What is your favorite Bethesda game?

[King Crispy]

I will echo my esteemed colleague Vazdru's thoughts on Daggerfall and name that as my favorite as well.

Back in 1994 I was working for a high-end motherboard company in Silicon Valley and was lucky enough to post some questions through the proto-internet at the time to I believe Julian LeFay himself about the game as it was still in development. I asked him some silly questions such as, "Will we be able to climb a tree and shoot a fireball at an orc?" to which I seem to recall him answering "maybe".

The point is that my hype for this exciting game -- a game that was promising to do things as an RPG that had never really been done before (I was a happy veteran of Arena) -- was dizzyingly high.

I'll never forget the day that I called in sick in order to devote 24 hours to its glorious release. Having been shipped via FedEx directly to my address (Bethesda did things like this back then), I actually drove to the local FedEx depot to intercept it, such was my desire to possess it.

The unboxing. The glorious, glorious box art (I got the Collector's Edition):

Finally installing the game. The deep character generation. Waking up in Privateer's Hold for the first time. It was all almost too good to be true. I loved it.

But the real thrill came when stepping outside the dungeon for the first time. Only then did you begin to realize the immensity of the game. Its true freedom. Fuck the bugs. I can deal with some bugs. But you can't fake or compensate for the lack of a truly open world. And for Bethesda to have actually pulled off a working story and main quest to slowly work on while LARPing my hero wandering from town to town?

Well, it just doesn't get much better than that. Even if I never could climb any of those trees.

 

[Beastro]

One thing I'll give Oblivion is that it was old enough to give you the freedom to get away with unconventional shit and reward you for it in the way games used to. Like pulling the Orc that held Umbra out of her dungeon and all the way into the Imperial City for her to aggro the guards, then murder dozens of them until they finally whittled her health down allowing you to loot that lovely sword as well as a lot of guard gear to sell as a newbie.

In Skyrim can you even pull mobs out of dungeons like that?

 

[Gepeu]

Morrowind, probably. It's not a good game, but it's definitely charming and has enough things for people to experiment on, even it it quickly leads to breaking the game (alchemy).

 

[TripJack]

bunch of slack jawed faggots itt

 

[buru5]

In Skyrim can you even pull mobs out of dungeons like that?

Some do, but it seems like a rare occurrence. Maybe several areas are programmed in such a way where it's not possible.

 

[Dustin542]

Guise didn't you get the joke...... first fallout was made by black isle.

No way, I thought it was made by Bethesda????

According to gog it is....... any traces of black isle have been removed.

People in the future will think that Fallout 1 and 2 was made by Bethesda.

Has Black Isle ever been officially credited for Fallout? Neither their name, nor logo, appear on the box or jewel case. Nothing in the intro, main menu, or credits either. Moby Games does not list them as the developer. Nor does Wikipedia.

As for GOG, surprisingly they don't list Black Isle on either Fallout's page. They are usually good about crediting the developer and the current rights holder. But in this case it reads "Interplay/Bethesda LLC." As does Fallout 2. Weirder still, Fallout Tactics does credit 14 Degrees East in addition to Bethesda. Looking at the GOG community wiki, both Fallout and Fallout 2 originally listed Black Isle as the developer when Interplay held the rights (see https://www.gogwiki.com/wiki/Fallout_(game) & https://www.gogwiki.com/wiki/Fallout_2). At present, Icewind Dale 2 still acknowledges Black Isle. In fact, that's the only title GOG currently acknowledges them for.

I don't think the Black Isle division of Interplay was made yet when Fallout came out.

 

[flabbyjack]

Why did they call it Fallout 3 when it was the first real Fallout game (Fallout: BoS on console doesn't count) ?

I guess they just had a sense of humor about the whole thing.

 

[Iznaliu]

Has anyone said Fallout 2? Depth, it's in the Codex top 70 or so, pretty good starting area, lots of meta humor - like you can actually talk to a radroach and teach it chess. The best part of Fallout 2 is that you can see where they kind of got the idea for Fallout 3 from - they took the best parts of Fallout 2 (mutants, ghouls, BoS, vertibirds, the Enclave (!) big ships, presidents, raiders, graffiti, machine guns, perks) some dashes of Fallout 1 (boring backstory, overseers, not much else). When people told me Fallout 3 was Oblivion with guns, I didn't really think they could pull it off. But they did and the rest is (sales) history!

Fallout 2 had nothing to do with Beth.

 

[Moonrise]

Daggerfall is the closest thing to a masochistic 1v1 Gygaxian nightmare in digital format. It's the only Elder Scrolls I bothered to finish. Top 5, easy. Nothing Bethesda has produced yet compares to Mannimarco's sex dungeon. I could bloviate over the game's numerous features, but make no mistake: this is the work of Daedalus, and Daggerfall flew too close to the sun. Did I ruin my reputation in a backwater province taking out a loan I knew I couldn't pay back in order to finance a boat? Yes, yes I did.

​

 

[typical user]

Fallout: New Vegas

because it wasn't made by those greedy cucks.

 

[fantadomat]

Fallout 5 and elder scroll 12

 

[Zombra]

If I'm being completely honest? Skyrim, despite its many and substantial flaws ←important.

