Why does nobody try to beat Bethesda?

>Bethesda games have a relatively unique style of gameplay that seems to be the only thing going for them
>running on an improved version of an ancient engine with many known flaws, acknowledged even by developers who had to deal with it
>even fans of their series admit every single game wastes a lot of potential due to writing and/or gameplay design, depending on the game

>their games are loved despite it because there are no good alternatives

How come no other development studio decided to beat Bethesda at their own game? There's plenty of companies with enough resources to develop a first person RPG with an open world, and Bethesda has proven time and time again that following the formula works wonders for profits even if the game lacks polish.

For fuck's sake, Enderal proved that some random German modders can make a better game than Bethesda, albeit using their base resources.

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Rockstar could probably do it
They'd also add in multiplayer with microtransactions

Because not every company has Bethesda money, and the ones that do are probably too entrenched in their own comfort zone to try challenging Bethesda's borderline monopoly on this kind of game.

That's the big problem really. Other triple-A companies could easily try doing something like this, but it would make a hell of a lot more economic sense to just keep making sequels to whatever money-printing franchise they have running.

I agree with every sentiment, and sadly play all of Bethesda's shitty games because i love first person open world RPGS and Bethesda is the only studio making AAA ones.

My assumption as to why companies dont try to rival them likely comes down to money. Their first party titles likely cost a fuck ton to make and have huge teams of devs and contractors, but they always make a return.

If a small or medium sized studio tried to make a game of that scale it could easily bankrupt them, and many other companies lack the user base and (unrightfully earned) goodwill from fans.

I also agree with this user, and am worried that DLC and rampant microtransactions are going to be a mainstay in every game like this as a financial safety net.

Bethesda are the only studio with no sense of pride or dignity and scale of budget to attempt to develop largescale openworld sandbox roleplaying games.

Because other studios trim and cut that which they cannot polish to an acceptable level.
Bethesda just leaves that shit in.
Bugs are features.
People are entranced by the romantic notion of scale and idea surrounding the game rather than realize the shit they're interacting with isn't actually very good.

Another parallel would be Star Citizen.
Also a ridiculously ambitious with ridiculous scope that is paralyzed by this ambition, except they have the ego or stupidity not to release an unfinished or unpolished product.

>Because other studios trim and cut that which they cannot polish to an acceptable level.
>Bethesda just leaves that shit in.
That's genuinely not true, and that's coming from a poor fuck who played Fallout 4 on PS4 day one. FO4 had an incredible amount of polish as far as Bethesda games go, on version 1.0.

Because ZeniMax Media will just buy them

>My assumption as to why companies dont try to rival them likely comes down to money. Their first party titles likely cost a fuck ton to make and have huge teams of devs and contractors, but they always make a return.
A lot of AAA titles cost a lot and have huge dev teams, some of them even do risky releases every now and then, like Ubisoft with For Honor. I think Bethesda's proven beyond a shadow of doubt that the formula works. It's easily a safer thing to develop than quite a few high profile games released in recent years.

That's probably even more of a reason to do it, it could mean a lot more short-term profit.

>FO4 had an incredible amount of polish

You're conflating a bump in graphics with polish.
It's as technically shitty as any other Bethesda game.

I had to resort to console commands to finish the game because of crippling bugs that broke the Institute storyline. Your opinion is objectively wrong.

Could a big studio get away with making a relatively low budget (obviously not too low) open world rpg; I doubt it would be a success.
The content cost is too great - there is a bottleneck in creating enough good stories and content in an open world-rpg that it becomes expensive; you cannot do small scale

Well, it's just anecdotal evidence, but I was pleasantly surprised with the miniscule amount or severity of bugs I've experienced.

>Why does nobody try to beat Bethesda?
They do, they're called modders.

Everyone else sees there's too little money in it for the risk. Welcome to corporate gaming, this is why you should support mods, open source and passion projects.

It's got the exact same bugs as every other gamebyro game.

Well would it kill the people that make such things to stop trying to just be artists and actually innovate a little?

>Everyone else sees there's too little money in it for the risk.
Fallout 4 generated 750 million dollars in the first 24 hours. That's a lot even by triple A standards.

>Its impossible to make big games good meme
Stop

I wish the day comes where AI assisted asset creation becomes a thing so very small groups of programmers can make whole games with a relatively low budget in a reasonable time timeframe.

