3, 4 and New Vegas all performed well with the latter proving that you can mix it up drastically and still appeal to the original audience.
The fact that they keep mixing it up only proves one thing to me - that Bethesda haven't met their sales projections for the past games. Why else would you build games from the ground up? Larian haven't done that with Divinity: Original Sin, have they? It costs a lot more money to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new engine etc. Successful companies don't fix what isn't broken.
Bethesda / ZeniMax is one of the most obscenely profitable companies in the history of gaming. And they haven't used a new engine since Morrowind, AFAIK.
But Bethesda is a garbage studio that makes crap game and which
has operated as a thug throughout its history.
There is backlash against Bethesda now, but there wasn't when F3 released, despite it being a terrible game and unfaithful to the Fallout series. But when people go back to it today, they often see it for the terrible game that it is.
Why didn't people see how bad it was when it released? When it released in 2008, it was during the surge of the Xbox to Xbox 360 generation. The gaming market had grown exponentially since the 1990s and 90%+ of the people who played Fallout 3 hadn't played Fallout 1 or 2 and were relative newcomers to gaming who would be easily impressed by most anything that they played, regardless of how stale and uninspired it might be. If that audience had been playing games for the past 10+ years, they'd have likely experienced how terrible that Fallout 3 is, just like people who had been playing games for 10+ year at that time expressed.
The Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3, Part 1 of a five-part analysisFallout 3 Is Garbage, And Here's WhyBethesda NEVER Understood FalloutWhy Bethesda Was Never That GreatBethesda Has Been Lying WAY Longer Than You ThinkThis stuff is pouring out after the scandals surrounding Fallout 76, but it was true all along. Why weren't people acknowledging it all along?
Well, I was acknowledging it all along, and getting flamed for it. What made me able to see what the public at-large wasn't able to see, but now does see?
Fanboyism played a huge role. That fanboyism largely came from a lack of experience on the part of the gamers. As I mentioned, when Bethesda released Fallout 3, the vast majority of the gaming audience was relatively new to gaming - and they didn't want to hear anybody rain on their hype parade. And since there were far more of them than there were of long-time gamers, they took the impression of consensus around them as confirmation bias that there really was nothing to the criticisms.
To that massive console audience crowd that came in with the Xbox and 360 console generations, everything, no matter how simplistic it was, seemed new and flashy. As a result, they created mythologies about the games they were playing. They erroneously assumed that that was the best gaming had ever been and they reacted fiercely to having their idols criticized. They took the like sentiments from other relative newcomer gamers around them as confirmation bias that the dumbed-down games they were playing were really all that.
But as time has passed and those gamers have gained more gaming experience, including experience with games that released before they got into gaming, they've more and more come to realize that the games they were so hyped about from the early Xbox console generations are often not actually that good in retrospect.
Angry Joe is one gamer who had admitted to a bit of that publicly, saying he never understood why people were criticizing DICE and Battlefield games, but now he gets it because he's seen those very criticisms in what DICE have done with Battlefield since he started playing the series. When he started playing them, he had no experience with prior Battlefields and just assumed that the ones he started with were the best and the examples of the peak of their titles. But, in reality, they were heavily dumbed-down versions and he just didn't see that because his experience started with those already dumbed-down and chepened Battlefields.
Now, with Bethesda, repeated scandals of theirs have thrown cold-water on the masses and snapped them out of their daydream about the studio and their games and jolted them into giving things a more objective look. And so now more and more people who were huge fans of Bethesda's early console-targeted games are acknowledging that they were never fully or, in cases, even at all what they had been assumed to be.
Fanboyism is a powerful drug. And we've seen that with D:OS2 and people cheering that "BG3" is really just D:OS 2.5. Fanboyism blinds people to objectivity and shuts people's minds down to reason, just like money has shut Larian's mind down to integrity and faithfulness and convinced them to sell-out with BG3 and betray the series' fans and the series' legacy.
