Elder Scrolls VI

Resardiv said:
Greater impact, hopefully for a good cause as it's Make-A-Wish.
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Fair enough, but an NPC can be missed, or forgotten, where a monument is seen every time the player comes to town.
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Ideally every RPG should be that way; Bethesda is quite hostile to that AFAIK, (and they are not the only studio either).


RPG content should play out like an ink blot mask on a Where's Waldo poster with only the exposed content accessible to a given PC, on a given play-through; based purely upon Luck, the PC's skill and attributes, and the player's choice of in-game actions for the PC. Where one choice leads to another (cutting off some paths while opening others).

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In the interview, Nesmith acknowledged many of these differences, and praised Larian’s bravery when it came to locking off content. “The thing that at Bethesda we could never get ourselves to do, is that they [Larian] poked into all the darkest corners,” Nesmith said. “They've come out and said, quite bluntly, 'we don't care if only 1% of the players will ever see this. Those 1% that do are gonna be happy, and they will tell the other 99%, who will then be happy that the option existed.’

"At Bethesda, the games we were making were so big we had to take the approach of, well, everybody's got to be able to do this at some point. We can’t lock off content that way. And you can see it in our games — we don’t. You can get to be the heads of all the guilds, you can be friends with all the companions, you can go to all the places. Nothing is off-limits.

“But when you play Baldur's Gate 3 you get the impression, rightly so, that this decision I'm about to make will close off parts of the game and open up others. It's meaningful. That means something. That’s a big deal.

“You have to acknowledge that — I’m just going to pull numbers out of my ass here — any one player is only going to see 50% of the game. That’s it. And furthermore, the work that I do as an individual developer may only be seen by 5% of the people out there. That’s a little disheartening. Hey bro, what parts do you work on? Oh this thing over here that hardly anybody ever gets to.
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Interview
Bethesda says it quite cleary that they don't want to hide content. Probably because it's part of their design to appeal to the lowest denominator.
 
Of course the ego of "hurr durr only 5% or something will see the content i made" instead of appreciating the fact that any amount of people will engage with that content.
 
Bethesda is rife with laziness, reactionary beliefs and hubris. They still see themselves as the King of RPGs like they were decades ago, but that era is no more. That culture resists any change as they belive they've reached peak game design.
 
There would seem to be an (obvious?) easy fix for this. When you play D00M [1&2] the game tells you outright at the end that you missed certain secrets, and it inspires one to replay the map. If an RPG tells the player that their resolutions were not always the best choice, or at least not the only option with a good (or evil) outcome, that could inspire players to replay the game making different choices for a different PC.

Fallout's ending slides had some players immediately restart the game to undo the events they caused in some locations.
 
Heh, did anybody else notice the fact that they reused the "reveal trailer" logo instead of oh I don't know, SOMETHING NEW!? You know, like an updated logo or something?


:confused: ;-)
 
Gizmojunk said:
Ideally every RPG should be that way; Bethesda is quite hostile to that AFAIK, (and they are not the only studio either).


RPG content should play out like an ink blot mask on a Where's Waldo poster with only the exposed content accessible to a given PC, on a given play-through; based purely upon Luck, the PC's skill and attributes, and the player's choice of in-game actions for the PC. Where one choice leads to another (cutting off some paths while opening others).

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The problem is that a lot of "RPG developers" or perhaps the overlords the dictate to them what goes in the game and what doesn't think that all parts of the game should be available to the player so that they cannot miss out on content. Why this is a thing, I do not know.
 
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