They can take as long as they want. After Starfield, I have zero confidence that TES6 will be any good. Bethesda has some serious issues they need to sort out with their production pipelines and methodology and they need to rethink how they approach story-driven open world experiences.

Every time I see a Starfield video and see the camera turbozoom in on a character as they deliver a forced, robotic line with terrifying facial animations - I get teleported right back to 2006. It is very obvious this studio does not know what they are doing and has learned little from their previous releases and from other contemporary games.

[–] PunchingWood@lemmy.world 51 points 6 days ago (8 children)

I've said it before, and I believe that Bethesda is going to completely mess up TES6.

There are several issues with Bethesda, the major problem being they seem to have lost all creativity and they're trying to apply the same old formula to every single game with minimal changes. Then hope that modders will keep it on life support. And sadly that's how I found myself having to play their games, because without many mods it was often awful to play on PC, and I still didn't have fun thanks to repetitive content and forgettable story and characters.

Another is that they're clinging on to that damn dilapidated game engine of theirs like it's their precious baby. It's an awful engine, insanely outdated, limited and performs terribly. Starfield is a great example of how awful it is, but every game before that has had major performance issues and limitations as well.

The only redeeming feature might be that TES6 probably won't be a procedurally generated world. They really showed how repetitive and boring it can get with procedural generation. And a handcrafted world would have so much more character. They could perhaps use the procedural engine for dungeons, and enemies and their bases, or items found through the world, but not the world itself.

But I'm afraid it's just going to be a near Skyrim carbon-copy. It'll likely be an okay looking game with an okay looking game world, but I bet gameplay will be mostly unaltered from what they've been doing for over 20 years. Same old basic combat, same talking heads with lifeless animations, same sneaking and magic gameplay, etc.

[–] ProfessorProteus@lemmy.world 16 points 6 days ago

Agreed. They need to retire that dogshit engine and write a new one. I know that's a huge and expensive undertaking, which is why they probably won't. TES6 will sell like hotcakes on its name alone.

I had been looking forward to TES6 for so damn long, but at this point the most exciting thing we can look forward to is the crazy glitches that speedrunners will discover. That is, if they're not just the same glitches we've alll seen time and again.

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