How a game with such bad gameplay and story become so popular?

The bethesda RPG formula is too good and literally no other competitor is using it. It has no competition. The witcher, nu assassins creeds and other super casual open world RPGs are very different and do not compete much with it. I want any other company to try it. I want first person open world RPGs and this and bethfallout is my only option.

Bad gameplay? Outdated, sure, but not bad.

The gameplay was barely any better than Oblivion's back in 2011. I don't think a single Elder Scrolls game has good combat.

Marketing doesn't keep a game popular 9 years after launch.

I don’t remember any numbers in oblivion. I mean it had spellcrafting, but wasn’t it literally the same as skyrim, but with off-the-rails level scaling?

It doesnt have to have good combat, its an rpg, you get infront of the enemy and attack, this is not souls you dont need anything else.

Bad story?
Bad Gameplay?

Your shitty taste is a you problem.

Combat isn't the sole component of gameplay. Skyrim is popular due to the world, and the mechanics that are streamlined (a bit *too* streamlined in some places imo) yet combined in such a good manner that makes your first time with it so magical. It's why people keep trying to spice things up in each playthrough because they want to experience that magic again.

It's babby's first rpg.

If marketing can make a shitty game popular explain Fallout 76 (a legit shitty game)

Everyone likes vikings, and it had the most talked about mods like Macho man randy savage and thomas tank engine. Plus all the Let's plays on it.

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Skyrim wasn’t a shitty game. 76 was. Putting the two games in the same basket demonstrates a lack of nuance.

It’s one of the only games that I think actually does open world well.
Its consistently decent across the board at other things too. Not great besides the music, rarely even good outside of the exploration, but decent in everything else.
It aims low in a lot of areas, but in a way it benefits from aiming low because it doesn’t suffer from failure at trying to be too much more than what Bethesda’s aging developer staff can handle. Solitude has like 25 people in it. That’s obviously low but it’s manageable and allows them to make a succinct enough town environment that you can kinda fill in the blanks with while playing. The game’s tendency to encourage you to go out exploring more helps keep you from staying in one place for too long and realizing how downscaled everything is.
And then of course there’s the extremely healthy modding community. I don’t think people realize just how massive the modding community is for Skyrim and what a big deal that is.

>It doesnt have to have good combat, its an rpg
It's barely an rpg, but that still isn't an excuse. Dark Messiah had better combat in 2006, regarding how swordplay was handled and how the player could use shit in the environment to their advantage.
>Combat isn't the sole component of gameplay
But it is what you spend most of your time doing in Skyrim, because of how most of the game's quests are designed. I'm not saying that there aren't other reasons why Skyrim is so popular, just pointing out that the combat has always been shitty, and isn't simply "outdated" like that other user was claiming.

I know.
The OPs question was how could a bad game be popular to which one of your responses was marketing.
My question was if marketing was so powerful to explain 76 flaming out.

Id argue you don’t spend most of your time in Skyrim doing combat. I think you spend the most of it exploring and just going around the world. Combat definitely is the currency of the game to its various markets such as experience, loot, progression etc., but it feels less the point then just exploring and getting immersed.
I play with a lot of mods, one of which being the fantastic caranthir wizard’s tower. I have spent upwards of 4-5 hours in a single session just walking around the tower, perfecting custom spells and training things and teleporting to towns to get supplies and all that, without any combat involved. I just think there’s something to that that’s innate to Skyrim. I know at any given time the exact console command to unlock the armor piece I want or perk I want, but I willingly go out and walk to a vendor in town to buy the materials so I can walk back to the tower to craft it myself. I don’t feel like I’m just waiting to get to the next combat encounter (and in fact my character has become so powerful the combat is usually more just a minor annoyance I try to get through as quickly as possible at this point)

I like the loot dungeon, sell loot, talk to npc, get quest loop. Plus I like first person games more than isometric or third person.

Outer Worlds looks like it's taking some inspiration from Bethesda's style, like a spiritual successor to Obsidian's own F:NV which was made in Bethesda's engine. It might scratch the same itch.

This is spot on. Bethesda have cornered the market on the genuinely open ended sandbox open world genre. The question is why Skyrim of all Bethesda games? Oblivion and Fallout 3 were both deeper games than Skyrim in some ways, yet even their popularity was dwarfed by Skyrim's. I don't buy that it was because they dumbed their formula down. Fallout 4 dumbed things down even further and it was the most poorly received Bethesda game apart from Fallout 76.

