The issue is Bethesda is making the game that they wanted to. And some dont like that beacuse it's not their vision for the game.

Because EA and Activision haven't offered to buy Beth as far as I know. Why do you act like making money is a bad thing?

*looks at morrowind*

No im pretty sure they are making the game the masses want. If it was what they wanted they would have made it before, they had a loyal fanbase. They chose to ignore them in favour of a larger fanbase. If they wanted a hack n slash AA game, they could have made one. Instead they made RPGs.

Yeah I disagree.

Lets look at one of the last true rpg devs. Obsidian *choir of angels* Their new game is going to be turn based. How the [censored] is that appealing to the masses ?
They could have made it much more casual, but they didnt, instead they decided to make it an almost dead playstyle. Bethesda has more money behind it than Obsidian, yet Obsidian is taking the risks. Its pathetic that a smaller company with more to loose, is risking more, while bethesda is just thinking about money.

Thats a little naive.

So just b/c it has a different playstyle than Skyrim, it's justified? TES has been real time for a long while, it's not Bethesdas fault.

Playstyle doesn't make an RPG, it doesn't make a good game, and it certianly doesn't make it a "true RPG".

For all you know the reason for them making a turn based RPG is b/c it takes less man power than to create a real time combat RPG.

Come on now, it's 2012! We can't allow the player to fail quests. Much less have consequences from said failures

No, im saying devs can still make games, that dont try and appeal to the mass markets. Skyrm however, does. The dumbing down and the hand holding show that. Its nothing to do with real time. You want a real time example fine. Dark souls. Sequal to demons souls, a niche market of masochists who love a challenge. Hell the game dosent even tell you where to go just "ring 2 bells". The devs could have dumbed it down, but they didnt. They stayed loyal to fans.

Hell they said about making a sequal, but apologised about blight town having such issues. They care about their fans, bethesda just use fans as beta testers.

I was just about to say, while Zenimax has demonstrated it is very similar to other large publisher, in the fact that they are attempting to acquire a large amount of developers, they are a private company and I figure that will make a different in the quality of the products, at least in the long term. Don't let Beth fool you though, they do in fact have corporate masters, even though Zeni is a helluva lot less strict than Dumb and Dumber. (Activision; EA)

A lot of the streamlining you've seen in Skyrim isn't some corporate dude yelling at Beth to make their games "dumber," it's legitimate design decisions made by the design team. I like a lot of them, and I despise others. We'll have to see how it turns out in the long run. At least Beth isn't *shudders* adding multiplayer. They are still committed to making the best Single Player open world games, and while I disagree with a lot of the choices they made, I do see the reasons they made them.

It'll be interesting to see where Bethesda is a couple releases from now. I can sort of see what Fallout 4/ TES: 6 might look like, but beyond that is only a mystery. Considering that Skyrim has sold like hotcakes, and that they clearly have a very large established audience now, I hope that they focus less on streamlining and more on depth. They have the market now, so they should focus on keeping it.

To be honest, Skyrim is the better game compared to Morrowind in almost every aspect except for quest pacing. I started with Morrowind when it came out on xbox. Downloaded it through steam recently and still love it. But Skyrim is more engrossing.

On Topic: It's been said plenty of times but Bethesda won't be gobbled up by Activision or EA because they are already under Zenimax's umbrella. Fun note is that Zenimax is owned by the original owner of Bethesda before he quit to form Zenimax, essentially buying his old company back. Also, Bethesda would probably commit sepuku before joining EA having been screwed by them in the past. You know that Madden NFL series? Bethesda was the precursor to that

Dark Souls isn't an open world game. There doesn't need to be hand holding. The only part of Skyrim that is hand holding is the quest markers, but seriously, all it's taking away is the looking at the make and guessing where next plot point is.

Instead of getting some round-about direction to a place, then traveling for 10 minutes, then looking around and getting lost for another 30 minutes, you know where to go with a quest marker.

And Dark Souls isn't anything special. Clumsy controls doesn't mean it's hard. It means the develpers don't know what they are doing. What you call hardcoe or whatever I call lazy.

Woah, I thought my thread had been deleted, but it was just moved here.

Money talks, and EA/Activision seem to buy out ANY game developer that has popular games so they can milk them for all they are worth, then riding them into the sewer like they did with Westwood Studios, among others. That's what I was getting at I think, it just seems strange that they would allow another corporation to keep Bethesda. Dragon Age Origins was a good example, this game felt like a rushed, LOTR game that was cancelled and recycle into a new game. The game itself wasn't too bad, but the story, characters, and everything else in it was to me extremely generic and boring.