I got more LARPing mileage out of Skyrim than any other Bethesda game to date. During that time, I myself became more highly involved with the "theory" of how and why I play these games, for lack of a better word, so I was able to get the most out of it. (It's this same awareness that stopped me from playing Fallout 4 altogether.) So maybe it wasn't so much the game itself as what I was able to bring to it.

Plus the learn by doing leveling system had better feedback and was less janky than ever before, and picking Perks was fun.
Best char system in series again despite its flaws.

Believe it or not, I'm still 30% looking forward to TES VI. If they don't make my fucking character for me (voiced protagonist, Fallout 4? fuck you) and if the writing is at least mediocre throughout (I'm looking at you Skyrim Thieves Guild), and Todd doesn't find some new fundamental way to ruin everything (not counting on it), I'll probably LARP the shit out of it and have a lot of fun. True Kodex Konfessions

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Elder Scrolls IX: The Eye of Argonia

Really, it's a question of Daggerfall's Gygaxian dungeon-crawling versus Morrowind's Arnesonian overland exploration. Ultimately, Morrowind's hand-craftedness, aesthetics, lore, and setting win out over Daggerfall's procedural generation, sheer expansiveness, and character customization.

 

[fantadomat]

Lets be honest Bathesda delivers what it promises ....most of the times.Even from the trailers you know what to expect.

 

[Iznaliu]

I haven't played any Bethesda games as of yet.

 

[Orma]

Probably Fallout 4, which is their biggest and most ambitious project yet.

It wasn't an easy choice though, since they are also responsible for classics such as a Oblivion and Fallout 3.

 

[The Wall]

Pete Hines: Twitter Feed.

Only followed as close second is Pete Hines: There's no Todd and I have to sell paid mods at E3 stage.

When I think about it, Pete Hines: The post-apocalyptic Smile wasn't that bad either. Overall Pete Hines serie is underrated.

Spoiler

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Daggerfall and Terminator: Future Shock/Skynet.

 

[undecaf]

My favorite Bethesda games is

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Doom 2016

http://steamcommunity.com/id/EctoLorean/recommended/379720

Thumbing this down for the so called "free weekend", and I probably won't update it until either I get over how friggin dumb Bethesda can get, or until I get the full game. Whichever comes first.

Don't get me wrong, the game is a lot of fun. And I mean a lot. But look at my game time. Should be around 90 minutes by the time I post this. That's because I already finished it, and a good chunk of that was for Multiplayer. Surprised?

Here, you have a 60 gigabyte (yes, GB.) DEMO. With 2 LEVELS. 2. (maybe 3, but I didn't really count.) They say it's "Free Weekend" but as soon as you finish the second level, they promptly shove "BUY THE FULL VERSION" in your face like a freemium mobile game. I have literally never played a Free Weekend game that did this♥♥♥♥♥♥ Out of all the stupid♥♥♥♥♥decisions Bethesda makes.


It takes more time to download the friggin game than it does to actually play through the "Free Trial". Hell; watching the 2005 film starring The Rock would give you more "Doom Time" than the "Trial" does.


You can use those 60 gigs to just go find a copy of Doom 2, and jam-pack it full of mods. Or download every Doom game prior, along with Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem 3D just to spoil yourself. And throw in Star Wars: Dark Forces while you're at it. And Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch.

Really, it just feels like Bethesda's desperately trying to get people to play the Multiplayer in Doom (also limited in the "Free Trial") which probably won't even last too long with Quake Champions coming around. And here I thought re-releasing Skyrim 20 times was as desperate as they could get.


So unfortunately, I'm thumbing this down until I can actually.. y'know.. PLAY THE GAME I DOWNLOADED. I guess they succeeded in getting me motivated to buy the game, I'll give them that. But there's a word for that... Almost like a DEMOnstration.


BETHESDA MADE ME THUMB DOWN DOOM.


TL : DR = Free Weekend is actually a 1 hour demo that takes up 60 gigs of memory.

 

[Goral]

All of them: https://af.gog.com/forum/general/gu..._games_by_playtime_50256/post25?as=1649904300

text form

goral: Skyrim is shit, as are all Bethesda RPGs

jurjeskovici: Yep, Beth games does that to ya! You should give the rest of the series a go! New Vegas is epic, truly, truly epic! Thank the gods it wasn't written by bethesda as it might've turned to shit.

dexterward: Go to any RPG forum out there, mention Bethesda and you will find this kinda posts flooding in. It saddens me to no end - I grew up with old school RPGs, consider Darklands and Goldbox series the best ever - but somehow was lucky not to get stuck with this narrow minded, blinkered attitude.

Slagging off Bethesda's games is a modern sport and a favourite narrative for many people - who funnily enough also consider themselves RPG connoisseurs. But what they are in reality is people who can not accept nor understand a completely different style of doing things and invent a litany of either fake or overblown faults then applied to Beth's games.

