You can really tell it was and still is being written by bigoted WASPs. Aside from the obvious monarchism and the Empire being portrayed unilaterally as “The Good Guys” (at least until Skyrim), I’ve noticed for a long time that the backstory is riddled with genocides and ethnic cleansings.
Almost always human on elf (the inhuman other), and almost always treated like a good thing. Usually it’s the noble and physically superior Nords who just so happen to be blonde haired, blue eyed vikings. And when it’s not them, it’s the psychotic child killing robot man Pelinal Whitestrake or Tiber Septim using a time bending superweapon to annihilate thousands of Altmer for the crime of checks notes successfully defending themselves from his Imperialist bullshit. I think it’s insulting that the victims of what can only be described as oppression are now painted as the Nazi-esque villains because the alternative would be making them way too sympathetic. That’s not even getting into how they treat the Orcs and the Beast races.
We talk about how guys like Tolkien and CS Lewis wrote a lot of racist undertones, and then Bethesda says “Fuck that” and just makes the ethnonationalism a plot point in all their games.
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Oh it will be more lib if anything. Of course, if it actually ever show itself since it’s now clear the first announcements were fake because Bethesda completely fucked up with Fallout 76 and needed anything to distract the fans. It’s incredibly weird for me, Morrowind-Oblivion-Skyrim created one of the biggest hype trains in games ever, and there is no sequel for 11 years and counting. I just don’t get why.
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Probably not the case, after the stunning success of Skyrim new game would rake them incredible cash and yet there is nothing for 11 years now and production would probably only really starts after the Starfield is released. I remember in 2019 the most sceptical people were saying that this is fake announcement and ES6 will show no sooner than 2025 - and they were probably too optimistic, not mentioning Covid which really disrupted game development globally (and they were called morons by starved ES fans).
You can be as well right, Bethesda was bought by Microsoft recenty and from what i read the company was in bad shape and were whipped up to shape, even work on Starfield started back then for good. Fallout 76 was giant blunder.
I think it is rather fault of the 2019 nadir in PC gaming, with the focus on multi shooters where every other game genre withered, it was especially bad time for crpg and strategy. Bethesda for example had no problem churning out new shooter every few months, because why not - CoD and such example confirmed that such games can bring as much money as more ambitious rpg games for a small fraction of development costs.
Fortunately things recovered somewhat since then, but many good franchises died then.
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I would say those games are much more popular because of the bigger and lower common denominator - not everyone can get the time to play RPG, or even like the genre etc.
I mean, look what bring most cash now - the mobile games ffs.
The oversaturation was the fault of overwhelming success of Fortnite - i guess it was the first PC game that broke to the mobile audience big time. So suddenly everyone wanted its own fortnite or at least something multiplayer. Mass Effect died for that :( It went so bad that in 2018/19 everyone was saying that the single player games are finished. Not even any genre like rpg or strategy, but all single player was dying. Of course as usual they were talking from their ass - one Fortnite was good and brought huge money, but who needs 20 of them? They never learned from the example of MMORPG - 18 years old WoW is still alive and good but no other game achieved even a fraction of its success.
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Both i think. On one hand you got millions download for tons of games on google store, and if only 1% of the people actually play it’s still huge market, and on the other you do have insane whales out there. I did played in few mobile games and some people were simply riduculous how many they did spent, and they weren’t even that rare, every server for every game had at least few titan whales and few dozen lesser ones - and there are usually dozens to hundreds of servers depending on the game.
For example recent hit Diablo Immor(t)al, which was incredibly bashed by lot of Blizz fans at first, earned 100.000.000 bucks in microtransaction in just 8 weeks, of which biggest whale spent at least 100.000.
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