I appreciate you typing all that out, but you're still missing the point. One guy claimed that Skyrim's combat is bad simply because it's "outdated" when in reality people were commenting on how weightless it generally felt and the lack of impact feel back in 2011. That's it.

Hell, I remember when Bethesda obtained Arkane Studios people assumed that Skyrim's would be more like Dark Messiah's as a result. And then it wasn't, and people were disappointed.

yeah but fallout 4 doesn't have dragons
dragons sell
so do extremely memeable trailers

I meant more in how you leveled up your character's stats through skill points. Skyrim didn't really have this, and instead traded it for the skill tree system that has become more common in action-adventure games. Ignoring whether it was a good or bad change, I feel it definitely attracted a lot more people to the game since the skill tree was likely easier to digest for most causal players.

>Fallout 4 dumbed things down even further and it was the most poorly received Bethesda game apart from Fallout 76
But it was also the best selling Bethesda game compared to any of their previous releases. If you compare release window sales for Skyrim and Fallout 4, the latter sold a lot more. Maybe this was because of the reputation Bethesda gained among the casual crowd thanks to Skyrim.

Oh I’m not the marketing comment user

Marketing made Skyrim popular. The modding scene kept it popular.

it wasn't a bad game, just incredibly mediocre.

Fallout 3 and NV were both extremely memeable too thanks to their soundtracks. I just can't figure out why Skyrim struck a cord with casuals the hardest and what exactly disappointed casuals about FO4 for it to break Bethesda's GOTY award winning streak that they held since Morrowind. Was Fallout 4 too casual even for casuals?

Like I say, Fallout 4 made an even more dumbed down version of that skill tree and it was still widely regarded as a step down from the SPECIAL + Skill Points system used in 3 and NV. My theory is that Bethesda crossed a line with FO4 by trying to emulate Mass Effect and limit the role playing options (i.e the main appeal of their games) with a voiced protagonist.

is there a more hollow game than skyrim?

Why was Skyrim so popular?
I know the answer but some of you won't like it. It deals with the subconscious.
There were no blacks in charge of anything and only 2 women. Of the 2 women one was an idiot and the other was a bitch who got put in her place at the end of her questline

You may not like it but here we are,

Launch No Man's Sky

Literally WTF is dark mesiah?

I love skyrim. Its the first game I downloaded for my first decent PC which I bought with my first job. Same job I quit thanks to skyrim until 3 am on week days.

>Maybe this was because of the reputation Bethesda gained among the casual crowd thanks to Skyrim.
This works for Skyrim too really, they've been building up their reputation with each game since at least Morrowind, saved them from tanking after the poor sales of the TES spinoffs when people got tired of waiting for their next RPG. Morrowind ended up such an unprecedented success for them and helped set up the even better release for Oblivion, which did the same for Fallout 3 and then finally Skyrim after it.
This continued to work because most people (sure, not on Yea Forums, but in the overall gaming community) considered each game to be better than the last and so Bethesda's reputation grew stronger and stronger. Todd was releasing nothing but GOTYs for the better part of a decade.

That continued until Fallout 4 which for the first time in a long time was generally considered by the public to not be a better game than its predecessor. With that and Fallout 76 they're now in the position of actually needing to prove themselves again with Starfield. This is a position they haven't been in since early 2002. It will be interesting to see what comes next.

Mods are a huge factor, but for normies I'd say the reason is the fact that you can have tons of mediocre fun in those games. There is nothing particularly mind blowing in those games but lots of fun that is rather mediocre if you think about it.

Also growth of gaming in general has hidden the fact that as games, their games have been on decline when it comes to quality for more than a decade.

Come back when you're over 18 and you might find out.

Bethesda itself doesn't necessarily understand why people like their games. The fact that people do tons of other stuff than main stories in their games isn't a reason to deliver subpar main stories. People might do quests added with mods and play a lot without having game achievements to show in their statistical analysis what the hell players are doing in their sandbox.

this is a preddy good comment

For real, Dark Messiah was considered the "linear Oblivion," when it came out, and is one of my favorite games of all time.