I'm not here to "dispute" these claims, it has been done over and over again and is an exercise in futility - if I tell you for example that every big complex game out there launches with a set of technical problems (that includes all of your beloved Witchers, never mind Arcanum, Gothics or Bloodlines - which were so broken as to require community patches to make them playable) or that coding a true open world with advanced physics, reactive NPCs, emergent gaemeplay etc is a completely different task than building a narrative-driven game with a set of simple design principles - PoE for example, your answer inevitably will be "but bethsofts games are console dumbass SHIT", no matter how logical or true to real life an argument is. So let's not do this

Side effect is that nobody really tries anything inventive these days and all these games such as PoE, Wasteland, Shadowrun and so on are mainly nostalgia driven but design wise awfully stuck in the past. The devs play it safe because they know they can make an easy buck this way with minimal effort. Hell, Darklands was written over 2 decades ago and is much more advanced than these titles. The only ones that are at least trying are Larian - they reinvented turn-based combat without any cheap gimmicks and although I do not dig their humour I consider D:OS a true modern masterpiece.

I tried all these other games and while they're okay-ish in general, they simply bore me with their simplicity - I'd much rather play FO4 -a game as close to a "living, breathing world" trope as was ever made, or some deep roguelike, than click on a few dialogue options, pretend this is "choice & consequence" and then have a bout of poorly made, never-really-in-control combat. So I do consider them sort of inferior - but not at all "shit" - they're just different style that does not necessarily suit me these days, and mostly decent games in general. See the difference between that and your "hate bethsofts" attitude?​

​

 

[The Wall]

All of them: https://af.gog.com/forum/general/gu..._games_by_playtime_50256/post25?as=1649904300

Wew, from where should I start and is starting even worthwhile? Probably not, gonna try to be short and on point.

I'm sick and tired of nostalgia argument. Oh you prefer your RPGs to have stat based system cause that allows you more build options and more opportunites to interact with the world and track all these things through numbers? What are you, some dork? Real neeeeerds nowadays play Skyrims and Fallout 4s, go to math class, you dork. Oh, I just teabagged Deathclaw, that makes me NERD OUT sooooo much (fuck that phrase and all basic bitches that use it).

Oh, you prefer to have your UI not literally be borrowed from Apple Store and be functional like one game in franchise ago? Huh, you're just like those kuffars in East London or parts of Paris who preferred back then when you could walk through these parts without worrying about Sharia police, being raped, decapitated or robbed. NOSTALGY FAGS!

Skyrim:
-responsive npcs: Hi stranger > (5 sec. later) I'm gonna fight you> (5 sec. later) you're my pal > (5 sec. later) stop killing me, you'll just brake your mouse, I'm essential > (5 sec. later) become Archmage and wear Archmage robes > (5 sec. later) if you like magic go to Winterhold > (5 sec. later) You're Dragonborn! > (5 sec. later) Piss off, nobody!
-advanced physics: At least problems are not noticable right out of the gate
-emergent gameplay: Quest #1: Hey traveler, I've got this lost family heirloom in dungeon #23, go and get it!
[on your way you're attacked by bears]
Quest #99: Hey traveler, I've got this family member trapped inside temple #69, go and rescue it!
[on your way you're attacked by bandits]
Quest #112: Hey traveler, you know the drill. Off you go!
[on your way you're attacked by werebear bandits]

I can't be bothered to write anything more and could write essays on topic, it's just not worthwhile. It would be just an exercise in futility, as he said.
Nostalgy has got to be one of the weakest, the most vague and laziest arguments ever. Oh you prefer to eat meals with forks? HA, nostalgy fag, NOW all the kool kids are doing it with Deathclaw gauntlets. I'm not against inovation, quite to the contrary, but it has to be meaningful. To improve stuff.

In modern day expecting things to be done competently, to work, be imaginative and demand from consumer to use his brain = NOSTALGIA.
Maybe overall decline of society is somehow mirrored in it? Not only factor of course, but you can't help but wonder.

All in all - lel you're NOSTALGY fag = NOT AN ARGUMENT.

 

[The Wall]

One more thing. The only reason why many people play Bethesda games or for that matter Total War games despite all the decline in their quality over the years is really, really simple. They have monopoly on the current market.

Which other dev offers you to play battles where thousands of soldiers are clashing and you can zoom in as far as you want?Answer is: right now NONE.
Which other dev offers you to LARP in 1st/3ed person in somewhat believable world and gives you sandbox, open world? Answer is: right now almost NONE.

That's why I think Kingdom Come: Deliverance will perform quite well as long as it's not bugged. It's larpers heaven, and many love to larp more or less.

And I think that upcoming Cain/Boyarski and especially Obsidian's Skyrim for which they are still finding ways to fund will shake up this stale part of market.
One of the reasons why Bethesda can get away with anything (even Fallout 4) is cause..... who you gonna turn to once they underdeliver? Answer is NONE...

...

Spoiler

for the time being.

 

[circ]

Obsidian could hire the most legendary developers and get unlimited funds and I'm convinced they'd still produce shit.

 

[undecaf]

Why did they call it Fallout 3 when it was the first real Fallout game

It's named in the same vein as Slaughterhouse-Five, District 9, or Fahrenheit 451, of course.

Spoiler

(I've heard - and have a vague recollection of seeing that - there were people who actually thought it was like that.)