Opinion - Saying Goodbye to Bethesda

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A Vice op-ed discusses how Bethesda's once irresistible charm has faded for one gamer.

For the past ten years, Bethesda games have sculpted how I think about games. Aged 14, I picked up my first Xbox 360 and a copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I still have that same disc today, in its case, the receipt tucked behind the hundred-page manual.

After putting thousands of hours of playtime into Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim, as well as all every expansion released to support those main games, Bethesda has even influenced what I want from other titles - in terms of gameplay features, design ideas, and that inimitable sense of freedom that few other open-world productions master so well.

When Fallout 4 was announced midway through 2015, just six months before it came out, I, unsurprisingly, lost my shit. Not only was a new Bethesda game on its way, guaranteeing a massive world to get invested in, but I only had a short while to wait for it. This so-brief period between announcement and availability was as good as unprecedented in our modern period of games publicity - but it's something I think will influence other developers' future projects and their own release plans, given how well it worked.

And when it came out, I really liked Fallout 4. I went as far as saying, on this site no less, that it was an unmissable open-world experience. Its world is truly magical to explore, and for me it features the best storytelling of any of Bethesda's games so far, even if its ideas, of fractured families and fizzing revolution, are familiar. This is a studio that places its strengths in building a universe rather than fleshing out character development and creating narrative complexity, but nonetheless it felt like a marked improvement on what preceded it. Most notably, though, it played like a proper sequel, something I had never felt with other Bethesda releases. Whereas Oblivion and Skyrim were two very different beasts, Fallout 4 sits comfortably, thematically and aesthetically, beside 2008's Fallout 3.

But the charm faded. It took a while, 60 hours of play and change, but having put over 300 hours into Skyrim I was expecting Fallout 4's amazing early game impressions to develop into a compelling whole, to last for a near-infinite future. And yet, that compulsion disappeared. The urge to explore everywhere, to see everything, just vanished. Which was pretty disappointing, to say the least.​