id Software producer says 'you'll never get another WoW or Morrowind in the current climate' in the wake of Xbox layoffs
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/id-software-producer-says-youll-never-get-another-wow-or-morrowind-in-the-current-climate-in-the-wake-of-xbox-layoffs/Open linkView original on feddit.online
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"Another Morrowind" is a weird way to say it. Does he mean another Elder Scrolls?
That is weird, but, I feel like there's even more to tear down? Like I know he meant "You're only getting slop games in the future," but, like I would call WoW a slop game. Like it's not as bad as most today, but, like come on, those shitty ideas came from somewhere. At least Morrowind had heart. I mean, it also opened the door to Bethesda shipping buggy games that need community patches, but still.
I'm fine not getting another WOW. We need a new mmorpg. Every mmo being a version of wow is trash.
We could use another Morrowind tho. It's ok. I think it's fine. We need to go thru a phase of trimming the fat. It's just a shame that under the current system "trimming the fat" means firing regular people. The fat we need to trim is executives.
I mean... does the world really need any more MMORPGs, at this point?
The industry is really getting fucked up from the inside out to be sure. But the notion that these sprawling, functionally endless games full of daily tasks and engagement bait that just takes over peoples lives are good or desirable... Idk, man. Maybe we need to Retvrn 2 Tradition and get back to the kind of Nintendo side-scrollers you can beat over a long weekend. Ones that don't require 500 coders working in a sweatshop for piecework wages, so that some IP management company can claim a profit off their labor for the next 40 years.
Morrowind is single-player...
OpenMW has a multiplayer fork. I tried it a year or two and was pretty blown away by how good it was, at least on the Nerevarine Prophecies server I tried out.
Oh dang, I gotta try that out.
Elder Scrolls III was released in 2002. It was a fraction the scale of Oblivion, which was a fraction of the scale of Skyrim. You could beat the game inside 40 hours. I would give you 10:1 odds we see similar - if not more expansive - open-world single player RPGs like this published inside the next five years. Hell, we already have a number of them in development.
FFS, The Witcher 4 is due to land in 2027. Cyberpunk 2 is targeting 2030. Divinity is getting an open world adaptation, with a workforce of over 500 professionals over at Larian Studio, with an early release scheduled sometime in the next year or two. Guild Wars 3 is in the pipe as is a Runeterra MMO from Riot.
And that's not even getting into all the titles coming out of the burgeoning Chinese studios - Black Myth, Honor of Kings, Genshin Impact. It's a deluge. We have more titles being released annually than anyone could dream of playing.
This is such a reductionary view of Morrowind, I don't even know how to properly respond to it. Granted, I grew up playing the game and still play it semi occasionally, so I'm obviously biased in its favor. But I'm willing to bet I've put a couple thousand hours into Morrowind and there is still content in that game that I've never seen. You can beat the game in less than ten minutes if you really know what you're doing, but judging the entire game by that really misses the entire point of the art, I think.
Morrowind was the high water mark of the elder scrolls series and this is a hill I will die on with fervor. Oblivion was bigger, and had voice acting, but it was an inch deep (in large part because of the voice acting but that's another conversation). Skyrim stripped even more game out of the game while taking more cues from Oblivion than from the rest of their history.
It introduced a ton of content that Oblivion and Skyrim would proceed to riff on.
But, again, this is a 25 year old game. To say "we'll never have another Morrowind" a few weeks after a bunch of ugly firings doesn't seem to acknowledge that we didn't get a "new Morrowind" before that, either. And we never will, because it's a product of a certain historical moment.
But we still got Eldin Ring and Horizon: Zero Dawn and Dragon Age and Mass Effect and Divinity: Original Sin.
I don't see anything to suggest we won't continue to get big budget open world RPGs, even if they aren't in the identical artistic or thematic style as an Elder Scrolls game.
I suspect the 'You'll never get another Morrowind' has more to do with the weirdness of the setting and the feeling of getting lost in a strange land, rather than the number of square miles the game technically consists of.
Also, https://imgur.com/favorite-map-size-comparison-skyrim-other-games-series-B7rBN
...though I suppose you could say that 3/7ths is technically a fraction.
Morrowind had a certain "what if we threw every fantasy trope at the wall and see what sticks" angle than a lot of games. That required a significant amount of art direction to pull off. But, even setting aside AI, we've made huge progress in modeling and skinning assets. I don't think we're going to stop seeing games with dozens of class/race pairings any time soon.
