The Elder Scrolls

Their focus should be way less on what the game looks like and way more on good story telling with a huge focus on excellent side quests. Maybe I'm the only one, but I could enjoy a game that looks and controls just like any of the existing Elder Scrolls if the writing is fabulous.

Bethesda, in recent games, has focused way too much on a main storyline and just let the side quests be pretty lame, and that's just completely against what people have liked about Skyrim and Oblivion, where the main quest was decent and all, but you could completely ignore the main quest and totally have an excellent experience just exploring the rich side quests and the characters that feel alive and real.

Unfortunately, I'm betting that they relied heavily on AI to do their writing and it's going to leave their game feeling completely soulless. I hope I'm wrong.

This idea is probably impossible to do, but here me out.

As we all know, most games today release before they're really ready to release and they end up letting the players be the beta testers to let them know what's wrong with the game. There have been some games that ended up improving so much after they launched with a fail that they're now considered good games.

I'm wondering if a studio could lean into that and release the unfinished game with all kinds of side quests, and let the players decide what the best side quests are. And then develop those side quests in free updates. Just plan the work into their budget. Plan into the budget that the game isn't done when it's initially released. It's done when the players have weighed in and developers add like a bunch of more content, free of charge based on the player's assessment of the interest of the sidequests.

For example, I know, this is an example from fallout, but in fallout, 4, there were a lot of really cool side quests that just fell flat. That could have been worked on so much more and made so cool. One of them was the flotilla of boats contolled by Raiders where they set up these lines of boats, and you had to follow a path from boat to boat to boat. And some of them were almost sinking. They reminded me of the boats from Jaws, and it was really kind of scary to navigate and you worked your way all the way up to this kind of tower area. And then it was such a disappointment. It fell flat. There was really no story. Players could have expressed that they liked that, and then they could have developed something super cool like maybe a shark attacked you randomly as you were trying to make your way through the flotilla of boats. Or once you got to the end tower, that was just the start of an extended quest. Let players decide what side quests should be filled out and expanded.

You could make the game what the players want by leaning in to releasing it before it's completely ready and letting players know that their input is going to determine what's developed.

Wouldn't this take some of their pressure off and allow them to release this game?