As far as I'm concerned, the original Skyrim was the last good product Bethesda made.

I used to respect Bethesda as one of the few holdouts against the big-budget megapublisher race-to-the-bottom. That respect has been thoroughly lost over the last few years, for good reason.

The beginning of the end started in early 2015 with paid mods via Steam workshop that caused an uproar. Paid mods were quickly withdrawn - for now...
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-04-28-bethesda-removes-paid-mods-in-skyrim

The next year, Bethesda rolled out "Skyrim Special Edition", an overhyped name for "Skyrim with extra bloated system requirements and fancy graphics" (https://www.google.com/search?q=skyrim+special+edition+launch&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1). Most glaring was the fact that no new content was added and they didn't even fix existing problems (https://www.ign.com/articles/2016/11/01/skyrim-special-edition-pc-review). Worse, it thoroughly breaks compatibility with existing Skyrim mods (https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/290153/do-skyrim-mods-work-with-the-special-edition), requiring mods to be compatibility-patched and possibly splitting the community over mods.

The reason for breaking existing mods became obvious in 2017 when the Creation Club (Bethesda's paid mods, minus Steam Workshop) rolled out (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/08/29/fallout-4-creation-club-launched-not-paid-mods/) - forcing mods to be re-released and encouraging pay-for-mods while vehemently denying the truth.

I remember that one time when my sister installed Elder Scrolls Online and then panic-called me when the installer started deleting many files off her computer.

Fallout 4 was a flop and widely criticized compared to its predecessors Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas (https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/fallout-4).

Online multiplayer Fallout 76 received even worse reviews (https://www.gamespot.com/articles/fallout-76-black-ops-4-underperform-at-gamestop/1100-6463554/).

Elder Scrolls: Blades (for once, a mobile game promising to be more than shovelware) keeps getting delayed. First announcement placed its release in September-October 2018, which was later delayed a day before the posted "expected" date to December 1 this year, and then delayed again to spring 2019 (https://www.reddit.com/r/ElderScrolls/comments/9dd8e0/blades_delayed_again/)

Don't worry, through, Bethesda has been pursuing other, more important priorities, such as harassing people for legitimate sale of box-edition (disc-based) used games (see https://www.gog.com/forum/general/bethesda_lawyers_are_barking_mad_attempting_to_block_legal_sale_of_used_goods).

IF anything the events just show that gamers have been giving Bethesda a free pass for a number of years. Bethesda games have always been full of glitches and bugs (to the point of game breaking) but since the engine they use is so modder friendly the community has fixed up there products quickly before even Bethesda could respond to the issue.

I'm sure this has made them lax since the community can fix what they released broken, an example of this is in Fallout 76 since many of the bugs in that game originated in Fallout 4 which were fixed by modders, again showing that they just ported the code from Fallout 4 bugs and all.

Plus the fact that with every release in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series they keep streamlining and simplifying the games which takes away a lot of player control in how they want to play.

Bethesda needs to pay the price for its years of laziness.
Evolve or die.

Nah. Bethesda is doing financially well. But as said, they are lazy developers with not much creativity, and mostly get off to people sandboxing and fixing their games to kingdom come (modding). They are getting flak for their flaws on Fallout 76, as people can't sandbox online server side games to save Bethesda asses. and they rightfully deserve it.

This. Bethesda has been a plague on the industry and the community's acceptance of it is showing that companies can get away with releasing inferior, unpolished, buggy products because the community will still buy it and even fix all those 500+ bugs for free.

>inb4 the Bethesda apologists flame me for pointing out what they choose to ignore

Buy my game

I'm told Bethesda banned half the player base (2 people) who were making "anti-gay statements" towards a guy who complimented the one guy's outfit. The guy complained that there was no in-game report button, and the web-based one that bethesda suggested was simply broken. Best part? It took the trolls 10 minutes to kill him when he wasn't even fighting back, and from what i could tell, even moving at all.

Not falling for that line again!

Diablo 4 my ass!

stfu and buy Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - 2019 edition

now with 2% better graphics and less frames

Okay, but THIS IS THE LAST TIME!

Give me a sec and I'll PM you my credit card number.

Bethesda has been making terrible games since at least Oblivion. Yet they have massive success and critical acclaim anyway. Apparently most people don't care that their games are terrible, just like with most other AAA games.

So no, they aren't going to fail.

I've been saying this for years. Even Skyrim wasn't without its flaws, especially at launch, if you can remember all the hilarious physics bugs.

Fallout 3 STILL has crash bugs, to this day, that requires mod patches to fix. For all the shit Obsidian got over New Vegas' bugs, Bethesda has been pulling and getting away with this shit for the past decade plus, and getting free passes because they hid behind a pro-gamer, pro-single player stance, a charade that's since been dropped, in favor of chasing flavors of the month.

Fact of the matter is that they're lazy. They write lazy stories, lazy lore, lazily refuse to update their engine, which has legacy bugs that date back to Morrowind, ffs, make lazy open worlds, which STILL force you to load new instances, with lazy implementation of physics and optimization.

What I don't understand is how they've been making games for this long and STILL haven't taken any cues from the other companies that have been making open world games successfully for almost as long. R* being one major example.

LOL!

I've come to expect companies laziness and utter disrespecting its own games and fans. Only a fool or a dumb teenager would think F76 is "cool". I can understand, and even try to forget the horrible things with FO4, but F76 takes the cake.

So yeah, naturally they do as EA and Blizzard - sets the lowest standard in the gaming industry just to get young teens with access to a mastercard hooked. Good job Netherlands, for banning gaming gambling!

Bethesda only got away with it for so long because they ACTUALLY cared back then and released games with good story and content in the past that over-shadowed the buggy engine. But not now.