Morrowind is the third Elder Scrolls game though, which means it inherited a good chunk of its weirdness. Bethesda decided to run with it and go weirder instead of leaning on well-worn tropes - whereas with Oblivion, they decided to go the opposite direction and turn the weird setting back into stereotypical Western medieval fantasy. That whole doing-the-safe-thing is one of the reasons why the big publishers are floundering right now; there's a dearth of fresh new experiences that can't be gotten anywhere else. And that drought is going to continue so long as the CEO's of these companies continue to ignore the gaming side of the gaming industry and try to run it like any other tech industry. We have to go to indies for that sort of experience now - and indies can't afford to build a sprawling, hand-crafted world like Morrowind.
I gotta disagree. There is an endless cavalcade of weirdness in the Indie gaming scene. Like, how do you just breeze by Undertale/Delta Rune? Or The Stanley Parable? Or Disco Elysium? Even just the vanilla Nintendo titles manage to keep it fresh, with SMB Wonder and Tears of the Kingdom and Pokémon Legends putting all sorts of spins on the fantasy genre.
Elder Scrolls tends to aim for a prodigious amount of content in a given release, with both volume of territory and depth of story giving their games a lot of replayability. But the idea that you can't play a cat girl sorcerer in any other title? Come on.
What we're seeing is the death of the nostolgia-inducing titles. It's the IP that's being squandered, not the broad artistry or gameplay.
Everyone starts somewhere. Blizzard wasn't always a multi-billion dollar studio. They built up the Warcraft and Starcraft settings brick by brick. Everyone from SquareSoft to FromSoft started with these small, somewhat boutique games and kept piling on more history and more story as they expanded and evolved.
Larian is currently undergoing the kind of expansion that these older studios were experiencing back in the 90s/00s.
4A Games has been putting out hits with it's Metro series
Kojima Productions has delivered two Death Stranding iterations and doesn't seem to be slowing down.
Owlcat's following in Bethesda's footsteps, with early isometric games that grow more complex and animation intense as they grow.
CD Projekt has been churning out big budget hits for over a decade.
You can't just blink past all these guys.
Yes, that's why I said
Kojima is NOT an AAA studio; the fact that it's named after a single person whose vision drives the company is proof enough of that. Larian is an AA studio that is putting out AAA-grade hits in what is normally considered a niche genre, but with none of the watered-down pandering to the lowest denominator that AAA studios have fallen into. The same could be said of FromSoftware. Owlcat DEFINITELY isn't an AAA studio.
Using Blizzard as an example is very much a misdirection, as ActiBlizz is very much one of the biggest offenders today; of course they were great back in the day, before AAA studios became what they are now. Then they became what they are now. So is playing as 'a cat girl sorcerer'; not only is that failing to even scratch the surface of what makes Morrowind the weird masterpiece it is, but also, I can do that in Final Fantasy 14.
CD Projekt and 4A are the exceptions that prove the rule. The publishing arm and the developing arm of CDPR are closely tied, similar to how Steam and Valve are. Even CDPR, however, has fallen afoul of some of the AAA pitfalls with the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk - they just managed to course-correct their way to victory after the fact, and were probably able to do so partly because the company is so cohesive. 4A, meanwhile, was founded specifically to avoid the money-obsessed thinking that I'm complaining about here.
Even then, I wouldn't really call them big publishers. They don't churn out games, they just make their own stuff.
And Nintendo, of course, is doing its own thing. They seem to be changing only as much as is necessary to stay relevant as time goes on, and it's working for them.
Mind you, I agree with many of your points, and I look forward to the next Morrowind; it's just probably going to take a good long while for the conditions for it to arise, and it's not going to come from Bethesda, or ActiBlizz, or Ubisoft, or Microsoft, or Sony, or EA, or Epic. Or Valve, or 4A, because they don't make those kinds of games. I'd include Nintendo in that list, but they made Tomodachi Life, so I wouldn't put much of anything past them if one of their big names got a bug in their ear.
If you want a game of similar quality to Skyrim that will happily consume as much time as you could ever give it and keep you coming back, might I suggest a Skyrim roleplay server like Keizaal? Certainly beats the hell out of any MMO.
id has certainly been hit with damaging layoffs, but I'm not sure it's the current Xbox climate overall that's the problem. Bethesda specifically, if we're talking Elder Scrolls, has been sitting on their hands for a decade. This is a company that had twice as many devs as the last time they released a game, without making anything other than remasters and Fallout side projects. A projected date in the 2030s for their next release in the franchise means they've fully lost the plot. There were literally 14 levels of management on the project, which has been slimmed down to 5.
Honestly, cutting some of the fat at Bethesda and handing Fallout to Obsidian is probably the best thing that could have been done to get the best and soonest new Elder Scrolls and Fallout. It's a shame that the same approach was also taken with what is a much more functional studio, but slimming down on bloated studios that move at a crawl with large numbers isn't a terrible idea.
After a certain point there does seem to be an inverse relationship between how many devs a studio has and the quality and regularity of their work.
they were working on starfield..... that was a big release