The outer worlds

One big mistake people keep making is comparing Skyrim to the previous Elder Scrolls games.
Too many nostalgic fans (Especially Morrowind fans) are quick to hate on Skyrim because it "Removed" content, but in reality it also adds a lot more to the game that neither Morrowind or Oblivion had.
The game hasn't removed elements as much as it has just transformed into something else. If you're looking for heavier RPG elements of course you'd be disappointed, but if you recognize Skyrim is more of an action/adventure game, you'll realize it's not that bad of a game. Not to say that you can't be disappointed if you were hoping for a more RPG heavy game, but it's trying to compare the two directly is just going to lead to horrible bias.

>genuinely open ended sandbox open world genre
More like a theme park where you can bring your own toys, there no sandbox in Skyrim.

I fell into this trap, not gonna lie, and for a long time too.

> good marketing
> use of magic and shouts makes it sound like there are a lot of fun mechanics, bit it's the same shit
> melee is so fucking boring
> quicksaves sound good on paper, makes it so a young child can play it no problem.
> every game difficulty beside from legendary is fucking boring and easy
> legendary makes it so elder dragons rape the shit out of you unless you have ebony armour
> the easiest build in the game is heavy armour, one handed and heal. one hundred heavy armour makes it so it has no weight. it's too fucking op and makes the game 100x easier
> side quest are mostly small and pointless, giving you the illusion that there is a lot more in store than the main quest and dlc quest
> alduin is a fucking joke of a boss, he's easy and a fucking let down. especially when you have three other npc's to help you in sovrngarde
> it can be open world for only so long until you reach the mountains
> sneak is only really used to stealing and rolling around for the hell of it
> they make the world look beautiful to get your attention

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Because it is a waifu simulator. Millions of beta virgins buy it to create tranny khajiits that take shits.

Amazing music and immersion. Also had lots of memorable quests and a beautiful world. God I fucking love Skyrim.

Fuck off Todd.

>2011
>Bethesda was the only company outside of Rockstar to attempt massive open world games
>social media was taking off
>gaming exploding in mainstream popularity
>popular ad campaign
>was an exciting new fantasy world for fans and newcomers alike

It was a perfect storm, Skryim had the image of "THE biggest and most epic game ever" when it came out, regardless of whether or not that's actually true.
Mods only cemented its popularity over time.

I like Skyrim and I'll defend the gameplay but if you think the story was good, this was definitely your first RPG.

user claimed people assumed with the acquisition of Arkane the combat would be more like Dark Mesiah.
I have never heard of it so wanted to know if it was something I missed .
I checked a video and there was a lot of kicking and throwing barrels.
Meh

Casuals finally had an """""""rpg""""""" they could play without having to worry about anything they felt intimidated by in the previous games..

Incredible immersion and soundtrack. Plus a lot of interesting quests and a gorgeous environment to explore. There's a lot to love about Skyrim.

>memorable quests
funny because I remember exactly none of them except for the one with a talking dog, that was dope. Meanwhile I still remember lots of Morrowind quests and even a few of the better Oblivion ones. Skyrim "quests" were a bland, forgettable joke.

Wonderful OST and immersion, along with some terrific quests and a pretty landscape. I really love Skyrim.

On console? I have no fucking idea.
On PC? Because of all the mods.

The gameplay is fucking atrocious. Every single RPG I've ever played it superior to it.

Well it has staying power like no other game storywise.
You can hit the bump limit to this day on multiple boards with an Imp V Stormcloak thread.

NV had a run for awhile on Yea Forums but has tailed off.
Witcher 3 supposedly was better written but the only thing people talk about that game are waifus.
Not seeing anyone close to that storyline.

Anyone here tried out that Ultimate Skyrim mod guide? Any good?

literally the only sandbox rpg on the market
bethesda has no competition

Music is completely forgettable.
Immersion is shit because everything is shallow as hell.
Quests are shit too and the few that actually are somewhat memorable suffer from the shallow gameplay, shitty writing, no consequences and shitty characters.
What a fucking casual.

The hangover inspired quest was good.

Seethe more contrarian

Rad immersion and some real kickin' beats, yo. You can't forget about all them rockin' quests and a nice big world to chillax in. Skyrim is my JAM.

You are clearly a major casual that has never played rpgs before, because otherwise you would see how poor the characters, quests and dialogue is.
Probably all you ever played was whatever fps is popular at the moment so Skyrim seemed like an incredible world when compared to linear corridor shooters.

