Do Bethesda actually IRL make good games?

My friend, I was eating a yogurt this morning and suddenly I was struck with an epiphany. A true revelation.

I realized that although the video game "Fallout 3" is a good and enjoyable game, the "Elder Scrolls" series of video games, regardless of Todd Howard's reassuring face, are just not very good when one gets past the fact that they are playing inside of a big world.

This is all coming from my heart, which is throbbing at the moment.

Well, I enjoyed Fallout 3 on my last playthrough thoroughly, despite it's flaws. Not sure about 90+ metascore though.

Yes. I fucking love Bethesda games with all my heart.

I call bullshits.

Call bullshits on my heart, I don't care!

I voted yes for them making good games, a few for me qualify for 90+, that includes Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, and i would even say Skyrim is close. I played all the games without mods and it was still a blast to play. Skyrim i modded for a little while but got bored fooling with the mods and went back to vanilla.

Out of ES and Fallout , all is meh.

I am not their huge fan and Fallout 4 isn't among my most anticipated games but I'll play it as well as the next The Elder Scrolls game and will enjoy them for like 70-100 or so hours before quitting them and never coming back again.

So, in my book their games are fun but I don't think they deserve over 90 metacritic (as asked in Thread Description). Only technical marvels or big leaps in gaming should be above 90, not just any other great/good or fun game. So No.

only with mods.

What's a "hart?"

No.

They make mod sandboxes, the actual base games are trash.

They make bland, boring games with a paint-by-the numbers approach to gameplay. Fallout 3 is the only Bethesda RPG that I finished last gen. I had fun with it, but I also skipped most of the crap filler, and thankfully my character died at the end so I never bothered to go back and check it out.

yup...F4 will be 5 game of the years in a row for them

In the bottom of my heart? Like the deepest, most bottomest?

Oh gee golly. No. Absolutely not, for you see their mechanics in every single one of their games would be something one would call "god-fucking awful shit ****". They make interesting worlds with nothing to show for them. Just poorly thought out quest designs, poorly thought out writing, and hemmoraged content that's seldomly worth utilizing.

I really feel Morrowind is the last good game they made. Everything since then has just been filler to show off Gamebryo, which was impressive when it was first revealed with Oblivion, now it's just sad.

Considering I completed every quest twice (with DLC) for Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 3 - I'd say "yes".

Morrowind was good everything else since then sucks. The stupid engine they use now is the worst. I'll probably skip fallout 4

i dont get the "ïn real life" part in the title....is there some virtual world or its only good in the forums?

and i think they make good games.

IMO Oblivion was a great game

Well done.

they make games. true but they make shitty games.

I think I have enjoyed each one of their releases since Morrowind a bit less than the one before. I think that is partly due to my tastes changing and my ability to notice poor mechanics/writing/storytelling increasing.

Skyrim is probably a better game than Oblivion, but I only played it for like 40-50 hours (including the big DLC where you go to the island) whereas I must have put 200 hours into Oblivion.

I think FO4 looks really good though. The universe is more appealing to me right now than The Elder Scrolls and it seems like they are putting some effort into improving the combat. I'm sure the exploration will be fun, so its a question of story/writing and the quality of side quests.

Their quality started suffering since Oblivion. Now their games are more like massive time sinks than actual quality games.

One of my major problems with the current direction elder scrolls has taken post morrowind is they seem much more focused on high fantasy tropes. Morrowind felt so damn refreshing because the world was truly like nothing I had seen before, it was so alien. Then we had Oblivion with it's classic medieval europe vibe with predominately humans,wood and high elves and it just got so damn uninspired, Skyim did it's thing with norse lore but it really just felt like one day they were discussing what would be a good theme for the next game, some dude yelled Vikings and they went "Y'know what, let's go with that."

No.

They have never had good mechanics in their games
The combat has always been trash
They routinely rely on procedural generated environments and not hand crafted level design which makes a lot of the dungeons in their games repetitive
Their games release buggy
Their games are badly written sans aspects of Morrowind
Their world design as a result of the procedural stuff makes no sense at times

They are exceptional at making a toybox the player wants to explore for escapism and a platform for some cool mods, but the core game has never actually been good. They made hiking simulators that act like they are games, the PC plebs only realized that after they "dumbed the game down", but that's actually how it's always been. It was never the intelligent game they thought it was.

wut?

Technical marvels absolutely should not be the ones getting 90 or above. Otherwise buggyness aside, Bethesda's games have almost entirely been carried by their technical achievements.

I loved Oblivion and Fallout 3. I also put in a massive amount of time into TES, so I would say yes. Fallout 4 will be a GOTY somewhere.

Bethesda are good at creating extremely immersive worlds, but almost every other aspect of their games are poorly executed.

And if the Vikings weren't generic enough, they also decided to throw in some Dragons for good measure. They could have done some cool stuff with Vikings (like the side quests in Witcher 3 where you get involved in the family politics) but no they had to make it about glitchy talking dragons instead.

the ES universe actually felt unique/distinct with Morrowind but now its pretty generic you are right

Technical marvels don't have to be graphics king. It can be something with better Level design than any game out there or more advanced AI or a great game that also brings a lot of new stuff to the table that wasn't possible before.

Fair enough, as long as it's something gameplay relevant, that's when it actually deserves high praise. I don't necessarily think that requires something to be ground breaking or even brand spanking new, sometimes exceptional execution (Nintendo on their best days) or said execution with actual gameplay depth (Platinum Games, Starcraft 2, Street Fighter) is more than enough.

Other technical achievements is like great, but it doesn't excuse x, y, or z, which is really been how Bethesda has been cashing in. I mean go listen to any "critic" about how they validate all the bugs these games have, "oh but the game is so big, there is nothing else like it", personally too many "critics" give way too much of a free pass for a technical achievement.

Bethesda need to make more engaging open world games with better atmosphere. This is a huge flaw in their games I mean back when games weren't as advanced this might have been ok but they really need to fix this issue. They make huge open world games filled with quest but they feel so lifeless and bland at times.

Yup,,, as I mentioned before, Starcraft 2 deserved over 90 because its gameplay is most polished in its genre. In fact the entire game is polished to perfection (close to it at least) from the beginning to end. On other hand you see stuff like Bayonetta 2 or other Platinum games that are mechanically close to perfect like Starcraft 2.

Yup, one of the best in the industry and they continue to get better with each game.

Amen.

Bethesda are overrated.

They make explorable worlds like no other. You can talk to all NPCs, pick and manipulate every object, enter in all doors, freely explore the world with almost no invisible walls, etc...

Bethesda is one of the best and most ambitious dev in this industry.

No. Boring, bug filled games

They also need major improvements in quest variety, roleplaying, actions/consequences, combat system, level-scaled enemies giving no sense of progression, etc.

without mods their games are pretty rough, still decent but if they ever cut off mod support their games would be forgotten really quickly. the only interesting skyrim videos you ever see are because of mods.

Hopefully fallout 4 will be a better game at its release and still be fun without mods.