Oblivion is hands-down one of my favorite games I have ever played and I feel it’s a more engaging game than Skyrim was. Sure it has its quirks and certain annoying features that are dated, but it captivated and locked me in way better than Skyrim. It was colorful, weirdly fantastical, and constantly had me going down random rabbit holes that revealed cool surprises! That is the Bethesda quality I desired that made me want to play their games.
If it was 2016 again and I heard this news about ES VI, I would be on the full hype train. But alas, we are post Starfield and I have lost any faith they will actually deliver on a decent follow-up. It was lackluster, boring, and all grey; nothing whimsical that used to draw me to their games. The doubling down on criticism tells me that creative spirit is gone and development has just turned into get the task done with a set time frame.
It’s all in effort of “line goes up” in the immediate short-term despite the fact that a year from now these companies are going to struggle to complete difficult projects. My company has layed off a number of 10, 15, 20+ year veterans because they were highly paid. Now there are gaps in knowledgeable folks to tap for help and Juniors are being forced to perform to a Senior level without proper support.
The pandemic growth periods caused every company to loose their damn mind to make growth projections based on those insane numbers for a time that should have been ruled out as an outlier. I know these MBA fucks had to take a business stats class, but literally dropped the fundamentals when they saw big $$$. Now they’re cutting the talent that fostered their primary growth and will be looking back 6 months from now wondering why they still aren’t growing. Well surely the Juniors aren’t working hard enough!