Any other words you want to put in my mouth?

It's not impossible, but it involves an exponential growth resource requirements.

Only Rockstar so far seems to be able to manage this, and they aren't interested in roleplaying.

While memebryo is an outdated abominations it's the only streamlined RPG focused engine available, if a new, better alternative to it came along there would definitely be competition, assuming Bethesda would be able to compete

this
this this this this this
day one PC was fucking horrid

Elex is 10 times better than anything bethesda has pulled out in the last 10 years, even with all its flaws.

Oblivion ripped off Lord of the rings
Skyrim ripped off Game of thrones
Whats the next big thing they will be "influenced" by?

I didn't really have any problems but I assume that was luck and not Bethesda becoming less trash

Bethesda may be shit but come on user.

Never heard of it, but it looks mostly good on the trailers. How is it in reality?

Stranger things

...

>Well would it kill the people that make such things to stop trying to just be artists and actually innovate a little?
It's not their job to innovate, it's their job to do the work they are paid to do.

Fallout 4 was also a low risk game that took the formula of 5 other Bethesda titles and barely changed it. It was a low risk for a business to make.
It's about return on investment, if they begin making changes to the game, especially changes that could alienate a potential customer then they risk selling less copies.
It's the same reason Hollywood keep making sequels and reboots despite getting horrible reviews and response. They make more money for less risk.

I'm convinced the people that have these conversations and make these threads are the same people who still don't realise gaming media is just a marketing machine for the largest entertainment industry in the world. If you care about artistic vision then just play mods and indie projects.

Difficulty is a little fucked up from what I've played (8 hours or so) but good from the exploration / roleplaying aspect. Also has a mix fantasy / science fiction / mad max factions, which is pretty cool.

Wouldn't be a bad thing tbqh

What the fuck are you talking about? I played the ps4 version and was hit with as many bug as expected from bethesda. The minutemen's radiant quests was bugged so Preston gave you a quest almost every time you talked to him. Buddy who shows you how to use the settlements had an super long neck and looked all messed up.

Things didn't get better either. You had to play the far harbor dlc at ~20 frames because the fog effect destroyed the ps4.
This is all of the top of my head, I had tons of problems.

>FO4 had an incredible amount of polish as far as Bethesda games go, on version 1.0.

I don't have a reaction image suitable for this statement.

also
>unique game play
They are just first person dungeon crawlers (Diablo clones) with less depth to combat and loot, neat voice acting+dialogue, 90% fetch quests and a whole bunch of set pieces thrown in to break up the game play. Just about the only thing they actually do right is the world building, and even then they seem to be throwing that to the wind sometimes.

>Fallout 4 was also a low risk game that took the formula of 5 other Bethesda titles and barely changed it.
That's what I'm suggesting a different developer should do.

>It's about return on investment, if they begin making changes to the game, especially changes that could alienate a potential customer then they risk selling less copies.
They actually make a couple pretty drastic changes between their games, though they're risk-free for the most part. But the basic gameplay and the exploration is what sells their games, and that could easily be copied and improved, without making it too complex for the average "Skyrim was my first and favourite game ever" casual.

>I'm convinced the people that have these conversations and make these threads are the same people who still don't realise gaming media is just a marketing machine for the largest entertainment industry in the world. If you care about artistic vision then just play mods and indie projects.
I don't care about artistic vision, I care about fun gameplay. Bethesda games are fun, but still sorely lacking. They do, however, sell a lot using the same basic formula for every single one of their games.

>They are just first person dungeon crawlers (Diablo clones) with less depth to combat and loot, neat voice acting+dialogue, 90% fetch quests and a whole bunch of set pieces thrown in to break up the game play.
Name three (3) games from other developers that are first person open world RPGs.
Borderlands doesn't count

BotW

Bethesda actually employs relatively few people considering the size and success of their games. They probably don't cost as much to develop as people think.

I'd argue Witcher 3 came close as far as lore quality, but nothing has really come close to New Vegas in RPG quality in a while.

Only thing diqualifying it is it's first person.

Besides Bethesda *cough* "Obsidian" *cough* has made a good RPG game before. But that doesn't make the big bucks anymore. You need normies that are just like "Lol look at this wacky game about how the 50's were bad! Now I'm going to go make a surface level choice at the end to pick a faction with almost zero depth!"

