Having a very big game that everyone loves feels like a blursed position to be in. On the one hand, cool! You made something and everyone likes it and thinks very fondly of it. On the other hand, oh no. Everyone likes this thing you made and now expect that level of greatness again and again. Forever and ever until… I dunno, one of you dies or retires, or something.
It certainly doesn’t help when so much time passes between the cool thing you made and the Next Big Thing that nostalgia starts to muddy those fond memories, making them even stronger and thus propping those expectations for the Next Big Thing just a little higher. I’m sure it’s a position that Bethesda is in right now in the midst of development on The Elder Scrolls 6, a game we still know absolutely nothing about almost eight years after its big announcement at E3 in 2018.
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Skyrim lead designer and former Bethesda developer Bruce Nesmith reckons expectations for that game have become such a beast that they can likely never be reasonably met. “I am very fond of a phrase called the game of expectations, and I’ve been trotting the game of expectations out for well over a decade” he said in an interview with PressBoxPR. “Bethesda’s in the bad position of having expectations being so high they cannot be met.”
In what is perhaps not the best example—but probably the most relevant—Nesmith references Starfield’s rather flat reception. “Let’s assume that a new studio had put out Starfield,” he said. “I suspect it would be talked about like the second coming. But because it was released by Bethesda, the expectations were so much higher that it was seen differently. Starfield is a good game. It’s a very good game. It’s just not the game that people expected it to be.”
I don’t particularly agree with Nesmith’s assumption that a smaller studio releasing a Starfield would have been treated as a sensation, though of course it would have been impressive to see a developer with far fewer resources than Bethesda putting out something that is quite technically impressive.
And while I do agree that high expectations of Bethesda did go towards muddying its reception, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect more from a developer that has garnered a reputation for its excellent worldbuilding.
But back to The Elder Scrolls 6: Nesmith thinks Bethesda at least has a better chance at making fans happy. “They have that same problem [as Starfield] but they also have the advantage of having done Elder Scrolls 5 and 4 and 3 and 2, to where I think they’ve got a good shot at meeting expectations.
“After Oblivion, there were very sky-high expectations and Skyrim met them and exceeded them. After Fallout 3, there were very high expectations for Fallout 4, and the studio met them. So the potential is definitely there, but … Boy, do they have their work cut out for them.”
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