Yea, a lot of people like Skyrim, that's not in question. But the main story of the game is still objectively awful, "defeat a dragon before it destroys the world". Seriously, yawn. You mention Stormcloak vs. Imp which I admit from a lore standpoint is interesting, but Skyrim does precisely nothing with it storywise, that was one of the most disappointing things about it. The set up for it was great but the execution was awful and the conclusion was as predictable as could be. I honestly don't think the story is what gave skyrim sticking power but the feeling of immersion the world gives.
>Witcher 3 supposedly was better written but the only thing people talk about that game are waifus.
user you could say that exact thing about Skyrim now thanks to mods. Regardless that's a pretty hyperbolic and apparent you haven't visited a witcher general. Plenty of people talk about the nuances of the storyline.

>Skyrim Fans
>Always talk about things like combat, action, gameplay, adventuring, mods
>Clearly focusing on how fun the game is to play

>Morrowind Fans
>Always talking about how many copy pasted buildings there are in towns, the number of diseases, and justifying bad gameplay design with "Lore"
>Clearly living in nostalgia because when they played the games as kids, they had no standards and are entirely reliant on their imagination to pretend the world and game is anything impressive

It's pretty obvious why Skyrim is more popular.

This.
Skyrim Fans realize the game has flaws, but still find fun in it. Hence why mods are so popular, because they can fix those flaws.
Morrowind fags are so caught up in their horribly broken game that they refuse to think there's any issues with it at all. That's why the Morrowind fanbase will never improve.

>Good aesthetic
>Cool fantasy shit
>Fun gimmick with shouts
>Good amount of backstory and world building
>Strong marketing campaign
Along with these 2011 was a pretty weak year for aside from a couple of gems which made the above points stand out even more compared to a more stacked year

Well no.
Sure Skyrim has waifufags ,by and large they have the decency to stay in their containment board /tesg/. but that is all Witcher 3 has. Even here, the biggest cheerleader for W3, you will never see a W3 non waifu thread last.
If the writing was as superior as you believe there should be more to talk about.

NV is the only one that has come close and I use the term close loosely.

Mods are largely a niche part of the fanbase.
Granted those that like mods REALLY like mods.

I think the worst part about it is that Morrowind fans refuse to state that Morrowind's brokeness is what makes it fun.

Part of the reason why you can have fun in Morrowind is that it's badly balanced and it doesn't restrict you. Things like Alchemy and enchanting are completely game breaking, but getting to mess with them makes the game enjoyable. Too many fans just sweep them under the rug, saying things like "It's not a problem because you can just not use it".

More people need to realize that just because a game has flaws or issues, doesn't mean it isn't fun. I think they're too afraid that if they admit there's ANYTHING wrong with Morrowind that it will be giving ground to the casualization of the series.

mods

What the fuck? That's so far removed from reality that I can only assume you're talking about threads that only exist in your head. Where are all these Morrowind fans that "always talk about the number of diseases"? Hell, Daggerfall's the only game where diseases even matter and they aren't going around talking about that either. Most TES discussions nowadays are about mods, in Morrowind's case usually stuff like openmw, tamriel rebuilt, rebirth, and that multiplayer thing.

>If the writing was as superior as you believe there should be more to talk about.
Why? Yea Forums has shit taste, literally everyone knows this. There are games out there with simply amazing storylines, rarely about here because this place is full of casual zoomers, so of course Skyrim would be talked about all the time. But again I doubt they are raving at what a good villain Alduin was or how amazing the supporting characters lines were (I honestly can't even remember any). They are mostly discussing lore, which I admit TES lore is fucking top notch.
Just curious, if you played it, do you honestly believe the story of Morrowind is better than Skyrims? I'm not talking about anything else, purely story vs story.

>Skyrim wasn’t a shitty game.
You know, my 2011-self would be inclined to agree but in retrospective it was pretty damn shitty.

There's a reason I have yet to finish the game even once after 8 fucking years.

The MQ of Morrowind was top tier in terms of pacing and content. The rest of the game was lacking.
Overall Skyrim was better.

100% chameleon was fun for a minute in Oblivion but made the game boring.
If that is the thing you enjoyed from Morrowind then I understand the issue. We have very different taste in games.

Just for shits I googled "best videogame story lines" and looked through the top google results, mostly "top 10/20/30" lists from normie websites.
Precisely zero had Skyrim listed. Sorry bud but even casuals don't think the Skyrim storyline is particularly great. It excels in other areas but not story. It has no twists, no surprises, no emotional moments, no theme, no interesting NPCs, really just nothing to take away from it.

