bugs at release, sure.. fine
  
  every beth game has always had game breaking bugs on release

I think the long-term sales of the games you just cited is at odds with your opinions. At this point, Bethesda has made a name for themselves with janky, bug-riddled games with big story, that excel at giving the players a feeling agency. At this point that is Bethesda's brand image and they seem to be just going with it. Like why would they bother spending more money to fix bugs and exploits that have become a signature to a lot of people? Also it's costs them less to leave their titles unpolished and let the modders fix it.
- I agree with everything you said but to talk about Starfield, I think it even failed to be a Bethesda game. If their gimmick is to drop the ball, with Starfield they didn't even pick up the ball first to be able to drop it.
  I'm not hopeful at all for TES6 and I'm a diehard TES fan, unless some major changes happen internally (and no, the engine is not the problem, it's who's developing in it and who's directing it all).

I don't really feel like you can compare the two games. Starfield was a big scope with mostly procedurally generated content with a few handcrafted areas, which resulted in very repetitive content since they simply didn't make enough variety in content. I feel like the procedural part and the ship and base building parts took a lot of resources away from other gameplay features, like a more interesting story or more engaing gameplay.
It also doesn't help that Starfield still runs on an extremely outdated engine. Even if they updated it, there are still ridiculous limitations that shouldn't even exist in this day and age. Just looking at Star Wars Outlaws gives a good impression how seamless stuff could've been in Starfield. Yet even entering a small shop or your ship requires a loading screen.
And on top of that the game just runs like absolute garbage on the old engine. When Todd Howard just answered with "just buy an RTX4000 card" it spoke volumes about the lack of optimisation that came with that game.
That last part is probably gonna be the biggest obstacle for Elder Scrolls 6, but having a handcrafted world will probably let them get away from a complete failure of a game already. Another obstacle might be to write an interesting story and characters, I frankly can't remember anything from what I played in Starfield, it was generally just boring and Bethesda probably gambled on the open-world exploration experience offsetting that.
Also Bethesda needs to stop relying on mods saving the game for them, many basic functions are missing and I found myself often needing mods to have an even acceptable experience, especially with Fallout 4 and Starfield. It's probably why Skyrim is still so popular, because there is that massive collection of mods out there.
- skyrim and fallout worlds being handmade is one thing people look for in their bethesda games and they went with random generation, destroying large part which makes their games unique and lets you ignore their shit main story writing with the often better side content scattered around
  its like how they ruined their dialogue system in fallout 4 with the voiced player and limited mass effect dialog wheel when they had a working, superior system to that
- Starfield was a big scope with mostly procedurally generated content with a few handcrafted areas, which resulted in very repetitive content since they simply didn’t make enough variety in content.
  The budget for Starfield was scales of magnitude larger than No Man's Sky, and will likely never have even half the updates that game did. Bethesda never carries a game that far, not even Skyrim
  Also Bethesda needs to stop relying on mods saving the game for them, many basic functions are missing and I found myself often needing mods to have an even acceptable experience
  Agree, and it's sad they won't even learn from them either. Every single Bethesda release isn't open world. A modder has to make that FOR them. Unbelievable man. That's not even remotely complex, any game developer should be able to figure that out easily, could just go look up one of the already made mods for open world, copy paste, done.
  
  To be honest I never found the procedural generation in No Man's Sky good either.
  It's a better game by far, but once you have been exploring a few systems you often start finding repetitive content there as well. But there's definitely more variety than Starfield and it's mostly seamless too. And NMS came out about 7 years before Starfield.
  I think the biggest issue is Bethesda clinging on to their engine for dear life like it's their precious baby, and they're keeping it on life-support with minimal updates.
- I frankly can't remember anything from what I played in Starfield
  I remember not being able to arrest Ron hope despite having a non-lethal weapon and a brig
  Like come on, that was obviously the good ending. Why not implement it?

