Bethesda - A Case Study of Problems

Many others and I take issue with modern video games for one or more reasons. These reasons tend to shift quickly to real political and social issues without addressing actual design problems, allowing them to continue. For the sake of being apolitical for a moment and to express my issues with modern games, we'll be looking at the Bethesda series The Elder Scrolls and a handful of other games for comparison, but mostly the former.

    For background, my entry into Elder Scrolls was the fifth installment, Skyrim. I owned it both on my Xbox 360 and laptop. Generally, when I take to a game that's a later entry in a line of games, I also look into the earlier games and that is what led me to buy a copy of Oblivion and much later Morrowind. And when I learned the second entry in the mainline, Daggerfall, was free, I got it as well.

    For the older games, Daggerfall and Morrowind, I quickly got Daggerfall Unity and OpenMW. The simplest way to describe them is to think of them as mods that overhaul the games, though that description does not do them justice. Meanwhile, I played the Game of the Year version of Oblivion both on PC and Xbox, while Skyrim I played the original and Special Edition versions. Needless to say, I've bought more copies of Skyrim & Oblivion than I care to admit, but at least they were on sale or used.

    With all of this in mind, I feel it should be clear why my impression of the games is backward instead of in their numerical order, counter to those that were with the series earlier on. While I do recognize looking at Skyrim, a game that came out in 2011 when it is almost 2025, may seem pointless when discussing modern games, I would argue that because something is old doesn't mean we cannot examine and learn from it or look to see if there is a larger trend over time.

    It is very often in the human experience that, if we do not experience things first hand, we judge the other side of being greener. At the same time, experience has a tendency to tint our perspective, creating the foundation for bias, usually disregarding if something is objectively good, bad, better, or worse.

Simplification of Gameplay

Before we get into the topic of game mechanics and gameplay as a whole, we will take a quick look at the definitions of streamline & simplify. Streamline is to improve efficiency. Simplify is to reduce complexity. In normal conversation, we use these interchangeably because they share a similar train of thought: Taking something and stripping away anything that can be considered excess to leave only what is needed, whether that's time to do something or parts that make a machine. I use simplification because for what we'll be discussing that is the more accurate term.

Have Menus, Won't Travel

From the third game to the fifth, The Elder Scrolls series has been released to console and PC platforms. With the argument that, with each release, the menus and controls were made simpler to improve the console experience and, in doing so, increase sales in that market. Shifting focus away from PC gamers and caring less about the platform the series originated on.

    What lends credence to this sentiment is the simplified of the inventory menu, which brought the existence of a vendor exploit where the player is able to sell a vendor their own store items, but only on PC. As shown in the video below.

    The simplification of the menus goes further than an exploit, as seen with the dialogue system. It is seen that when speaking to NPCs what you hover over with your mouse and what is highlighted in the menus are not always the same, resulting in selection mistakes. And, because the game does not contain the mouse in the application, if you scroll with the mouse wheel through dialogue or inventories, while having a second screen, you'll find other applications scrolling. Internet browsers, Discord, Steam, & so on.

    What is probably more egregious than the menus system, however, is the disorder between exploration & quests. In Morrowind, you were generally given a direction & quest information was put in a journal. This mostly translated over to Oblivion, with the addition of the quest marker, but not every quest was holding the player's hand. This is not the case in Skyrim.

    To use a minor quest as an example, there is a character in Riften named Brand-Shei. He is a dark elf with an unusual name which the player can ask about. When asked if he has any clues, all he states is that his father found him in a wrapped blanket bearing the symbol of a great house. Then, as if clairvoyant, the moment you accept the quest the marker points you to a shipwreck. At no point in asking for a clue did he he allude to the idea that he was found in a wreck. It is only when he is asked about why he is searching Skyrim that he mentions a ship & claims his lead ran cold after learning its name. Which does not explain how we came to know its location.

    Instead of allowing the player to explore the coastline of Skyrim, the marker tells you exactly where it is on the northeast coast. This brings us to fast travel. Why would I travel from the bottom of the map to the top when I can travel on foot or by other means to Winterhold, a "major city" not far from the location, when fast travel is free & quick? Then, once I have the item, I can just fast-travel back to Riften & retrieve my reward.

    The truth is that Skyrim doesn't encourage you to travel on foot for long distances. Clear based on the facts that if you have a horse, followers will chase after you on foot instead of mounting a horse of their own. The removal of traversal spells, which will be mentioned next. And how most quests are not far from one of the major cities that are easily unlocked with a cheap ride by carriage.

