With Bethesda now going about crowing over its latest re-release, this time the PS5 port of Starfield, I found myself thinking about just how different this company and its games are compared to its Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim era. In pure dollars and cents, Bethesda is bigger and enjoying more success than ever before, yet its also no longer the celebrated studio it once was.

Rather than generating massive hype and excitement, the prospect of new Bethesda games invites mere cautious optimism at best. Even worse for them, smaller studios are now stepping in to fill the gap Bethesda left behind. The studio no longer the best developer in the genre it basically pioneered, so one can’t help but wonder if they too are no traveling the long road to irrelevancy and closure. They wouldn’t be the first after all, just look at BioWare and Bungie.

I don’t say this with any sort of happiness. I was a big fan of Bethesda for a long time, with that fandom only taking its first hit with Fallout 4. Fallout 4 wasn’t a bad game by any means, but it still lacked a lot of what made prior Fallout games and even Skyrim fun and interesting experiences. There was nothing compelling to it, no (positively) memorable moments, characters or quests that I’d want to experience again. It was just there. After that, we saw more and more re-releases, editions and collections for Skyrim, the disastrously cynical Fallout 76 and that phoned-in snoozefest called Starfield. It was not, and still isn’t, a good trend.

(Really quickly here, I acknowledge that there are many who like and enjoy Fallout 76 and Starfield. Even though I very much disagree as to whether they’re truly good games, I do understand that these things are subjective. What isn’t subjective, though, is that they do not measure up to Bethesda’s previous efforts in a number of aspects.)

We still have no idea when the next Elder Scrolls game will see the light of day (if it ever does), and nothing Bethesda has been doing gives any confidence that it’ll actually be anything other than disappointing. Put another way, it very much seems like Bethesda has long been content to coast along on its past success and is still only putting in just enough effort to keep fans from going elsewhere.

They’ll likely be able to continue doing so too since it’s basically mainstream in a manner very similar to Activision. They’re no longer the purveyors of high quality RPG experiences and, realistically, they have no need to be. It sucks to see Bethesda fade, but, fortunately for those who enjoyed the kinds of games that made the studio famous, there are alternatives.

Two major ones that come to mind are Ardenfall (by Spellcast Studios) and Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. The former is an experience very comparable to The Elder Scroll III: Morrowind. While still very basic in the art department, Ardenfall still offers a very similar level of depth, to the degree that the skills and stats you select when you create your character have a very great impact on quest options and dialogs as you progess through the game. It’s still in development and there’s only a demo available to try right now, but the amount that’s already there is quite surprising.

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, on the other hand, is already out and takes after Oblivion more than Morrowind. It’s not just “Oblivion-lite,” though. Rather, its closer to what many were likely expecting back when The Elder Scrolls V: Skryim was first announced: a true evolution of an expansion upon what Oblivion was. The character and questing systems are deeper; its visuals are better; its world is full of handcrafted exploration, and its combat takes cues from soulslike rather than just blindly hacking and slashing at enemies until they fall down. It’s more of everythig we loved in Oblivion, but taken to the next level.

If Bethesda was actually interested in building upon its winning formula, then I’m confident we would have seen them make something very similar to these games (and done it even better) at some point in the past 15 years. It wasn’t, though, which is why they are what they are today. Bethesda is a giant company that’s still raking in the big bucks, but that success has changed it for the worse. It’s no longer a top-shelf RPG studio, causing their sun too start setting and making room for others to rise in its place.

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How do you feel about Bethesda these days? Do you see it ever reclaiming the top spot?

Image by Flickr user: cinz (cc)