Yea but you can mod out the bad aspects of Morrowind today.
You can't mod in a compelling main quest for Skyrim.

I enjoyed Imp V Stormcloak well enough.

Well it startedin Oblivion but a big improvement over Morrowind was the guilds getting an arching narrative to cover the quest lines.
Morrowind was fairly bare bones in the guilds writing.

test

I am going to guess weebshit took the top spots?
How many had RDR?

B+
You can do better if you apply yourself.

Most leaned more western, I think just about every list has Mass Effect 2. But yea Persona 5 and a Final Fantasy game were on every list too.

Did 76 have a lot of marketing? I certainly dont remember it having anywhere near the marketing of skyrim but I'm probably misrembering some of the hype as marketing. I mean if it did then that's omegalol

>the number of diseases
You must have not seen one of the many images that Morrowind fags keep posting to try and claim their game is the best, such as the George Costanza one. For some reason they constantly always bring up the number of diseases for some strange reason and always believe it's irrefutable proof the game is perfect.
If for some reason you don't believe me, I believe googling "Morrowind george costanza" should find the image for you. It basically appears in half of the Morrowind Threads.

Sorry user, but you're clearly the one out of touch here. Disease shitposting has been a thing for years.

Every football game for 3 weeks had a 76 commercial. They spent some money on the ad campaign.

Unironically considering downloading again and modding it to shit and back, but my usual modlist is now "under moderation" on nexus and it had a pretty good pack of gameplay and graphic modes. I heard SE is able to use SKSE now, is there like a recommended mod list anywhere to make SE pretty?

I think they had the same amount of marketing. I'd argue that 76 had marketing since it was mmo. Its just that 76 was a mess and thus did not keep the hype going after release

Oh so you're just talking about those bait images, I thought you meant it's what people actually talked about in Morrowind threads which is obviously wrong.

So Bethesda wasted all that money...
awesomesauce

> the easiest build in the game is heavy armour, one handed and heal

Stopped reading there.

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As to story
Skyrim won the BAFTA and the Academy of Interactive arts and Sciences awards for writing.
So there is that.

Morrowind's gameplay is beyond bad, it's shit that is thrown in your face and you can't get away from it. The only time when it becomes semi decent to play is when you already have finished the main quest and your stats are okay.

user, we're talking about Britain, the nation with an extreme fixation for crime-solving vicars.

>Bait
I'm sorry to say user, but there are many people who unironically take those images at 100% face value. After all, many people don't actually know the games very well and simply parrot what they see.

Morrowind threads are Trainwiz pretending to be multiple anons and spamming random Morrowind shit from his Morrowind folder.
That thing must be near a gig.

You're being part of the problem if you deny there are shitty Morrowind fans looking for any excuse to defend their game.

Is this your first go around with the Morrowind defense force. They take any criticism of Morrowind as a personal affront. They will admit no flaw. they are near cult status.

A test to see if they have shown up yet is to use the word "nostalgia" within seconds of them seeing it they will have a pavlovian need to post some variation of "I just started Morrowind and wow"

>Bethesda itself doesn't necessarily understand why people like their games

There's an interesting note to be made on this:
In an interview somewhere, (I forget where), Todd expressed genuine surprise that some people where making Unarmed builds in FO3. This is because Unarmed was never intended to be a viable skill, but because the Unarmed Perks in FO3 are so overpowered, Unarmed becomes an extremely good skill.

Todd literally expected people to be a Jack-Of-All-Trades character rather than make specialised builds. I think that illustrates perfectly how out of touch Bethesda is with it's own audience.

Sure I can't make sweeping claims to say those don't exist but it's another thing entirely to suggest, as did, that that's the majority of the discussion of the game.
Surely you also see the double standard in claiming that Skyrim fans who praise its gameplay are "focusing on how fun the game is to play" while holding that Morrowind fans who do the same are just "looking for any excuses to defend it".

It's amazing to me that it took FO76 for people to realize Bethesda has no fucking clue what it's doing 90% of the time.

As if the Skyrim defense force it any better. You have people in this very thread praising Skyrim's storyline which is near universally agreed outside of Yea Forums to be extremely mediocre.

I think it's because every Bethesda game up until FO4 had moments of brilliance mixed in with moments of incompetence. In FO76 only incompetence remained.

