#i have no hope for tes6.

[fallout-tactics]

huh???

oh my fucking god. (source in replies)

[llitchilitchi]

Oblivion did such a great job with its UI, the choice of fonts was phenomenal, the constant presence of kingthings petrock as subtitles and as the player's journal evoking medieval books, the quest updates framed with floral ornaments that look right out of manuscripts, the little icons tied to specific quests and questlines and the different crests that appear in your log to signify your rank in different factions

[leemarkies]

i’m back to complain excessively about the complete lack of content/releases from the two biggest medieval rpg franchises in the past decade

[da3drat]

GUN TO YR HEAD TODD. PERSUASION BETTER FUCKING DO SOMETHING THIS TIME.

[ilinalta]

honestly, at this point I am not sure if i have any hopes fort TES6 being remarkable and, for me, it boils down to how we treat video games and media in general

TES is such a strong franchise because it was build when consuming media was SLOW. even up to morrowind you can't rush through it and make every choice carefully, as you're constantly risking losing your next battle if you are not careful enough.

oblivion and skyrim have both rapidly and vastly diverted from a very slow gameplay model, but still offered the depth of exploration for those who seek it. they still had books scattered all around, unmarked locations to find, when you simply were trying to catch the sunset from the best possible spot.

but i worry that this was the last moment to do that, to still write 300+ books found in the game and hope someone would read at least a few of them.

i worry that the greed, yes, but also the pace at which we are expected to consume makes this type of depth redundant.

[wispstalk]

obligatory TES6 is never coming out bc my oubliette etc etc but if the bethesda game writers ever escape the sunless pit in which I have trapped them I still hope the game is never made. it's gonna suck let's be real. stripping away more RPG mechanics because they have contempt for their players. incoherent politics but worse than usual. padding out a paper thin story with references to old games to bait the redditors into doing free advertising online. just crawling over each other to be the first to make a breathless video essay on the "easter eggs"/nostalgia bait to prove they're the lore-knowingest boy around. however I will grant a stay of execution if bethesda hires the dad from the vvitch to voice a major character. That guy's voice goes so crazy like he was in game of thrones and all his lines had this weird compression on them bc I don't think a regular lavalier mic can handle his resonant bass.

[order-of-the-eye]

I will never get over how BEAUTIFUL the visions you receive in Starfield are.

There's a conversation you have with Sarah about your visions at some point in the game, and she asks for a more in depth explanation of what you felt, rather than saw and heard. And you have the option to tell her that it felt like you were being pulled across the galaxy. And I think, visually, that is the best way to describe it. It is so enamoring. It is so fucking beautiful. With every artifact, every power my character gets, I am left astonished at the visuals Bethesda provides.

The glyphs, the stars, the bending of light, it's all so breathtaking to me as someone who is captured by the stars and the spaces between them and everything to do with astronomy. And it makes me yearn to learn more about the origin of the artifacts and temples.

It just sucks that it's attached to such a bland mechanic, you know? I won't go into the powers (I think Starfield could have been fine without them, they're more interesting in a narrative sense, and I hope to God Bethesda doesn't throw in sword-singing into TES6 just for the sake of having Dragon Shouts 3.0) but I think we can all agree that the temple puzzle is lackluster, boring, and repetitive.

If we had gotten similar whimsical visuals back in 2011 with Skyrim, whenever we learned a new word of a Dragon Shout from a Word Wall, it would have been praised to Hell and back. And I think Starfield's visuals for the powers and artifacts is absolutely deserving of praise. But because it's Starfield and not TES and the path to getting to those visuals is objectively lackluster, it won't get the love it deserves.

I just think watching space bend as you learn unknown cosmic knowledge that you were never meant to understand is really fucking cool and I wish Bethesda made the temple puzzles better to reflect that.

[ansu-gurleht]

honestly i hope they either stop the “dumbing down”/“paring back” of game mechanics in tes6 or reverse course on it completely. and i have some hope for this actually. gameplay wise fallout 4 was way better than 3, so maybe they learned their lesson from skyrim. but given the fact they keep rereleasing it without any gameplay changes probably means they haven’t

[stillness138]

on this fine evening, after unsuccessfully trying to get skyrim to work, i am once again remembering a conversation i had recently.

when starfield came out, i, mostly jokingly, asked a group of friends "so what is the game about?"

i haven't scouted that many reviews - in fact i only watched a few videos, only one of them post-release - but videogame news seep their way in front of my eyes quite frequently. i have seen reveals and some discussions, but somehow, even after starfield actually came out and people claimed to have played all the way through the main questline, i still knew next to nothing. what is the game about?

