This will undoubtedly change the tone of The Elder Scrolls 6. When Skyrim was being developed and written, the mainstream point of reference with high fantasy was The Lord of the Rings.
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It’s strange to think that when Skyrim was first released, there was only one series of Game Of Thrones and the hundreds of also-ran series that followed hadn’t reached our screens. It’s hard to predict what the landscape of fantasy media will be when The Elder Scrolls 6 releases. With an entirely skill-based combat system, the player would improve their character’s skill by literally getting better at the game. One of the best elements of Skyrim’s levelling system was that if the player used a certain skill over and over again, the character would get better at it. If the combat in The Elder Scrolls 6 was anywhere near that fun, there wouldn’t be a bandit camp in the entire game that would be safe.
While a new player will swing wildly at you, if you know what you’re doing, you can parry with one movement and then divorce their head from their shoulders with the next. Every battle is genuinely engaging, and as you get better at it, you feel like a threat to anyone. It’s also brutally gorey, with limbs and heads flying everywhere. However, if you manage to find yourself in a 1v1 situation in Chivalry 2, you’ll be plunged into an incredibly fun rock-paper-scissors style battle of parrying, blocking and reposting.
In reality, it’s a bit more like “I’m King Arthur, welcome to Jackass” as players have a penchant to simply run in and throw their swords blindly into groups of soldiers. If you’re unfamiliar, on the surface Chivalry 2 presents itself as a somewhat serious game about armies of knights battling it out over a series of control points. Two competitors wiggle their swords at each other until one of their souls leaves their body and they crumble in a heap like a mannequin that’s been pushed from a tenth-floor window.Ĭhivalry 2 provides the perfect template for how high-fantasy combat could work in an RPG. This can’t simply be the clumsy melee combat of Bethesda games past. That’s what The Elder Scrolls 6 needs to course correct.įor us, one of the key things that will set The Elder Scrolls 6 apart from its predecessor is the combat. Dialogue options have never felt thinner or more inconsequential. It’s also clear that the Bethesda story-telling style is wearing thin.
What if it’s not actually that different? A big reason that Fallout 4 is (harshly) looked back upon with disappointment is that despite the superficial changes that Bethesda made, it’s not all that different from the games that came before it. However, if it’s a buggy mess, which has very much been the MO of Bethesda on consoles, will players put up with it? If Starfield is a triumph, a genuine leap forward and doesn’t feel like a suped-up Bethesda game, then it will have all the goodwill in the world going into The Elder Scrolls 6. Starfield will really set the table for Bethesda in terms of how this game is going to be received.