I wish Bethesda didn’t make Fallout and The Elder Scrolls – Reader’s Feature

A reader is frustrated at the slow progress on The Elder Scrolls 6 and a new Fallout and wishes that Bethesda would work more closely with other developers.

I feel there are a lot of love/hate relationships in gaming. Where you love the games but, if not hate, at least feel exhausted having to put up with the nonsense of the company making. Even Nintendo is kind of like this, with all their weird ways of doing things, but at the end of the day they make great games, so everyone lets it slide.

For me though the big problem is Bethesda. I love Skyrim and Fallout, but I swear they must be the slowest, most backwards company in the whole of gaming. There was a story this week about how there are a bunch of new Fallout games on the way, including New Vegas 2, and all I could think is I hope that Bethesda don’t have anything to do with them.

I know how weird that sounds, considering they’re the ones that created the franchises (well, not Fallout but the modern first person ones) but I think it’s pretty obvious by now that they have not moved with the times and you don’t even need Starfield to tell you that.

I don’t want to harp on about Starfield, because I feel everything that could be said about it already has been, but I think the most important thing to note is that for something that was meant to be a graphical step forward it was the smallest baby step possible. More importantly, the gameplay didn’t do anything new at all. Not only that but it purposefully undermined one of the best bits about Bethesda games, in terms of their open world design.

This makes me very worried about The Elder Scrolls 6, because Bethesda seems to hate negative feedback and always does everything to talk themselves out of it. And if they do react it’s by the smallest degree possible, as in Starfield’s graphics.

How much this has to do with Todd Howard I don’t know but he does seem to have an unhealthy amount of influence. If it wasn’t because he wanted to direct it, we would have already had Fallout 5 by now. But instead, they’ve been caught empty handed after the Fallout show hit it big and are now going to end up relying on other developers anyway.

And what if they do a better job, as Obsidian did with New Vegas? Todd’s probably going to get all funny about it again, because there’s no way he doesn’t feel bitter about how much love New Vegas gets. If they were sensible, they should’ve had a sequel to that 10 years ago. Heck, they probably should’ve bought Obsidian (not that that would’ve made much different now Microsoft owns them both).

I hesitate to say this, given the layoffs at Microsoft at the moment – which I am totally against – but I really do feel the old guard needs to be removed from Bethesda, or at least put in a purely supervisory role, so that we can get some forward momentum here.

In terms of their first party studios, their best games are all over a decade ago and the one big one they’ve done since then, was heavily criticised for being old-fashioned. Heck, so was Fallout 4 for that matter.

I think what’s maybe most worrying for Bethesda is I don’t see when there’s going to be any change. Everything’s gone quiet on Starfield (what happened to one expansion per year?) and The Elder Scrolls 6 doesn’t seem any closer now than in the last 15 years.

I hate to say it but I’d rather other developers took over the Fallout franchise entirely. It’s probably too late for The Elder Scrolls 6 now, but at the very least commission the Elder Scrolls equivalent of New Vegas and see what another team can do with the franchise.

Bethesda leaders, whether that’s Todd Howard or whoever, have got to get themselves into gear and embrace current day technology and standards. Because if their next game is another Starfield style disaster then we all know what Microsoft’s response is going to be to that…

By reader Koban

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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