And Skyrim is a hell of a great RPG, I don't know what you guys expect from your games nowadays. The UI svcks but it doesnt bother me much, I got used to it..although I refuse to play a magic-only character until someone mods a proper way to swtich spells. I can play with a melee guy or archer with no problems. The game used to crash a lot before they did the last patch but now it never crashes unless I do a lot of alt-tabbing.

And there are mods, they didn't have to allow mods. The CoD guys shut that down so they could make more money selling maps and other ridiculous things. I've been enjoying a lot of *free* stuff that would never be allowed on child-friendly consoles, and it just makes the game that much better and that's the way PC gaming should be.

Zenimax media was basically created by bethesda to act as a shell company for the management of various properties. As such, Zenimax media does not produce any products, does not provide services, and has no economic output outside of it's subsidiaries. (i.e. gamesas and other companies) Even if EA wanted to obtain control of bethesda game studios, Zenimax is not in a position to sell. Secondly, after the seperation of Bethesda into Bethesda softworks and Bethesda game studios, Bethesda softworks has developed into a full-blown publishing house, capable of publishing all games produced by any developer under the Zenimax umbrella. This means that Bethesda game studios can act and operate in the gaming market without the assistance of companies like EA, Activision, 2k games, or other publishers. This independence in turn means that there is little benefit to being acquired by a publisher. (Such as what happened to firaxis games, bioware, and others) Finally, Zenimax is a private company, and as such, hostile takeovers aren't possible.

Lets see, thieves guild with no need for stealth.
Immortal NPCs.
Dungeons reduced to corridors (cant risk getting lost)
Enemies scale.
Dont even need to work to find the guilds, [censored] the thieves and companions approach you.
Deadric quests are easily found, pretty much pointed out to you. E.g Mythic dawn museum.

Thats off the top of my head.

What, what has this got to do with being an open world game ? We are on about games pandering to the masses, this is irrelivent.

Dark souls combat is superior to skyrims, by far. Controls are simple, the game just dosent hold your hand. Parrying takes skill, weapon type comes into play, you cant just hold down block and win. Then you have the dodging, pyromancy and miracles. Enemies arent a laughing matter, even at higher levels you can get killed by basic enemies.

The UI is also better, I can quickly switch between a spear or pyromancer flame in 1 hand, or a shield and talisman in the other.

How is skyrim special exactly ? Its a bland open world, filled with linear dungeons, repetative enemies, and very shallow rpg elements.

there is a difference between buying a development studio and publishing their titles. the only game studio zenimax actually owns is bethesda game studios, which was never independant from zenimax any ways.

zenimax owns the license to titles such as brink and wet, but they do not own the studios that make the games, essentailly

looking through this thread more its astonishing how much misinformation is being portrayed with confidence as fact.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0_PiTtSp_I
so here is the first part of the all your history videos that were made not too long ago so that every one can get a reliable 2nd degree account of bgs history and why it has not been bought out.

The only NPCs that are immortal in my game are the ones that shouldn't be killed for quest or story related reasons. Back in the day when that could happen, it wasn't "hardcoe" it was poor programming. No one wants to kill an important NPC and have to restart the game.

Dungeons have always been corridors to an extent....even in Morrowind. The dungeons in Skyrim are much more vibrant than in Oblivion or Morrowind. Besides, not everything has to be non linear. There are some great games that are non linear. Also, theres a huge world outside those dungeons.....maybe they thought a little change was good?

Not all enemies scale. Frost Trolls are made to be hard at earlier levels. Also, dragons may scale but it's not like they don't have a few levels on them to make them a challenge at lower levels.

I've played about 70 hours of Skyrim and no one has come up to me and said they were in the thieves guild and I haven't found any daedric quests. I've talked to many ppl and no one has said anything.

Dark Souls is a porr example. I said it's not open world and therefore doesn't need any hand holding. If all you have to do is go down this corridor or whatever theres no reason to point someone in a certain direction. Dark Souls combat is awful. I can't count how many times I had to litterally run and do a full 180 just to point the other way.....then if you're being attacked by 2 things you can't turn while blocking or anything. Blocking is useless. I block one guy and the other guy is swinging at me and hits me anyway. It doesn't help that all these fights are in tight places and it's a pain to move around.

I don't find the UI in Skyrim oh-so-horrible as everyone seems to want to describe it. Sure you have to get out of it to switch from magic to weapons but it isn't that big of an deal. The favorites menu works just fine.

Skyrim is special b/c it's one of the few really open RPGs. You can go anywhere you want. Around every corner theres a threat of a dragon. Theres dungeon crawling for loot. The aesthetics are off the charts. <---thats what makes it so good.

I think SWTOR is pretty good honestly. And I've never had a reason to dislike either EA or Activision....But regardless, it doesn't seem like Bethesda would have any need to let themselves get 'gobbled up'. Valve is pretty successful and to the best of my knowledge they haven't been bought up, so I guess it doesn't always have to happen that way.