Everything good about Oblivion, FO3 and Skyrim was a massive fluke. That's what happens when you get a studio like Bethesda where some of the staff are talented people, while others have no idea what they're doing.

>Bethesda where some of the staff are talented people, while others have no idea what they're doing.
Yea that mixed bag really shows in every game except FO76, what the fuck happened to the talented ones during that dev cycle? Did Bethesda finally drive them all out?

I have no clue. Part of me thinks Zenimax may have pressured Bethesda into even further Casualisation and stripping away the roleplaying elements after the major success of Skyrim. Skyrim was probably the last Bethesda game that remained true to Bethesda's established formula.

One thing that baffles me is that Bethesda's lead writer on all their games, Pagulirio, is the same guy who wrote Thief 2. My question is what the fuck happened to his writing for it to fall that far from grace?

The more concerning major developer in Bethesda in my opinion is Emil Pagliarulo. Guy did a couple brilliant quests for Morrowind expansions and Oblivion, then he was promoted to their main writer. He literally sees actual multiple outcomes from a quest in open world game as waste of time and problems as players spend time on side content... in a open world game that is moddable. He is the one that pushed 4 choices that are yes-yes, I'm sarcastic prick - yes in other words and I'll come back to say yes later quest and dialogue design for fallout 4.

When it comes to that Jack-Of-All-Trades build, there is also the flipside of that coin players just wanting to experience everything on single play through and players that want to replay the game with different characters and character choices. Both of those can be accommodated, but it means watering down choices if one must be able to do everything on single play through.

Fallout 4's start as woman is perfect example of shitty writing. You are lawyer with no military experience, they just hand you over a fucking power armor and tell you kill bunch raiders and fucking deadclaw. I think that a pre-war lawyer would be pretty much out of her comfort zone with that shit. With voiced protagonist, that should be a fucking divergence point in the story. Lawyer goes by the default into talking her way out and war hero goes in with guns blazing. Assuming two preset characters is a good idea.

76 took everything that was enjoyable about a Bethesda game and put a giant roadblock in front of it.
Storage was miniscule
Merchants were designed to not be useful off loading junk.
Carry weight was gimped
Survival was not optional
Item degradation was brought back

The game was built on tedium.

How can you be extremely mediocre?

I think you meant Skyrims award winning writing user.

Bethesda Maryland worked on the game building the world while Bethesda Austin(?) bolted on MP.
Once that was done Austin took full control of the game.

You've just highlighted why I think FO3 is arguably Emil's best when it comes to quest writing. Many quests in FO3 have at least 3 or 4 outcomes, with some even rewarding you with unique perks and equipment that can't be obtained otherwise. It's actually impossible to see all of FO3's content in one playthrough. Especially since they weren't afraid to have you permanently fail quests and permanently lock you out of locations. I think the writing on the wall really started to show for the more handholded approach they'd take in future when Skyrim allowed you to join every faction, repeat every random encounter and made most quests only have 1 outcome.

The worst part is that FO3's DLC improved on the writing of the base game, so why was Skyrim a regression?

Marketing like with every other modern garbage mainstream AAA game.

You could lead every faction in every game since at least Morrowind.
Funny quirk of Morrowind.
The Arch Mage would give you a quest to kill the telvani councilors even if you were a telvani councilor.

>call skyrim combat shit
>IT DOESN'T NEED TO BE GOOD IT'S AN RPG
>call skyrim RPG elements shit
>IT IS AN ACTION RPG YOU JUST STAND THERE AND ATTACK
Like clockwork. Why is skyrim so bad as action and rpg game?

> Quests only have one outcome
Well except for the daedric quests, the DB, some random quests, the Imp v Stormcloak,Blades v Greybeard, the peace negotiations, etc
The radient quests only had one outcome though. Lazy fuckers.

FO3 was his first game as lead writer and designer. In Morrowind and Oblivion he wrote just some the best quests of those games.

When it comes to my opinion, the Pitt was where Fallout 3 captured the general tone of original Fallouts the best. A dark story of good intentions going sideways. Bunch of quests in FO3 had multiple outcomes, but most of those had rather lackluster effect on world outside of specific settlements and in larger scale of things. Choices were rather cosmetic and karma on one end of scale led to different bounty hunters waiting for you at end of metro exits. Same laser rifles and shit. Different cosmetic armor.

The android quest in Fallout 3 was a good one. Slaver thing also had multiple solutions, but for me the forced nuke the megaton or not choice was just too damn handheld in first place.

