* In units sold?

Skyrim has sold more than 20 million units so far, vgchartz says around 18.5 million on all platforms but I think the Steam PC sales are not taken into account. Do you think Fallout 4 can beat that record? I mean for an RPG that's quite impressive, but I wonder if the fans expect this trend to continue, the new Bethesda game more successful than the last one.

* In Metacritic scores?

Skyrim has 92-94-96 critic scores, how well do you predict Fallout 4 will score?

Well Beth claims they seen pre order figures that "blows skyrims out of the water" so it has the potential.

Regarding sales no, i don'think it will sell as good as Skyrim. Skyrim was a one time wonder, other great quality rpg's like The Witcher don't come near, which shows Skyrim was just an exception.

As for Metacritic scores I think it will get similar to Skyrim and Fo3 and Oblivion, which is 90+something. One or two points more or less isn't saying much, above 90 every game is supposed to be stellar.

And how can explained the one time wonder? What Skyrim had and other games don't?

A very good question. But Skyrim has a HUGE following. Just look at the http://www.nexusmods.com/games/. Nearly twice as many mods as Oblivion and 3 times as many as New Vegas.

I personally consider Fallout 3 to be a much better game then Oblivion. So I expect Fallout 4 to be better then Skyrim. At least, I'll probably like it a lot more then Skryim.

On the other hand every Bethesda-developed game since Morrowind has sold consistently more than the predecessor, so there is no sign that the pattern will break with Fallout 4. The Witcher is a much smaller franchise from a smaller studio, and if you compare its sales with products from other developers of the same size or notoriety (Piranha Bytes, Reality Pump, etc...) it's quite impressive actual;ly.

Pretty much the same, I guess. Gaming journalists love Bethesda-styled games. Sure, if determining the score would follow a very exact methodology (ie witcher graphics vs fallout graphics, witcher writing vs fallout writing, etc...) then it may fall short overall but as far as I know, for the journalists the score is always drivewn by overall experience rather than the average of all parts, and goodness knows Bethesda are the masters of overall experience.

I perdict day one sales for Fallout 4, will beat Skyrims day one sales by a fair margin!!

I'm more interested in whether Fallout 4 will surpass Fallout NV. Well, you know, like a Beth against Obsidian.

Vikings & Dragons my friend, vikings and dragons Plus a game of thrones'esque vibe during the boom of HBO's first season, plus a very smart and aggressive marketing campaign. On top of the huge established following of the TES series, of course. It remains to be seen if the next TES will be as successful or not, I would bet it won't, unless they pull out of the hat something with as much mass appeal as vikings and dragons.

So, you think there's still potential for new customers, but until when? Isn't there a market saturation where you need to make unacceptable concessions to grab more public? For the sake of both series I hope Bethesda won't aim to sell more than COD and GTA combined. I already think Skyrim has made enough concessions to the non-rpg crowd.

I think day one sales of Fallout 4 may well top Skyrim, overall sales I am not sure. To me personally the fallout series is the best gaming series out there. However I think Skyrim has a more accessible theme (fantasy/dragons etc) which is more appealing to to the non die hard fans of both series.

What makes Bethesda unique is that they don't seem afraid to change the games and try new things.. appealing to larger amounts of people with every iteration. Despite an outcry from a portion of gamers who seem to not like change, every game has done better than the last so far. I assume this will be the case with F4. I also assume there will be a breaking point as with every franchise and something they make will inevitably falter.... But I don't think that is going to be F4..

FNV was advertised and sold by Bethesda too, so it's hard to measure how much of its success is due to Obsidian's name and how much to Bethesda. Many people still confuse which game was made by which studio. One thing is clear, Bethesda as a publisher is selling more and more units with each installment within each series, so the pattern is yet to be broken.

What concessions? Skyrim is as much a RPG as any other of the TES games.

Do you mean to say thet Fallout: New Vegas sold more copies than Fallout 3? VGChartz says Fallout 3 sold more (9.26 million vs 7.89 million).

I can easily see Fallout 4 beating Skyrim on all fronts. Fallout started building a following what seems to me like 20 years ago when it first was introduced after that movie A boy and his dog and most of the people I know that played it back then are still playing it today on top of all the people that have started playing it since.

The fan base for Fallout is already there and bigger than the Elder Scrolls crowd, the series didn't just pop into existence with Fallout 3.

Its a borderline cult that spans at least 3 generations of players and has had people sitting on the edge of their seat in anticipation of the next installment since 2010.