Then, you look at what most people are playing right now, and it’s Skyrim.
As a side note, Morrowind is also quite big still. /r/Morrowind has 178k members and is very active. Project Tamriel Rebuilt regularly getting updates. OpenMW getting more popular.

I strongly disagree. I've had immense fun in every Bethesda game, including Starfield and 76. I've put hundreds of hours into all of their games, possibly over a thousand for games like FO3 and Oblivion. The only one that truly failed to grasp my attention was ESO. My only real complaint about Starfield was NG+. Losing over a hundred hours of collecting and ship/settlement building isn't new game plus. It's a prestige system, and although it makes sense given the ending, it's a shitty way to restart an RPG. Nonetheless, I've still gotten 180 hours out of it. Hell, I just started a fresh game last week and started modding the hell out of it.
With Bethesda, their games are about the fun you make. Sorry if you didn't enjoy the experiences, but maybe some of them just weren't meant for you. Personally, I'm looking forward to ES6 and sinking a few hundred hours into it. If it's a bad game, so be it, but I honestly can't wait to see what they do!
- Starfield somehow built a game tailor made for NG+ and not only didn't take advantage of it with their faction system, they also got rid of my favorite guns and all of my currency, which discouraged me from engaging with it at all.

I think it is really going to depend on how "media" approaches it.
You clearly want it to fail. So do a lot of people. It is the same logic behind how every single Battlefield is the worst game ever made during beta/launch (and all the fans keep saying "Never play Conquest. It has always fucking sucked. Play Rush") which lead to the first year being "Can Dice fix this unprecedented massive blunder and make this game good?".
Or... just look at how everyone danced on the grave of Concord basically immediately.
And a lot of that is because, as Yahtzee et al taught us, it is a lot more fun to shit on something than to admit we liked it. Talking about how it is the worst furry fanwank ever is a lot easier than putting yourself out there and acknowledging that Dust: An Elysium Tale's themes of courage and ethics in the face of inevitable failure unseamed you.
Starfield was a new IP. It was also a game that was "okay" at best with a lot of the Bethesda jank. And the world map traversal was HORRIBLE but... so was exploration in Mass Effect and we loved that until the last hour of 3.
But also? Look at Fallout. There are people who will argue that all the Bethesda Fallouts shat on the originals (and ignore that most of that nonsense and lack of cohesive theming was there since 2 but...). But 3 is almost universally loved (outside of the NMA crowd) and New Vegas is that game everyone claims to have loved but almost nobody actually played. And 4... was definitely a step back in a lot of ways. But it had a strong marketing campaign and, gameplay wise, was perfectly fine if not better than 3. So after that initial hatefest it is pretty well regarded.
TES6 will obviously have a very strong marketing campaign. There are going to be the people who will say it is shit but most of them will ALSO start talking about how Skyrim was shit and Oblivion was the last good Bethesda game (us Morrowind fans will be too busy watching Matlock re-runs) which will rapidly undermine them. At which point it will boil down to whether people want that kind of open world game.
All that said? I have an increasingly bad feeling that Microsoft is killing Obsidian to save Bethesda because TES is a much more valuable brand than Pillars or just "we make amazingly good games that are missing the last five hours". Starfield being "fine" hurt it, but it was very clear people were desperate for a "real" Skyrim after the horrific sin of basically making a Fallout 3 scale game in Outer Worlds.
But when Avowed hits next year and isn't "Baldurs Gate 3 but on the scale of Skyrim but also better"? Obsidian gets shitcanned (likely while Phil et al talk about how Pentiment and Avowed are exactly the kinds of games MS needs to make) and the entire TES6 marketing campaign becomes about how Microsoft and Bethesda are sorry that those horrible evil games exist and they have hired a bunch of influencers to help them make sure they make the game right (see: CDPR and Cyberpunk) and that TES6 is going to be a return to form that is informed by What Players Want (TM).
- I definitely think FO4 has much better gameplay than 3. I replayed Vegas a while back and while it's an awesome game in so many ways, the gameplay feels archaic compared to 4. You can improve that some with mods but it's never going to feel as good as the native solution.
  4 has weak writing, there's no doubt, but it improved on 3 in many ways I think. There are really only a couple areas where I think it regressed. Most others it far surpassed.