Fallout 3 has a lot of hidden outcomes for choices that the game doesn't broadcast. Stealing the Delacration of Independance without Syndey's help for example, triggers a random encounter where she'll hunt you down and try to kill you as payback. The problem is that this encounter only has a low chance of occurring, so some players never see it. Same goes for other encounters like encountering Vault 101 residents in the wasteland if you decide to open the Vault. Still, the isolated nature of the choices doesn't bother me that much since the game world as a whole is anarchic and disconnected.

Mods but knowing Bethesda they are going to see this and say "hey, people are still playing this game today, let's just do the same shit with Skyrim I'm tes6"

The only correct answers
Also let me add the fact that they don't have any competition for their types of games whatsoever so they can do as they wish.

>Fallout 3 has a lot of hidden outcomes for choices that the game
It is kinda part of the problem with Bethesda Fallouts. In the original BlackIsle Fallouts the idea of action and consequences of that action were the core design of the games. Ones that come apparent in epilogue screens if not earlier.

I'll just say that I'm old fan of originals. I kinda defended some of design choices of Fallout 3 in NMA. What a shitstorm that caused. BEthesda did somethings right, even when they missed the biggest point of the franchise. IMHO the absolutely best part of FO3 were the random shit on random offices on computer terminals and data tapes. It is where they got the setting most right.

>most people considered each game to be better than the last
Literally why? They get worse and worse writing with every subsequent release and remove more and more rpg mechanics each time making the games more simplistic. The only ways these games have improved is graphically.

>added elements
Like what? The only think I can think of that Skyrim adds to Oblivion is those janky ass beheading animations in combat.

What button did you use to shout in Oblivion? I forgot.

This. I also only remember the talking dog quest. Morrowind, Oblivion and FO3 all had memorable quests, but all of the quests in Skyrim just consisted of going into copy pasted ruins and doing that same picture matching “””””puzzle”””””” over and over again.

How are the shouts any different to regular spells?

To go even further, you could max out your rank in every faction in the original version of Daggerfall too, even ones that are "enemies" of each other. They later changed it in a patch so that you couldn't be in multiple temples and knightly order at the same time, presumably because players started to notice that they were all basically clones of each other.
Even with that change you can still join another temple/order if you leave your own by letting your reputation drop and eventually do them all in one playthrough even with that change.

Arena didn't have factions, so really it's quite a strong tradition: every TES game with factions lets you join and complete them all in a single playthrough except for the Civil War factions (and the two from the dawnguard DLC) in Skyrim and the Great Houses (and maybe vampire clans if you count them; there's not much to them) in Morrowind.

Perks would be the biggest change gameplay wise. Sure not all of them are that impactful but enough are, and the fact that you get to make any impactful decisions about your skills at all was a positive change. People often claim otherwise but it's a lot easier to become a "master of all" in Oblivion than it is in Skyrim when you consider how much more it takes to get every perk in the latter vs. just getting 100 in every skill in the former. Hell, it wasn't even possible to get every perk in Skyrim until they added the Legendary system over a year after the game's release.

I can understand that. It's probably why people liked NV's more curated and linear approach better since it telegraphed the consequences of your choices very clearly. The benefit it adds to FO3 I feel however is that it improves replay value by making every journey through the overworld completely random in terms of what you'll actually encounter. 3's gameplay felt very dynamic and emergent because of this.

I think F4's main problem was that they railroaded you into being a specific character with a predefined background like the Elder Scrolls games. There's virtually no room in F4 to make the character your own without mods as you are "parent with dead spouse looking for kid" with voiced lines and their own personality unlike the blank slates of other games. Even though Fallout 3 had you with a predefined origin story it pretty much stopped as soon you got out of the vault outside of "find dad".
Also Fallout 4 is extremely similar to Fallout 3 in terms of graphics and locations since they reused a shit ton of resources.

1. some of the best marketing in video game history. knock bethesda for their games, but their marketing is godly
2. huge visual improvement over previous iteration
3. name power from elder scrolls gave clout with publications, causing them to cover it leading to release and feeding into point #1
4. contextual rise of fantasy in television / film as well as "gamer culture" coalescing into the perfect environment

there's almost certainly more and next to none of them have to do with the gameplay / story
it's was really a perfect storm

For me the replay value thing between FO3 and FO:NV is about four mostly different end game quest lines in FO:NV. Written content, even if Legion play through was seriously cut due to publishing schedule pressures and lot of House play through and independent play through are essentially same. There is at least three ways to end it.

meant unlike the Elder Scrolls games.

