Current Events > Bethesda games are fun.

(+) Yeah! (+)

At least on PC.

I don't get the hate tbh
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Morrowind is my favorite game ever. Daggerfall is in the top 5-7.

Games since haven't lived up to 2 and 3.
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It's just that they leave shit so buggy and don't know what they are doing when they try to patch things up. I love their games but they need to learn how to clean up their mistakes.
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People hate on Bethesda?
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You know those toys that have "some assemble required" on the box?

Every Bethesda game boxart should include that phrase in giant letters.
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Wow Oblivion's UI is awful.
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Zodd3224 posted...

People hate on Bethesda?

It has a pretty sizable hatedom. It's especially weird because it's hardly as bad as companies like EA or Actiblizzard.
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UncleBourbon33 posted...

Wow Oblivion's UI is awful.

What do you dislike about it? I found Skyrim's UI worse

The problem with Bethesda is that their games are getting progressively more brain dead. The RPG elements are being stripped further and further, making their games more action focused.

Oh, and they can't optimize worth a damn.
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They make great games. The only big problem imo is a trend toward less depth and more breadth, which worked for Skyrim but left Fallout 4 feeling unsatisfying. That and the pushing of paid mods in various ways, but that has more to do with the company than the games themselves.
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DreadedWave posted...

It has a pretty sizable hatedom. It's especially weird because it's hardly as bad as companies like EA or Actiblizzard.

It's not weird at all if you actually look at the major problems.

Bethesda repeatedly overhypes and exaggerates the things they're doing with their games and keeps shipping half-assed products that are treated like these amazing AAA greatest games of all time but then all the diehard fans have to put the asterisks there that this is only applicable to PC after modding the balls off it so it's like, okay, so, Bethesda releases wonky games, that fans fix up and add more to, for free...and Bethesda ultimately gets the credit for that.

Next, Bethesda seems to have an actual aversion to RPGs which is, unsurprisingly, a problem. This was apparent to me when reading interviews when they tried to explain the logic of not including things like spellmaking in Skyrim and the neutered enchanting. They think any thought from the player into numbers is bad. What kind of dumbass mentality is that for a company that makes RPGs? So they dumb it down, and make it more obscure with the mechanics that remain in.

And then the big'n: glitches. No, not just glitches, but code entropy. If you took a game like Skyrim, and just played the main quest from start to finish, it's not a very good game. A focused game that is well designed blows it away. The strength of Bethesda games isn't focused quality, nor is it depth: it's being a sandbox, it's compensating for lack of depth with extreme width. Yet...the games are so buggy, that the longer you play on one file, the more risk of it breaking apart in some way. They're games designed to get a lot of mileage out of, quantity over quality, but are ill-equipped to handle that playstyle.

Every Bethesda game I played, I ended up having to stop before I wanted to, because of overbearing glitches that became too much to deal with. In Oblivion's case it outright killed my save file and that's thanks in no small part to the fact Oblivion was a ticking time bomb for awhile because it shipped with a "glitch of doom" that would eventually affect everyone after enough playtime and corrupt the game beyond repair. Even when they eventually patched that problem, it couldn't repair already damaged files.

Most recently, with Fallout 4, I used cryo weapons a lot, and eventually discovered this permanently broke every enemy spawn that I killed with them which did a lot of damage to regularly trafficked areas before I realised it, and several effects that I wanted to use broke other things or didn't work properly, like the essentially detect life effect that broke several quests and the pacify/command abilities. Then there was the settlement glitch where random settlements would show extremely wrong stats that aren't true but negatively affect the stability of the settlement until you return to it to make the glitch snap out of it, and it could happen several times in a row when you leave to do other stuff, forcing me to keep having to check it in the pip-boy while I'm playing to make sure the game isn't breaking it again.

There's also way too many glitches in the game that indicate Bethesda literally doesn't even playtest their quests because there's repeatable glitches for some quests that happen every time, and the fact they shipped the game with that means they never tested if the quest works fully properly.


The games might be more well received if they stuck to only releasing on PC.
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Ki_cat_ posted...

UncleBourbon33 posted...

Wow Oblivion's UI is awful.

What do you dislike about it? I found Skyrim's UI worse

The problem with Bethesda is that their games are getting progressively more brain dead. The RPG elements are being stripped further and further, making their games more action focused.

Oh, and they can't optimize worth a damn.

Thank God for SkyUI.
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Ki_cat_ posted...

UncleBourbon33 posted...

Wow Oblivion's UI is awful.

What do you dislike about it? I found Skyrim's UI worse

The problem with Bethesda is that their games are getting progressively more brain dead. The RPG elements are being stripped further and further, making their games more action focused.

Oh, and they can't optimize worth a damn.

And the action suck ass compared to real action games.
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they are fun but fallout 4 is shit and almost no Bethesda games have actually good RPG mechanis
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Honestly part of the fun is the glitches.

Because of auto saving and being able to have so many saves it's easy to quickly recover from major bugs and a lot of them are just hilarious.

