It feels like when Fallout 3, 4 and Skyrim came out you couldn’t escape people posting about them for weeks, especially with Skyrim. Now the most I’ve seen are complaints about how disappointing Starfield was.
Is the game that much blander or does Internet culture just move on that much faster these days? On the other hand, I do feel like there was a lot more enthusiasm for other games like Elden Ring, and sometimes you get an Among Us that just completely take over the Internet.
man you can really tell that bethsoft was coasting off the fumes of the quality worldbuilding of TES and Fallout
the moment they had to make their own setting they made the most uninspired shit ever
tbf Elder Scrolls is their own setting too. tbef, it is also the most uninspired shit ever
Has to be my favorite fictional setting by far - the worldbuilding isn’t just the “muh deep lore” shit but actually incredibly fascinating religious cosmology and philosophy. The 36 Lessons of Vivec, the Sword Meetings of Cyrus, the concept art…
This is all almost entirely separate from what is actually represented in game though. They can’t help themselves but make generic western fantasy fetch quest sandboxes.
It does but all the amazing worldbuilding is an illusion caused by character statements and books in-game that expound on interesting lore. Most of it is never actually relevant, never appears in game, or when it does appear in game, it is changed radically to be more mundane and not at all how it was described (Cyrodiil). I think the only cool lore that actually paid off was when they foreshadowed all the Dragonborn business in Skyrim in a few ways including Mankar Camoran seemingly being a Dragonborn due to be able to wear the amulet and describing “speaking fire” or something in one of his books
I think a lot of the original world building was done by people who no longer work there, so still coasting
Pretty much everyone of the original crew that built the world dipped by the end of Morrowind. In one of those ungodly 8+ hour retrospectives I watched I remember them sorta dissecting quests in Morrowind in terms of who wrote them and in doing so you could sorta see the proto-modern Bethesda emerge from Todd’s design choices.