and i didn't seek this info on my own - i bet wikipedia has, at this point, been updated to give a rundown of the story - because i noticed this pretty early on and found it entertaining to observe how people talked about it. spacehips, playstyle builds, weapons,.. media criticism in general is at a pretty low point because media comprehension is, but with things like movies, people do discuss themes passionately. even music gets topical analysis, if you're not on the ghost subreddit. tumblr likes to talk themes, of course, the new zelda game has been through it, bg3 is going through it despite all the horny. maybe it's because starfield has barely reached my dash and the only bits of information i see are from gamer bros, but apart from "people have colonized some planets and there's weird rocks", i haven't learned what starfield is about.

the funny rebuttal to this question came, of course, in the form of "well what is skyrim about?"

i do not expect bethesda to write a profound, deep story, those days are gone (since morrowind, or arguably, morrowind is the only one), and tes has it easier thanks to being an estabilished, developed universe, but i feel like it would take more effort to actively not make a describable narrative. like the game's gotta be about something, right? so what is it?

but i actually did think about skyrim in this context. i'm often dismissive of it because 'it's just a blank slate' and that's why it has the biggest modding scene at the moment, and that's true, but there has to be substance somewhere deep down.

it's awfully clear skyrim only ever introduces a concept and then doesn't go nearly as far with it as it could, and it's sometimes frustrating to think about it in the context of tes lore because of this (and modders have attempted to flesh different concepts out with varying degrees of success) but arguably, skyrim is about the inevitability of change. at least that's what i answered in that friend group.

this idea floats around the civil war and even the guild quests but i think it fits the main story with alduin. how he wound up in 4e 201 in the first place, a delayed apocalypse, one that is bound to come at some point. and how ultimately, the ldb doesn't absorb his soul, and even though it really is condensed into a throwavay dialogue option with the chief greybeard, because of how the final battle went down, this apocalypse may still come.

and i think that's a cool idea to at least introduce. maybe my hopes are too high (i'm clowning here hoping it will play a part in the plot of tes6), but since even skyrim, the blandest of them all, has something for the mind to ponder, i can't not ask,

what is starfield about?

imma go read the wikipedia page i guess.

[dogshitdotnet]

I literally, LITCHERALLY. cannot think about the fact that tes6 is allegedly in development right now because I know it's going to be so fucking awful terrible stupid I can't even have hope

[friend-of-giants]

5 Random Things

I was tagged by @mareenavee to share 5 random things i enjoy! Tagging @boethiahspillowbook @duo-kun @elfinismsarts @katastronoot @thelavenderelf and whoever else wants to join in.

1. Art! I have been drawing since before I could write. My school notebooks were filled with doodles, sketches, even comic strips. I even wanted to work in animation when I grew up, but due to a Series of Unfortunate Events, I quit drawing in my teens and picked it back up in my early 30s. I've been back at drawing for 3 years now and I forgot how much I love it!

2. Video games! Another thing I've been doing since I was just a wee lass, starting with the NES in the early 90s. The Mario Bros/Duck Hunt combo cartridge was my first experience with gaming and 4 year old me was hooked instantly. Sometimes I feel strange about being a grown woman who actively plays games almost on a daily basis, but it's something I enjoy and I don't have plans to stop. Catch me in the nursing home 50 years from now playing TES6 (if it's out by then)

3. Dogs! I'm a dog person through and through. I've grown up around large breeds and currently have a 9 year old Great Dane whom I love to pieces. He is absolutely my hairy, drooling son and I will hear no argument. I also adore every other dog I've encountered and want to pet each and every one of them, except the Golden Retriever who bit me in the face.

4. Pop/Soda. I may have a slight addiction to sugary drinks. I am not proud of myself but dammit I love the way it tastes and I crave the fizz.

5. Daydreaming! I've always been a creative minded person and probably 95% of the time, my brain is off in la la land. Currently that la la land is Skyrim and I'm busy conjuring up situations to throw my blorbos into, but before 2011 when Todd Howard ruined my life, I had ideas for all manner of original works that I hoped someday to be able to work on. I thought about writing or drawing them out constantly but never really did anything about it. I just really liked fantasizing about my projects that never came to fruition.

[hacknet]

Sorry im talking about skyrim again. skuldafn is my favorite part of the main story and ONLY skuldafn not sovngarde. i think sovngarde is neat but could have been done better. anyway. even if you had a follower they cant come with you through the hardest area...there are tons of enemies that are incredibly strong, multiple dragons, and a dragon priest, with hardly any cover in some sections. the open map design means that if you break stealth every nearby enemy detects you

i LOVE the map design and i love how the openness(/emptiness in some areas) of it still feels natural and works to make you feel even more alone there. you have a job only you can do and you cannot leave until it's done good luck :)

and so i don't know if this is just me hating bethesdas dialogue writing or what, but in all of my favorite areas in the game you are alone (blackreach, skuldafn, and the twilight sepulchre) its like they have a switch they can flip between good game and mediocre game that they flip during specific parts only.

