Honestly I’m expecting a hot steaming pile of garbage given their trajectory. Just another fantasy veneer on the same tired Bethesda formula rife with bugs. My expectations are so low, in fact, my plan is to wait for a good sale to get it, or until I hear that it’s released in a playable state but still post release.
Yup it is. Most recent example is Space Marine 2. I don’t have a problem paying full price if the review consensus is that it’s good enough to warrant it. So I waited for the reviews, and my most trusted reviewers lavished it so I bought it day one. Lo and behold it lived up.
I don’t expect the same for ES6.
I’m expecting:
- dialogue choices to be binary.
- all NPC’s are voiced by Todd.
- there’s a mandatory 200GB texture pack update on day one.
- the Creation Club is integral to the main story.
- skills are distilled down to STRONG, BENDY, SMART.
- these three skills have a perk tree which is actually just a perk stick with no branches.
- AI assesses whether your constructed town is good enough and won’t let you proceed to the next mission unless you’ve gone to Granny Earl’s house for three consecutive IRL Sunday’s and sent photos of your freshly baked Sweet Roll™ to the Bethesda’s Antarctic game studio (you incur all costs associated with postage) in the middle of Winter (May).
- races outside of Imperial are DLC, as is any skin colour besides white, and any genital options besides “Jewish”.
Bethesda has already run up against the wall of insurmountable expectations with Starfield, which by most measures was good but not great. That’s resulted in a sub-60% user rating on Steam and a general sense that the game was somehow a failure—or at the very least, a fumble.
Ah no. The problem with Starfield is mostly that they didn’t know where to go with it.
They thought the open planets concept would be as appealing as the open worlds concept and it’s not cuz the world’s are boring.
All you have to do is make it more like Morrowind with some updated mechanics. The world doesn’t have to be huge; smaller, handcrafted one is preferred to huge, lifeless one. Set it in an interesting, alien province, not generic medieval like Oblivion and Skyrim. And for the love of God, move on from Gamebryo/Creation engine, it’s been outdated for over a decade.
Translation: “We refuse to bring Michael Kirkbride back to the project.”
It wouldn’t be hard to meet my expectations, just don’t be worse than Skyrim. Skyrim already was a watered down mostly boring experience, surely you can match that or, god forbid, do better.