Like that survival run that was nearly ended by Preston Garvey turning into a a fucking terminator, the weightless dragon skeleton's etc.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvGXCisAaR4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvHE2Scq4Ms

I still like Bethesda games, but I'll call them out on their bullshit. Fallout 4 was lazy for a game that took 5+ years. The Creation Club is a fucking joke. They overhype and lie. Etc. Etc.
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DreadedWave posted...

Zodd3224 posted...

People hate on Bethesda?

It has a pretty sizable hatedom. It's especially weird because it's hardly as bad as companies like EA or Actiblizzard.

Well, blizzard actually finishes their games instead of letting the player base mod them to completion and then later trying to make money off those mods
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They don't necessarily make good games, they just make games that no one else makes. The scale of the games are impressive, but content and quality is on a harsh downward slope.

Tmk posted...

DreadedWave posted...

It has a pretty sizable hatedom. It's especially weird because it's hardly as bad as companies like EA or Actiblizzard.

It's not weird at all if you actually look at the major problems.

Bethesda repeatedly overhypes and exaggerates the things they're doing with their games and keeps shipping half-assed products that are treated like these amazing AAA greatest games of all time but then all the diehard fans have to put the asterisks there that this is only applicable to PC after modding the balls off it so it's like, okay, so, Bethesda releases wonky games, that fans fix up and add more to, for free...and Bethesda ultimately gets the credit for that.

Next, Bethesda seems to have an actual aversion to RPGs which is, unsurprisingly, a problem. This was apparent to me when reading interviews when they tried to explain the logic of not including things like spellmaking in Skyrim and the neutered enchanting. They think any thought from the player into numbers is bad. What kind of dumbass mentality is that for a company that makes RPGs? So they dumb it down, and make it more obscure with the mechanics that remain in.

And then the big'n: glitches. No, not just glitches, but code entropy. If you took a game like Skyrim, and just played the main quest from start to finish, it's not a very good game. A focused game that is well designed blows it away. The strength of Bethesda games isn't focused quality, nor is it depth: it's being a sandbox, it's compensating for lack of depth with extreme width. Yet...the games are so buggy, that the longer you play on one file, the more risk of it breaking apart in some way. They're games designed to get a lot of mileage out of, quantity over quality, but are ill-equipped to handle that playstyle.

Every Bethesda game I played, I ended up having to stop before I wanted to, because of overbearing glitches that became too much to deal with. In Oblivion's case it outright killed my save file and that's thanks in no small part to the fact Oblivion was a ticking time bomb for awhile because it shipped with a "glitch of doom" that would eventually affect everyone after enough playtime and corrupt the game beyond repair. Even when they eventually patched that problem, it couldn't repair already damaged files.

Most recently, with Fallout 4, I used cryo weapons a lot, and eventually discovered this permanently broke every enemy spawn that I killed with them which did a lot of damage to regularly trafficked areas before I realised it, and several effects that I wanted to use broke other things or didn't work properly, like the essentially detect life effect that broke several quests and the pacify/command abilities. Then there was the settlement glitch where random settlements would show extremely wrong stats that aren't true but negatively affect the stability of the settlement until you return to it to make the glitch snap out of it, and it could happen several times in a row when you leave to do other stuff, forcing me to keep having to check it in the pip-boy while I'm playing to make sure the game isn't breaking it again.

There's also way too many glitches in the game that indicate Bethesda literally doesn't even playtest their quests because there's repeatable glitches for some quests that happen every time, and the fact they shipped the game with that means they never tested if the quest works fully properly.


The games might be more well received if they stuck to only releasing on PC.

Did you play the PS3 ports or something? They're glitchy yeah but I never had THAT much of a problem with them.
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They're enjoyable but as of late have been shallow as shit.
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UncleBourbon33 posted...

Did you play the PS3 ports or something? They're glitchy yeah but I never had THAT much of a problem with them.

Yes.

Not everyone experiences as bad of glitches as I do; some experience worse. Some experience barely any.

A lot can go wrong. They're big games. But the thing is, like I said, the more time you spend on them, on one character, the higher risk it becomes, and it was really absolute in Oblivion.

There was a formID bug in Oblivion where they never refreshed, so, eventually, the game would just run out of them, causing all sorts of problems that was basically like the digital equivalent of a save file becoming terminally ill. It was just a matter of time, it would eventually affect everyone if they played enough.


But overall the balance is that minute for minute, Bethesda's games aren't as good as a focused well designed game; the value is in the longevity and amount of things to do...so I spend a lot of time on a character. But the game world struggles to remain stable long enough to actually do everything I want to do.

Though some problems I ran into are absolute things. Like back when Skyrim's framerate got unforgivably bad on PS3 for awhile and Bethesda was in denial about it for awhile until they finally patched it. And the cryo and detect life effect glitches in Fallout 4 were always there, it's just a question of how much you want to use them (in my case, I wanted to use them a lot). So those aren't random. I'm actually not sure if those Fallout 4 glitches were ever patched either. I was following the patches for awhile after I stopped playing in the hopes they'd be fixed and I could return with enthusiasm. Never saw mention of addressing them. Then they took away Survival Mode which I played on and replaced it with a mode I'd never use forcing me to play on a crappier easier difficulty and I further lost interest. Not sure if they ever rectified that either. I got tired of waiting.
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Eh. I enjoy Bethesda games.

