Name any other game that comes close to the scale and freedom of Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion or Skyrim.

No other game developers even try to compete. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is probably the closest.

Might have a stronger legacy than Richard Garriott and Peter Molyneux so far too!

Starfield and BG3 - I doubt Starfield will run on my PC though, and there’s still awful GPU and CPU shortages in Europe :/

I imagine it’ll be good in a few months.

Bethesda gets a lot of criticism for buggy launches, but all huge games are just as bad really. I hit a game-breaking bug in Baldur’s Gate 2 recently and had to enable cheats and use the console to even continue. And Cyberpunk also had loads of experience-ruining bugs like enemies seeing through walls repeatedly.

Kingdom Come Deliverance is good, but I agree overall.

The best TES moment for me was the Ahdarji’s Heirloom quest where you have to steal the ring off the noblewoman and can do it either waiting until night and sneaking into the castle, or during the day by pickpocketing her in the market, etc.

The added stealth and physics system was such a huge win over Morrowind.

Now in TES6, Imagine a quest like that but with no loading screens or separation between areas, so you could levitate into the castle, or climb up the walls, or shoot a rope up, or use an invisibility potion for easy pickpocketing, or use a powerful Charm spell to make her hand it to you, etc.

And that’s just one quest, with no dungeon-diving or combat!

Imagine drop-in co-op play for dungeon-diving, so you could play with a DnD style party of spellcasters, rogues and warriors. Exploring massive dungeons with traps, physics like Underworld Ascendant had wanted (i.e. burning rope-bridges, freezing water to walk on it, etc.), spells with environmental effects, etc.

Imagine NPCs with dynamic needs, planning and scheduling, and settlements with their own needs and market - relying on traders to exchange goods, and caravans that you could escort or rob. Dynamic enemies like Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode - bandits and necromancers that take over towns, or infest abandoned settlements and dungeons.

That is what TES6 should be.

Such a shame the Radiant AI stuff never got fully developed in Oblivion or Skyrim.

It was the biggest step forward since like Ultima VII. And it worked great in Oblivion like with the Ahdarji’s Heirloom quest where you have to steal the ring off the noblewoman and can do it either waiting until night and sneaking into the castle, or during the day by pickpocketing her in the market, etc.

Imagine a quest like that but with no loading screens or separation between areas, so you could levitate into the castle, or climb up the walls, or shoot a rope up, or use an invisibility potion for easy pickpocketing, or use a powerful Charm spell to make her hand it to you, etc.

And that’s just one quest, with no dungeon-diving or combat!

I’d rather have a long development cycle but deeper, more substantive games.

This isn’t anything new - the “Megagames” were famous for having crazily long development times for the era. And some of those went on to be very well received like Ultima VII, Ultima Underworld, Daggerfall, Baldur’s Gate, etc. - I remember Baldur’s Gate advertising the “90 man-years” required to create it and same for Daggerfall for the (procedurally-filled) map “the size of Great Britain”.

There are plenty of companies with short turn-around times, but they make mediocre games.

I wish more games would release their engines and tooling as FOSS like id Software used to back in the day. It’d make it easier for games to build on top of one another like mods do.

Maybe Godot and Bevy, etc. will become good enough for full AAA-level games one day. It’s nice that Blender is pretty much already there for modelling and animation.

But it’s crazy how much great work gets thrown away when games are cancelled or code is lost.

Why would you want early access for what will likely be a buggy launch? Better to wait a month or so and at least play after the launch issues.

Even good launches like TOTK benefitted from waiting with the performance patches.

It’s not even the first issue - remember when they hired and defended that British paedophile too - even when he was covering up news stories about his own family?