    Even when you do travel, there is a large but limited number of encounters you'll have. Most are hostile NPCs & more are nameless. Making the encounters more filler than quality substance. A great example from Morrowind is right outside the starting location. If you decide to walk toward Balmora instead of paying for a ride that the game points you toward, you're highly likely to watch a mage fall from the sky. On him, you'll find scrolls that can send you flying across the map, a journal of his experiments, & a very fashionable hat.

    Skyrim has M'aiq the Liar, the only encounter I remember having a name & is there as a meta character. With very few others only to serve as givers for quest makers, because the only notable locations are the one's the main quests will bring you toward.

    The main problem, that the Elder Scroll series has always faced, is the emptiness of their maps. I do not mean in the sense that they are devoid of things like features of nature, but in quality of content. The idea that the player can climb the mountain they see in the distance sounds nice, but if climbing it is all there is then there is nothing. From Daggerfall to Starfield, the problem has always been the same, failure to understand that the size of their worlds means nothing if the contents are shallow. More on that later.

Destruction (of) Spells

Shown above is a list of mechanics related to spells. The red is to highlight things that have been removed and changed over time with each release. Almost every time I played Skyrim, before playing the others, my characters were always melee-focused. This is because magic & the quests associated with them always felt like an afterthought.

    Winterhold is a great example of what I mean. In the "city" there are only four buildings, the rest destoried & the college of magic users. What has left the city in ruin was an event called the Great Collapse in the 4th Era of the 122 year. Skyrim takes place in the year 201 of the same era.

    In almost forty years no one has thought of removing the destroyed buildings, repairing the college bridge, nor looking into what really caused the Great Collapse. Making matters worse is the fact that there is no quests involving such matters. The magic system & the "city" of Winterhold have one thing in common, a single line attempts to excuse the lack of depth. Because, supposedly, other parts make up for others. That is a flawed way to justify ignoring the bad.

    In both Morrowind & Oblivion, getting into the mages guild & advancing required work, leveling up magic schools, & multiple quests. Meanwhile, in Skyrim, becoming the head mage of the college requires little in the way of spell skills, with the exception of a few points that can be solved with novice-level spells. Making it more insulting is how short the mage questline actually is & how little of a school the college feels like.

    This is made worse once the thieves' guild is examined & compared. To properly restore the guild the player is required to perform jobs until a special job comes up. Once that is completed, a new asset will appear in the main base. There are also unmarked objectives & a questline that continues after you become the guild leader. This questline leads to special bonuses that the player can choose & more unique armor.

    Meanwhile, for magic users, if a player wishes to learn a spell then they will find any court mage, in any of the cities, will do as well as the mages of the college. While there are mastery quests, these are a complete joke, both in terms of substance & rewards when the requirement to get them is to get level 100 per skill. These ritual spells bring nothing unique to the experience.

    One could say that the college isn't like a school because there is nothing to teach about magic. Spells always work & require no prerequisites to learn. Apart from a few, there is no point in investing a lot into them. But even those spells are somewhat undermined by the dragon shouts that can be used without unequipping weapons, just like how spells worked in Oblivion. As if they were pushed to the side to make room for shouts in the spotlight.

    That said, like spells, shouts suffer from the same issue where only a few are required to progress & like in the mages questline, they are handed to the player. It's almost as bad as how armor & weapons are handed out.

I've Been Looking For You (& The Other Issues)

I hold a special kind of confusion for Dwemer armor & weapons being sold by blacksmiths who have no means to craft or acquire the ingots required to craft them. Instead of finding the armor in ruins or exclusively from the blacksmiths of Markarth, smithies far from Dwemer ruins can be found selling them. This is an example of a wider problem with armor & weapons being tied to player level.

    For instance, what reason is there to go to or discover an Orc stronghold if you can get orcish weapons & armors from others who are not Orcs? One of the reasons I like going to the theive's guild is because joining them is one of the few ways the player can get their armor. Instead of using this mindset of "if you want X then explore Y" for things other than daedric weapons & locking us into committing to something, Skyrim wants us to be able to see & experience anything we want. Whether we ask for it or not.

    This train of thought that the player must see everything might sound familiar if you've seen videos talking about Starfield. In fact, the seeds of this mindset originated earlier than in Starfield. But I'm getting off track again.

    I bring up armor for the previous reason that if every smith sells the same stuff, then no smith is special. But also bring up Calcelmo, a researcher of the Dwemer in Markarth, who somehow magically hears about the purchase of Dwemer gear five seconds after purchase & sends a courrier to deliver a message saying he does not know how it got there but is willing to buy it.

