What is the one thing that TES is known for, above all else?

If you said "open-world, go-anywhere-do-anything gameplay," then DING DING DING! You're probably right.


Daggerfall came out when the GTA series was just a twinkle in Rockstar's eye, but ever since then, the whole idea of "sandbox" or "open-world" gaming has been growing non-stop.

Morrowind had a couple of titles to compete with - GTA III and Gothic - but those were different enough that while they still had a similar "sandbox" feel to them, they weren't really direct competitors (and, let's be honest, I love the early Gothic games so much, but Morrowind was better).

Oblivion is more or less the same. GTA is now known as *the* sandbox series, but aside from being open-world, GTA and TES have basically nothing in common, so that's not too big a deal. Oblivion ends up bringing the TES style of play into the mainstream - while the earlier games had all been successful, Oblivion really blasted open the console doors and let the money all rain in.

This may have been the series' undoing.

In between Oblivion and Skyrim, open-world games became utterly massive (uh, in terms of popularity). Suddenly you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a game that's all about giving the player freedom and giving them all sorts of things they can do outside the main objective. Beth themselves would contribute to the noise by taking one of gaming's most venerated open-world series and releasing a third instalment for it, inspiring even more open-world frenzy.

So now, all of a sudden, the market is full of this stuff. And that's the market Skyrim gets released into. TES is no longer the undisputed king of open-world.

On top of that, with every TES game, more and more elements unique to TES are being stripped away. Now, this is a statement of fact. I am not offering an opinion one way or the other as to whether this stripping away is for the better or for the worse. Based on what I've read, many people feel that removing classes and attributes from Skyrim was a good choice, but it remains that they are core TES elements that are gone.

So... What we're left with is the fact that there are now a massive amount of games competing with TES for their slice of the pie, and as much as many of those games are trying to be like TES, TES is also trying to be like them. And I've heard some people say that Far Cry 3 has beaten TES at their own game (DISCLAIMER: I've never actually played Far Cry 3, I don't know if there's any truth to that fact or not - but the point is not whether Far Cry 3 or Skyrim is better, but rather that this market is becoming a lot more competitive).

The question is not whether TES will continue to remain profitable, because it almost certainly will. The question is, will Beth be able to put out games that are relevant? A step forward? Or will they simply end up being more white noise in the over-saturated open-world market? And when the open-world fad inevitably passes, what will become of TES?


As an aside, we're seeing TES Online come out, but I'd bet any amount of money that it ends up suffering the same fate as every other MMO that's tried to go up against WoW. I mean, let's face it: If a Star Wars game, developed by one of the most well-known RPG companies out there, went F2P less than a year after it was released, what chance does a TES game that's not even being developed by Beth have?