Oblivion to Starfield: Bethesda's 20 Year Journey to The Elder Scrolls 6

There's something to be said about the loyalty of The Elder Scrolls fans when Bethesda can re-release a 20-year-old game with no official marketing and it still ends up at the top of Steam's bestseller list. Amusingly, there's even a non-zero chance that some of the people who are currently playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered weren't born when the game first came out.

Admittedly, this loyalty isn't entirely undeserved when you look at Bethesda's history. For all the complaining that people do, and some of it quite justifiable, Bethesda's games are very much one of a kind. For RPG fans, they somewhat literally define a console generation.

There have been no shortage of competitors either. Every so often, an RPG comes out with better mechanics than what any Bethesda game has to offer, yet time and again, people keep flocking back to The Elder Scrolls.

After all, it's hard to argue that contemporary games like Avowed don't have objectively better role playing mechanics. The Dragon Age and Mass Effect games blow Bethesda games out of the water when it comes to the writing for romances and companions, not to mention actual reputation systems. Baldur's Gate 3 is in an entirely different league in almost every practical metric if you overlook the differences in sub-genre.

What's in the Secret Sauce, Todd?

Indeed, most people would fully acknowledge that The Elder Scrolls' approach to combat has historically been its weak point. The writing for faction quests in particular can be hit or miss too. Throw in the increasingly simplified reputation system and ever present bugs and you might wonder what do The Elder Scrolls games actually offer to deserve their fame.

The answer is that very few games on the market have player-to-NPC interaction, player-to-world interaction, NPC-to-NPC interaction, and NPC-to-world interaction running more or less seamlessly and simultaneously. To put it simply, Bethesda specializes in creating living worlds, and sometimes "it just works."

Case in point, Oblivion is a 20-year-old game where NPCs have their own schedules and can react to changes in their environment. They'll walk around, go to sleep, talk to each other, and if you commit crimes, they'll react appropriately. You can then walk up and talk to, rob, murder, or simply observe most NPCs and they'll more or less act logically. The same feature (with some tweaks) has since been a key feature of Bethesda's major RPGs.

By comparison, most developers opt for static NPCs because it's (presumably) easier, faster, and less prone to causing problems. Recently, Avowed was criticized for this as you could literally steal food off people's plates and they wouldn't react at all. Was it easier for the developers? Most likely. Did it bother people who care about such things? Almost certainly.

In purely practical terms, there's no difference between the two approaches. At the very least it seems doubtful that the average player is following Oblivion or Skyrim's NPCs around to make sure that they are eating and sleeping. The difference is that Bethesda's approach maintains an illusion of a living world, and for such games it goes a long way to engaging with players.

A living virtual world isn't created "simply" by having NPCs that can move though. The world itself needs to feel like people lived in it. In The Elder Scrolls' case, that means making up 10,000 years of history. Civilizations rise and civilizations fall, so Bethesda isn't just writing a made up culture for each of the playable races, they're also creating societies that might have gone extinct for peoples who no longer exist or have simply undergone a culture shift.

This means distinct clothing styles, architecture, religions, languages and naming conventions, even literature. While inspiration can be taken from real life, as evidenced by Oblivion's Western European-themed Cyrodiil, you've still got the truly alien Shivering Isles in the eponymous DLC and the planes of Oblivion to contend with.

It's nothing short of a herculean task, and while other game developers can and have produced similarly amazing work, Bethesda remains one of the best in the field for a good reason.

Did Bethesda Forget The Strength of Their Own Games?

Unfortunately, Bethesda seems to struggle once they leave their area of expertise. Fallout 76's early years certainly didn't do much to disprove this notion. Between the lack of NPCs, live-service multiplayer with no private servers, and PvP where you can lose your loot, it's a small miracle that the game survived long enough to be updated to a more palatable state.

Starfield's mixed reception only intensified people's concerns regarding the future of The Elder Scrolls VI. Make no mistake, Starfield had some novel gameplay mechanics, but features like randomly generating the surfaces of 1,000 planets lacks widespread practical appeal. If anything, Bethesda should've realized this when Oblivion was first released, if not earlier with Morrowind.

That AAA game development is trending towards greater complexity is not a comforting fact either. Bethesda's games are notoriously buggy as is. One can only imagine the problems that can arise when you add more features, more NPCs, more of everything. Granted, most of the common bugs in Bethesda's games aren't really game breaking, so it's more of an unfounded fear than anything else unless you are diving deep into modding.

The potential for feature creep is a far greater concern. We went from building our own houses in Skyrim to building settlements in Fallout 4 to building spaceships in Starfield. It's a very neat feature that can be improved upon in The Elder Scrolls VI. However, if Bethesda intends to treat the building aspect the same way that they "improved" the settlement system in Starfield by making it needlessly complex and tedious, then it's better to omit it altogether.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered - From Oblivion to Skyrim to Hammerfell and High Rock?

That being said, it seems questionable that anyone genuinely believes that The Elder Scrolls VI will be literally unplayable at launch. Whether or not it will live up to people's high expectations of both the franchise and the developer is up to debate, which is the real cause for concern.

Thankfully, the success of the Oblivion remaster should provide at least two bits of good news for Bethesda. The first is that people still love the Elder Scrolls games, warts and all. Oblivion is fundamentally the same game as it was 20 years ago, and if people can overlook the strange quirks of the game today, then that's a good enough baseline for determining the absolute bare minimum of what The Elder Scrolls VI should feel like.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is that Bethesda should be able to get relatively fresh feedback. Again, it should be pointed out that there is a non-zero chance that some of the people who are playing Oblivion Remastered weren't born when the original was released. Even returning players should be able to provide better feedback with an additional 20 years of context. That there is no release date for The Elder Scrolls VI means that time is on Bethesda's side, and they can and should course correct if needed before it's too late.