This is one of those questions like "Is water wet?", "Can you breath air?", the answer is already obvious before the question is even asked. A more interesting question would be something "So how many other game companies do you think will go broke from their big release because who wants it if they own a copy of Fallout 4?"

On a foot note, and as example, on the day after the Fallout 4 release announcement, digital sales of Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas both jumped roughly 1,175%. Just the sales of those previous versions outdid the pre-order numbers of any upcoming game to be released this season.

I wished I owned stock in BGS because their going to make cash by the buckets off this for years.

As far as critic numbers, critics are generally self-proclaimed experts who generally know very little about the subject they are voicing an opinion on, and just as a rule of thumb should be ignored since if they like Mario-Cart, their going to give bad ratings to any game that isn't Mario-Cart.

Where did you get that impression? I'm not saying you're definitely right or wrong, I doubt these fandoms can be measured in a sociologically rigurous way outside actual sales, and TES sold more than Fallout, at least under Bethesda. TES as a series is also older than Fallout (1994). Even a brief look at this forum's numbers shows more activity (threads and replies) in the TES forums than in Fallout forums.

I really don't care. The only thing I care about is whether I like the game.

I think gamers see "Bethesda Game"/"BGS Game" and take notice. TES and Fallout are somewhat two sides of the same coin. They share a lot of the aspects that are major draws. The approach to an open world, the mod communities, there is a lot of overlap even though one is fantasy and the other sci-fi. I think the following grows in part because this duality, as Bethesda picks up some every time because they are drawn to specifically either the fantasy or the sci-fi, but then stay around for the other because of the overall quality of their experience makes them "get it" in some deeper way and want to experience that anew again and again.

I don't doubt that FO4 can beat Skyrim in sales, ...and I don't doubt that TES: VI will in turn raise the bar after it, ...and so on ...and so on.

Well I dug around and couldn't find any factual numbers anywhere on sales that I could use to support my claim. Would have sworn I saw an article someplace that said with the recent online orders factored in New Vegas sales were fast approaching the point to go over Skyrim sales, but digging through my history can't locate it.

I don't know that much about the release histories of the elder scrolls series since I'd honestly not heard of it till like maybe 10 years ago, so on that I just go by what the current scrolls fans I know tell me is, which for the most part amounts to since elder scrolls came out online they have nothing but bad things to say about the series, lol.

Isn't vgchartz an unreliable metric for sales? I know that the only people who know the exact sales for Skyrim are Bethesda themselves, and Valve for the PC sales.

Anyway, either Fallout 4 will surpass Skyrim's sales, or Bethesda will finally plateau. I expect Fallout 4 to be at least comparable in sales to Skyrim, probably exceed it, but I don't know if it will outsell Skyrim by a wide margin. Then again, Skyrim got a huge amount of longevity from the modding community; now that Bethesda's putting mods everywhere, that might keep Fallout 4 selling for years after it would usually peter out. I have no idea what's going to happen, except that Bethesda is going to make bank.

Just to see how shallow Metacritic can be as a quality indicator, Skyrim (PC) used to level at around 84% user score, and stayed there for a few good years, until the Steam paid mods scandal and then in just 2 days a few hundred people rated Skyrim (PC) 0/10, and so the score lowered to 80%. That's Metacritic for you, very relevant for the actual game evaluation.

Well I don't think vgchartz is very accurate because when I checked it the thing said new vegas had sold 3.8 million copies world wide since its release but I also found sources that said FNV sold over 5 million copies in less than a month of its release. Somehow those numbers don't really seem to agree with each other...

Skyrim underwent a full-circle of DLC-releases, steam sales etc. for four years now. You can not compare that to a game that still has it's DLCs in development and is only out for three months. I just looked at the sales for both on a comparable basis and within the first 6 weeks, Skyrim sold 10 million copies, while the Witcher scored 6 million. This is a huge difference indeed, one will have to see and look at the difference in two years time, which will likely be much smaller.

But as said before, every successor of a good game to start with that does indeed cause much more attraction than a new brand. And I would even count Fallout and TES as one franchise as they share the same philosophy of gaming and are generally developed by the same team. That means that Skyrim really is the benchmark for Fallout 4.

However I do think that Morrowind still is the best installment of the TES series, but of course if you get a decent successor you will sale more because the brand is trusted upon. This would mean that Fallout 4, and I fully believe it, will sell more copies than Skyrim in the end, if we can assume that the game will be at least good.