Microsoft documents leak new Bethesda games, including an Oblivion remaster
And a new Doom game.
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Of all the games to choose to remaster they decided on Oblivion and not Morrowind? Man, Bethesda couldn't confirm how out of touch they are even harder if they tried
I think you might be in a bit of an echo chamber. Oblivion has a much bigger audience.
My big point here is that Bethesda isn't aware of what their fan base enjoys. There are plenty of people who have played their games who are not fans. When I say fan what I'm talking about is the kind of people who play all of their games throughout history. You garner good will with your community by catering to the desires of the fan base itself. that said even if they wanted to do the most money grabbiest thing they could it would still make more sense to start with 3 and work their way toward 5 again. It would give them more games to monotize and would also let them build hype for the games that did penetrate the general audience
I don't think they're interested in gatekeeping which group of their customers are considered "fans", nor do I think it's them that's out of touch. I know Morrowind is the cult classic, but Oblivion just does better numbers.
I'm not really tracking this at all. I never said Morrowind had better numbers and I'm not clear on what you mean by the idea of gatekeeping. I was drawing a distinction between the average person who just buys whatever is popular at the time and the consistent community that has been very vocal over the years
Gatekeeping who is or is not a fan. The community that is vocal about Morrowind is just probably not as large as the one that would buy Oblivion again. Many of their fans are only fans because they started playing Bethesda games with Oblivion. Many of them probably went back and played Morrowind and didn't care for it but stuck with all of those subsequent releases.
That's not at all what I'm saying there. I'm not making a judgment about people and their enjoyment about the experience. I'm talking about a very obvious thing about how communities like this work. Which is simply the idea that there is a spectrum here. Right. There are people who are actively engaged and there are people who are not (and everyone in-between). You're reading too much into the word "fan" here. I could just as easily had called them community members. There's obviously a distinction here. What I'm getting at is that Bethesda is tone deaf to these people on that end of the spectrum despite their years of dedication to the IP. Any connotation about gatekeeping is not something I brought into this conversation. There are clear aspects about people's behavior that anyone can observe and agree on here.
And if we want to bring in people who played Oblivion and tried Morrowind later I'm one of them. Morrowind is clearly a labor of love in so many ways that their later releases just aren't. I like Oblivion it's a good game, but it's not a great game like Morriwind is. Everything that Oblivion has that makes it good Morrowind had and so much more (assuming we ignore things like how they've aged and all that).
I hear what you are saying and I'm not disagreeing with the idea that Oblivion has been more successful from a raw numbers perspective (this is an indisputable fact from any measurable metric). What I'm getting at is that in this pursuit of numbers Bethesda has lost something along the way and they have never really recaptured it. This always happens when you start to appeal to a wider audience
Obviously Bethesda knows what they are doing as a business they wouldn't still be around otherwise
I can kinda see why they went with Oblivion. For one, Morrowind would be harder to do because it relies heavily on invisible dice rolls and she stats of you vs the enemy for...basically everything. From hit chance, to if your spell is succesfully cast, to how much damage your armor (or the enemy's) eats up. Unless they gut that entire system and do a more modernized one instead (like Oblivion/Skyrim's)
Another reason i wanna say they picked Oblivion is because, frankly, it's the middle redhead child of the "modern" elder scrolls main games. Everyone praises Morrowind and Skyrim, but Oblivion....yeah. I love it, it was what Skyrim was to many players, but yeah it can be rough in a lot of aspects. Sometimes even more so than Morrowind (YMMV. I could easily get used to Morrowind, even vanilla. Everytime i go back to Oblivion, I have to make myself look past the roughness to see the good stuff).
IDK, i see this as a great second chance for the game...and, foolish it may be but, I'm also hoping they restore Cyrodiil to the jungle it was hyped up to be in Morrowind and the pocket guides since the tech is there now, plus they no longer have to cash in on the Lord of the Rings movies. They won't. But i can dream.
Plenty of games do combat with dice rolls and surface the numbers, so I'm not sure why that would be an obstacle.
It's not so much the dice rolls that are the problem...but, they kinda are...let me try and explain what i mean
It isn't so much that going back to Morrowind's style of gameplay is a bad thing. Like you said, a lot of games do that and do it well, even today (Baldur's Gate 3 does Dice Rolls for everything too, and its great) it's more of is Bethesda going to keep it intact (either completely or modernize it) and risk potentially alienating the part of the fans that have only played Skyrim (A large part of players, at least from what I've seen) or are they going to scrap it and replace it with a more Oblivion/Skyrim system, thus potentially alienating the ones that are wanting an Elder Scrolls game to go back to when there were tangiable RPG mechanics in there (and that's not assuming they don't try and have it both ways...IDK how that'd look, but if you try pleasing everyone, well...).
Did that make sense? I'm kinda running on an energy drink and a dream atm
But really, i think it's more of they looked at Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, and just went "out of those 3, Oblivion's the one that could use the tuneup the most" (again, it's the redhead middle child, sandwiched between the much more universally loved Skyrim and respected older Morrowind).
Dice rolls!! And now I want to replay Neverwinter Nights..
I get caught off guard in morrowind any time I have to jump up stairs.
Oblivion is full of jank, too, obviously, but it's the things that are annoying all the time that get me.
I would hope they remove the randomness from Morrowind. It doesn't serve the experience one bit
Randomness? What do you mean? If you mean the dice rolls, they're not too bad if you stick with the class you picked/created in the beginning of CC. And I'd argue they does serve the experience: showing the player's progression.
Because you're not some master of all jack of all traits in Morrowind. You can be, but you don't start as one. You start as a poor soul fresh off the prison boat who kinda knows how to use a weapon and can't run for long (or maybe you can do both pretty well, but suck at magic, jumping, or wearing heavy armor, or you can't tell the end of a spear from the front so using one efficiently is going to take a while. All depends on how you made your character), but as you keep adventuring and doing those things your character kinda sucks at, you get better at them--doing much more damage and barely missing hits at all with weapons-- and rather than running slower than molasses, you can can run faster and farther than ever before.
Well yea at the time that was the popular way to show progression. But there are other mechanisms to achieve the same that both serve the game language of progress and also dont actively feel detrimental to the player. At the very least you would need to make combat more kinetic to get any one use to modern games to play it
