Arena - 1994

Daggerfall - 1996

Battlespire - 1997

Redguard - 1998

Morrowind - 2002

Oblivion - 2006(announced 2004)

Skyrim - 2011(announced v. late 2010)

The gap between OB and SK had was big because Bethesda made Fallout 3 which was released right between OB and SK. The gap between SK and TESVI is going to be even bigger than the gap between OB and SK because it's already been 2 years since SK and Fallout 4 hasn't even been announced yet. Even if Fallout4 was announced right this minute and they released it next year, it'd still come out over three years after SK. Compare that to F3 which was released two years after OB. This means that we'll be waiting at least a year longer for TESVI, and that's only if F4 is announced soon. Why are the gaps getting so big? Bethesda is much bigger than it was in 2006, so shouldn't the gaps be getting smaller instead of bigger?

I wish Fallout didn't exist and they'd focus solely on TES

Preface: This just seems like another hidden cry for Bethesda to stop making the Fallout games and just focus on TES. Well, tough [censored] and get used to it. I for one am also for the work to be contracted out because Obsidian did a MUCH better job with New Vegas in pretty much every aspect, but Fallout 3 was great in it's own right so they do know what they are doing.

First off, Battlespire and Redguard were different types of games than Arena and Daggerfall, definitely not to the scale of the original two of the main series. Morrowind was pretty much a ground-breaking game, and it was 6 years removed from Daggerfall and 4 from Redguard. OB was 4 removed from Morrowind. Skyrim was 5 removed.

So when talking about the main series, it has been pretty consistent because of the new things they have kept adding and changing SINCE Daggerfall. Also remember that Skyrim used a new* engine (relatively new) that Bethesda built* themselves. So if it goes back to 4 years or remains at 5, it's still within that consistent standard.

Secondly: Why has the gap gotten larger? Just look at the games themselves. Just because company gets bigger doesn't mean it takes less time to make a game especially when you consider the graphic fidelity of the games themselves these days. More pixels means more man-hours filling those pixels. If anything, the growth of the company is not in proportion to the growth of the games. As the games get more and more complex, in reality the company gets bigger just so the jump in work needed to be done doesn't get overwhelming but managable. Also there is the whole theory that more development personel =/= longer completion time simply because you have more minds conflicting on how work should be done and therefore you slow down progress. Ever see some small company make a great game? It's been done a few times to simple amazement, obviously nothing that comes close to the titles Bethesda or Rockstar has pumped out, but nevertheless the amount of stuff in that game in relation to the amount of people working on it is staggering.

Welcome to the minority. Not only that, but a minority (more like micrority...i made that word up I think) clique inside the minority

There is also the Harley Davidson theory of keeping supply low to create a mystique about your product to boost demand.

I think Bethesda purposely releases titles only once every five years (or more) so that when try do release an Elder Scrolls Game it will be a big event that everyone will be excited about, so it will boost their sales.

With the money they made in Skyrim, they could certainly afford to hire more people to have separate teams working on TES and Fallout concurrently. Doing that however, would greatly increase their overhead, which would put the company at greater risk if one of their games didn't sell well.

By staying leaner they keep their overhead lower and create more anticipation about their games, reducing the chance that one of their titles might not be a best seller.

I never said to stop making Fallout. Stop putting words into my mouth. I complained that it's taking longer than from Oblivion to Skyrim even though they also made a Fallout between those games. Why should Fallout 4 take so much longer this time around when they have a bigger team? It isn't even announced yet two years after Skyrim and by two years after Oblivion Fallout 3 was released.

Redguard and Battlespire being different types of game doesn't matter. Fallout 3 and Skyrim are very different too. The point is, between Daggerfall and Morrowind they made two games and they delayed major work on Morrowind until after those games were released. And for Morrowind they had to get used to an entirely new engine and they had to switch from DOS to Windows. The difference between their old engine and NetImmerse was way bigger than the difference between NetImmerse/Gamebryo and Creation(which they made themselves, to suit themselves. Unlike Gamebryo which wasn't made by them).

They rushed Skyrim a lot - so I'd be happy to wait until even 2020-2022 if we get an awesome game with an awesome world and awesome characters. If Bethesda fleshed out the characters like Obsidian does, then it would easily be the best game ever made.

