Former Bethesda lead is sceptical of The Elder Scrolls' return to 'fiddly stat sheets', even in the face of Baldur's Gate 3's success
Baldur's Gate 3 was one of last year's biggest critical and commercial successes—selling bonkers numbers and taking the crown of our annual top 100 list. We rather liked it, in case you couldn't tell.
What's more, it did so against what big-budget companies making RPGs would like you to believe is convention. It's a turn-based RPG that directly uses a TTRPG system, Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, and there's nary a quick-time event in sight. I'd even argue that it's even more demanding than its parental D&D ruleset, since it has you controlling four characters (in a singleplayer campaign, at least), while also letting you equip tons of magic items (5th edition, in contrast, usually only lets you attune to three major ones).
Meanwhile, long-standing RPGs like Dragon Age and Final Fantasy have gone all action-based in recent years. While Bethesda games always had an element of this, being first person and all, they've more recently leaned harder in this direction—shedding RPG mechanics and complexity like Todd Howard got really into a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Removing Stats.
Even compared to Skyrim, Starfield felt particularly thin on the RPG mechanics. I never quite felt like I was playing an archetype of a character, just a suggestion of one. That's not likely to change, though, according to a former Bethesda developer in an interview with Videogamer. Bruce Nesmith, who took lead on Skyrim, explains his reasoning:
«When you look at something like Baldur’s Gate 3, I think that’s a very different animal. They had a very specific charge. They were taking Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition and putting it onto a computer game. So it was intentionally looking backwards … It was, you know, reflecting back to the good old days.»
Mmm. I don't think Nesmith's completely wrong—Baldur's Gate 3 is a bit of an outlier, and unless you're one of the big boys like Atlus, a crunchy RPG is a bit of a hard sell. But I'm not actually convinced that TTRPGs are a bygone relic,
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