    I would give credit to this being a way to direct the player to Markarth & Calcelmo's questline if it weren't for the fact that Calcelmo shouldn't be surprised when it seems every merchant that sells arms & armor has the ability to sell Dwemer items. Undermining any notion that Dwemer gear is rare, especially so when the player can craft it.

    Mentioning that, it could have been a more rewarding series of quests if Calcelmo & the Orcs were used to teach the player how to craft their respective gear once their questlines were completed. A vehicle to deliver lore into their respective histories. As often, sadly, the reward for most quests are a measly few hundred gold that mean nothing or a random item that is often sold.

    We are then sent to our next objective, delivered to us by a courier that somehow finds us in the middle of nowhere. But what truly bothers me, is how everyone wants to talk to you, especially the guards. You cannot walk past a single guard from any of the cities without them giving you a quest or repeating the same lines unprompted.

    The game is designed for the type of player that is more reactive than proactive. And while there is an argument to be made that RPGs are meant to be reactive to what is in front of the player. This, however, fails to understand the importance that, if there is no option for the player to do more than what is handed to them, then the genre might as well be action-adventure than RPG. Having choices outside of what is known, is equally if not more important than the obvious choices.

    Case & point, Mass Effect 2 & the series. If you didn't go out of your way to upgrade the ship, gain the loyalty of your crew, or pick the right person for the right job, then each failure will result in the death of characters & affect the experience of the third game. Now while one can argue Mass Effect gives the illusion of choice, the second entry is not an illusion.

    There is also the fact that the galaxy also seems to revolve around the main character Shepard. However, I'd argue that, unlike Bethesda, Shepard is merely a big piece of a puzzle. If it wasn't for the others that helped Shepard, then we wouldn't have an excellent story, because each character is a reflection of an aspect of their people. And how we deal with them plays into the larger narrative, the prime example being the Geth & Quarian conflict, which is affected by previous decisions.

    Returning to Skyrim, the idea that different actions have different consequences is lost. The civil war is a great example. No matter what side wins, it does not matter. Nothing has changed except who the Jarl of a hold is. And the story attached to each questline is non-existent or weaker than paper.

    Now, in Morrowind & Oblivion, your actions aren't impactful on the world either. What I can say, at least in the case of Oblivion, the other towns will send support to fight the gate of Oblivion if you first help them. And in Morrowind's case, you can sever the threads of fate, which means killing important characters, something that becomes impossible in later series. But in Morrowind, the player can still beat the game if they know what they're doing.

Wider World & Wider Issues

I mentioned before that the main problem, which the Elder Scroll series has always faced but never admitted, is the emptiness of their maps. Now, the balance between content & map size has always been a delicate problem to solve. Depending on the type of game an open map can do more harm than good for the player experience. So, let's talk about some examples & why it's not just an issue of a wider map.

    The Mass Effect series has adjusted map sizes, from the original game with mostly empty planets to a Citadel requiring either long jogs or fast travel via taxis. To the later games using smaller Citadel spaces & linear planet map designed with certain ones having combat in mind. Completely removing the vehicle travel that was part of the original, with a few exceptions. And character combat elements reminiscent of RPGs were tone downed & simplified.

    You would almost assume, from the way I described Mass Effect, that it has similar problems to that of Elder Scrolls. Where the earlier games have something the later one lacks. This would be correct, as the title says, Bethesda & their games are a case to study, not the sole case of problems with modern development. However, to the credit of Bioware, by moving things closer & utilizing cutscenes the game feels full & open even when it isn't.

    For instance, cutscenes. With the exception of the opening cutscenes from the earlier entries, the Elder Scrolls series has no cutscenes. Everything is experienced from the viewpoint of the player's character, most often first person. This limits the ability to use creative camera work to otherwise add to the experience. As people often forget that video games use the arts to give an experience & the absence of one of these arts can lower the quality of the final product.

    A problem observed a lot in the AAA game is the idea that better graphics equates to a better game. While it is true that graphics can add to the experience of a game, those alone do not make for a good game. Or they attempt to rely on a form of rule of cool. Where something is so spectacular that it makes up for unrealistic or illogical actions.

