Quote:
Originally Posted by LoathsomePete
The biggest problem I have with Bethesda developed games is that they sacrifice pacing and story in favor of a big, but kind of samey and shallow world.
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It's certainly a difficult balance to achieve. Bethesda has found themselves in this weird position between genres with a divided fan base. Basically they've got the RPG fans coming from a background of Baldur's Gate, Diablo, KOTOR, Zelda, maybe WOW, Final Fantasy etc, and the linear FPS fans coming from a background of Half-Life, BioShock, Halo, STALKER, Far Cry, and COD etc. How do you please both camps?
Bethesda seems to tread very lightly between which gameplay elements dominate. On one hand they want to create this big open world full of secrets and **** to explore, things to collect, interesting fleshed out NPC's to meet, and give you complete freedom to explore it whenever you want. And at the same time they have to inject a story interesting enough to keep your attention amidst all of that freedom and opportunity. How do you get players to care about the main story and its characters when there is so much out there to distract them? You have all of these massively interesting side quests and somehow you have to make sure that your main quest is even more interesting than that, otherwise the player doesn't relate to any of the central characters and then next thing you know you've got blogs going "Bethesda can't write a story for ****".
In every single Bethesda game I've played I found the side quests more interesting and entertaining than the main quests. The most memorable moments always stem from free exploration. It's a consequence of taking on such an insanely daunting task, you end up diluting the world with stories and in the end there's so many of them that none of them really stick out as a strong central plot. But in the end it doesn't really seem to matter all that much and obviously they're doing a good enough job overall, because every single time we keep coming back. Every single time the hype machine for these open world Bethesda games completely dominates the gaming industry for a year straight.
Sympathy for Bethesda, they're doing their best, and as far as I know there isn't anybody doing the same thing better, except maybe The Witcher, but we'll see if that holds true after Fallout 4 comes out.