1: It's in the best interest of the series for Bethesda to make money.
2: Unless it has been stated, you don't know if Bethesda is going after the casual crowd, and if they are it's not their sole focus.
It -has- been stated, by Todd Howard, in fact, that they were going after the so called casual gamer.
3: You're the consumer, not the maker. It is incredibly misguided to believe you know what's best for the series when you're not the creator of the content. You could have played TES since the beginning and it isn't validated.
Consumer: The person who gives you money for your product, thereby contributing to your paycheck and continued employment.
A couple of things I find confusing... if the features in morrowind were already deep, how could you possibly make them deeper? Also the OP mentioned specific examples from Morrowind and was annoyed that they had been taken out of the game. He never mentioned innovation, because honestly most of the features are still in the game just in a different form. He mentioned them as they were in Morrowind.
It's impossible to satisfy everyone, you're always going to alienate a group of people. It's also easy to come up with ideas, it's even harder to implement them in a way that isn't game breaking.
When you design a thing into the game to begin with, you don't get into that issue like you would hacking or modding it in as an afterthought.
Good is subjective, and Bethesda didn't sell out. Games change, ideas change, the market changes, and that is something people have to get over. I don't exactly like how every shooter is like CoD, but I don't hold it against them because it works. It has been years since Oblivion, and the RPG market has changed, especially i the west.
And here's a free prediction. the money they've made at the beginning may well be -all- the money they make. People are already using the word =bored= in relation to Skyrim. And all the online gaming mags buzz isn't making a dent in that perception. Daggerfall is still being played to this day, and has a dedicated modding and re-engining community supporting it (and no gamesas creation kit. Such things didn't exist. These are reverse engineer projects). 15 years after it came out. Morrowind still has its active mod community, and though it has slowed in the past couple of years, the passion is still there. Oblivion is 6, and the loyalty seems noticeably lacking. But it was still 3-4 years before that became really apparent. Skyrim hasn't been out for 6 months yet, and people are calling boredom? gamesas may have caught the casual tiger by the tail.....but that beast knows nothing of loyalty, and is rabidly fannish.....until something else gets their attention, and the previous new and shiny is tossed under the couch and forgotten. And when the casuals toss and leave, all you have left to sustain the fire are the dedicated fans.....who seem to be the ones complaining about the exact same issues. Maybe they want to be like other games; played for a year then forgotten. I would have thought they took pride in the longevity of their games. Ultima hasn't lasted; Doom is about the only gaming franchise that has survived as long as TES.........
» Sun Jun 03, 2012 10:59 pm 
