After the massive blunder of Starfield, I cannot see how Elder scrolls 6 could possibly be successful. Everything points to the fact that they knew that the game was not even half finished, in my opinion, with major glaring issues, and they decided to just send it off anyway. The difference between this game and Oblivion is that this time, it wasn't light-hearted and filled with silly mistakes that made people laugh. It instead inside it a lot of anger and disbelief as to how they could fail so spectacularly with a AAA title...
But this has not been the first time that Bethesda as a whole has failed, and is in fact the third strike. They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4, which took the gaming industry by surprise after seeing how poorly developed it was, and the extreme low quality of the story, how unfinished the game was, how simply broken many areas and features were, I could talk about it for hours. Biggest thing to me was the poorly made settlement system that barely even worked because there was no snapping, and it felt like playing an indie game. The second strike was Fallout 76, crazy how disappointing his game was and even to this day is still broken and in disarray. It's only been able to survive purely because of microtransactions...
Then, you look at what most people are playing right now, and it's Skyrim. Above any other game out there, it's Skyrim. The similarity between Skyrim and Elder scrolls 6 doesn't really matter that much, the age is what you should really focus on. Why are people playing such an old game still to this day? Hint, it's because every single other title they've released has been a disappointment.
Personally, I have no faith or belief that Elder scrolls 6 will be anything other than a colossal disappointment. I don't see how Bethesda as a studio can possibly manage to produce AAA titles anymore, I think they have a budget of half of what they need to have, and it's only getting smaller each year as costs are being cut, and People are being laid off, stakeholders and stockholders want more revenue growth than ever before. It's unbelievable honestly. They expect infinite growth with minimal headcount that keeps shrinking
I don't really feel like you can compare the two games. Starfield was a big scope with mostly procedurally generated content with a few handcrafted areas, which resulted in very repetitive content since they simply didn't make enough variety in content. I feel like the procedural part and the ship and base building parts took a lot of resources away from other gameplay features, like a more interesting story or more engaing gameplay.
It also doesn't help that Starfield still runs on an extremely outdated engine. Even if they updated it, there are still ridiculous limitations that shouldn't even exist in this day and age. Just looking at Star Wars Outlaws gives a good impression how seamless stuff could've been in Starfield. Yet even entering a small shop or your ship requires a loading screen.
And on top of that the game just runs like absolute garbage on the old engine. When Todd Howard just answered with "just buy an RTX4000 card" it spoke volumes about the lack of optimisation that came with that game.
That last part is probably gonna be the biggest obstacle for Elder Scrolls 6, but having a handcrafted world will probably let them get away from a complete failure of a game already. Another obstacle might be to write an interesting story and characters, I frankly can't remember anything from what I played in Starfield, it was generally just boring and Bethesda probably gambled on the open-world exploration experience offsetting that.
Also Bethesda needs to stop relying on mods saving the game for them, many basic functions are missing and I found myself often needing mods to have an even acceptable experience, especially with Fallout 4 and Starfield. It's probably why Skyrim is still so popular, because there is that massive collection of mods out there.
I remember not being able to arrest Ron hope despite having a non-lethal weapon and a brig
Like come on, that was obviously the good ending. Why not implement it?
skyrim and fallout worlds being handmade is one thing people look for in their bethesda games and they went with random generation, destroying large part which makes their games unique and lets you ignore their shit main story writing with the often better side content scattered around
its like how they ruined their dialogue system in fallout 4 with the voiced player and limited mass effect dialog wheel when they had a working, superior system to that
The budget for Starfield was scales of magnitude larger than No Man's Sky, and will likely never have even half the updates that game did. Bethesda never carries a game that far, not even Skyrim
Agree, and it's sad they won't even learn from them either. Every single Bethesda release isn't open world. A modder has to make that FOR them. Unbelievable man. That's not even remotely complex, any game developer should be able to figure that out easily, could just go look up one of the already made mods for open world, copy paste, done.
To be honest I never found the procedural generation in No Man's Sky good either.
It's a better game by far, but once you have been exploring a few systems you often start finding repetitive content there as well. But there's definitely more variety than Starfield and it's mostly seamless too. And NMS came out about 7 years before Starfield.
I think the biggest issue is Bethesda clinging on to their engine for dear life like it's their precious baby, and they're keeping it on life-support with minimal updates.