Maybe this time, Bethesda is thoroughly looking (or will look) at what was good in Skyrim and what was weak, and then learn from the mistakes. Maybe they would look at Obsidian's attempt at a game on their engine - and see that you can have a good RPG in a sandbox game.

Though I think it's wishful thinking.

This is an important thing to consider. When you look at games like Call of Duty or Assassins Creed, they both went through a period where there was a new game every 9-12 months. It impacted their sales based on nothing but market saturation. With such a short development time, the changes between titles were minimal so there was little incentive to buy the new game (beyond what idiocy passes as story in those titles...) and to compensate they packed in absurdly over priced 'extras', and the sales volume still dropped.

This is particularly evident in sports games, which have at most a 1 year turnover, and whose sales have become so spotty that several games have simply evaporated into the ether.

Over-saturation of your market is just as dangerous as producing a bad game. In fact, its usually more so, because consumer fatigue makes people NOT buy the game, while a bad product can still sell well in the short term (looking at you, Duke Nukem).

Also, considering the life expectancy of TES games tends to be considerably longer than other titles (look at Morrowind, it's community is still very active, and there are more and more people every year that are going back to try Daggerfall) the 4-6 year development cycle for a TES game isn't that bad...

In fact, i sometimes wonder if they picked up Fallout, which most believed was a dead franchise for awhile there, because overall development time was dropping. With 2 titles to work on, they keep it at a good 'addiction' level, despite the ability to make games faster.

If they waited anywhere near that long all but the best of fans will get bored and leave and they'll have to advertise to an entirely new generation of gamers. Not to mention that in a development cycle that long, they'd have to keep restarting when new technology comes out.

This is a major problem, and this is exactly what killed Duke Nukem Forever. They took too long, and then had to constantly re-tool their development to new systems. Anything more than a 7 year development cycle is pushing the envelope and risks having to deal with these resets.

Even 7 years is too long. 7 years was the length of the last generation(which I think was the longest one yet) and the difference between the first games made and the last ones was HUGE. Just compare Oblivion(one of the best looking games of 2006) with a game from 2013. With 7 years, even if you started at the very start of a generation, your game would end up looking a lot worse(unless you repeatedly remade all the meshes and textures and stuff) than other games and it's engine wouldn't take advantage of all the tricks learned during the generation. I'd say 5 at most and no TES game has actually taken 5 years. The space between them has been around that but the bulk of the development for most games took like 3 years or so(Skyrim, for example, only had a very small dev team working on it before Fallout 3's release in 2008).

That assumes you want to be the best of the best of the best. Which is starting from a point of failure, if you ask me...

Even a game designed to take the absolute maximum capabilities of, say, an Xbox 360, still looks damn good on the Xbox One.

Imagine if Oblivion was released about a year or two ago. It'd look [censored]e. In 2006 it looked amazing. There's a big difference in quality between the start and the end of a gen and if you start making a game at the start of a gen and finish it at the end, it'll look TERRIBLE compared to other games. It's not about looking like the best of the best, it's about not having your new game look 7 years old on release.

Compared to what? Farcry? Crysis? Frankly, i think it still looks better than most games, except for the god awful faces (which was a design choice, not a graphical limitation) and the overly generic art. And it's almost a decade old at this point.

There is also the thing with open world games taking on avarage a bit more time then a linear games. Especially long if we are talking about the way Bethesda does its open world.

1. You obviously didn't read the whole post because the 2nd part why the sequels of games are taking longer (which is the beef of my post....or if you're vegetarian, it's your protien portion)

2. Redguard and Battlespire are different and it does matter, and they are not different in the way Fallout3 and Skyrim are different. You see that gap between Arena and Daggerfall? Those games, as complex as they were, were also simplistic with graphics and a lot of mechanics. It had a lot of stuff in it, but it was still pretty straight forward. Redguard and Battlespire are not like the main series of games, there is less going on in both titles compared to the main numbered series.



Just saying, it was the longest because of a lot of overlapping...in previous generations, not every console maker was in step. Hell, 7th gen was *barely* in step because Microsoft jumped the gun on Sony.

I'm not sure how old you are, either.