The masses don't want to play something that makes them think or consider their actions. You might have a quest in New Vegas with seven separate endings based on your skills, conversations, and the ending you picked. But thats not why these basic bitches buy it. They buy it for the prestige of saying "I don't play regular games like Call of Duty, I play a thinking game like Fallout. Ask me about post-modernism scum! LOL!"

Rather than wanting a game where they can forge their pathway, they want to have an objectively "right" pathway so that the most amount of people can feel justified in picking it.

Because that’s what Prey 2 and RAGE tried to do and look what happened to them.

I feel like other companies don't understand what makes their games popular. People don't necessarily want more "epic" moments in RPGs. People remember Skyrim fondly for just the comfy environment, going around towns; the tiny things you can do that make you feel more immersed in the world. Other games just try to be too flashy

Nintendo didn't even have to try

Actually, playing this game made me appreciate Skyrim even more. Skyrim's world feels rich with content, NPCs, lore, caves and ruins, compared to BotW's outrageously boring world of shrines. For all the mediocrity, Skyrim at least has a world you want to learn more about, where BotW feels utterly sterile

>other studios trim and cut that which they cannot polish to an acceptable level.

Laughing out lol

>as far as Bethesda games go

Because bethesda games aren't good, they just have a large dedicated modding community willing to fix then improve their games for them, any company that tries to beat them would have to bank on having a community popup around them instead

Is that why their console sales are so good?

>dev asks the AI to create a horrifying 10 foot monster before they leave for Xmas holiday
>AI experiences a slight glitch and misinterprets the request
>it creates a murderous 10 foot robotic monster irl
Pls no

The biggest problem with Skryim isn't lore or atmosphere, it's gameplay.

Sure the villages were memorable, the atmosphere, quite a few of the people, etc. The problem is that every quest basically boiled down to "go to this cave, kill dragur, return."

There were a few different ones, but they were far and few between. Not to mention easy to find. Companions Quests, Mage's Guild Quests, Dark Brotherhood Quests, etc. Where in Oblivion or Morrowind, you could simply hear gossip that you could investigate. Suddenly you'd find yourself in a cult conspiracy, or a plot for a wife to murder her husband. You didn't really have that in Skyrim, they'd just recommend that you talk to people who are heads of factions like the Companions or one of the civil war factions. I think the one I remember being somewhat interesting is the one about the ghost whose killer you needed to track down. It ended with a huge vampire conspiracy. However, even this is shallow with only an option to kill the vampires.

How is that an RPG? Why is there no option to let their plan succeed, so we have an entire town of vampires who now have human cattle? Imagine them only dealing at night? Imagine that making becoming a vampire worthwhile with the fast travel point inside to ensure you don't die in the sun?

That's the problem, even the best quests which are easy to find and get out of the way only slightly break the mold.

I want to go back to Oblivion where you could pick up a ring that weight 1000 pounds that a mage left as a trap to kill you in a well. But unfortunately I don't think we'll ever see the day that Bethesda has a quest as well thought out ever again.

Fallout 4's problem is that it was Skyrimified, but had the addition of simplified dialogue. The facade falls almost immediately on a replay, that what you say never matters. Even Skyrim didn't fuck that up, you could pry for information, and you could still express you attitude in usually 3-4 ways.

As much as I hate to say it I have to agree here. BoTW is so lifeless, a physics toybox and not much else. I really hoped BoTW was going to be filled with old villages, locations from the past, book after book of information, Skyrim done right. But here I am, haven't touched BoTW in months but current playing through Skyrim again and that says it all to me.

I wish every game was a first person RPG. It's my favorite genre.

this desu
even trash like skyrim is a much better game apart from the combat

Not true.
You just need to supply a decent game and some decent modding tools and you'll grow a dedicated community in no time at all.

Name a single developer who has released a good game with extensive modding tools that has never seen some form of success.

Nothing in BotW compares to Blackreach

It feels like lightning in a bottle.

Their implementation of Gamebryo made scripting and modding extremely simple.

Other, better games support modding, but never to the same extent or with as much simplicity. Most other games probably feel restrictive or prohibitively complicated for modders to work on extensively as a hobby.