    In the case of Bethesda, they are guilty of both. With how they boasted about the number of sandwiches they could place in Starfield as if people weren't already filling their houses with cheese wheels in Skyrim. Seriously though, the facelift of NPCs from the 2D of Daggerfall to the 3D of Morrowind, to the ugly era of Oblivion to the normal of Skyrim, helped at the time to make Bethesda look as though their development skills were going uphill. Until the years after Skyrim's release.

    The next upgrade to graphics was Fallout 4 in 2015, which made the cracks in Bethesda & the simplification of games more noticeable. The dialogue menu was replaced with something perfect for consoles, the main character speaks, & it is almost impossible to be evil. There is an awkwardness with how the camera moves when speaking with people, or rather how people keep moving that was seen in Skyrim. Other than your own settlements, there are no towns or cities like in previous games because Bethesda expects the player to do it. Just as they expect others to fix their bugs.

    But as a last example of things going backward, when I first played Daggerfall, I was surprised that the thing it reminded me of was Kingdom Come Deliverance. This is because weapons attack from different angles depending on mouse movement. While it was awkward in Daggerfall, the removal of the mechanic shows a trend of reducing mechanics instead of expanding & developing them over time.

Mods - The Cure That Poisons

I would argue that many people who believe Skyrim to be a great game are the same people who mod it. And if they played the base game, they would be bored. Modders have done great work, making the shallow puddle of Skyrim into a proper pool to play in by fixing bugs that Bethesda themselves hadn't fixed after multiple re-releases of the same game. And in the cases where Bethesda did update the games, they have broken the games further & angered the player base.

    And how does Bethesda go about thanking its modding community? By monetizing it, so the only way a console player can mod their game is through spending money. But it's worse than that.

    I have no issue with console players. I believe the best thing for the industry is for people to recognize when another party is being screwed over & for them to hear each other out. In this case, it's the creation club. If Tod says it's to support modders, he's lying. Mod makers receive a fraction of the cost, but more egregious is how Bethesda themselves publish their own "mods" & receive 100% of the profit.

    Does that sound like a micro-transition in a single-player game? Because it is.

Show above is Creation Club content from Fallout 4

    They have turned mods into micro-transitions. A poison that has lingered into the AAA space & made EA a synonym for greed. But we often forget the horse armor of Oblivion, which sold well, & was the first hint Bethesda cared more about money than anything. It's little wonder then why their latest entry, Starfield, is devoid of anything impressive. Because they probably expected mods to make up for it.

    Unfortunately for Bethesda Games Studios, they released Starfield two years after Microsoft bought them, & in the years between then 2023 & the release of the mess of Fallout 76 in 2018, we've seen great games like The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 (After two years of fixes), Hogwarts Legacy, The Legend of Zelda, Elden Ring, Ghost of Tsushima, Spiderman, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Red Dead Redemption 2, & more. Is it any wonder then, why we hold Bethesda, a supposed big player in the RPG genre, to such high expectations?

    It shouldn't be. And that too is another issue with modern games. When a developer sets a standard or makes a promise & cannot keep it, they betray the expectations they themselves set for the players & deserve no sympathy.

    No Man's Sky & Cyberpunk 2077 are great examples of games that sold on a promise they couldn't originally keep. However, since their releases, the developers have worked to fix the issues that plagued them. And while they deserve forgiveness, it would be foolish to simply forget the failures of someone's past & then act surprised then they fail again.

    A key reason some indie games are successful the way they are is because they set a simple promise to the player. Stardew Valley, Factorio, Satisfactory, Rimworld, Palworld, & many more set a reasonable expectation & standard without lying to the player. Or worse yet, attacking people who criticize their game.

    And you want to know the funny part? Each game I listed has mods & they're free.

In closing, since I realized I became less & less focused on explaining my thoughts, resulting in mindless rambling which undermined the serious points I originally wanted to show. So I'll end with one final point. Most people don't know the individual people who made the games they enjoyed, resulting in them not understanding the shift in quality & content that they see.

Of the people who made the games we love, some have left for other studios, made their own, or left the industry as a whole. I did not know until writing this that many of the games I enjoyed, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout New Vegas, FTL, Pillars of Eternity, Prey (2017), Pathfinder Kingmaker, & Star Wars Fallen Order had writing contributions from the same guy, Chris Avellone.

Perhaps the reason we don't look too into it is because it can affect our perceptions of the games. But maybe it should. Our opinions, like people, have the capacity for change. And the studios we once knew are not the same. And like anyone else, they can get worse over time if we enable them.

Once you know the secret behind the magic trick, you expect the magician to show a new trick. We know what the Bethesda Magic is. It's time we expected a new trick.