Didnt care for Fallout 4 tho.
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i dislike them primarily for what they've done to the fallout series
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You probably didn't like Fallout 4 because you like RPGs and/or open world RPGs and didn't want to play a better graphic but much shittier Minecraft featuring Preston Gravy's Wacky Settlement Comedy Hour and a race to see how fast you can fill your pockets with 18 tons of garbage that ends up being critical to your progression.


You know, there was a point where my settlers in Sanctuary were getting kidnapped so much (despite being extremely well protected, isolated and outfitted with weapons) by common raiders that, literally, without exaggeration: I'd go to a place to rescue one, and report back...and immediately be informed someone was kidnapped, and they're actually in the EXACT same place, but everyone there is still dead, so I walk in to a room filled with corpses of guys I just killed to find the settler who apparently was tied to a chair by a ghost and free them. Sometimes this happened AGAIN after that.

Of all the problems in the game though I didn't mind that too much because it was practically an XP exploit the game was doing for me. But still. What the hell.
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Tmk posted...

You probably didn't like Fallout 4 because you like RPGs and/or open world RPGs and didn't want to play a better graphic but much shittier Minecraft featuring Preston Gravy's Wacky Settlement Comedy Hour and a race to see how fast you can fill your pockets with 18 tons of garbage that ends up being critical to your progression.


You know, there was a point where my settlers in Sanctuary were getting kidnapped so much (despite being extremely well protected, isolated and outfitted with weapons) by common raiders that, literally, without exaggeration: I'd go to a place to rescue one, and report back...and immediately be informed someone was kidnapped, and they're actually in the EXACT same place, but everyone there is still dead, so I walk in to a room filled with corpses of guys I just killed to find the settler who apparently was tied to a chair by a ghost and free them. Sometimes this happened AGAIN after that.

Of all the problems in the game though I didn't mind that too much because it was practically an XP exploit the game was doing for me. But still. What the hell.

Yeah, I just couldnt get into it. Which is a shame, since it takes place in my stomping grounds, and 3 is one of my all time fave games.
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It sounds like Bethesda couldn't get into it either from what I read about the lackluster DLC. I mean compared to what Fallout 3 got anyway.

I'm honestly not even looking forward to the next Elder Scrolls either. I'm sure it'll just be a lot of promise and cautious optimism at first, but slowly the game will degrade again, annoying glitches will surface they drag their ass about fixing, and how simplified and dull so many mechanics were made will begin to grate on the nerves.

They'd have to do something like bring back spellmaking, and ensure it's not neutered like enchanting was, to really get me feeling like they might do things right.
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Tmk posted...

It sounds like Bethesda couldn't get into it either from what I read about the lackluster DLC. I mean compared to what Fallout 3 got anyway.

I'm honestly not even looking forward to the next Elder Scrolls either. I'm sure it'll just be a lot of promise and cautious optimism at first, but slowly the game will degrade again, annoying glitches will surface they drag their ass about fixing, and how simplified and dull so many mechanics were made will begin to grate on the nerves.

They'd have to do something like bring back spellmaking, and ensure it's not neutered like enchanting was, to really get me feeling like they might do things right.

Elderscrolls going casul, Souls going casul, dark times to be a nerd my friend...
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It's not even really casual, it's just...at odds with making an RPG.

It was clear to me Bethesda is just dumb with RPGs when I played New Vegas. Just like, wow. From 3 to New Vegas, it was clear that the team that made New Vegas likes RPGs, and wants to make RPGs. >_>
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Swagnificent119 posted...

Fallout 4 was lazy for a game that took 5+ years.

Here's where I would disagree to a fair extent. Fallout 3 was the low point of Bethesda game development: apart from the atmospheric overload of stepping out of the Vault into the wide wasteland, that game fails on nearly every conceivable level to the point of being downright insulting. Skyrim was the epitome of their one step forward, one step back mentality, and in my opinion reeked of laziness the way Fallout 3 dripped with ineptitude.

Which was why I was pleasantly surprised that Fallout 4, while still having many many flaws, actually showed me that Bethesda gave a shit for a change. You really have to understand the fundamental ways that Fallout 3 failed to see how Fallout 4 actually made some decent strides in correcting those failures, especially in the worldbuilding (I'd be happy to elaborate on some examples if someone was truly interested). And in the fields where they couldn't improve on their own, they actually shocked me a bit by very closely emulating New Vegas (or at least as best as they could) - this is especially prevalent in the main quest structure and the follower system. There are some noteworthy steps backward with 4: the dialogue trees, the over-reliance on radiant quest, etc. But considering my low opinion of Fallout 3 in general, they couldn't score any lower than a tie with 4, so I wasn't particularly disappointed with 4's shortcomings (except the Vaults: those are the biggest misstep 4 made and the only thing that 3 inarguably did better).
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Their engines are so goddamn bad. Animations suck. They become less and less RPG with every game. Oblivion is so goddamn broken in every way.

...but I still love them all. Except Fallout 4, what a mediocre game.
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