Also, since much of the shit running behind bethesda games hasn't changed. Modders don't need to acquire new know-how to mod Beth stuff.

Witcher 3 competely destroyed Fallout 4 and shamed Todd into hiding after E3 2015. And it took based polacks less than 10 years to beat them. It's better than Skyrim and F4 in every way.

*Nintendo didn't even try

>Name a single developer who has released a good game with extensive modding tools that has never seen some form of success.
That's actually an interesting point.

It's true, but it also has drastically different gameplay.

UT3 and UT4
it still hurts, utk4 had the greatest modding scene of all time

CDP could have easily repurpose Witcher 3 into Skyrim clone. Skyrim would never have been Witcher. Not with these ugly characters and broken animations, decades old engine and copy pasted quests.

I'm still a huge fan of Morrowind, Oblivion was good fun, but it started a trend of cutting down on things. Skyrim hardly felt like an RPG to me, it was fun for the first 5-10 hours, but then it starts to feel really lackluster and just lacks depth. A group of modders were able to take the assets and engine of Skyrim and turn it into a drastically better written and mechanical game, Enderal.

Fallout 4 was similar but even worse, with dungeons that all feel the same after the first 10, being populated with either super mutants, raiders, or ghouls, dull quests, and half-baked mechanics like settlements and gun modification.

Also I can't recommend Enderal enough, it's even getting a free DLC soon.

The core mechanics of the gameplay were fine in Skyrim, the combat were more refined than they ever had been beforehand and it felt less awkward to play than the previous bethesda games.

The problem was with the quests, as you said, but that's not all. Simply put, Bethesda's games are deviating further and further away from the RPG genre.

Skyrim at the very least maintains some aspects of roleplay in the sense that your character is a completely blank canvas, but Fallout 4 (and to some extent Fallout 3) completely abandoned them. And that's a worrying precedent.

By trying to streamline the game and make it more accessible, they've sacrificed so many aspects that made the earlier games intriguing. Is Elder Scrolls VI just going to be a boring action game where your character is fully voiced and yet cannot alter the course of the game regardless of what you say? Are the quests going to have different outcomes and affect your overall experience? Who knows?

I wish I had a working PC for Enderal, what little I've played of it on my laptop looked incredibly promising

But that's why Breath of the Wild was disappointing. They aped Bethesda's style except did it "better". Good if you wanted a decent Bethesda-style game, bad if you wanted a fucking Zelda game instead.

the bethesda "feel" has been ingrained in people since oblivion and no other way of doing things can entice people

love or hate oblivion, it absolutely the nailed open world 1st/3rd person RPG. how they should play, handle, ect.

nobody can replicate this because zenimax realllllyyyy likes to sue people

>but Fallout 4 (and to some extent Fallout 3) completely abandoned them. And that's a worrying precedent.
I'm pretty sure even Todd Howard himself has said that making the Sole Survivor a voiced protagonist with a personality was a mistake.

It was a really great experience, a well designed world, a main story with lots of twist and turns, neat twists on the gameplay from Skyrim. I ended up putting about 50-60 hours into it.

Felt more like Breath of the Wild Hunt to me, it doesn't really have what makes Bethesda games unique, like extensive looting mechanics, tons of clutter you can pick up or ignore, first person, densely placed points of interest and side quests that are often more interesting than following the story.

Enderal, woo. Enderal's writing was kino. Totally blown Avellone out of the water.

>I ended up putting about 50-60 hours into it.
Holy fuck

There's a lot of content and it's getting a DLC that's supposed to add 20 more hours of content.

Cause other devs can't make open world maps.

ye also this

i disliked skyrim but the map was just incredible. forests, coasts, geysers, tundra. i had more fun running around picking flowers than i did touching the main quest

Fallout 4 was such a shame, its a very pretty game especially with some graphic mods and the gunplay was so good for a bethesda game it surprised the hell out of me but everything else took a few steps back

>and the gunplay was so good for a bethesda game it surprised the hell out of me
I was genuinely shocked the first time I saw a weapon in a Bethesda game that actually feels like it has impact. I wanted to keep using the 10mm just because it was so satisfying to shoot.

>Skyrim ripped off Game of thrones

Mind explaining this to me?