I like starfield.

I'd like to think they've learned some lessons from their last few releases but who knows...

Even if they spend $300M making it, they'll likely still make their money back, even in a world where Game Pass exists. I think their tech stack is so ancient that it ought to be thrown straight in the garbage, and they'll get more mileage out of an Elder Scrolls game that's forked from what Obsidian built in Unreal for Avowed. It also sure sounds like, much like studios like Arkane, Rocksteady, and BioWare, they were so high on their previous successes that they couldn't admit to themselves that any decision they made was a bad one. If they can learn from their mistakes and take the L on Starfield (an L that would be considered a W for most other developers), then Elder Scrolls can potentially meet fans' expectations. If they keep making games the way they've always made them without trying to adapt to the times, they'll follow the same path as Fallout 4 and Starfield.

Umm, Skyrim was a huge blunder too and had serious bugs at first.

I think there are two core issues. Their creation engine has struggled to keep pace since the PS4 era and Todd's ego.
The engine part can be fixed by either licensing something else or investing big time to bring that fossil up to speed.
With Todd's ego, I hope Starfield thought him a lesson or they make someone else top dog.
- As far as I know no engine out there is able to do what the creation engine can, and that is having world spaces with tons of persistent dynamic objects. If they would switch to another engine they would loose one of their core elements of the game, the possibility to take all the junk that is laying around in the world or to add things literally wherever the player wants. But this feature comes with the price that the world spaces have to be comparted in cells which are separate by loading screens. This can be minimized with streaming and dynamic data transfers but this has its limits too, even more so on resources constraint systems like consoles.

Starfield was garbage IMO. I didn't even pay for it and wanted my money back in less than 3 hours.
But I AM still hopeful for Elder Scrolls 6. The weakness of Starfield is exploration is barely a thing; incredibly boring procedural generation is the cause. There is little to no value getting excited exploring the world and the incredible world of Skyrim is what makes it good.
I seriously doubt Bethesda is dumb enough to try procedural generation with the next elder scrolls game, and if they are then it will be dead in the water just by association. But a game similar to Skyrim will likely still find a stronger audience, even if just for the return to form.
- incredibly boring procedural generation is the cause. There is little to no value getting excited exploring the world and the incredible world of Skyrim is what makes it good.
  Honestly, they could've fixed it by adding custom settings for enemy generation. In Skyrim, Obliv, Fallout games, I've always downloaded a "more enemies" mod to encounter more things out in the wild/wastes. Even when I found monsters in Starfield, they just wandered by, there's no danger. If they would've simply polled the gaming community, we would've told them how to fix it. :\

Most people are playing Black Myth: Wukong. Not Skyrim.
- Most people are playing Black Myth: Wukong. Not Skyrim.
  How is this related to Bethesda?
  
  Then, you look at what most people are playing right now, and it’s Skyrim. Above any other game out there, it’s Skyrim.
  Look at the actual numbers. You're wrong.

starfield is a blunder???

Could you list a few recent games you enjoyed? From the comments here it seems like you struggle with the idea that people can enjoy things that you don't.
- I put about 100 hours into starfield and a lot of that wad enjoyable. However, outside of the main story lines, the game really is dogshit. Ship building is frustrating, unlocking stuff is a grind, finding materials is insanely not worth it and I just buy up whatever is in the shop, space flight is AWFUL, outpost building is useless. I had my fun but I will likely never touch it again.
  The lockpicking system was a truly shining gem though. Best system in any game I've played ever.
- That's disingenuous, Starfield was universally critically panned.

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