i thought the "puzzles" in the twilight sepulcher were alright, the mechanic i liked most was the darkness room, but they could have pushed it a lot further. it feels like they were afraid to commit to it completely because they stopped after just one room of it :/ so i hope tes6 does more dungeons with creative puzzles instead of just...walk through crypt. pull levers. kill zombies. kill biggest zombie. open chest. leave

and theres the biggest issue with skyrim again, the fact that it had so much potential. if only the level design was better. if only your shouts could be used in more creative ways (the literal only example of this in the game is using whirlwind sprint to cross gaps. the rest is just combat). if only the characters were more developed, or the effects of your actions on the world were more important, or the player was given more thoughtful dialogue options, or the combat was more in-depth/strategic and fluid, or if the disposition system from oblivion had been reworked rather than axed, or the weapons actually played differently between types instead of just being different speeds/damages, etc etc i could go on but i dont feel like it

so thats the problem with skyrim. if you spend enough time with it you start to see through its veil of entertaining video game. but of course a new player or even someone with a couple hundred hours might not see many issues with these, since these aspects of the game aren't like glaringly "bad" or unpleasant to play (except for the ui. that scrolling list for an inventory what were they THINKING) theyre just mediocre or missed opportunities in most cases so a casual player can easily overlook them

[lmanberg]

I don't know if you saw but bethesda's new game, starfield, it's gonna remove the protagonist voice and instead of going with the wheel of dialogue like fallout 4 they are going to go with the new vegas way of having a lot of open dialogue

Maybe bethesda is finally going back to the more rpg style and fallout 5 will be more close to fallout new vegas than fallout 4 and since obsidian works with them because of microsoft we can always hope for it to be amazing

Awesome! Fallout 5 is gonna come after TES6, which is coming after Starfield, so there’s a while to wait. The parallels between Bethesda and Bioware increase, I’m expecting major Mass Effect vibes from Starfield but I’m also not following it very closely. I hope the TV show is good if it’s even still happening, but low expectations

[thenerdcommander]

I hope the reason TES6 is taking so long is because they’re having Wes Johnson record SO many voice lines

[terendelev]

One very telling thing is how the wikia of starfield is still so barren. I remember when skyrim came out we where all rushing to add things to the wiki and even the tiniest detail was added within a week or two. Starfield doesn't even have decent wikia pages for the romances or main quest line. Even the people that like this game are not writing it down.

As for the mods, bethesda didn't break them. But the structure of the game is being described as "hostile" be senior modders. As soon as a dlc drops EVERYTHING will be broken. Bethesda wanted to make a game that was good for modders but the only things that are easy to mod are remnants of fallout 4 they used. All new code is almost impossible to works with. Just one broken patch would be fine. But the fundaments of the game are no good for modding.

And they made the game barren so it could be modded in the future. They literally failed at everything they tried to do. It's honestly really fucking sad. I was looking forward to a new world to dive into to be honest.

wikia being empty... is a bad sign definitely because if the fandom isn't excited & aren't doing things out of excitement for the game idk if Starfield will leave an impact at all.

The only content I have seen about it were some of mutuals gifset but... thats all.

I don't think tes6 is going to happen anytime soon but I hope... at least they make it better than Starfield.

[skrimcats]

I just finished the thieves guild questline for the first time and I might be slightly emotional.....

.

(click “keep reading” to find out why because sometimes the tags aren’t enough for rambling) (also maybe spoilers if you are like me and haven’t completed it in 2019??)

Well if you haven’t noticed the thieves guild’s characters in Skyrim are well built and you can interact with them more than with many other characters (at least compared to other questlines like idk imperials) and that makes me mad but also glad because I just... love them...... s o much........ Brynjolf, Karliah and even Gallus’ story..........gfdhgfhkghfkgkj

BUT ALso for personal reasons. About a year ago I started to play with my first proper Skyrim character, Ru’is, who was just a streetcat and a disaster child at first, but then she joined the guild and hoo boy you know how they welcome you to their “happy little family” so she was ready to die for them. And because of my way too immersive gameplay and hyperactive storytelling instincts of me and my sis and friend, she did die for them.

Actually, I just couldn’t continue to play with her after the last summer because I moved to places, the platform she was on stayed at my friends’ house and I lived rather far away for a half year. So I never really got much further than defeating Mercer and she did actually drown because I couldn’t find the way out of you-know-where on my first try. So that became her grave and the thieves guild remained unfinished for her and for me. But now I have been playing with a new khajiit boy, Paju, who I decided was Ru’is’ son. A thief as well and trying to find out what happened to his mother as his mission. 

So, the thieves guild was friends, family and life for Ru’is, and now I have restored the guild to its former glory with her son. I mean, finishing a questline (especially this long) feels good anyways, but it was kind of a conclusion for my early Skyrim character’s story, and also an end of one chapter for my new character, who now can maybe start to pursue something new, as this has been one of my only goals for him so far.

I just love my cats so much.