Windows 95 and Windows 98 were also DOS-based. They hid it fairly well, but Windows was still a GUI overlay to DOS when Daggerfall, Redguard, and Battlespire were made.

I remember things before MS DOS if that gives any indication. Though them being based in DOS is something I did not know (honestly, Windows is not my strong suite...I prefer other alternatives)

I do too (to both points. ) Windows was developed on two paths in the 90s. (DOS-based and NT) The consumer product was still DOS-based (behind the GUI) until the two product lines were finally merged in Windows XP. Oddly, Apple has gone in pretty much the other direction during the same period, moving from a tightly integrated graphic user interface to the present OSX, which is a GUI overlay to UNIX.

On topic: I would like to believe that Bethesda's game-release timing is intentional, but it seems to me that they've missed the mark more than they've hit it. That's probably because the Console upgrade cycle has proven to be a moving target.

I think that there may be another factor in the delay of a release of their next game (presumably FO4.) I think they may not have wanted to "step on" the release of their sister company's ESO; they wouldn't want to compete with themselves for sales.

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I did read it.
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So you understand and agree with my premise that it's the biggest contributing factor?

@glargg

The release date probably is intentional too, we know Skyrim was aimed at 11-11-11, but to what extent is it aimed for? I think you have a small point about ESO, the target audience does overlap a bit, but not by much. If these boards are any indication, most pure TES players prefer sp games over mp, and mmo is even further degree of mp that is sort of different then itself.

Fallout definitely is the biggest factor I think now. Oblivion and Fallout 3 dungeons were not as hand-crafted as those in Skyrim (another contributing factor for development workload severly increasing). I still think increased workload is biggest factor as it doesn't rise in equal proportion to working staff.

I'm not saying it should be delayed like Duke Nukem Forever. I meant that if Beth develops TES VI for 2-3 more years, then we will see an awesome game. Skyrim was hyped up to be better than Morrowind - though it's a good game, a lot of promised features didn't make it.

Rushed games make me sad. At least Skyrim wasn't as rushed as Spyro 4. Now that was a shambles.

It's also worth considering that Bethesda have never been in any great rush to release games as they've not had any real competition in the massive open world game genre. That is something that is all about to change though I think with other developers starting to produce this type of game.
An obvious example of this is Witcher 3 due for release next February. Lets imagine that W3 is a huge success and shifts millions of copies, lets also imagine that it is pretty bug free, highly polished (due to the 6 month delay) and receives full customer support from the developers. I'm fairly sure that this would force Bethesda to up their game which would then probably increase the time between releases of their products even further. I guess the good thing about some healthy competition with these types of games is that the bar will be raised and we can expect games of a higher standard and not the rushed bug ridden ones that we have to accept at the moment.

Doesn't bother me much at all. Compared to many posters I read I must be a horrendously slow player. Daggerfall was pretty much the only game I played for 4-years straight. Been playing Morrowind and Oblivion regularly since their initial release dates and still haven't done everything I wanted to do in either game. I've yet to spend more than two hours with Skyrim (don't get over to my son's house often enough to use his machine and I'm not really thrilled with Nords). So you see. I more than enough to keep me busy for a few years. Not saying I wouldn't be interested in a new game, if the location and story is right I might even jump on in.

Yes that is unimaginably slow. I usually only have 1-3 saves per game(first always unmodded) but I try to do absolutely everything in the game(every quest, find every location, get every artefact without googling, and get to a ridiculously high level[which I've noticed is a lot quicker and easier in Skyrim]) and I've finished that in all three games years ago(only like 2 years for Skyrim though). Do you only play like one hour a month?

Some of us like to savor a game. I bought Oblivion the day it came out and I only played the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood quests for the first time last year. I still haven't finished Shivering Isles (only gone as far as Xedilian so far).

I haven't done the Mages Guild, Thieves Guild, Morag Tong, Telvanni or Hlaalu Houses or the Tribunal expansion in Morrowind either.

It's funny how you were always in the Oblivion discussions when you have barely touched it even now. "Mrwind is batr dan de gaem iv plyd 5 mins ov!!!"

And that's not called savoring a game. That's called doing 5 quests a year. That's like eating one square of a chocolate bar every 3 weeks. It's gone past savoring it.