Could you adjust the power of the spell by only casting 1/3rd of it?

Todd made a sex tape and distributed it to every person in the world
check your spam folder

> How did a game I didn't like become popular
It's a mystery.

It was the definitive "I'm a gamer" game of the early 2010's. Fallout 3 landed just around the time that gaming started going from mainstream to THE mainstream, and Bethesda cemented itself as one of the big names for that new crowd. Its shallow but wide, has just enough shit around the next corner to fuel the reward system while not having any depth that might scare off casuals. Its also first-person which adds a level of immersion that most other open-worlds don't have. And it had a massive marketing campaign. Its the perfect game for casuals to lose themselves in without requiring any sort of mental effort to do so.

Gamer

Someone feeling cheeky could say yes: through spellmaking which was present in all of Elder Scrolls 1 through 4.

You seem to be forgetting the fact that Skyrim sold more on console than on PC.
Mods have been an important factor to the longevity of the game on PC, but console niggers eat that shit raw 24/7.
Don't underestimate how low is the lowest common denominator.

Am I the only one that plays these games in third person?

Yeah but mods are what made it last so long before SE, PC mods are what kept people coming back

the mods make that game god tier

best game of all time

I get that but most people who bought the game played it without any mods.

How many games did what Skyrim did in 2011?

Its flaws might be glaringly obvious eight years later, but it was one of a kind in its time.

it's supposedly 20ish hours long and the areas on each planet aren't neary as gigantic as skyrim's

This isn't true at all. Its always been shit

95% of the time people whining about gameplay like games like newvegas which has horseshit unplayable tier gameplay

>IMHO the absolutely best part of FO3 were the random shit on random offices on computer terminals and data tapes. It is where they got the setting most right.
Bethesda can't write for shit and have seemingly forgot how to make RPGs, but they are fucking savants when it comes to creating setpieces (that are wasted with shitty gameplay and stories)

>I get that but most people who bought the game played it without any mods.
Makes sense, but that's during it's first few months within release. 3 years later, no one was playing Skyrim on the 360/ps3

Good. As long as it has the replayability to back up it's length there's no issue with the length

All the people posting this shit must have been children when Skyrim came out. Back in it’s time? Nigger, video games haven’t changed at all since Skyrim released.

One of a kind? It’s literally just Oblivion/Fallout 3 with a new coat of paint. It did absolutely nothing new or interesting. Just because it was the first RPG that YOU ever played, doesn’t make it unique.

Don't lie to me Yea Forums, the whole of november 2011 was skyrim threads in here

I think that further cements the impact it had. It was fucking unplayable on ps3, yet normalfags kept lapping it up.

Name one game since Skyrim that's similar to it? Bar Outer Worlds there is literally nothing

>heavy armor
Opinion discarded

This. Once everyone knew they could fulfill whatever porn fetish they ever could imagine in Skyrim, the sales kept on going.

Because there is nothing like it since. People would stop loving it if there was actually an alternative.

Mod's to shill fag's

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Remember when witcher niggers thought their shitty game would replace skyrim

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But they were.

Fallout 4.

Also, why “since”? Shouldn’t it be “before” if you’re trying to prove how unique it is?

If it was unplayable then how did it have impact 3 years before SE?

I don't recall playthroughs afterward on console years later

I meant besides for Bethesda, but that's on me.
>Also, why “since”? Shouldn’t it be “before” if you’re trying to prove how unique it is?
Also not that user. However the reason it's so popular is because it was the first a ton of people played. You're just being a douche bag trying to show how "informed" you are instead of actually looking at it logically.
It was the first one people played, and since then nothing has really come that checks the same boxes, bar Fallout 4. Anything that came before is irrelevant to the common person, especially when Oblivion was 5 years before and Fallout 3 was 3 years before.

>I don't recall playthroughs afterward on console years later
imagine thinking that it means something

I’m not trying to show how “informed” I am. Everyone on this board knows that there were other Bethesda games before and after Skyrim. I’m trying to point out that the concept that “Skyrim was unique for its time” is retarded. That is in no way a contributing factor to its success. It was never unique.

>liking Damage Sponge Mode
>not knowing about the armor cap
>motherfucking One Handed + Heal
wew lad

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