I think ive read somewhere that they employed ID's help with the gunplay portions of the game and I really hope they take this lesson and get outside help for bethesdas weak points in the next iterations of TES and Fallout, specifically animation

>muh ancient dragons reawakened
>muh warring houses
>muh magical frost zombies with magical frost zombie commanders

they definitely emphasised the parts of lore that match up with whatever fantasy has the most hype in pop culture at the time, its not necessarily a bad thing but you cant deny it.

>I have no hat but I must tip

>Skyrim ripped off Game of Thrones.

Nigh impossible, GoT started airing only 7 months before Skyrim came out; and note that means it didn't finish until June. They woulda been too far along to change much of the game.

I wish it had copied Game of Thrones.

Could you imagine a Elder Scrolls game where instead of a civil war, you fought with one of multiple houses (there could be a couple factions, but one house could rise to the highest power between the factions) and could fight as a bannerman? Moving up to become their head commander? Riding into battle with a leader who you feel is a fucking bro? Crushing your enemies? I mean they could do a subplot too, maybe the winner determines how well you can defend against an oncoming threat (with multiple levels of success depending on what you did to support a house, and the specific house you picked; make it like New Vegas). You can even stop and/or fail to prevent plots against your leader, making you take a life of shame or coming up as a hedge knight.

That would be fucking rad.

*drastically better
and even then W3 gameplay is nothing to write home about

W3 gameplay is pretty shit senpai, I would unironically say its worse than skyrim, atleast skyrim had some sort of customization and class building even if it was dumbed down from previous installments, W3 excels in world building, grafix, voice acting, writing and atmosphere but its gameplay is terrible.

all those things are common high fantasy tropes you mongoloid

Yeah but just like the RAGEngine Bethesda games are notoriously difficult to heavily mod.
I’m not saying the shit is difficult but it’s a lot more complex than going onto the steam workshop in say, Arma, and downloading 100gigs of mods that just werk

>Their implementation of Gamebryo made scripting and modding extremely simple.

Just copy them then, things like scripting and how mods (plugins) are handled can hardly be copyrighted, especially if you alter them just enough.

Speaking of, when the hell is it supposed to be coming out?

Dunno, it said in 2017, it's mainly being worked on by one guy.

Doesn't seem very likely, sadly:

reddit.com/r/enderal/comments/6vlq35/enderal_forgotten_stories_updatepost/dpdepua/

Oh well, guess I could replay FNV again over the holidays.

True, I still can't understand how those shitters prefer WC3 over SC2 even thought gameplay in SC1 was already miles ahead.
Yeah, graphics is nice, story is nice but the playstyle is retarded.
By that I mean the original strategy game of course, some customs were pretty fun.

No one tries to make "bethesda RPGs" because they take like 4-5 years to make and even then they're still buggy and unpolished as hell with no guarantee that it will even sell well.
Most AAA studios can make more money by just shoveling out rehash after rehash every year

/thread

A better question would be, why hasn't anyone copied S.T.A.L.K.E.R. instead? Surely it can't be the money because those games were made by some third world commies on a shoestring budget.

Bethesda is known for having a much smaller development team than other AAA studios, especially open-world ones.

Would Bethesda money really be necessary? Bethesda wastes a lot of their money on celebrity voice actors and stuff.

Not as profitable as copying Far Cry 3. People like the idea of open-world shooting, but don't want to get bogged down with the inventory management/status ailments/magic fuck-you zones.

The Red Zone sections of Homefront: The Revolution had some STALKER-like vibes.

the assets are all good but sweet christ beth fucking sucks at modeling terrain

trying to make it EBIG but not having enough realism to make it palatable

>Welcome to corporate gaming, this is why you should support mods, open source and passion projects.
And why you should fight the fucking Creation Club at every opportunity.

Because they sabotage, fuck over, ridicule and shit all over anyone who tries. See Obsidian.
They hold a monopoly on it because journos, executives and corporations conspire to keep them as the top dog.

Anyone could do better but there's a reason why its specifically Bethesda, the only fuckheads with 0 skill, dignity, talent, effort or brain power who do it. Why do these games sell well when they're literally unplayable on console and literally unplayable without 80+ mods on PC? Because they're marketing memes, corporation propaganda to rake in easy fucking money. Similar to Destiny. People don't play these; they buy them like sheep.