Anyone who is a fan of RPG videogames would immediately recognize top titles from Bethesda such as Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Doom, and many more. These games have revolutionized the way the genre of games is played and have forged several generations of loyal fans.
Though in recent years this reputation has caused many more issues than opportunities for the company as it has expanded and started producing more moderate quality games which had diluted the brand, though loyal fans would hold out hope for the next release of their main titles and how they would redeem the company.
One of the company’s best selling titles was Fallout New Vegas. Produced by Obsidian, a subsidiary of Bethesda, this post apocalyptic game blended the mechanics experimented on with the last title with a proper combat system improving gameplay exponentially. The iconic characters, soundtrack, quests, open world, and story of the game would solidify its place as one of the best RPG games to date. The success of this game though created a huge void as time went on and the graphics became more outdated people started to expect a new great game from Bethesda.
Ironically all this hope for these games creates unreal expectations which cannot be achieved by the studio, especially on the launch of their games. This issue came to a head with the release of Fallout 76. A multiplayer game that many players thought was just a revamp of Bethesda’s previous game Fallout 4.
The reason players accused them of this was because Bethesda was using the same objects, game engine, textures, mechanics, framework, and pretty much everything from the previous game, which was dated five years prior. Somehow this “brand new game” which had been in development for years had little improvement over the previous one and instead actually had many more issues. Todd Howard, CEO of Bethesda, responded to angry comments saying, “It just works!” His now infamous response.
This titan of RPG gaming history has been slowly sinking as quality drops take hold. Though while the main studio has changed the spirit that was put into designing our favorite games still lives within its subsidiary companies like Obsidian and Bioware. So truly we can hold out hope that the next big Bethesda game will live up to our expectations.
Though lately it seems that entertainment companies across the board have been making quality cuts wherever they can to save an extra penny. Its gotten to the point where even one of the biggest titles, Call of Duty has more animosity behind its name than joy. Will those of us who enjoy video games be seeing the fall of our favorite series due to this greed, or perhaps even the entire hobby itself might be plunged into the buy low sell high ideals where we suffer and pay higher prices for new games of worse quality.