I think that Bethesda did take a page from others when they made Skyrim: I've seen several thing that I'm convinced they took from Gothic 3. But I don't think that's a bad thing at all, to look at other games for inspiration.

And yes, I agree with Scow that Skyrim is the best one yet. This talk about appealing to the masses is silly: Morrowind wasn't meant to appeal exclusively to the Daggerfall [censored]. And Daggerfall wasn't made to cater to Arena [censored]. Skyrim took good things from Morrowind, and good things from Oblivion and made many of them even better. It's got better combat and stealth than Oblivion and better dungeon design than Morrowind.

THIS!

Except Bethesda isn't an isolated game developer. It's also a publisher and an integral part of a larger company. If Zenimax Media sold off Bethesda they'd lack a publishing arm for their other developement studios, and that wouldn't make any sense at all. It also wouldn't make sense to sell off Bethesda Game Studios, the developing arm of Bethesda, to a rival publisher given the popularity of their games.

But EA or Activision has enough capital to buy everything, is what I'm getting. We are very close to complete control of the gaming industry by two corporations, thanks to their marketing schemes and manipulating gamers into buying the same thing every year. If EA/Activision made an offer to buy out Zenimax, you can bet that offer would be enough for them take it. The name of the game now is popularity, nothing else matters. And popularity has nothing to do with quality, look at the top 10 mp3 downloads each month...most of them make me want to vomit, and I'm a musician.

Gamers today only care about what they think OTHER people are playing, they care very little about their own tastes. They want to be part of something huge, thus the insane number of WoW subscriptions, and the gamers themselves make that happen. RPGs simply do NOT interest this many people, that's how you know. Another example is CoD, it is simply impossible that there are that many FPS fans that own consoles; they want to be a part of the trend. It makes them feel good to play a game that they know a lot of other people play. Gamers today are truly pathetic in that they play games to make themselves feel better...about themselves.

Which brings me back to Bethesda. There are in the exact same position that Bioware and Blizzard were when they were bought out. They have a very popular game, and a game that has very little difficulty and gives the player that "I'm invincible" feeling that makes money. I've seen very many posts on here against any changes to smithing, enchanting, alchemy in Skyrim because it was against the "TES tradtion" of making your character into effortless god-mode on any difficulty. The common argument is that you don't have to the tradeskills, but when you buy a game you don't do hardcoe research about things like this.

I guess I'm just sick of corporations controlling the one thing that's always been there for me in my 34 years of life. No matter what's been going on in my life or the world, I've always been able to crank of my games and enjoy them. That has changed, I can barely enjoy anything anymore and it's because of these corporations completely shutting down the creativity of game studios to ensure that the mass market will buy the game. On the Bioware forums, I asked them what do they do when they decide to make a new game, Do they make the game the best possible game they can, or do they make it so they make the most money possible. I asked that becuase of DA:O had zero DLC and that they actually programmed that into the game as an advertisemant, a quest guy would actually link you to a external web site where you entered credit card information, etc. That crossed the line with me, I've hated Bioware ever since....they are corporate [censored]s and care nothing about their fans.

I'm starting to ramble so I will stop, but Bethesda please don't sell out...you are the only one left!

RPG's do since Skyrim sold 10 million copies. There is money to be made in the RPG market and that's why Zenimax doesn't sell out. Because it knows it can get just as big as EA or Activision and they aren't going to sell Bethesda Game Studios since they are their first and best game development team. Zenimax also has something called Zenimax online so I suppose they are going to have a go at the multiplayer market as well. They just still have some standards when publishing games compared to EA or Activision that don't.

Also Activision isn't what they used to be.

Oh? I tought they were buying them, not just publishing for them. Well now i know better.


Like the captains of the Imperial/Stromcloak camps you are encoureged to destroy after the war is over?

I seen a few people say "true RPG" and Dragon age origins in the same line.
DA:O is a RGP, yes.
It has little in the way of "choice" compared to older games like BG or NWN. Those had far more dialog and options simply because they are not voiced.
I like VO/VA too but its imposable to have the amount of dialog like NWN or BG has if you voice it.

I haven't finished the Witcher but its quite the RPG so far, no clear good or bad choices.

That said, all the game makers are targeting the largest and lowest common groups to make the most money.
Who can blame them.

Only the small guys (tale worlds M&B comes to mind) are doing anything new/different.

I was excited for Dead state.

If Bethesda gets bought by EA I'll stop playing video games. EA is by far one of the worst companies out there that ruins everything they touch. They ruined Battlefield, Need for Speed, Star Wars as well as a multitude of other game franchises.